Due pome acerbe, e pur d’ avorio fatte, Vengono e van, come onda al primo margo, Quando piacevole aura il mar combatte. I am convinced that such traits as these, compressed into one or two stanzas, would be far more effective than the five over which Ariosto has spread them, interspersed with cold descriptions of form much too learned for our sensibilities. Anacreon preferred the apparent absurdity of requiring impossibilities of the artist, to leaving the image of his mistress unenlivened with these mobile charms. τρυφεροῦ δ’ ἔσω γενείου περὶ λυγδίνῳ τραχήλῳ Χάριτες πέτοιντο πᾶσαι. He bids the artist let all the graces hover about her tender chin and marble neck. How so? literally? But that is beyond the power of art. The painter could give the chin the most graceful curve and the prettiest dimple, _Amoris digitulo impressum_ (for the ἔσω here seems to me to mean dimple); he could give the neck the softest pink, but that is all. The motion of that beautiful neck, the play of the muscles, now deepening and now half concealing the dimple, the essential charm exceeded his powers. The poet went to the limits of his art in the attempt to give us a vivid picture of beauty, in order that the painter might seek the highest expression in his. Here we have, therefore, a fresh illustration of what was urged above, that the poet, even when speaking of a painting or statue, is not bound to confine his description within the limits of art. XXII. Zeuxis painted a Helen, and had the courage to write beneath his picture those famous lines of Homer wherein the elders express their admiration of her beauty. Never did painting and poetry engage in closer rivalry. Victory remained undecided, and both deserved to be crowned. For as the wise poet showed us only in its effects the beauty which he felt the impossibility of describing in detail, so the equally wise painter exhibited beauty solely through its details, deeming it unworthy of his art to have recourse to any outward aids. His whole picture was the naked figure of Helen. For it was probably the same that he painted for the people of Cortona.[141] Let us, for curiosity’s sake, compare with this Caylus’s picture as sketched for modern artists from the same lines of Homer.