The study of a piece of old Turkey carpet, or a camel's hair shawl, or a butterfly's wing, or a bouquet of many flowers would have taught the best artist in the exhibition more concerning color than he would learn in ten years simply copying the best of the old painters, who had themselves studied directly from these things and their like.
In sculpture, as in painting, the artists showed the same tame following other sculptors; the same fear of facing Nature, and studying her face to face. A pretty kind of statue of Modesty a man would make, who would take the legs of a satyr, the body of a Venus, the head of Bacchus, the arms of Eros, and thus construct her; yet scarcely a modern statue is made wherein some such incongruous models do not play their part. Go with a clear head, not one ringing with last night's debauch, and study the Dying Gladiator! That will be enough—something more than five tenths of you young Popolites can stand, if you catch but the faintest conception of the mind once moving the sculptor of such a statue. After you have earnestly thought over such a masterpiece, go back to your studio: break up your models for legs, arms, bodies, and heads: take the scalpel in hand, and study anatomy as if your heart was in it. Have the living model nude before you at all times. Close your studio door to all 'orders,' be they ever so tempting: if a fastidious world will have you make 'nude statues dressed in stockinet,' tell it to get behind you! After long years of earnest study and labor, carve a hand, a foot: if, when you have finished it, one living soul says, with truth, 'Blood, bones, and muscles seem under the marble!' believe that you are not far off from exceeding great reward.
In the Popolo exhibition for 1858 was a marble statuette of Daphnis and Chloe, by Luigi Guglielmi, of Rome.
Chloe had a low-necked dress on.
The Roman censor disapproved of this. In a city claiming to be the 'HOME OF ART'—they pinned a piece of foolscap paper around the neck of Chloe.
Rome is the cradle of art:—if so, the sooner the world changes its nurse, the better for the babe!
'MISSED FIRE!'
Oh not in Independence Hall
Will ye proclaim your will;
Nor read aloud your negro call,
As yet, on Bunker Hill.
He said he would, and thought he could,
And tried—and missed it clean;—
Now he's o'er the Border, and awa',
Weel thrashed and unco' mean.