"So far did the heathens carry their notions of ideal beauty, that they taxed Demetrius with being too natural, and Dionysius they reproached as but a painter of men. Lysippus himself upbraided the ordinary sculptors of his day, for making men such as they were in nature, and boasted of himself, that he made men as they ought to be. Phidias copied his statues of Jupiter and Pallas from forms in his own soul, or those which the muse of Homer supplied. Seneca seems to wonder, that, the sculptor having never beheld either Jove or Pallas, yet could conceive their divine images in his mind; and another eminent ancient says, that 'the fancy more instructs the painter than the imitation; for the last makes only the things which it sees, but the first makes also the things which it never sees.' Such were also, in the fulness of time and study, the ideas of the most distinguished moderns. Alberti tells us, that 'we ought not so much to love the likeness as the beauty, and to choose from the fairest bodies, severally, the fairest parts.' Da Vinci uses almost the same words, and desires the painter to form the idea for himself; and the incomparable Raphael thus writes to Castiglione concerning his Galatea: 'To paint a fair one, it is necessary for me to see many fair ones; but because there is so great a scarcity of lovely women, I am constrained to make use of one certain idea, which I have formed in my own fancy.' Guido Reni approaches still closer to the pure ideal of the great Christian School of Painting, when he wishes for the wings of an angel, to ascend to Paradise, and see, with his own eyes, the forms and faces of the blessed spirits, that he might put more of heaven into his pictures.