Paris: Grant Allen's Historical GuidesAllen, Grant
History
Paris: Grant Allen's Historical Guides
Allen, Grant
Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- Guidebooks
The =Salle du Tibre=, which we next enter, contains in its centre the
celebrated figure of =*=Artemis (Diana) known as “Diane à la Biche” or
the “Diane de Versailles,” one of the antique statues acquired by
François I^{er}, the influence of which on later art will be very
distinctly felt when we come to examine the French sculpture of the
Renaissance. It is a charming, graceful, and delicate figure of the age
of declining art, exactly adapted to take the French fancy of that
awakening period. It was probably executed at Rome by a Greek sculptor
about the time of Julius Cæsar. At the end of the room, colossal
recumbent figure of the Tiber, represented as the benignant Father Tiber
of Rome, bearing the oar which symbolizes the navigable river, and the
cornucopia denoting the agricultural and commercial wealth of the Tiber
valley: by its side nestles the wolf, with Romulus and Remus; a pretty
allegorical conception of Rome and the stream which made it: itself
doubtless a pendant to the similar recumbent figure of the Nile in the
Vatican. Close by, two Satyrs, imitated from Praxiteles. Behind, four
Satyrs as Caryatides, from the theatre of Dionysus, Athens, 3rd cent.
B.C. Round the wall, good draped figures of goddesses. Walk through
these rooms often, in order to gain an idea of the astonishing wealth
and purity of Hellenic sculpture.
Now, return through the Salle Grecque and the Rotonde, and turn to the L
into the =Roman Galleries=, which contain for the most part statues and
busts of the imperial epoch.
In the first room are reliefs of sacrifices, and fronts of sarcophagi,
together with a fine portrait-statue of Sulla. By the second window, the
famous and noble head of Mæcenas, the great Etruscan statesman and
minister of Augustus, who practically organised the Roman Empire. The
astute features, very Tuscan in type, which in some degree recall those
both of Bismarck and Möltke, are full of practical vigour and the wisdom
of statecraft. A more characteristic or finer head has not been
bequeathed to us by antiquity. Contrast this magnificent and thoughtful
bust of the best Roman age, instinct with meaning, with the coarse and
coarsely-executed colossal head of Caracalla, the cruel and sensuous
Emperor of the decadence, in the next window,—as crude as a coarse
lithograph. In the corner, a Mithra stabbing a bull, of a class to be
noted again in greater detail later. By the passage into the next room,
masks of Medusa with the snaky hair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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