And now from the end of the Renaissance in Orlando Lasso and Palestrina right up to Wagner, from Titian right up to Manet and Marées and Leibl, great musicians and great painters followed close upon one another while the plastic art sank into entire insignificance. Oil-painting and instrumental music evolve organically towards aims that were comprehended in the Gothic and achieved in the Baroque. Both arts— Faustian in the highest sense—are within those limits _prime phenomena_. They have a soul, a physiognomy and therefore a history. And in this they are alone. All that sculpture could thenceforward achieve was a few beautiful incidental pieces in the shadow of painting, garden-art, or architecture. The art of the West had no real need of them. There was no longer a _style_ of plastic in the sense that there were styles of painting or music. No consistent tradition or necessary unity links the works of Maderna, Goujon, Puget and Schlüter. Even Leonardo begins to despise the chisel outright: at most he will admit the bronze cast, and that on account of its pictorial advantages. Therein he differs from Michelangelo, for whom the marble block was still the true element. And yet even Michelangelo in his old age could no longer succeed with the plastic, and none of the later sculptors are great in the sense that Rembrandt and Bach are great. There were clever and tasteful performances no doubt, but not one single _work_ of the same order as the “Night Watch” or the “Matthew Passion,” nothing that expresses, as these express, the whole depth of a whole mankind. This art had fallen out of the destiny of the Culture. Its speech meant nothing now. What there is in a Rembrandt portrait simply cannot be rendered in a bust. Now and then a sculptor of power arises, like Bernini or the masters of the contemporary Spanish school, or Pigalle or Rodin (none of whom, naturally, transcended the decorative and attained the level of grand symbolism), but such an artist is always visibly either a belated imitator of the Renaissance like Thorwaldsen, a disguised painter like Houdon or Rodin, an architect like Bernini and Schlüter or a decorator like Coysevox. And his very appearance on the scene only shows the more clearly that this art, incapable of carrying the Faustian burden, has no longer a mission—and therefore no longer a soul or a life-history of specific style-development—in the Faustian world. In the Classical world, correspondingly, music was the art that failed. Beginning with probably quite important advances in the earliest Doric, it had to give way in the ripe centuries of Ionic (650-350) to the two truly Apollinian arts, sculpture and fresco; renouncing harmony and polyphony, it had to renounce therewith any pretensions to organic development as a higher art. VIII