The conditions of Italian art, on the other hand, favoured an opposite tendency--to particularise, to enforce detail, to emphasise the artist's own ideal or the model's quality.

When the type of a Greek deity had been fixed, each successive master varied this within the closest limits possible.

For centuries the type remained fundamentally unaltered, undergoing subtle transformations, due partly to the artist's temperament, and partly to changes in the temper of society.

Consequently those aspects of the human form which are capable of most successful generalisation, the body and the limbs, exerted a kind of conventional tyranny over Greek art.

And Greek artists applied to the face the same rules of generalisation which were applicable to the body.
The Greek god or goddess was a sensuous manifestation of the idea, a particle of universal godhood incarnate in a special fleshly form, corresponding to the particular psychological attributes of the deity whom the sculptor had to represent.