"I did all this wrong for you, and you were worth it."
The face (perhaps, with the present necessities of a catholicized Art, its most important excellence) is not a Greek face, but a much farther Oriental.
The bas-reliefs of Layard's Nineveh are not more characteristic, national, faithful to the probable facts in that best aspect of facts with which Art has to do.
As for the figure, none of those who from Roman studios have hitherto sent us their work have ever given a juster idea of their advancement in the understanding of the human anatomy. The bones of the right metatarsus show as they would under the flesh of a queenly foot. The right foot is the one flexed in Zenobia's walking, and that foot has never been used to support the weight of burdens; it has gone bare without being soiled. The shoulders perfectly carry the head, and no anatomist could suggest a place where they might be bent or erected in truer relative proportion to either of the feet. The dejection of the right arm is a wonderful compromise between the valor of a queen who has fought her last and best, and the grief of a woman who has no further resource left to her womanliness.
Both arms, in their anatomy, in their truthfulness to the queenly circumstances, may equally delight and challenge criticism. The chains which the queen carries are smaller than we suspect a Roman conqueror put even upon a woman and a queen; but let that pass,—for they do not hurt the harmony of the idea, and are simply a matter of detail, which womanly sympathy might well have erred in since chivalric days, though their adherence to actual truth would not have blemished the idea. At all events, Zenobia holds them like a queen, so as not to hurt her. She will remember her glory.
The drapery of the statue is a subordinate matter; but that has been attended to as true artists attend to even the least things which wait on a great idea. The tassels of the robe have been chiselled by Miss Hosmer's marble-cutter with a care which shows that the last as well as the first part of the work went on under her womanly supervision. Every fold of the robe, which must have been copied from the cast, falls and swings before our eyes as the position demands. Grace and truth lie in the least wrinkle of a garment which needs no after-cast of the anatomist's cloak of charity to hide a sin.
In many respects, we regard Miss Hosmer's "Zenobia" as one of the very highest honors paid by American Art to our earliest assertions of its dominant destiny.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Patriotism in Poetry and Prose. Being Selected Passages from Lectures and Patriotic Readings. By James E. Murdoch. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. 12mo.