The Park in Muskau 171 



persons who, probably by reason of the happy 

 contrast, have selected the chief city of Frederick 

 the Great for a rubbish-heap, and whose propri- 

 ety goes so far that they would provide every 

 Cupid with a pair of breeches and every Venus 

 with underskirts before permitting them to be 

 exposed to the public eye, have immediately 

 come to the front with the dictum that the nude 

 in these pictures is in any case highly immoral, 

 but still more inappropriate in the vicinity of 

 the holy cathedral. (Even so these cheap holy 

 ones have recently protested against telegraph 

 wires on the church towers.) Yet with just as 

 much right should the whole museum be con- 

 demned, where for some years now the unutter- 

 able has occurred, and great and little have had 

 plentiful opportunity for becoming familiar with 

 the nude and " the gods of Greece." If we can 

 view these Christian pictures, countless altar- 

 pieces, edifying representations of the pains of 

 hell, etc., mingled heterogeneously with the old 

 classic art, why should the Christian cathedral 

 be unable to endure the proximity of Schinkel's 

 world-embracing and world-historic ideas per- 

 sonified in beautiful human form ? Yet St. Peter's 

 in Rome, the cathedral of Christendom, permits, 

 in the near proximity of the Vatican, profane 

 wall-paintings, nude pictures and statues of all 

 kinds; and does not, in the Capitol, the altar of 

 Ara Cceli lie, as it were, cheek by jowl with a 

 Bacchus and the Venus of Praxiteles in the bare 

 adornment of nature ? But I forget that Catho- 



