With such eyes _Michael Angelo_, _Raphael_, and _Poussin_, considered the performances of the antients. They imbibed taste at its source; and Raphael particularly in its native country. We know, that he sent young artists to Greece, to copy there, for his use, the remains of antiquity.
An antient Roman statue, compared to a Greek one, will generally appear like _Virgil_’s Diana amidst her Oreads, in comparison of the Nausicaa of _Homer_, whom he imitated.
Laocoon was the standard of the Roman artists, as well as ours; and the rules of _Polycletus_ became the rules of art.
I need not put the reader in mind of the negligences to be met with in the most celebrated antient performances: the Dolphin at the feet of the Medicean Venus, with the children, and the Parerga of the Diomedes by _Dioscorides_, being commonly known. The reverse of the best Egyptian and Syrian coins seldom equals the head, in point of workmanship. Great artists are wisely negligent, and even their errors instruct. Behold their works as _Lucian_ bids you behold the Zeus of _Phidias_; _Zeus himself, not his footstool_.
It is not only _Nature_ which the votaries of the Greeks find in their works, but still more, something superior to nature; ideal beauties, brain-born images, as _Proclus_ says[2].
The most beautiful body of ours would perhaps be as much inferior to the most beautiful Greek one, as Iphicles was to his brother Hercules. The forms of the Greeks, prepared to beauty, by the influence of the mildest and purest sky, became perfectly elegant by their early exercises. Take a Spartan youth, sprung from heroes, undistorted by swaddling-cloths; whose bed, from his seventh year, was the earth, familiar with wrestling and swimming from his infancy; and compare him with one of our young Sybarits, and then decide which of the two would be deemed worthy, by an artist, to serve for the model of a Theseus, an Achilles, or even a Bacchus. The latter would produce a Theseus fed on roses, the former a Theseus fed on flesh, to borrow the expression of _Euphranor_.
The grand games were always a very strong incentive for every Greek youth to exercise himself. Whoever aspired to the honours of these was obliged, by the laws, to submit to a trial of ten months at Elis, the general rendezvous; and there the first rewards were commonly won by youths, as _Pindar_ tells us.[3]_To be like the God-like Diagoras_, was the fondest wish of every youth.