DOI chapter:
Chapter II: Naples - The Museum - Capo di Monte
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.59000#0079
Naples
motor-cars—find an embodiment in an art which is the
perfection of magnificent calm ?
Turn to Psyche with the divine intellectual brow.
Of what does she dream ? The eyes speak of profound
dreamland ; the head, delicately poised on exquisite
shoulders, seems to embody the most perfect blending
in marble of physical and psychical beauty. She has
well been named Psyche,—for it is indeed the statue
of a soul, and no sculptor may hope to go further.
I love the wild and twisted forms of the fauns, with
heads garlanded in berries and vines. One of them
holds a lovely laughing child astride upon his shoulders.
The position is the same as that in which children are
held to-day in the East. The faun, stepping lightly,
clashes cymbals in each hand, and, turning his head,
greets the child’s delighted eye with a smile. It is a smile
in which may be read the whole genesis of the myths
of the woodlands and the streams. Indeed, thronging
memories of the singers of the woods and the waters
awake in us before many of these marble groups. To
what poet in chief shall we attribute our associations ?
Is it Theocritus, the “ singer of the field and fold,”
the bard whose sweet words are fresh with the air of
the sunny slopes of Sicily, the wild-cactus leaves, and
the goats feeding from them ? Or may it be, perhaps,
the majestic echoes of Pindar that touch us when
standing before the form of a hero or athlete whose
limbs seem still to tremble from the glory of some
Olympian contest ? Perhaps, after all, it is to our
Homeric memories that we owe the most. Every
3°
motor-cars—find an embodiment in an art which is the
perfection of magnificent calm ?
Turn to Psyche with the divine intellectual brow.
Of what does she dream ? The eyes speak of profound
dreamland ; the head, delicately poised on exquisite
shoulders, seems to embody the most perfect blending
in marble of physical and psychical beauty. She has
well been named Psyche,—for it is indeed the statue
of a soul, and no sculptor may hope to go further.
I love the wild and twisted forms of the fauns, with
heads garlanded in berries and vines. One of them
holds a lovely laughing child astride upon his shoulders.
The position is the same as that in which children are
held to-day in the East. The faun, stepping lightly,
clashes cymbals in each hand, and, turning his head,
greets the child’s delighted eye with a smile. It is a smile
in which may be read the whole genesis of the myths
of the woodlands and the streams. Indeed, thronging
memories of the singers of the woods and the waters
awake in us before many of these marble groups. To
what poet in chief shall we attribute our associations ?
Is it Theocritus, the “ singer of the field and fold,”
the bard whose sweet words are fresh with the air of
the sunny slopes of Sicily, the wild-cactus leaves, and
the goats feeding from them ? Or may it be, perhaps,
the majestic echoes of Pindar that touch us when
standing before the form of a hero or athlete whose
limbs seem still to tremble from the glory of some
Olympian contest ? Perhaps, after all, it is to our
Homeric memories that we owe the most. Every
3°