336 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. 



modern court-dress star, to be made in diamonds. And yet 

 all this wild ornamentation is, if you will examine it, more 

 purely Greek in spirit than the Apollo Belvidere. 



You know I have told you, again and again, that the soul of 

 Greece is her veracity ; that what to other nations were fables 

 and symbolisms, to her became living facts living gods. 

 The fall of Greece was instant when her gods again became 

 fables. The Apollo Belvidere is the work of a sculptor to 

 whom Apollonism is merely an elegant idea on which to ex- 

 hibit his own skill. He does not himself feel for an instant 

 that the handsome man in the unintelligible attitude,* with 

 drapery hung over his left arm, as it would be hung to dry 

 over a clothes-line, is the Power of the Sun. But the Floren- 

 tine believes in Apollo with his whole mind, and is trying to 

 explain his strength in every touch. 



For instance ; I said just now, " You see the sun's epaulettes 

 before the sun." Well, dont you, usually, as it rises ? Do 

 you not continually mistake a luminous cloud for it, or won- 

 der where it is, behind one ? Again, the face of the Apollo 

 Belvidere is agitated by anxiety, passion, and pride. Is the 

 sun's likely to be so, rising on the evil and the good ? This 

 Prince sits crowned and calm : look at the quiet fingers of 

 the hand holding the sceptre, at the restraint of the reins 

 merely by a depression of the wrist. 



160. You have to look carefully for those fingers holding 

 the sceptre, because the hand which a great anatomist 

 would have made so exclusively interesting is here confused 

 with the ornamentation of the arm of the chariot on which it 

 rests. But look what the ornamentation is ; fruit and leaves, 

 abundant, in the mouth of a cornucopia. A quite vulgar and 

 meaningless ornament in ordinary renaissance work. Is it so 



*I read somewhere, lately, a new and very ingenious theory about 

 the attitude of the Apollo Belvidere, proving, to the author's satisfaction, 

 that the received notion about watching the arrow was all a mistake. 

 The paper proved, at all events, one thing namely, the statement in 

 the text. For an attitude which has been always hitherto taken to mean 

 one thing, and is plausibly asserted now to mean another, must be in 

 itself unintelligible. 



