(_β_) The earliest departure from this austere loftiness consists in this that the entire pose suggests the beginning of an action, or the conclusion of the same, without the godlike repose being thereby disturbed, or the figure being presented as in struggle or conflict. We place under this type the famous Medicean Venus and the Belvedere Apollo. In the times of Lessing and Winckelmann the admiration of the critical world over these statues, as the highest Ideal of art, was unconditional; nowadays, since we have come to know works more vital and substantial in their configuration, and more profound in their expressive power, we must deduct somewhat from this estimate; critics, in fact, place them in an age somewhat subsequent to the great period, an age in which the smoothness of their elaborate workmanship already suggests that to please is the main object, and the genuine grand and severe style is not persisted in. An English traveller goes so far as to say that the Apollo is "a theatrical coxcomb," and while admitting that the Venus has extraordinary softness, sweetness, symmetry, and coy grace, yet only finds in this a spiritual quality that is wanting in much, a negative perfection, and--a good deal of insipidity. We may generally review that transition from the former more severe repose and holiness as follows. Sculpture is no doubt the art of lofty seriousness, but this elevated austerity of the gods, inasmuch as the same are no abstractions, but individual figures, brings with it the absolute blithesomeness, and thereby a reflex attitude to reality and finite life, in which the blithesomeness of the gods does not express the feeling of absorption in such finite content, but the feeling of reconciliation, of spiritual freedom and alertness.