This is an all-important consideration.

It is to this that our whole argument is tending.

Therefore to enlarge upon this point will not be useless.
Christ is specially adored in His last act of love on Calvary; and how impossible it is to set that forth consistently with the requirements of strictly plastic art, may be gathered by comparing the passion of S.
Bernard's Hymn to our Lord upon the Cross with all that Winckelmann and Hegel have so truly said about the restrained expression, dignified generality, and harmonious beauty essential to sculpture.

It is the negation of tranquillity, the excess of feeling, the absence of comeliness, the contrast between visible weakness and invisible omnipotence, the physical humiliation voluntarily suffered by Him that "ruled over all the angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven, whose feet were clothed with stars"-- it is all this that gives their force and pathos to these stanzas: Omnis vigor atque viror Hinc recessit; non admiror: Mors apparet in inspectu, Totus pendens in defectu, Attritus aegra macie.
Sic affectus, sic despectus, Propter me sic interfectus, Peccatori tam indigno Cum amoris in te signo Appare clara facie[3].
We have never heard that Pheidias or Praxiteles chose Prometheus upon Caucasus for the supreme display of his artistic skill; and even the anguish expressed in the group of the Laocoon is justly thought to violate the laws of antique sculpture.

Yet here was a greater than Prometheus--one who had suffered more, and on whose suffering the salvation of the human race depended, to exclude whom from the sphere of representation in art was the same as confessing the utter impotence of art to grasp the vital thought of modern faith.