THE RHODIAN GENIUS. 381 



rest of sea-girt Sicily, the riddle of its meaning still remained 

 unsolved. It was not even known to what temple it had 

 formerly belonged, for it had been saved from a stranded 

 vessel, which was only conjectured, from the freight it carried, 

 to have come from Rhodes. 



The foreground of the picture was occupied by a numerous 

 group of youths and maidens, whose uncovered limbs, although 

 well formed, were not cast in that slender mould which we 

 so much admire in the statues of Praxiteles and Alcamenes. 

 The fuller development of their limbs, which bore indications 

 of laborious exercise, the human expression of passion and 

 of care stamped on their features, all seemed to divest them 

 of a heavenly or God-like type, and to fix them as creatures 

 of the earth. Their hair was simply adorned with leaves and 

 wild flowers. Their arms were extended towards each other 

 with impassioned longing, but their earnest and mournful 

 gaze was rivetted on a Genius, who, surrounded by a brilliant 

 halo, hovered in the midst of the group. On his shoulder 

 was a butterfly, and in his right hand he held aloft a flaming 

 torch. His limbs were moulded with child-like grace; his 

 eye radiant with celestial light. He looked imperiously upon 

 the youths and maidens at his feet. No other characteristic 

 traits could be distinguished in the pictiire. Some, however, 

 thought they could perceive at his foot the letters and s, and 

 as antiquarians were then no less bold than they are now, 

 they inferred, though far from happily, that the artist was 

 called Zenodorus, the name borne at a later date by the 

 modeller of the Colossus of Rhodes. 



"The Rhodian Genius," for so this mysterious painting 

 was called, did not however want for interpreters in Syra- 

 cuse. Virtuosi, especially the younger of them, on their 

 return from a flying visit to Corinth or Athens, would have 

 deemed themselves deficient in all pretensions to connoisseur- 

 ship, had they not immediately advanced some new explanation. 

 Some regarded the Genius as the personification of spiritual 



