lint arts.
The colossal statue of St. Charles Borromeo, which stands on a hill near Arena, overlooking the Lago Maggiore, has lately been ascended, like Mont Blanc and other places inaccessible to ordinary mortals, by an Englishman—Mr. Sankey. The feat was accomplished inside the statue, by climbing and squeezing, like a chimney-sweeper, through spaces be- tween the metal and. the central masonry. The statue, which was planed on the hill in the year 1624, is not cast, like ordinary statues, but made of plates of bronze about half-an-inch thick, hammered into form and riveted together by copper rivets. Such is the excellence of the model- ling, that Mr. Sankey imagines it could not have been done without using some gigantic mould. The eyes and ears are perfectly formed, and the hair is represented short, the chin being covered with a stubbly beard. The expression of the -features and the attitude are described'as admirable. The statue is 70 feet high, and cost 40,000/. in those days: The thumb measured 4 feet long, and the mouth 2 feet 4 inches. The inside of the head would make a comfortable sitting-room. The peculiar mode, of construction seems to point out at least a very strong and ready method of erecting statues of dimensions far larger than any- thing attempted now, and ,suggests some interesting points as to the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, of which a hundred are spoken of in history. Colossal statues have been favourite monumental works of art from very early times. The Egyptian sculpteis took the side of a mountain for their bloekoand carved out of it a group of their Titan kings. The guardian statue of the Athenikis—the Minerva Poliades, which stood. on the Acropolis, and whose spear-head was seen far at sea by the Greek sailors as they came round Cape Sunium—was a gilt bronze statue, and stood till the year 395 to strike with wonder Alarie the Goth. Some seven centuries later, the Greeks built up their colossal Minerva and Jupiter at Elia, after the models of Phidias, and under the eye and hand of that great representative sculptor, using slabs of gold and ivory laid upon marble as a support; the head and limbs being carved in ivory, the drapery in gold. The Egyptian colossi remain to this day, perfect with the exception of the head of One, and we are familiar with them by their substitutes in the Crystal Palace. They are sixty-one feet in height, which was the height of the Minerva Poliadcs ; "the great statue of Athenc," as Demosthenes spoke of it is not known ; the r. Pallas of Vel- letri " in the Louvre is considered to represent the attitude of the goddess, and was probably lammed as a copy on a small scale. Of the crysele- pbantine statues which occupied the temples, the Minerva was thirty- seven feet high, and the Jupiter a seated figure, forty-five feet high. A century later, when Alexander the Great was the hero, colossal statues cast in bronze, were made by Lysippus. The well known " Farnese Hercules" which is in the Naples -Museum, is a copy in marble by Glycon, of the more celebrated figure in bronze by Lysippus. The 'two grand equestrian groups at Rome, which give the name " Monte Ca- vallo" to the hill on which they stand, are copies in marble of colossal bronze monuments in honour of Alexander. Very fine copies of these famous works are, shame to say, at the present time buried beneath the scaffolding of the great orchestra in the Crystal Palace, as though they had not cost an enormous sum, and were of no value as examples' of art. The Colossus of Rhodes, which fables said stood with one foot on each side of the harbour mouth, so that the ships passed under it, was another statue cast in bronze. It was 105 feet high, and the largest of which there is any description. Pliny says the limbs were hollow, and contained large stones to give might and strength to the figure. Whether this mode of construction was faulty or not, it fell to the ground after fifty-six years from the time of its erection in 280 B.C., and the fragments remained for centuries, being sold in 643 of our era : had it stood over the sea, this could not have been the case.
The German sculptors have shown more inclination to colossal works of art than any of the moderns. Schwanthaler executed the grandest work of our times in the bronze statue of Bavaria for the " Ruhme- ehalle," or Hall of Heroes, built by Louis, ex-King of Bavaria, in front of which it stands, 54 feet high, with a gigantic lion at her side, upon a lofty pedestal, raising the whole group to 114 feet in height. A east from the head of this statue is in the Crystal Palace. IIalbig, a pupil of Schwanthaler, who produced the colossal statue of " Franconia," at Kel- heim, and Rauch, the sculptor of the magnificent monument of Frederick the Great of colossal proportions, at Berlin, and ether well-known Ger- mans.
The Belgian sculptors, William and Joseph Geefs, are also distin- guished for their colossal statues, of Rubens in the Place Vert, at Ant- werp, and of Godfrey de Bouillon. A cast of the latter was in the 1851 Exhibition, and the Rubens is in the Crystal Palace.
The colossal works of our English sculptors are generally of very in- ferior mould. The strange half-nude figure of Dr. Johnson, by Bacon; a " Samson," by Mr. Legrew ; a " Milo" and a " Satan," by Mr. Lough, are neither excellent in art nor indeed to bo compared in point of difficulty with the works we have spoken of. _The " Achilles," and the notorious equestrian figure of the Great Duke by Mr. Wyatt, which has so long been permitted to outrage the -architectural proprieties of Mr. Decimus Burton's triumphal arch, cannot be pointed to with any satis- faction, although we admit that perhaps both works are seen in a position most advantageous to them, and this in addition to the fact that the Great Duke and Sir Frederick Trench can no more be offended at the proposal, is a very fair reason why their colossal uglinesses should be removed to some locality more becoming and suitable.
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