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Statius does the same

Illa Paphon veterem centumque altaria linquens, Nec vultu nec crine prior, solvisse jugalem Ceston, et Idalias procul ablegasse volucres Fertur. Erant certe, media qui noctis in umbra Divam alios ignes majoraque tela gerentem, Tartarias inter thalamis volitasse sorores Vulgarent utque implicitis arcana domorum. Anguibus, et sæva formidine cuncta replerit Limina.h

But it may be said, the poet alone possesses the power of painting with negative traits, and, by mixing the negative and positive together, of uniting two appearances in one. No longer is she the graceful Venus; no longer are her locks bound with golden clasps; no azure robes are floating round her; her girdle is laid aside; she is armed with other torches, and larger arrows than her own; furies, like herself, bear her company. But there is no reason, because the artist is compelled to abstain from the exercise of this power, that the poet should do the same. If painting must needs be the sister of poetry, let her not be a jealous sister; and let not the younger forbid the elder every ornament that does not sit well upon herself..

h Thebaid. Lib. v. 61.

CHAPTER IX.

If we wish to compare the painter and poet together in single instances, we must first inquire, whether they both enjoyed entire freedom, whether, uninfluenced by any external pressure, they could labour at producing the highest effect of their respective arts.

Such an external influence was often exercised by religion over the ancient artist. His work, destined for worship and devotion, could not always be as perfect as if the pleasure of the beholders had been his sole aim. The gods were overburdened with allegorical emblems by superstition, and the most beautiful of them were not everywhere worshipped as such.

Bacchus, in his temple at Lemnos, out of which the pious Hypsipyle, in the form of the god(23), rescued her father, was represented with horns, and so, without doubt, he appeared in all his temples; for these horns were allegorical, and one of the emblematic components of his being. But the unfettered artist, who executed his Bacchus for no temple, omitted this emblem; and if we, among the extant statues of this god, find none in which he

is represented with horns(24), it is perhaps a proof that none of the consecrated images, under which he was actually worshipped, are remaining. Besides, it is exceedingly probable that upon these latter, principally, fell the fury of the pious iconoclasts of the first centuries of christianity; by whom here and there a work of art, if polluted by no adoration, was sometimes spared.

As, however, among the excavated antiques, pieces of both kinds are to be found, it were to be wished that the title of works of art was confined to those alone, in which the artist had the power of really shewing himself to be such, in which beauty was his primary and ultimate object. None of the others, in which unmistakeable traces testify to an obligatory conformity to the service of religion, deserve this name, because, in their case, art did not labour on its own account, but was a mere helpmate to religion, which, in the material representation that it allotted to it for execution, looked rather to significance than to beauty. Yet, for all that, I do not mean to maintain that it has not frequently either embodied all this significance in the beautiful, or, at least, out of indulgence to the art and the fine taste of the age, retained so much beauty that the latter seems to hold an undoubted rule.

But no such distinction is drawn, and, in consequence, connoisseurs and antiquarians are constantly coming into collision, because they do not

understand one another. If the former, from his insight into the intention of art, maintains that the ancient artists could not have produced this or that work, i. e., not as artists, not voluntarily; the latter extends this into an assertion that neither religion nor any other external cause, lying outside the region of art, could have had it executed by an artist, i. e., not as an artist, but as a mere artisan. Thus he believes he can refute the connoisseur with the first statue that comes to hand, but which the latter, without the least scruple, though to the great scandal of the learned world, condemns again to the heap of rubbish from which it had been extracted (25).

On the other hand, too much importance may be attributed to the influence, exercised by religion upon art. Spence affords us a curious example of this. He found in Ovid that Vesta was not worshipped in her temple under any personal image; and this seemed to him a sufficient ground for concluding that, as an universal rule, there were no statues of this goddess, and that all, which had hitherto been considered such, represent, not Vesta, but one of her priestesses. A curious conclusion! Had the artist lost his right to personify a being, to whom the poets give so definite a personality that they represent her as the daughter of Saturn and Ops, and as being in danger of falling under the brutality of Priapus, besides relating several other myths concerning a Polymetis, Dial. vii. page 81.

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her? Had, I say, the artist lost his right to personify, in his own manner, this being, because, in a single temple, she was only worshipped under the symbol of fire? For Spence here further commits the error of extending what Ovid states only of one particular temple of Vesta, viz. the one at Rome(26), to all her temples without distinction, and to her worship universally. It does not necessarily follow that she was worshipped everywhere, as she was in this temple at Rome; nay, before Numa built it, she was not thus worshipped, even in Italy. Numa did not wish to have any divinity represented by either the human or the brutish form; and the improvement, which he effected in the worship of Vesta, without doubt, consisted in the rejection of all personal representation of her. Ovid himself informs us that, before the time of Numa, there were statues of Vesta in her temple, which, from shame, when her priestess became a mother, covered their eyes with maiden hands(27). That even in the temples, which the goddess possessed, outside the city, in the Roman provinces, her worship was not precisely that established by Numa appears to be proved by several old inscriptions, in which mention is made of a Pontifex of Vesta. At Corinth, too, there was a temple of Vesta, without any image at all, but with a simple altar, upon which sacrifices were offered to

Lipsius de Vesta et Vestalibus, cap. 13.

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