As a rule, then, romantic sculpture, which has deviated only too frequently into every kind of confusion, remains most loyal to the genuine principle of plastic art in those cases where it approaches most nearly the Greek, and either is concerned to treat in the mode of sculpture ancient subject-matter, much as the ancients would have done, or to model the standing figures of heroes and kings, and portraits, with an intention to imitate the antique. This is exceptionally the case nowadays. Much of the most excellent work, however, has been accomplished by sculpture, even in the religious field. It is only necessary here to mention the name of Michelangelo. We can hardly admire sufficiently his dead Christ[212], of which we have a plaster cast in our Royal Museum. The authenticity of the sculptured figure of the Madonna in the Frauenkirche at Bruges, a consummate work, is disputed by certain critics. Speaking for myself, nothing has ever more impressed me than the tomb of the Count of Nassau at Breda[213]. The Count reposes with his lady, life-size figures both in alabaster, on a slab of black marble. At the angles of this are placed Regulus, Hannibal, Caesar, and a Roman warrior in a bowing posture, and they support above their heads a black slab similar to the one beneath. Could anything be more interesting than to see a character such as that of Caesar placed before our eyes by Michelangelo. Even when dealing with religious subjects the genius, the power of imagination, the force, thoroughness, boldness, in short all the extraordinary resources of this master tended, in the characteristic production of his art, to combine the plastic principle of the ancients with the type of intimate soul-life which we find in romantic art. But as we have seen, the direction as a rule of the Christian emotion, where the religious point of view and idea are paramount, is not towards the classical form of ideality, which primarily and with highest results is the determinant factor of its sculpture.
From this point we may now fix the transition from sculpture to another principle of artistic apprehension and presentment, which requires for its realization another sensuous material. In classical sculpture it was the objective and _substantive_ individuality in its human shape, which constituted the vital core, and the human form was placed thereby at such a lofty level, that it was in fact retained in its abstract simplicity as the beauty of form, and as such converted to the Divine image. Under such a one-sided aspect of content and representation man is not fully himself in his _concrete humanity._ The anthropomorphism of art remains in its incomplete state in ancient sculpture. For that which fails us here is humanity in its _objective universality_, a universality which we identify at the same time with the principle of _absolute personality_, quite as much as that aspect of it which in common parlance is called human, in other words the phase of _subjective singularity_, human weakness, contingency, caprice, immediate sense life, passion, and so forth, a phase or factor which must be taken up into that universality in order that the _entire individuality_, the subject of conscious life, that is, in its entire range, and in the infinite compass of its reality, may appear as the vital principle both of the mode of presentment and its content.