Sculpture

You are fifty years old and would worship a day old statue!

— Sculpture

In general, just as painters in working from models constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus strive to transfer the expression of the original to their own artistry, so too he who is anxious to make himself perfect in all the kinds of virtue must gaze upon the lives of the saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and must make their excellence his own by imitation.

— Sculpture

The men who ushered in the Dark Ages were men like Theodoric and Cassiodorus, who were intent on restoring the cities, preserving the statues, and transcribing the classics. Their adoration of the ancient world was matched only by their inability to understand it, for by the time that they were born, classical culture was already dead. They were the first of the great medievals and began to build a new civilization in an attempt to restore the old.

— Sculpture

After a long time the great and awful Name was forgotten and the people, men, women and children, only recognized an image of wood or stone and the temple of wood or stone which they had been brought up from infancy to serve by bowing down. ... Abraham ... knew that all were mistaken and that what caused them to err was worship of the images which drove the Truth out of their minds.

— Sculpture

Tacitus says, that the Jews held God to be something eternal and supreme, neither subject to change nor to decay; therefore, they permit no statues in their cities or their temples. The universal Being can only be described or defined by negatives which deny his subjection to the laws of all inferior existences. Where indefiniteness ends, idolatry and anthropomorphism begin.

— Sculpture

The stone unhewn and coldThe more the statue grows.

— Sculpture

A sculptor wieldsTo beauty.

— Sculpture

Not from a vain or shallow thoughtHis awful Jove young Phidias brought.

— Sculpture

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoön how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

— Sculpture

Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature,Are statues, and not paintings.

— Sculpture

Sculpture is more than painting. It is greaterPhantoms that seem to live.

— Sculpture

And the cold marble leapt to life a God.

— Sculpture

The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repairWhen did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried.

— Sculpture

Then marble, soften'd into life, grew warm.

— Sculpture

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

— Sculpture

So stands the statue that enchants the world,The mingled beauties of exulting Greece.

— Sculpture

The marble index of a mind foreverVoyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

— Sculpture