There is another somewhat more subtle reason given for this strange superiority in art of a people who had not a tithe of our experience or of our mechanical resources: I shall give it to you in the words of a gifted Italian essayist. Professor Pasquale Villari: “The problem,” he says, “set before the famous sculptor Donatello, at the dawn of the Renaissance, could not be solved by the mere study of ancient art. The Greeks had no means of expressing Christian spirit or emotion. Their quest was for outward beauty of form, and their nature, being simpler, more spontaneous, and more harmonious than ours, could be adequately expressed in marble. They had no experience of the mental maladies, the tortures of remorse, or the whole inner life created by Christianity. In their times, no ascetics, no hermits, no anchorites, no martyrs, no crusaders, no knight errants had appeared in the world. But in Donatello’s day all things were changed; the faculties of the human mind had been altered and multiplied. Therefore, a new art was needed to represent the new inner life. Assuredly, Christ and the Virgin cannot be chiselled in the same way as a Venus or an Apollo. Outward beauty was no longer the sole aim of art. It was now bound to express character, which is the mind’s outward form. Even the very soul of man, with all its load of new struggles, sorrows, and uncertainties, must show through the envelope of marble. Was this possible, and if so, to what extent? That was the question put to Donatello.”[24] To criticise this interesting passage, to show what a partial and imperfect view it expresses of Greek genius, might be a task instructive to my hearers, but too wide and irrelevant to my present discourse. Some points, however, will help us directly to the understanding of Greek sculpture.