authority [Footnote: Newton, "Essays on Art and Archaeology" page
81.] as showing only "a meager and painful rendering of nature."
That is one way of looking at it. But there is another way, which
has been finely expressed by Pater, in an essay on "The Marbles of
Aegina": "As art which has passed its prime has sometimes the
charm of an absolute refinement in taste and workmanship, so
immature art also, as we now see, has its own attractiveness in
the naivete, the freshness of spirit, which finds power and
interest in simple motives of feeling, and in the freshness of
hand, which has a sense of enjoyment in mechanical processes still
performed unmechanically, in the spending of care and intelligence
on every touch. ... The workman is at work in dry earnestness,
with a sort of hard strength of detail, a scrupulousness verging
on stiffness, like that of an early Flemish painter; he
communicates to us his still youthful sense of pleasure in the
experience of the first rudimentary difficulties of his art
overcome." [Footnote: Pater, "Greek Studies" page 285]





CHAPTER VII.

THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD OF GREEK SCULPTURE. 480-450 B. C.


The term "Transitional period" is rather meaningless in itself,
but has acquired considerable currency as denoting that stage in
the history of Greek art in which the last steps were taken toward