The record-union. [volume] (Sacramento, Calif.) 1891-1903, 1899-04-30

| Literary Digest: Mr. Bartlett's bronze
statue of Michael Angelo, recently
| placed in the rotunda of the Congress
sional Library at Washington, has been
hailed by some as an epoch making
work. According to the most conserva-
| tive estimate it is a significant addition
to American art. The traditional broken
nose has been ignored. Mr.. Bartlett is
an American who has. for soma time
made his home in Paris.s sympathetic
appreciation of his Michael Angelo ap-
pears in "ScrfbneT's Magazine" for
March, in the course of which IS sug-
gested a kinship between the work of
the American sculptor and that of NJ.
Eodin. The writer finds the special in
terest of this statue in the fac that it
embodies so much of that striving for
human and individual expression which
| is characteristic of the leading artists of
| our time, and goes on to say:
1T is as vain to ask a first-rate mind
| of the present time to ignore such hui
man and Individual expression. and to
give itself, as it might in a former age
have given itself, to the working out Of
| the sculpturesque problem pure and
simple, as it is to ask a writer of our
did, or the dramatic problem like an
Elizabethan. There is here and there a
man who is led by his nature to do this,
and to be a Greek in sculpture though
not in painting; and such an instance
| there is in the great Paul Du Bots,
whose allegorical and symbolica1 figures
might almost be said to be sculpture
pure and simple; but such instances are
rare, and the modern artistic spirit, in
ferior in a thousand ways to the artistic
spirit of this or that past century, is,
perhaps, superior to it in so much as it
is sympathetic. Apparently
| it is this which makes the charm of Ro-
din's sculpture. From a sculpturesque
point of view, the bedraggled and for
| lorn figures of the Calais group are but
poor subjects, and their treatment is
almost an offense From the sculptur-
esque point of view, again. such por-
trait-bust as that of Victor Hugo is al
most an outrage; and the soft flesh Of
the Eve after the Fall into which her
| fingers are dug in a spasm of grief and
| horror, is a contradiction of the primary
lesson which a sculptor learns that he
must not destroy the dignity of the
| body in his artistic rendering of it,
The impulse of many first-rate artist
has been, as he has entered the foundry
| to see the cast or the bronze, to take off
his hat and salute this work of I'M
questioned genius. One per-
son will see in it more, and another less,
of the Michael Angelo of his dreams It
seems evident, however, that this is a
| faultless embodiment of the Michael
Angelo of which Mr.. Bartlett has
dreamed. And yet, the word dreamed
gives a false impression, for the living
sculptor must have studied the works
and ways of the dead one profoundly
and here, perhaps, it may be right to
say that one who has studied Michael
| Angelo as a sculptor and as fresco-
painter, and has tried for years to find
a consistent theory of the man and his
| life, find in this statue an almost per-
feet realization of the man and an al
most perfect and complete theory ready
at hand"
The colossal statue of Mr.. Gladstone
which Mr. Administration is executing
for the town of Blackburn, England, is
eleven feet high, and is intended to
stand on a pedestal of ten feet. The i'm
mense block of Carrara marble from
which the colossal statue is to be hewn
has been got into the workshop, and is
just beginning to lose its square edges.
! Nevertheless, it is said the completed
statue is expected to be in it's place in
November. On the back of the pedestal
is to be inscribed a passage from Lord
Salisbury's eulogium of Mr.. Gladstone
in the House of Lords.
| Next June will occur the tercentenary
| of the birth of Velasquez, which VIII be
celebrated at Madrid by the exhibition
of a large number of his paintings and
| by the unwilling of a statue or the artist
in front of the Museo del Prado.
i
Andre Castaigne, whose brilliant pic
lures Illustrating the Life of Alexander
the Great are now appearing in the