During the Romanesque and Gothic periods, it seems, with the information we have on this subject, that a similar procedure was practised. Minor works are left to the master stone-carvers, but the large groups and statues are too complete, too "right in place," to have been left to the whim of the stone-carver.
During the Renaissance, where we find so many masterpieces, with complete harmony between architecture and sculpture (notably in the tombs by Mino da Fiesole, Desiderio da Settig nano, Donatello and the Della Robbias), the work was generally in the hands of a sculptor. In Michelangelo we have the in dividualist who had difficulty in working with assistants; he found it easier to do the work himself than to put up with the slowness and irritation of helpers. He carved his figures himself directly in the marble, and we see with what results. No statue of his, not even the "David," is completely finished. The top of the "David's" head is not finished. This lack of completeness grew out of a number of different causes, namely, his impetuosity, his impatience, and his practice of attacking the block of marble without sufficient preparation. He is recorded to have said that one should make a full-sized model first, but his own temperament forbade it in his own case. As a compensation for the fragmen tary and incomplete state of his works in sculpture, we have the most wonderful and expressive marble-carving in the world. No where is there such surging life, nowhere is the actual stone so transformed. His chisel cuts the marble with the creative power of a brush stroke of Rembrandt. Under his hand marble becomes truly living stone.
The modern cult of the "taille direct" shows none of this transforming power. Only too often it is used as a questionable merit to cover up incompetence, the thought being, "I cut it directly in this hard stone; therefore it must be good." The dif ferences in modelling between carved and modelled surfaces is not as great as is generally assumed. Of course, stone should remain stone, granite should remain granite, and wood should remain. wood. Certain things perfectly feasible in bronze when trans lated into stone or marble become objectionable because of the nature of the materials. Such things as the statues of Siva, found so often in Hindu art, with the encircling halo of flame, become atrocities when carved in stone. This grows out of the very nature
of the materials themselves. Bronze, being a very tough material with great tensile strength, may be pierced full of holes provided the unity is maintained in the design ; stone, having a low tensile strength, demands a treatment more in the mass.
The surfaces of stone, marble and granite, as well as wood, may be treated to show the mark of the cutting chisel or carried to the highest degree of polish. The polished surface makes a very different appeal to the eye and also to the sense of touch. Marbles, granites, and the hardiest stones, such as basalt and diorite, change colour as well when polished. The degree of smoothness or polish should always be determined by the effect desired.
It will be well to remember that bronze is always a cast material and though it has very special qualities of its own, of hardness, colour and reflecting powers, it has always been cast molten and fluid into a mould from a model. The better the casting the less work necessary on the finished statue. Details are often chased on the bronze but generally they exist in the original model and are only sharpened in the bronze. (M. Y.) So widely separated have become those, in this modern genera tion who write on art, from the artists themselves, that criticism is generally completely ignored by the latter save when they re ceive gratifying though really unimportant praise, and it is almost an unheard of thing for an artist to change his style because of critical suggestion. Therefore it has been thought advisable, in the planning of this Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, to resort to the artists themselves for the articles cov ering the practice of every art and to supplement this first-hand information by a few brief treatises which help to bind it together and unify its deductions.
This article, therefore, like the one on TECHNIQUE IN ART and others on DRAWING and DESIGN, is written primarily for the pur pose of correlating the artist's theories, and will be of use to the student, as well as for the purpose of establishing a type of criti cism making possible judgment not only of the results of an artist's labours but also of his various plans and methods of arriv ing at them.