Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/214

II. GREEK SCULPTURE. IT was in Greece that sculpture first became an ideal art. Oriental arts were fettered by dogmatic rules. The chief aim of sculpture and painting in Assyria was the glorification of the reigning monarch; and in Egypt, sculpture, though religious as well as monumental, did not advance beyond conventional types. It was far otherwise with the Greeks, who early threw off the yoke of the old monarchies, and broke loose from the trammels of routine. It is true that they owed much to the Egyptians and Assyrians, but they borrowed chiefly the technical and mechanical rules of art, and, emancipating themselves from the old narrow traditions, rapidly worked out an independent style which was purely their own. In, Greece, as elsewhere, sculpture was connected with the religion of the country ; the mythology of the Greeks, rightly understood, is an exquisite poem, and Greek art is a translation of that poem into visible forms of beauty. The imagination of the free-born Greek was unfettered by priestly dogma, and he peopled his land with deities, embodying the elements in ideal human forms instinct with life and intellect. The Greek realized with exceptional intensity the beauty of nature ; he saw his gods in the