Et si bel oeil vert & riant & clair:
Le Sire de Coucy, chans.
But I do not know whether art had any share in their colouring. And as to the small-pox, Hippocrates might be quoted, if grammatical disquisitions suited my purpose.
However, I think, no effects of the small-pox on a face can be so much the reverse of beauty, as that defect which the Athenians were reproachfully charged with, viz. a buttock as pitiful as their face was perfect[33]. Indeed Nature, in so scantily supplying those parts, seemed to derogate as much from the Athenian beauty, as, by her lavishness, from that of the Indian Enotocets, whose ears, we are told, were large enough to serve them for pillows.
As for opportunities to study the nudities, our times, I think, afford as advantageous ones as the Gymnasies of the ancients. ’Tis the fault of our artists to make no use of that[34] proposed to the Parisian artists, viz. to walk, during the summer season, along the Seine, in order to have a full view of the naked parts, from the sixth to the fiftieth year.
’Tis perhaps to Michael Angelo’s frequenting such opportunities that we owe his celebrated Carton of the Pisan war[35], where the soldiers bathing in a river, at the sound of a trumpet leap out of the water, and make haste to huddle on their cloaths.
One of the most offensive passages of the treatise is, no doubt, the unjust debasement of the modern sculptors beneath the ancients. These latter times are possessed of several Glycons in muscular heroic figures, and, in tender youthful female bodies, of more than one Praxiteles. Michael Angelo, Algardi, and Sluter, whose genius embellished Berlin, produced muscular bodies,
——Invicti membra Glyconis,
Hor.