Caylus recommends this idea to the painter, but adds: “It is a pity that Homer has given us no account of the attributes under which Sleep was represented in his day. We recognize the god only by his act, and we crown him with poppies. These ideas are modern. The first is of service, but cannot be employed in the present case, where even the flowers would be out of keeping in connection with the figure of Death.” (Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée d’Homère, et de l’Enéide de Virgile, avec des observations générales sur le costume, à Paris, 1757–58.) That is requiring of Homer ornamentations of that petty kind most at variance with the nobility of his style. The most ingenious attributes he could have bestowed on Sleep would not have characterized him so perfectly, nor have brought so vivid a picture of him before us, as the single touch which makes him the twin brother of Death. Let the artist seek to express this, and he may dispense with all attributes. The old artists did, in fact, make Sleep and Death resemble each other, like twin-brothers. On a chest of cedar, in the Temple of Juno at Elis, they both lay as boys in the arms of Night. One was white, the other black; one slept, the other only seemed to sleep; the feet of both were crossed. For so I should prefer to translate the words of Pausanias (Eliac. cap. xviii. p. 422, edit. Kuhn), ἀμφοτέρους διεστραμμένους τοὺς πόδας, rather than by “crooked feet,” as Gedoyn does, “les pieds contrefaits.” What would be the meaning of crooked feet? To lie with crossed feet is customary with sleepers. Sleep is thus represented by Maffei. (Raccol. Pl. 151.) Modern artists have entirely abandoned this resemblance between Sleep and Death, which we find among the ancients, and always represent Death as a skeleton, or at best a skeleton covered with skin. Caylus should have been careful to tell the artists whether they had better follow the custom of the ancients or the moderns in this respect. He seems to declare in favor of the modern view, since he regards Death as a figure that would not harmonize well with a flower-crowned companion. Has he further considered how inappropriate this modern idea would be in a Homeric picture? How could its loathsome character have failed to shock him? I cannot bring myself to believe that the little metal figure in the ducal gallery at Florence, representing a skeleton sitting on the ground, with one arm on an urn of ashes (Spence’s Polymetis, tab. xli.), is a veritable antique. It cannot possibly represent Death, because the ancients represented him very differently. Even their poets never thought of him under this repulsive shape.
Note 30, p. [76].
Richardson cites this work as an illustration of the rule that the attention of the spectator should be diverted by nothing, however admirable, from the chief figure. “Protogenes,” he says, “had introduced into his famous picture of Ialysus a partridge, painted with so much skill that it seemed alive, and was admired by all Greece. But, because it attracted all eyes to itself, to the detriment of the whole piece, he effaced it.” (Traité de la Peinture, T. i. p. 46.) Richardson is mistaken; this partridge was not in the Ialysus, but in another picture of Protogenes called the Idle Satyr, or Satyr in Repose, Σάτυρος ἀναπαυόμενος. I should hardly have mentioned this error, which arose from a misunderstanding of a passage in Pliny, had not the same mistake been made by Meursius. (Rhodi. lib. i. cap. 14.) “In eadem tabula, scilicet in qua Ialysus, Satyrus erat, quem dicebant Anapauomenon, tibeas tenens.”
Something of the same kind occurs in Winkelmann. (Von der Nachahm. der Gr. W. in der Mal. und Bildh. p. 56.) Strabo is the only authority for this partridge story, and he expressly discriminates between the Ialysus and the Satyr leaning against a pillar on which sat the partridge. (Lib. xiv.) Meursius, Richardson, and Winkelmann misunderstood the passage in Pliny (lib. xxxv. sect. 36), from not perceiving that he was speaking of two different pictures: the one which saved the city, because Demetrius would not assault the place where it stood; and another, which Protogenes painted during the siege. The one was Ialysus, the other the Satyr.
Note 31, p. [79].
This invisible battle of the gods has been imitated by Quintus Calaber in his Twelfth Book, with the evident design of improving on his model. The grammarian seems to have held it unbecoming in a god to be thrown to the ground by a stone. He therefore makes the gods hurl at one another huge masses of rock, torn up from Mount Ida, which, however, are shattered against the limbs of the immortals and fly like sand about them.
... οἱ δὲ κολώνας
χερσὶν ἀποῤῥήξαντες ἀπ’ οὔρεος Ἰδαίοιο
βάλλον ἐπ’ ἀλλήλους· αἳ δὲ ψαμάθοισιν ὁμοῖαι
ῥεῖα διεσκίδναντο θεῶν περὶ δ’ ἄσχετα γυῖα