If, on this account, any should apply to him what the old artist said to one of his pupils who had painted a gayly decked Helen,—“Since you could not paint her beautiful, you have painted her rich,”—Virgil would answer: “I am not to blame that I could not paint her beautiful. The fault lies in the limits of my art, within which it is my merit to have kept.”
I must not forget here the two odes of Anacreon wherein he analyzes the beauty of his mistress and of Bathyllus.[[136]] The device which he uses entirely justifies the analysis. He imagines that he has before him a painter who is working from his description. “Thus paint me the hair,” he says; “thus the brow, the eyes, the mouth; thus the neck and bosom, the thighs and hands.” As the artist could execute but one detail at a time, the poet was obliged to give them to him thus piecemeal. His object is not to make us see and feel, in these spoken directions to the painter, the whole beauty of the beloved object. He is conscious of the inadequacy of all verbal expression; and for that reason summons to his aid the expression of art, whose power of illusion he so extols, that the whole song seems rather a eulogium of art than of his lady. He sees not the picture but herself, and fancies she is about to open her mouth to speak.
ἀπέχει· βλέπω γὰρ αὐτήν.
τάχα, κηρέ, καὶ λαλήσεις.
So, too, in his ode to Bathyllus, the praises of the beautiful boy are so mingled with praises of art and the artist, that we are in doubt in whose honor the song was really written. He selects the most beautiful parts from various pictures, the parts for which the pictures were remarkable. He takes the neck from an Adonis, breast and hands from a Mercury, the thighs from a Pollux, the belly from a Bacchus, until he has the whole Bathyllus as a finished Apollo from the artist’s hand.
μετὰ δὲ πρόσωπον ἔστω,
τὸν Ἀδώνιδος παρελθὼν,
ἐλεφάντινος τράχηλος·
μεταμάζιον δὲ ποίει
διδύμας τε χεῖρας Ἑρμοῦ,