Paris: Grant Allen's Historical GuidesAllen, Grant
History
Paris: Grant Allen's Historical Guides
Allen, Grant
Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- Guidebooks
Enter by the same door as for the paintings. Proceed along the corridor
(Galerie Denon) and dive, right or left, under the great staircase.
(Good new room to the R, containing excellent Roman mosaics from French
North Africa.) Pass some good sarcophagi and other objects, and enter
the =Rotonde=, which contains for the most part works of a relatively
late period. In the centre, the =*=Borghese Mars (or, in Greek, Ares), a
celebrated statue, less virile than is usual in figures of this god.
Round the room are grouped many fairly good statues, not a few of them
almost duplicates. Among them should be noticed (beginning from the
door) on the R a fine Melpomène; then, the Lycian Apollo, with harmless
serpent gliding from a tree-trunk; and especially the famous =*=Silenus
nursing the Infant Bacchus, of the School of the great sculptor
Praxiteles—perhaps the most pleasing of the many representations of
Faun and Satyr life which antiquity has bequeathed to us. This work
should be studied as showing that later stage of easy Greek culture when
sculpture was not wholly religious and monumental, but when the desire
to please by direct arts and graces was distinctly present. Close by are
two or three good draped female figures; and another Lycian Apollo,
which should be closely compared with the one opposite it, as indicating
the nature of the numerous copies or replicas commonly made of famous
works of antiquity. Beside this, a couple of Hermæ, or heads on rough
bases, in later imitation of the archaic Greek style, with its curious
stiff simper: the type was doubtless too sacred to be varied from: a
portrait-statue of a lady with the attributes of Ceres; a charming
Nymph, carrying an amphora; excellent figures of athletes, etc. Many of
the statues in this and succeeding rooms are much restored, and in some
cases with heads that do not belong to them. They are interesting as
showing the general high level of plastic art among nameless artists of
the classical period.
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