The
Arrotino Which Smollett So Greatly Admired, And Which The
Delusive Bianchi Declared To Be A Representation Of The Augur
Attus Naevius, Is Now Described As "A Scythian Whetting His Knife
To Flay Marsyas."
Kinglake has an amusingly cynical passage on the impossibility of
approaching the sacred shrines of the Holy Land in a fittingly
reverential mood.
Exactly the same difficulty is experienced in
approaching the sacred shrines of art. Enthusiasm about great
artistic productions, though we may readily understand it to be
justifiable, is by no means so easily communicable. How many
people possessing a real claim to culture have felt themselves
puzzled by their insensibility before some great masterpiece!
Conditions may be easily imagined in which the inducement to
affect an ecstasy becomes so strong as to prove overpowering.
Many years ago at Florence the loiterers in the Tribuna were
startled by the sudden rush into the place of a little man whose
literary fame gave him high claims to intuitive taste. He placed
himself with high clasped hand before the chief attraction in
that room of treasures. "There," he murmured, "is the Venus de
Medicis, and here I must stay - for ever and for ever." He had
scarcely uttered these words, each more deeply and solemnly than
the preceding, when an acquaintance entered, and the enthusiast,
making a hasty inquiry if Lady So-and-So had arrived, left the
room not to return again that morning. Before the same statue
another distinguished countryman used to pass an hour daily.
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