As already stated, in no branch of the arts did the age of Pericles make a deeper and more lasting impression than in that of architecture. Although the Doric order was employed many hundred years before his time, and the Ionic scarcely less many, yet the finest types of each and the examples of these orders which stand for their most perfect and artistic development are to be found in the Acropolis at Athens in the time of Pericles, the Parthenon serving as the criterion of one and the Erechtheum as the model of the other. That these orders should have been brought to such perfection and endowed with their crowning dignity and grace, must alone prove without further argument, if need be, that the architectural talent and artistic sense of the age was incomparable. The part which the great sculptor Phidias played in the art drama of his time has been already alluded to, but not sufficiently, perhaps, to exclude a further reference to him. The comparison has often been made between Phidias and the talented revivalist of the fifteenth century, Michael Angelo, and a casual consideration of the two eminent artists would indicate that it was a proper one. They were both sculptors, both painters, both engravers (Phidias of gems), but they were not both architects, as is erroneously assumed. As to the respective degrees of talent which each manifested toward the branches of art which he professed, they also differed widely. In sculpture the school of Michael Angelo will not outlive that of Phidias, but in painting, especially in its application to mural decoration, the Greek must bow to the Italian. In architecture also Phidias possessed none of the technical knowledge and skill which in Michael Angelo enabled him to suspend the great dome of St. Peter’s “as if in the air,” and which was so important a factor in his long artistic career, manifested in other ways as well, and gaining for him perpetual applause. However, the two artists may be well compared, inasmuch that they both created epochs of their own; and both excelled in exhibiting a noble understanding as to the high and exalted possibilities of art that has never been equalled.