The Goose-man of Nuremberg and the Brussels Mannikin are instances of local Realism; Tadda’s “Justice” at Florence and Michael Angelo’s “Pietà”—these in spite of their religious relations are examples of universal human Idealism. It is characteristic of the timidity of sculpture, even in its proud epoch of the Renaissance, that it dared not cast itself adrift from presenting what was of immediate utility. It thought it needed an excuse for stepping out into the market-place before all the people. It found it fairly in supplying towns with water. It created fountains. These are the first and, for a long time, the only monumental works which were suggested neither by religion nor by loyalty to some dynasty; which aim neither at immortalising the memory of a particular event, nor at refreshing the schoolboy knowledge of the more liberally educated, but embody, without any pre-possession, a purely artistic conception of form fulfilled and animated with subjective emotion. The stages of development of the monumental fountains, which pretend to be mere sports of untrammelled fancy on the artist’s past, extend to the present day, in the latest phase, in which the fountain is not really intended to distribute water, like Sluter’s “Fount of Moses” at Dijon, or Jean Goujon’s “Fontaine des Innocents” in Paris, but uses the water only as a decorative element, as Donner’s fountain in the market-place of Vienna, or Reinhold Begas’s Neptune fountain in the Berlin Schlossplatz. We must come down to the last century to find at last a monumental art of universal feelings or thoughts, still, for the most part, modestly cringing under the protection of architecture, as groups on pediments of palaces, theatres, and exhibition-buildings, and taking possession of the public square in full independence only in the last decades. Historical works, even of an universal, impersonal sort, such as the numerous war-memorials in Germany and France, the _risorgimento_-monuments of Italy, the patriotic battle-memories in Switzerland—do not come under consideration here, but only abstract works such as Bartholdi’s “Freedom enlightening the World,” at New York, or Dalou’s “Republic as the Protector of Labour and Culture,” in the Place de la Nation, at Paris. Even these works still continue to show a birthmark, which betrays their origin from the sculpture of purpose, for Bartholdi’s gigantic statue is a lighthouse, and Dalou’s “Triumph of the Republic” belongs to the fountain series.