Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LESSONS FROM PORTRAIT STATUES 71 religion of Greece simply by epithets which define the gods and by the actions which poets attribute to them we should risk a total misconception. We do not possess, alas! those master- works of Phidias which render men, the ancients tell us, more religious, the Athene Parthenos of the Acropolis and the Zeus of Olympia; but even from reproductions which have reached us one may divine the master’s embodiment of luminous intelligence and of sovereign power in benevolent repose. It is to be regretted that our students do not visit more frequently the galleries of the Louvre; I have seen more than one high school boy there, but ordinarily these visitors are impatient to reach the picture galleries of the second floor, hastening by the sculpture on the first?the work of the ancients. As I have watched them glancing about with an indifferent eye how I have wished they would linger and lend an ear. If one has learned to listen, these statues ranged against the walls,?the Mars which bears, it is believed, the mark of Polyclete, the Diana ofthe Chase, the Victory of Samothrace, the divine Venus of Melos, may speak and in some such words as these: Young man, you are studying Greece in Homer and in Plato, in Sophocles and in Herodotus; do not pass us by so quickly; we are also of this Greece. You need neither grammar nor dictionary to understand and to love us. You need to educate your eyes. You need to learn point by point the refinements of beauty. Do not fear to waste your time, especially if you aspire later to become an authorized interpreter of Greek works of genius. The day when by long and affectionate intercourse your acquaintance with us shall have ripened into an intimacy so close that at any moment you are able to summon our images before y…
