[Illustration: THE CERIGOTTO BRONZE Athens] The marbles, with one exception, were unrecognizable. But the bronzes had fared better. In particular, a life-sized statue of an athlete, with right arm outstretched, proved capable of complete restoration. It now stands in the museum at Athens. The critical battle as to the date of its casting was a long one. General opinion to-day regards it as an early Hellenistic work based upon the Lysippic style. In the “Cerigotto Bronze,” the tendency towards excessive realism noted in the “Farnese Hercules” has not proceeded so far. But in the body, and especially in the treatment of the abdominal muscles, a departure from the idealistic standard approved by the great masters of the fourth century can be clearly detected. Instead of being content with a suggestion of the natural form, the Hellenistic sculptor aims at realistic representation. He seeks to copy the human form, regardless of the lesson afforded by every great sculptor of Greece, that the more indirect methods of idealism are far better calculated to arouse the uplifting emotions which every true man and woman must feel before the grandest object Heaven ever made. The classical art critics were fully aware of the snare which lay in this passion for extreme realism of detail. They clearly recognized it to be a characteristic feature of much Hellenistic sculpture. They tell, for instance, of the statue of the “Dying Jocasta” in which the Hellenistic sculptor mingled silver with the bronze, to denote the pallor of coming death. Pliny adds that the sculptor Aristonidas of Rhodes mixed iron with the metal from which he cast a statue of Athamas—that the ruddy glow might suggest the blush of remorse which a father who had hurled his son from the rocks would naturally wear. Both these instances are narrated as mere eccentricities. Their interest for ourselves lies in the fact that they illustrate precisely the same tendency which distinguishes the “Hercules” of Glycon from that which Lysippus had made three centuries earlier or the “Cerigotto Bronze” from a similar work by a fourth-century sculptor. When analyzed, this tendency towards realism points clearly to an absence of that fine critical faculty with which every supreme artist is endowed. It argues a lack of moderation which in the end must lead to disaster. The admixture of silver to the bronze “Dying Jocasta” was no isolated case. Hellenistic Greece proved itself open to a charge of immoderate folly on many another occasion. The instance furnished by that “Wonder of the World,” the Rhodian Colossus, will occur to every one. The great statue of the Sun-god at Rhodes measured 105 ft. high. It was cast hollow, the separate pieces being set up, one upon another, around an inner structure of masonry. Pliny says of it:—