A method of avoiding the difficulty is to conceal the face of the personage presumed to be suffering from grief. Timanthes is recorded by Pliny as having painted a picture of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia in which the head of Agamemnon was completely covered by his robe; and a picture of the same subject in a Pompeian fresco represents the Grecian monarch hiding his face with his right hand, while the left gathers up his robe.[a] This invention was the subject of considerable discussion in Europe in the eighteenth century, in which Reynolds, Falconet, Lessing, and others took part. Reynolds said of the device that an artist might use it once, but if he did so a second time, he would be justly suspected of improperly evading difficulties. Falconet compared the action of Timanthes to that of a poet who avoided expressing certain sentiments on the ground that the action of his hero was above anything that could be said[b]; while Lessing held that the grief which overcame Agamemnon could only find expression in distortion, and hence the artist was right in covering the face.[c] Unquestionably Lessing was justified, for nothing more is demanded of the painter than to impress the imagination of the observer with the intensity of the grief depicted, and in this he succeeds. Obviously the poet is in a different position from the painter because he can express deep grief easily enough without suggesting distortion of the features. [a] See Plate 14[55]. [b] "Traduction des 34me, 35me, et 36me livres de Pline." [c] Laocoon. The artifice of Timanthes was practically unused during the Renaissance, though Botticelli once conceals the face of a woman lamenting over the body of Christ,[a] and Richardson quotes a drawing by Polidoro where the Virgin hides her face in drapery in a lamentation scene. In Flanders at a little earlier period, Roger van der Weyden used the device,[b] and the Maître de Flémalle shows St. John turning his head away and holding his hand to his face in a Crucifixion scene.[c] In the succeeding centuries little was known of the practice, but quite lately it has come into use again. Boecklin painted a Pietà in which the Virgin has thrown herself over the dead body of Christ in an agony of grief, her whole form being covered by a cloak. Feuerbach has a somewhat similar arrangement, and in a picture of the Departure of Jason, he hides the face of an attendant of Medea, a plan adopted in two or three frescoes of the subject at Pompeii. Prud'hon, in a Crucifixion scene, hides the face of the Magdalene in her hands, and Kaulbach in his Marguerite so bends her head that her face is completely concealed from the observer. Where the face cannot altogether be hidden owing to the character of the design, it is sometimes thrown into so deep a shade that the features are indistinguishable, this being an excellent device for symbolical figures typifying great anguish.[d] [a] The Brera, Milan. [b] In a scene of The Eucharist, Antwerp.