One, too, who had noble original
powers; for none but such could have formed and wrought out the
conception of that stately head, with its calm, grand smile, so
full of mingled sweetness and strength.
He appears, however, to have worked under certain disadvantages.
He had not such command of materials as a civilized country could
have afforded him. He had to put up with the best stone he could
find. I think that the peculiar posture of the statue can be
fairly explained by supposing that the original block tapered away
toward the feet, and was only just about the breadth of the statue
as we now see it. This seems fairly to explain the curious position
of the left arm. The artist had to put it there because there was
not breadth enough to put it in any other position. So of the
position of the feet--one over the other. The stone may not have
been wide enough to have admitted of any other position. Who was he?
Let us analyze a little.
In the ancient world, only the Greek School of Art was capable of
such a perfect reproduction of the human form. I have seen no
Egyptian or Assyrian sculpture which approached this in anatomical
accuracy.
Throughout the middle ages till the great Art Revival, no one in
Europe had skill enough for the purpose. It appears, therefore,
that unless we adopt the somewhat strained hypothesis that a highly
civilized society, now utterly extinct, once existed on this
continent, we are forced to search for our sculptor among the
European adventurers who have sought homes in North America during
the last three centuries, as no one, I presume, is prepared to
maintain a that the statue has a Greek or Roman origin, unless, indeed, it
was brought over as an antique by some forgotten amateur of art.
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