Doubtless Grecian Art owed its superiority, in some degree, to the
gymnasium. Living models of manliness, grace, and beauty were daily
before the artist's eye. The _stadium_ furnished its fleet runners,
nimble as the wing-footed Mercury,--fit types for his light and airy
conceptions; while the arena of the athletes offered marvellous
opportunities for the study of muscle and posture, to show its results
in the burly limbs of Hercules or the starting sinews of Laocooen. Many
of the most lifelike groups of marble which remain to us from that time
are but copies of the living statues who wrestled or threw the quoit in
the public gymnasium.
It is worthy of remark, in corroboration of this view, that the
department of the fine arts which depended on outline surpassed
that which derived its power from coloring and perspective. The
sculptors far excelled the painters. The statue was the natural result
of the imitative faculty surveying the nude human figure in every
posture of activity or repose. Pictures came later, from more educated
senses, and from minds which had first learned outward nature through
the medium of the simpler arts.
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