66
PARTISAN REVIEW
these statues by the immensity of every architectural fragment;
but the ruse is broken before very long, and the effect becomes
if anything more crushing because of the early deception. At
the other extreme, a Cellini figurine or a statuette from Tutank–
hamen's tomb may have a thousand times the grandeur of Liberty,
but it is small and exquisite as well. (I know of no greater
anomaly than the miniature colossi of Lachaise.) Greek sculpture,
aiming always at the reproduction of humanity in an idealized
form, was, in its most notable examples, quite appropriately a
little larger than life-sized.
The shape and physical boundaries of a statue are defined
only by the artist's conception. Paintings, on the other hand, are
restricted by the canvas-limits, and from this point we push our
contrast a step further. As we have seen, sculpture becomes so
much a part of the world that it admits of no spatial deception.
While looking at a painting, however, we step as through a window
mto another world, where every space and distance is hounded
only by the artist's ability to realize his intention. I do not suggest
that the spectator is merely lured into another locality, for through
quite abstract pictures one can be similarly transported,-farther
from where one stands than Leonardo's mere hundred miles. This
represents no feat in itself, merely the nature of the art-form.
(Even the sharpest photograph does not project such a quality to
anything like the same degree.) Thus removed from the objects
in the midst of which he is standing, the spectator is no longer
restricted by any sense of scale. There are small pictures that
become colossal and some huge ones that no one considers par·
ticularly big. For the illusion of scale depends only on the rela·
tion of the parts that fill the painted rectangle. The painter is
indeed in command of a "magical world" which can become at
once his freedom and his downfall. The history of art reveals a
fluctuation somewhat akin to breathing, with the artist now lost
in a maze of picturesquely remote illusions, followed by a ret11111
to sculptural "hereness" from which he is re-equipped to start
agam.
II.
Let us now penetrate behind the painter's "window" and
between and around the sculptor's manifest forms. From different
aspects the two forms of art now begin to reveal divergences
