OCR Text |
Show 404 THE VITAL FORCE j a shipwrecked vessel, which was only conjectured from the merchandise it contained, to have come from Rhodes. On the foreground of the picture, youths and maidens formed a closely crowded group. They were without clothing and well formed, but at the same time did not exhibit the more noble and graceful proportions admired in the statues of Praxiteles and Alcamenes. Their robust limbs, showing the traces of laborious efforts, and the purely terrestial expression of their desires and sorrows, seemed to take from them everything of a diviner character, and to chain them exclusively to their earthly habitation. Their hair was simply ornamented with leaves and field flowers. Their arms were outstretched towards each other, as if to indicate their desire of union, but their troubled looks were turned towards a genius who, surrounded by bright light, hovered in the midst. A butterfly was placed on his shoulder, and in his hand he held on high a lighted torch. The contours of his form were soft and childlike, but his glance was animated by celestial fire : he looked down as a master upon the youths and maidens at his feet. Nothing else that was chaJ"acteristic could be discovered in the picture. Some persons thought they could make out at its foot the letters ~ and ~, from whence (as antiquaries were then no less bold in their conjectures than they now are) they took occasion to infer, in a somewhat forced manner, the name of Zenodorus; thus attributing the work to a painter of the same name as the artist who at a later period cast the Colossus of Rhodes. The " Rhodian Genius," however-for such was the name given to the picture--did not want for commentators and interpreters in Syracuse. Amateurs of the art, and especially the younger amongst them, on returning from a short visit to Corinth or Athens, would have thought it equivalent to renouncing all pretensions to connoisseurship if they had not been provided with some new explanation. Some regarded the genius as the personification of Spiritual Love, forbidding the enjoyment of sensual pleasures; others said it was the assertion of the empire of Reason over Desire: the wiser among the critics were silent, and presuming some high, though yet undiscovered meaning, examined meanwhile, with pleasure, the simple composition of the picture. |