The Ideal Form.

"Not a nude figure, I hope," comments a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860). Hawthorne's novel, set in Rome, tracks a band of American artists abroad. As Hawthorne's sculptor, Kenyon, prepares to unveil a "figure," his friend Miriam observes, "Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing." Miriam's teasing remarks shed light on the state of nineteenth-century American sculpture. At midcentury a marble nude titled The Greek Slave (circa 1843) enchanted the American art world. Hiram Powers (1805-1873), creator of The Greek Slave, had recently immigrated—like so many sculptors of his generation —to Italy, where he and compatriots such as Horatio Greenough (1805-1852) developed a taste for grandeur, classicism, and what Greenough called...