-in consideration of the rapidity of the death
by crushing, adds infinitely to the power of the Florentine's
conception, and would have been better hinted by Virgil, than that
sickening distribution of venom on the garlands. In fact, Virgil has
missed both of truth and impressiveness every way--the "morsu
depascitur" is unnatural butchery--the "perfusus veneno" gratuitous
foulness--the "clamores horrendos," impossible degradation; compare
carefully the remarks on this statue in Sir Charles Bell's Essay on
Expression, (third edition, p. 192) where he has most wisely and
uncontrovertibly deprived the statue of all claim to expression of
energy and fortitude of mind, and shown its common and coarse intent
of mere bodily exertion and agony, while he has confirmed Payne
Knight's just condemnation of the passage in Virgil.

If the reader wishes to see the opposite or imaginative view of the
subject, let him compare Winkelmann; and Schiller, Letters on
Aesthetic Culture.

[25] Whenever, in monumental work, the sculptor reaches a deceptive
appearance of life or death, or of concomitant details, he has gone
too far. The statue should be felt for such, not look like a dead or
sleeping body; it should not convey the impression of a corpse, nor
of sick and outwearied flesh, but it should be the marble _image_ of
death or weariness. So the concomitants should be distinctly marble,
severe and monumental in their lines, not shroud, not bedclothes,
not actual armor nor brocade, not a real soft pillow, not a
downright hard stuffed mattress, but the mere type and suggestion of
these: a certain rudeness and incompletion of finish is very noble
in all. Not that they are to be unnatural, such lines as are given
should be pure and true, and clear of the hardness and mannered
rigidity of the strictly Gothic types, but lines so few and grand as
to appeal to the imagination only, and always to stop short of
realization. There is a monument put up lately by a modern Italian
sculptor in one of the side chapels of Santa Croce, the face fine
and the execution dexterous. But it looks as if the person had been
restless all night, and the artist admitted to a faithful study of
the disturbed bedclothes in the morning.

CHAPTER VIII.

OF SYMMETRY, OR THE TYPE OF DI