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| STATUARY IN CEMENT - As pottery plays the
leading part in history - that is, as the art and culture, even the
trace of man, may be deduced from the pottery which he has made - it
is not impossible that future ages will read of the people of 1900 as
the cement-makers. There will be a distinctive character to statues
that were not chiseled. If this Venus of Milo, here represented,
shall turn to stone as hard as the Idaho petrefactions, so that no
sculptor could, by the most patient toil, overcome its resistance; or
if the mounds of the future shall deliver to the Schliemanns of that
time this Venus of Medici, or this Bacchante, or Gambrinus, or
Penelope; or this noble lion or his mate, the lioness, or the Emperor
Frederick, it cannot fail that the scientist will discern the
potter's rather than the sculptor's art. These statues are all cast
in cement. When the sculptors shall discover a material that will
harden into ivory-Carrara marble we shall then have reached the
height of this potter's age, and may hope to pose as people of the
highest civilization before the coming generations. Everything here
is cement; and because all is not made with artistic love and
patience, we see the highest thoughts of art consorting with the
meanest forms. Because the base and the comic were easy to make and
quick to sell, we see them here, casting disrepute on cheap but
beautiful Milo and Medici. As in the statue of Germania, Portland cement was used for these
figures. |
