"These statues?" he replied. He looked around at the white figures ranged along the walls, and the grand lines of his visage took on an expression of extreme contempt. "Those who bought these things did not even know what Greek art was. They knew about as little as the ignoramuses who collected the mediocrities of the Tribune or of the Vatican." "What?" interrupted Madame de Carlsberg. "The Venus de' Medici is at the Tribune and the Apollo and the Ariadne at the Vatican!" "The Venus de' Medici!" cried Fregoso, angrily, "don't speak to me about the Venus de' Medici!--Look," he went on, pointing to one of the statues with his gouty fingers, "do you recognize it? That is your Venus!--It has the same slender, affected body, the same pose of the arms, the same little cupid at her feet, astride a playful dolphin, and, like the other, it is a base copy made from Praxiteles's masterpiece in the taste of the Roman epoch which brought it into existence.--Would you have in your house one of those reproductions of 'Night' which encumber the shops of the Tuscan statuary dealers?'--Copies, I tell you; they are all copies, and made in such a way!--That is the sort of art you admire in Florence, Rome, Naples.--All those emperors and Roman patricians who stocked their villas with the reproductions of Greek _chefs d'œuvre_ were barbarians, and they have left to us the shadow of a shadow, a parody of the real Greece, the true, the original, the Greece that Pausanias visited!--Why, that Venus is a pretty woman bathing, who takes flight to arouse desire! She is a coquette, she is lascivious!--What has she in common with the Anadyomene, with the Aphrodite who was the incarnation of all the world's passionate energies, and whose temple was forbidden to men, with the goddess that was also called the Apostrophia, the Preserver?--Think of asking this one to resist desire, to tear Love from the dominion of the senses!--And look at this Dromio of your Apollo.--Does it not resemble in a confusing way the Belvedere that Winckelmann admired so much?--It is another Roman copy of a statue by Scopas. But what connection is there between this academic gladiator and the terrible god of the Iliad, such as he is still figured on the pediment at Olympia?--The original was the personification of terrible, mutilating, tragical light. You feel the influence of the East and of Egypt, the irresistible power of the Sun, the torrid breath of the desert.--But here?--It is simply a handsome young man destined to lighten the time of a depraved woman in a secluded chamber, a _venereo_, such as you can find by the hundred in the houses at Pompeii.--There is not an original touch about these statues; nothing that reveals the hand of the artist, that discloses the eye guiding the hand, the soul guiding the eye, and guiding the soul, the city, the race, all those virtues that make Art a sacred, magisterial thing, that make it the divine blossom of human life!"