At the commencement of our century, the Institute of France offered a prize for the best answer to the following question: _What were the causes of the perfection of the antique sculpture, and what would be the best means of attaining it?_ The successful competitor, M. Emeric David,[112] maintained the opinion then dominant, that the assiduous study of natural beauty had alone conducted the antique art to perfection, and that thus the imitation of nature was the only route to reach the same perfection. A man whom I do not fear to compare with Winkelmann, the future author of the _Olympic Jupiter_,[113] M. Quatremere de Quincy, in some ingenious and profound disquisitions,[114] combated the doctrine of the laureate, and defended the cause of ideal beauty. It is impossible to demonstrate more decidedly, by the entire history of Greek sculpture, and by authentic texts from the greatest critiques of antiquity, that the process of art among the Greeks was not the imitation of nature, either by a particular model, or by several, the most beautiful model being always very imperfect, and several models not being able to compose a single beauty. The true process of the Greek art was the representation of an ideal beauty which nature scarcely possessed more in Greece than among us, which it could not then offer to the artist. We regret that the honorable laureate, since become a member of the Institute, pretended that this expression of ideal beauty, if it had been known by the Greeks, would have meant _visible beauty_, because ideal comes from [Greek: eidos], which signifies only, according to M. Emeric David, a form seen by the eye. Plato would have been much surprised at this exclusive interpretation of the word [Greek: eidos]. M. Quatremere de Quincy confounds his unequal adversary by two admirable texts, one from the _Timaeus_, where Plato marks with precision in what the true artist is superior to the ordinary artist, the other at the commencement of the _Orator_, where Cicero explains the manner in which great artists work, in referring to the manner of Phidias, that is to say, the most perfect master of the most perfect epoch of art. "The artist,[115] who, with eye fixed upon the immutable being, and using such a model, reproduces its idea and its excellence, cannot fail to produce a whole whose beauty is complete, whilst he who fixes his eye upon what is transitory, with this perishable model will make nothing beautiful." "Phidias,[116] that great artist, when he made the form of Jupiter or Minerva, did not contemplate a model a resemblance of which he would express; but in the depth of his soul resided a perfect type of beauty, upon which he fixed his look, which guided his hand and his art."