ABSTRACT
Carving, Modelling and Agostino like glow of the limestone rocks and buildings and statues about him, and to other humanistic influences of Mediterranean topography which, at some point, are always connected with that living yet objective condition of the stone as I too have conceived it. A plastic idea may vitalize, as well as de-vitalize, carving aim. What a stimulus it must have been to Hellenic carvers when the first naturalistic bronzes were taken from the mould! Here were the figures which the carver had vaguely attributed to his block as the fruit of his intercourse with the stone, by the modeller ripped, as it were, gleaming from a womb. In a certain imitation of the more facile process, the carver now becomes more precise in his aim, more naturalistic: the children he wants from the stone must comply more and more with his own image. His successors, however, will sooner or later dissipate the underlying style without which any form of naturalism is meaningless. But the naturalism may yet be pursued without a single real plastic or carving idea. The ideal nude ceases to have any but a pornographic interest, even perhaps for its perpetrator, whatever he may say or think and a commercial interest, of course.
