212
EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
going hand in hand with the fashions, and cases are, unfortunately, far from rare where the artist has debased his material in the perpetuation of an idea, of a pose, of a costume, that would do no credit to the rudest clay that was ever worked by the hand of a sculptor. The same taste that inspires the florid decoration of every object that will bear ornamentation, that disfigures the human fonn by supplementing shapeless masses to its graceful contours, and entirely contradicts the first idea of drapery, the same taste that encourages and stimulates all that is artificial and imitative in opposition to the natural and original, bids for the representation of these ideas in the same material that has immortalized the grandest conceptions of the artistic mind. The sculpture is less distinctly divided into schools than the painting, and the differences are slighter, and there are more general resemblances between the productions of the different nationalities. I n every department where the collection of statuary was of sufficient extent to warrant a judgment, the tendency seemed to be toward the trivial and the forced sentimental, while the serious ideas found only rare exponents.
The Italian list of statuary was by a great deal the largest, and in exactly inverse proportion its merits may be measured. Good cutting, perfect manipulation, the most skilfully instated textures and modelling fine in a w T eak way, all this certainly was seen in the Italian works. No one can deny the skill of the practised marble cutters of Italy; Americans owe to this purchasable talent a great proportion of the statues that are received from Europe as the work of American sculptors, and we, least of all, should fail to pay tribute to this skill and facility. Unfortunately for both parties, the workmen have not the brain to sell with their hands. With this perfection of mechanical execution the merits of the Italian marbles stop. In the whole collection there was scarcely a work that would bear a second examination, and the majority disgusted the spectator at the first glance. There was a ght- ter, a chic about them that attracted the multitude as well- dressed dolls or Avax figures would do : crowds gathered to admire a marble ballet-girl, dressed in the nondescript masculine costume of the coryphee lounging about on the basin of a raised fountain, smiling the most meaningless smile and