The Examiner article, June 30, begins with the quotation from Cowley and then adds, before the paragraph beginning ‘The true lesson,’ etc., the following: ‘According to the account of Pliny, it does not appear certain that Phidias ever worked in marble. He mentions indeed a marble Venus at Rome, conjectured to be his; and another at Athens, without the walls, done by his scholar Alcamenes, to which Phidias was said to have put the last hand. His chief works, according to this historian, were the Olympian Jupiter, and the Minerva in the Parthenon, both in ivory: he executed other known works in brass. The words of Pliny, in speaking of Phidias, are remarkable:—[“That the name of Phidias is illustrious ... magnificence even in small things.”—Natural History, Book xxxvi.].
‘It appears, by the above description, that Phidias did not make choice of the colossal height of this statue with a view to make size a substitute for grandeur; but in order that he might be able, among other things, to finish, fill up, and enrich every part as much as possible. Size assists grandeur in genuine art only by enabling the Artist to give a more perfect developement to the parts of which the whole is composed. A miniature is inferior to a full-sized picture, not because it does not give the large and general outline, but because it does not give the smaller varieties and finer elements of nature. As a proof of this (if the thing were not self-evident), the copy of a good portrait will always make a highly-finished miniature, but the copy of a good miniature, if enlarged to the size of life, will make but a very vapid portrait. Some of our own Artists, who are fond of painting large figures, either misunderstand or misapply this principle. They make the whole figure gigantic, not that they may have room for nature, but for the motion of their brush, regarding the quantity of canvas they have to cover as an excuse for the slovenly and hasty manner in which they cover it; and thus in fact leave their pictures nothing at last but monstrous miniatures.
‘We should hardly have ventured to mention this figure of five and thirty feet high, which might give an inordinate expansion to the ideas of our contemporaries, but that the labour and pains bestowed upon every part of it,—the thirty Gods carved on the pedestal, the battle of the Centaurs and Lapithæ on the sandals, would at once make their magnificent projects shrink into a nutshell, or bring them within the compass of reason.—We had another inducement for extracting Pliny’s account of the Minerva of Phidias, which was, to check any inclination on the part of our students to infer from the Elgin Marbles, that the perfection of ancient Grecian art consisted in the imperfect state in which its earliest remains have come down to us; or to think that fragments are better than whole works, that the trunk is more valuable without the head, and that the grandeur of the antique consists in the ruin and decay into which it has fallen through time.’
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[326]. Who to the life. Cowley, To the Royal Society.
To learn her manner.
‘Acknowledges with joy
His manner, and with rapture tastes His style.’
Cowper, The Task, III. 227–8.
[327]. Alternate action and repose. Cf.