I should compare Rubens to Shakespeare for the wonderful variety and vital force of his artistic power. I know no other mind he so nearly resembles. Like Shakespeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords, only to enhance the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some use even in defects. A faultless style sends you to sleep. Defects rouse and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellences. Some of Shakespeare’s finest passages explode all grammar and rhetoric like sky-rockets,—the thought blows the language to shivers....
The halls devoted to painting of which I have spoken give you very little idea of the treasures of the institution. Gallery after gallery is filled with Greek, Roman, Assyrian, and Egyptian sculpture, coins, vases, and antique remains of every description. There is also an apartment in which I took a deep interest, containing the original sketches of ancient masters. Here one may see the pen-and-ink drawings of Claude, divided into squares to prepare them for the copyist. One compares here with interest the manners of the different artists in jotting down their ideas as they rose, some by chalk, some by crayon, some by pencil, some by water-colors, and some by a heterogeneous mixture of all. Mozart’s scrap-bag of musical jottings could not have been more amusing.
On the whole, cravings of mere ideality have come nearer to meeting satisfaction by some of these old mutilated remains of Greek sculpture than anything I have met yet. In the paintings, even of the most celebrated masters, there are often things which are excessively annoying to me. I scarcely remember a master in whose works I have not found a hand, or foot, or face, or feature so distorted, or coloring at times so unnatural, or something so out of place and proportion in the picture as very seriously to mar the pleasure that I derived from it. In this statuary less is attempted and all is more harmonious, and one’s ideas of proportion are never violated.
My favorite among all these remains is a mutilated statue which they call the Venus de Milo. This is a statue which is so called from having been dug up some years ago, piecemeal, in the island of Milos. There was a struggle for her between a French naval officer, the English, and the Turks. The French officer carried her off like another Helen, and she was given to Paris, old Louis Philippe being bridegroom by proxy. Savans refer the statue to the time of Phidias, and as this is a pleasant idea to me, I go a little further, and ascribe her to Phidias himself.
The statue is mutilated, both arms being gone, and part of the foot. But there is a majesty and grace in the head and face, a union of loveliness with intellectual and moral strength, beyond anything which I have ever seen. To me she might represent Milton’s glorious picture of unfallen, perfect womanhood, in his Eve.
Compared with this matchless Venus that of Medici seems as inane and trifling as mere physical beauty always must by the side of beauty baptized and made sacramental, as the symbol of that which alone is truly fair.