"The first question, then, in examining the style of a given art, is, in what does this difference of means, as compared with nature, consist? The answer may for the present be confined to sculpture. It is agreed, then, or it is a _convention_, that a colourless hard substance shall be the material with which the sculptor shall imitate the perfection of life. His means are, by the primary condition, effectually distinguished from those of nature; and it remains for him to cheat the imagination (not the senses) into the pleasing impression that an equivalent to nature can be so produced. He may, therefore, imitate the characteristics of life closely. His select representation, however faithful, is in no danger of being literally confounded with reality, because of the original conventions, viz., the absence of colour, and the nature of his material. But it is not the same with the imitation, in this art, of many other surfaces. As already observed, a rock in sculpture and a rock in nature can be identical; it may, therefore, be sometimes necessary to imitate the reality less closely, or even, in extreme cases, like that now adduced, to depart from nature. The reason is obvious: the degree of resemblance to reality which is attainable in the principal object of imitation--the surface of the living figure--is, from the established convention, limited; and it is desirable that the spectator should forget this restriction. He is, therefore, by no means to be reminded of it by greater reality in other, and necessarily inferior, parts of the work. In painting, it is sometimes objected that inferior objects are more real than the flesh. The defect is great; but there is this difference between the two cases--in painting, the inferiority in the imitation of the flesh may be only from want of power in the artist; in sculpture, the perfect resemblance of the flesh to nature is impossible, in consequence of the absence of colour. The literal imitation of subordinate objects is, for this reason, more offensive in sculpture than in painting. A manifest defect in the art seems more hopeless than a defect in the artist."