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It is very remarkable, but I would rather it were in another place. Arles is delightfully pagan, and Saint Trophimus, with its apostolic sculptures, is rather a false note. These sculptures are equally re- markable for their primitive vigor and for the perfect preservation in which they have come down to us.
Peter's is less like a church than a collection of large churches enclosed under one gigantic roof.... One is lost in it. It is a city of columns, sculptures, and mosaics." So says the clever, versatile Willis, in his "Pencillings by the Way," and it would certainly take months to examine minutely all that is worthy of attention in this vast pile.
They were three abreast; the middle one was in shafts, those on either side ran free in traces, and by dint, as the boys supposed, of long training, each carried his head curved round outwards, so that he seemed to be looking half-backwards, giving them a most peculiar effect, exactly similar to that which may be seen in ancient Greek bas-reliefs, and sculptures of horses in ancient chariots.
After all, it is of much less consequence to be assured of the master's name than to know and enjoy the masterpieces themselves. The great statesman under whose administration these immortal sculptures were produced was commemorated by a portrait statue or head, set up during his lifetime on the Athenian Acropolis; it was from the hand of Cresilas, of Cydonia in Crete.
With the shortening of the distance from which they could be examined, their scale was made to conform more closely to the real stature of human beings. There is another singularity to be noticed apropos of these sculptures. The themes treated outside are very different from those inside the palaces.
We may not agree whether the perfect man and woman ever existed, but we do know that the highest representations of them in form that in the old Greek sculptures were the result of artistic selection of parts of many living figures. When we praise our recent fiction for its photographic fidelity to nature we condemn it, for we deny to it the art which would give it value.
Above the king stood or sat two rows of gods; still higher, a line of people with offerings; at the very summit of the pylons were winged serpents intertwined with scarabs. Those pylons with walls narrowing toward the top, the gate which connected them, the flat sculptures in which order was mingled with gloomy fantasy and piety with cruelty, produced a tremendous impression.
We begin on the western side. There are seven sculptures on the western, southern, and northern sides: six on the eastern; counting the Lamb over the entrance door of the tower, which divides the complete series into two groups of eighteen and eight.
A considerable portion of these sculptures is now in the British museum among those known as the "Elgin marbles." We may mention here the other celebrated national games of the Greeks. The first and most distinguished were the Olympic, founded, it was said , by Jupiter himself. They were celebrated at Olympia in Elis.
Perhaps through your genial reconciliation there came, however dimly, a suggestion of something unnatural and alien in your presence there as a mere sightseer, or, at best, a connoisseur much or little instructed. If you had been there, say, as a worshipper, would you have been afflicted by the incongruities of the sculptures or by the whole baroque keeping?
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