EUR ID SUBNIR 1K OXG Page Nine

combined successfully the work of designing a noble building and carrying out
a scheme of sculptural decoration. Benevenuto Cellini, who died a year later than
Sansovino, was successful in small work, particularly bronze, and he remains a
consumate genius and an inspiration to craftsmen of all times. Bologna produced
several works that will carry his name on through the, centuries. The Italian
Renaissance closes with Bernini.

After Bernini’s death, sculpture in Italy fell asleep for centuries until Canova,
whose sculpture was rather insipid and left no school except Thorwaldsen.

The 19th century gave us Barye and Carpeaux. Barye is the animal sculpture
of the age. The limits of his subjects only limited Barye’s influence, and it re-
mained therefore for Carpeaux to be called the father of French sculpture as we
know it to-day.

There was born in 1840 one of the geniuses of our own time, a man whose
work has revolutionized all our conceptions of sculptural art, and whose influence
is now apparent in many of the works of the younger sculptors of our own day.
I refer to Auguste Rodin. Rodin, the most original of the modern French sculp-
tors, has manifested himself a great thinker in bronze and marble, a representer
of many of the subtle attitudes and aspirations of contemporary souls. He
esteems moral beauty and beauty of expression and of character more highly than
simple beauty of form. Rodin has achieved an exquisiteness of formal beauty and
delicate modelling that words cannot describe. He was the apostle of individualism,
and his life long battle with the respectable conventions did not deter him.

To leave Meunier out would be an offence to Belgian sculpture. He found
inspiration in the workman and gave us a new type in art. Like his models his
work is sombre, violent and tragic. His work is at once simple and majestic, and
he has done for the peasant and the miner in sculptural art what Millet did in
paint. I will close by mentioning a Serbian sculptor, Mestrovic, who is as great a
virtuoso of the race as of his art. He has found for his art a style entirely his
own, and his choice is a primitive and often archaic form.

The source of excellence in Art generally lies not so much in the study of the
processes or of the methods of schools as in the study of nature herself; an excel-
lence of the highest kind within the reach of only privileged temperaments, which
spring into existence mysteriously and irresistibly, master by innate and apti-
tudes, and in spite of schools and theories.”