Flaxman states that he himself had seen, in the stables of the Braschi palace, a statue which he supposed might be the original work of Praxiteles. Strange to tell, nothing is now known of its fate! A supposed cast from this, or from a copy of it, conforming to the figure on the model of Caracalla, is to be seen at the Royal Academy. Of the VENUS DE MEDICI, Flaxman says, it "was so much a favorite of the Greeks and Romans, that a hundred ancient repetitions of this statue have been noticed by travellers. The individual figure is said to have been found in the forum of Octavia. The style of sculpture seems to have been later than Alexander the Great. Let us now briefly examine this Model of Female Beauty. The Venus de Medici represents woman at that age when every beauty has just been perfected. "The Venus de Medici at Florence," says Winckelmann, "is like a rose which, after a beautiful daybreak, expands its leaves to the first ray of the sun, and represents that age when the limbs assume a more finished form and the breast begins to develop itself." The size of the head is sufficiently small to leave that predominance to the vital organs in the chest, which, as already said, makes the nutritive system peculiarly that of woman. This is the first and most striking proof of the profound knowledge of the artist, the principles of whose art taught him that the vast head, on the contrary, was the characteristic of a very different female personage.[50]--In mentioning the head, it is scarcely possible to avoid noticing the rich curls of the hair. The eyes next fix our attention by their soft, sweet, and glad expression. This is produced with exquisite art. To give softness, the ridges of the eyebrows are rounded. To give sweetness, the under eyelid, which I would call the expressive one, is slightly raised. "The eyes of Venus," says Winckelmann, "are smaller, and the slight elevation of the lower eyelid produces that languishing look called by the Greeks [Greek: hygron]." To give the expression of gladness or of pleasure, the opening of the eyelids is diminished, in order to diminish, or partially to exclude, the excess of those impressions, which make even pleasure painful. Other exquisite details about those eyes, confer on them unparalleled beauty. Still, as observed by the same writer, this look is far from those traits indicative of lasciviousness, with which some modern artists have thought to characterize their Venuses. Love was considered by the ancient masters, as by the wise philosophers of those times, to use the expression of Euripides, as the counsellor of wisdom: [Greek: tê sophia paredrous erôtas]. One thing must be observed: there is not here, as in some less happy representations of Venus, any downcast look, but that aspect of which Metastasio, in his Inno a Venere, says: "Tu colle lucide Pupille chiare, Fai lieta e fertile La terra e'l mare." And again: