ANCIENT PAINTING AS AMONG THE LOST ARTS. 237 



Trojans not to admit into their city the huge wooden horse which 

 the Greeks had offered them on the eve of their pretended de- 

 parture. And for tin's, Minerva is fabled to have sent two 

 enormous serpents from the sea, which folded and crushed in 

 their horrible embrace the priest and his two sons. For agonized 

 expressions, as well as anatomical contortions, this is justly con- 

 sidered the great masterpiece of sculpture. These two examples, 

 if there had been no others found in the ruins of Rome, would 

 have been sufficient to establish the fact of Grecian superiority 

 in the line of statuary, over all nations and times, ancient or 

 modern. 



The art of painting involves the same principles, the same 

 knowledge of form and proportions, and the same skilled hand 

 and eye, that sculpture does. It is impossible to imagine the 

 successful cultivation of the one, without that of the other. For 

 these reasons I think we cannot avoid the conclusion that the 

 painter's art has never since, not even in the palmiest days of art 

 in Italy, arrived at such a state of perfection as in the flourishing 

 periods of ancient Greece. 



And for this superiority there was necessary exactly the con- 

 dition of things which we find in Grecian culture and civilization. 

 Here was a nation of hero worshipers, of refined idolators, 

 whose religion was the adoration of the beautiful, whose highest 

 aspirations were to represent their divinities under the most per- 

 fect of human forms. Was it the chaste Diana, the goddess of 

 hunting ? Then her resemblance must be that which, not one 

 life, but generations of huntresses would develop. Was it a 

 Hercules to be represented ? His type can by no means be made 

 up from ordinary wrestlers and pugilists. It must be the out- 

 come of a line of warrior athletes, whose very existence for 

 generations may have depended on their power to carry the 

 weightiest armor and to wield the heaviest battle-ax. It will 

 never answer for a criticism, to say we never saw such length and 

 slenderness of limbs, together with such fullness of the vital 

 organs, as the old artists have given to their Apollos and Dianas ; 

 nor such swollen and knotted muscles as seem almost to disfigure 

 the Farnese Hercules. We may be sure that their models have 



