The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863, page 49 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download50
grows more and more animated, puts forth in more luxuriant growth; multitudes of new forms spring up in the bosom of this magnificent creation; when lo! at length man completes and embodies them all--his own noble image stands revealed--the rude, but white and glittering stone glows almost into life under the passion of his forming hand.
'Sculpture is but an immediate development of architecture, proceeding naturally and organically from it. In proof of this, we have only to examine it in its first efforts. Forms, unfinished and embryonic, at first closely attached to the stone, growing by degrees in accordance with their own fixed laws until able to detach themselves from the medium through which they were originated, after having acquired the conditions necessary for their individual life, spring to actual life, to independent life, almost as the organized being springs from the womb of its mother.
'Sculpture, however, represents but imperfectly the marvellous glories of God's creation. It can give but faint ideas of the various effects of light and shade, the constantly shifting play of colors; it cannot offer that full harmony of beauty which nature is ever spreading before us in the complicated scenes of life. To satisfy this want, a new art is created! Closely linked with all those which have preceded it, its development is but their legitimate expansion. The gray and stern arches, the hitherto colorless sky of the art temple, now take the azure hue of the heavens, while hovering cherubs look down from their cerulean depths; the relievos glow, and color defines, as it etherealizes, the works of man. Painting, at first absorbed in the plastic arts, scarcely begins to show symptoms of life until she is fully born, and living in her own distinctive form! As that power which develops the almost infinite variety of forms is to the universe, so is painting with its ever ready and vivid canvas to the temple of art.
'Meanwhile the art temple has not remained wrapped in gloomy silence; an