He spoke in a low voice, with the ardor of a devotee, bending above the marble as if he loved it. “It is truly flesh!” he said. And beaming, he added: “You would think it moulded by kisses and caresses!” Then, suddenly, laying his hand on the statue, “You almost expect, when you touch this body, to find it warm.” A few moments later he said: “Well, what do you think now of the opinion usually held on Greek art? They say—it is especially the academic school which has spread abroad this idea—that the ancients, in their cult of the ideal, despised the flesh as low and vulgar, and that they refused to reproduce in their works the thousand details of material reality. “They pretend that the ancients wished to teach Nature by creating an abstract beauty of simplified form which should appeal only to the intellect and not consent to flatter the senses. And those who talk like this take examples which they imagine they find in antique art as their authority for correcting, for emasculating nature, reducing it to contours so dry, cold, and meagre that they have nothing in common with the truth. “You have just proved how much they are mistaken. [Illustration: A DRAWING By Michael Angelo _See page 98_ ] [Illustration: ANTIQUE TORSO Bibliothèque Nationale ] “Without doubt the Greeks with their powerfully logical minds instinctively accentuated the essential. They accented the dominant traits of the human type; nevertheless they never suppressed living detail. They were satisfied to envelop it and melt it into the whole. As they were enamoured of calm rhythms, they involuntarily subjected all secondary reliefs which should disturb the serenity of a movement; but they carefully refrained from entirely obliterating them. “They never made a method out of falsehood. “Full of respect and love for Nature, they always represented her as they saw her. And on every occasion they passionately testified their worship of the flesh. For it is madness to believe that they despised it. Among no other people has the beauty of the human body excited a more sensuous tenderness. A transport of ecstasy seems to hover over all the forms that they modelled. “Thus is explained the unbelievable difference which separates the false academic ideal from Greek art. While among the ancients the generalization of lines is totalization, a result made up of all the details, the academic simplification is an impoverishment, an empty bombastry. While life animates and warms the palpitating muscles of the Greek statues, the inconsistent dolls of academic art look as if they were chilled by death.” He was silent for a time, then— “I will tell you a great secret. Do you know how the impression of actual life, which we have just felt before that Venus, is produced? “By the _science of modelling_. “These words seem banal to you, but you will soon gauge their importance.