[pu] In that which Genius did, what great Conceptions can.—[MS. M. erased.]
[526] [Pliny tells us (Hist. Nat., xxxvi. 5) that the Laocoon which stood in the palace of Titus was the work of three sculptors, natives of Rhodes; and it is now universally admitted that the statue which was found (January 14, 1516) in the vineyard of Felice de' Freddi, not far from the ruins of the palace, and is now in the Vatican, is the statue which Pliny describes. M. Collignon, in his Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque, gives reasons for assigning the date of the Laocoon to the first years of the first century B.C. It follows that the work is a century later than the frieze of the great altar of Pergamos, which contains the figure of a young giant caught in the toils of Athena's serpent—a theme which served as a model for later sculptors of the same school. In 1817 the Laocoon was in the heyday of its fame, and was regarded as the supreme achievement of ancient art. Since then it has been decried and dethroned. M. Collignon protests against this excessive depreciation, and makes himself the mouthpiece of a second and more temperate reaction: "On peut ... gôuter mediocrement le mélodrame, sans méconnaître pour cela les réelles qualités du groupe. La composition est d'une structure irréprochable, d'une harmonie de lignes qui défie toute critique. Le torse du Laocoon trahit une science du nu pen commune" (Hist. de la Sculp. Grecque, 1897, ii. 550, 551).]
[pv] [{446}] ——the writhing boys.—[MS. M. erased.]
[pw] Shackles its living rings, and——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[527] [In his description of the Apollo Belvidere, Byron follows the traditional theory of Montorsoli, the pupil of Michael Angelo, who restored the left hand and right forearm of the statue. The god, after his struggle with the python, stands forth proud and disdainful, the left hand holding a bow, and the right hand falling as of one who had just shot an arrow. The discovery, in 1860, of a bronze statuette in the Stroganoff Collection at St. Petersburg, which holds something like an ægis and a mantle in the left hand, suggested to Stephani a second theory, that the Belvidere Apollo was a copy of a statue of Apollo Boëdromios, an ex-voto offering on the rout of the Gauls when they attacked Delphi (B.C. 278). To this theory Furtwaengler at one time assented, but subsequently came to the conclusion that the Stroganoff bronze was a forgery. His present contention is that the left hand held a bow, as Montorsoli imagined, whilst the right grasped "a branch of laurel, of which the leaves are still visible on the trunk which the copyist added to the bronze original." The Apollo Belvidere is, he concludes, a copy of the Apollo Alexicacos of Leochares (fourth century B.C.), which stood in the Cerameicos at Athens. M. Maxime Collignon, who utters a word of warning as to the undue depreciation of the statue by modern critics, adopts Furtwaengler's later theory (Masterpieces of Ancient Greek Sculpture, by A. Furtwaengler, 1895, ii. 405, sq.).]
[528] [{447}] [The "delicate" beauty of the statue recalled the features of a lady whom he had once thought of making his wife. "The Apollo Belvidere," he wrote to Moore (May 12, 1817), "is the image of Lady Adelaide Forbes. I think I never saw such a likeness.">[
[529] [It is probable that lines 1-4 of this stanza contain an allusion to a fact related by M. Pinel, in his work, Sur l'Insanité, which Milman turned to account in his Belvidere Apollo, a Newdigate Prize Poem of 1812—
"Beauteous as vision seen in dreamy sleep
By holy maid on Delphi's haunted steep,
'Mid the dim twilight of the laurel grove,
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Yet on that form in wild delirious trance
With more than rev'rence gazed the Maid of France,
Day after day the love-sick dreamer stood
With him alone, nor thought it solitude!
To cherish grief, her last, her dearest care,
Her one fond hope—to perish of despair."
Milman's Poetical Works, Paris, 1829, p. 180.
Compare, too, Coleridge's Kubla Khan, lines 14-16—