Now these Frenchmen were in much the same position as the early Greeks. They were confronted with the task of making images of their objects of worship for great temples. They had no more real knowledge of the Personality of Christ, the Virgin, and most of the Saints than had the Greeks of the Homeric gods and legendary heroes, and like the Grecian sculptors they fully believed in the spiritual personages and religious events with which they dealt. The Grecian and French artists therefore started from the same line with similar general ideals, for the ancient workers took no heed of Homer and Hesiod in respect of the failings of their gods; and they both had only pure formalities in sculpture behind them. And what was the result? The ideal divine head of the Christian Frenchman is much the same as that of the Greeks in regard to form, and only varies in expression with the character of the respective religious conceptions. The French sculptors did not reach the sublime height of the Phidian school, nor did they attempt the more human beauty typified by the giants of the fourth century B.C.; but apart from these, and leaving aside considerations of the nude with which they were little concerned, they climbed to the highest level of the latter end of the fourth century and the beginning of the third--the level attained by those Grecian sculptors who more or less idealized portrait heads by adding Phidian traits. And it would appear that in reaching towards their goal they followed the same line of thought as the Greeks, and arrived at similar conclusions in respect to every detail of the head and pose of the figure. As a rule they gave to the faces of Christ and the Saints a large facial angle, set the eyes in deeply and the ears close to the head, and generally worked on parallel lines with the principal sculptors of Peloponesia living sixteen hundred years before their time. It is perhaps natural that they should make similar variations in the proportions of the figures to provide for the different levels from which they were to be seen, but it is curious that they should adopt the practice followed by the Greeks in the representation of children in arms, by minimizing to the last degree the figure of the Infant Christ in the arms of the Madonna. They could not have more closely imitated the Greeks in this respect had they had Grecian models in front of them. No doubt they fixed the position of the Child at the side of the Virgin in order that the line of her majestic form might not be broken, and that her face might be revealed to observers below the level of the statues, but that they should have made the Child so extremely small and insignificant considering His relative importance compared with that of the Grecian infant in arms, is remarkable. NOTE 37. PAGE 90