Sculpture

Nevertheless, how will you discover the beauty which their excellent soul possesses? Withdraw within yourself, and examine yourself. If you do not yet therein discover beauty, do as the artist, who cuts off, polishes, purifies until he has adorned his statue with all the marks of beauty. Remove from your soul, therefore, all that is superfluous, straighten out all that is crooked, purify and illuminate what is obscure, and do not cease perfecting your statue until the divine resplendence of virtue shines forth upon your sight, until you see temperance in its holy purity seated in your breast.

Let us imagine two pieces of marble placed side by side, the one rough and inartistic, the other one fashioned by the sculptor’s chisel, who made of it the statue of a goddess, a grace, or a muse; or that of a man—but not that of any individual whatever, but that of a (cultured gentle) man in whom art would have gathered all the traits of beauty offered by different individuals. After having thus from art received the beauty of the form, the second marble will appear beautiful, not by virtue of its essence, which is to be stone—for otherwise the other block would be as beautiful as this one—but because of the form received through art. The latter, however, did not exist in the matter of the statue. It was in the thought of the artist that it existed before passing into the marble; and it existed therein, not because it had eyes and hands, but because it participated in art. It was therefore in art that this superior beauty existed. It could not have become incorporated in stone. Dwelling within itself, it begat an inferior form, which, passing into matter, could neither preserve all its purity, nor completely respond to the will of the artist, possessing no perfection other than that allowed by matter.