The difficulty in tracing the connection between such men as Canova, Thorvaldsen, Flaxman, and the age in which they worked, seems to be due to the necessity for first abandoning the method which has served us hitherto. In dealing with Greek and Roman, Italian and French sculpture, we have appealed to national history—national circumstances. Now we are concerned with a body of thought and feeling which is not national but European. Instead of thinking in states, we have to think in continents. The men who created the sculpture of the Revolution and Reaction were essentially cosmopolitans; Winckelmann—Saxon; Raphael Mengs—half-Dane, half-Bohemian; Canova—Venetian; Thorvaldsen—Danish; Flaxman and Gibson—Englishmen, long resident in Rome. They did not drift towards Rome as the Hellenistic sculptors had done, because the city was the centre of the political force of the age. Nor did they come with the purpose of Michael Angelo, that they might add to the glory of a universal church seeking to extend its power over the known world. Far from this being the case, in the early part of the nineteenth century Rome was a no-man’s land. If it stood for anything, it was for a disintegrated Italy and an enfeebled Papacy. At the very time Canova was working there, Italy was powerless to prevent Napoleon stripping it of its choicest art treasures. Anything approaching a national stimulus to sculptural production was entirely lacking. The first result was the rise of the essentially eclectic style which we recognize in the sculptures of Canova and Thorvaldsen. Nominally, it was based upon a return to the Greek example. In reality, it was no more than a borrowed Hellenism, misunderstood and misapplied by men who did no more than steal “The livery of the Court of Heaven.” We shall not be misunderstood. No one can deny—it is impossible to do so—the graceful beauty of very many statues of the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Indeed, no school of sculpture has produced a larger number of popular works—in the best sense of that rather dubious term. But our criticism is justified by the fact that such men as Canova and Thorvaldsen deliberately set out to interpret their experience in the terms of classic art. They rightly judged this to be the highest achievement attained by the sculptor. Unfortunately, they only filched the Hellenic externals.