. Art and criticism : monographs and studies. ng. These image-carvers, in their allegories of the vices andvirtues, of the wise and foolish virgins, of the last judgment,and in all their naive transpositions of the mysteries of religionand eternity into the formulas of common life, were rationalists,realists, frondeurs, observers and lovers of nature, always ex-pressive, and always appealing directly to their work is a mirror of the whole originality of the Frenchintellect; in Gothic sculpture we detect the same qualitieswhich produced the prose of Montesquieu and Voltaire
. Art and criticism : monographs and studies. ng. These image-carvers, in their allegories of the vices andvirtues, of the wise and foolish virgins, of the last judgment,and in all their naive transpositions of the mysteries of religionand eternity into the formulas of common life, were rationalists,realists, frondeurs, observers and lovers of nature, always ex-pressive, and always appealing directly to their work is a mirror of the whole originality of the Frenchintellect; in Gothic sculpture we detect the same qualitieswhich produced the prose of Montesquieu and Voltaire, name-ly, an innate need of giving to the conceptions of the mindand to external facts a translation and a presentation so ade-quate, so direct, so natural, and so precise, that there remainsnothing vague, enigmatic, or mistakable. With all its short-comings in execution, Gothic sculpture is always clear, logical,and measured — three essential qualities in plastic art — andfrom the twelfth to the fifteenth century these Gothic sculptors. FALGUIERE IN HIS STUDIO. MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 223 produced masterpieces enough to prove that, before the Re-naissance was dreamed of, France had her national school ofsculpture, the development of which was perhaps more hin-dered than forwarded by the influence of the revival of clas-sical art in Italy. This question is complex, but it is interesting to notice thetendency of many modern French critics to lament the tri-umph of the Renaissance in art and literature, and to accusethat movement of having hampered the modern mind with thenightmare of antiquity, of having perverted French architect-ure, and dethroned living French national art in favor of adead and cold pagan ideal. That the Renaissance pervertedFrench architecture we may perhaps admit, while still admiringthe wonderful buildings which we owe to that perversion ; thatthe Renaissance perverted French sculpture from its true pathis less evident, the more so as people are divi
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