Then every solemnity, every festival, afforded the artist opportunity to familiarize himself with all the beauties of Nature. In the most happy times of their freedom, the humanity of the Greeks abhorred bloody games, which even in the Ionick Asia had ceased long before, if, as some guess, they had once been usual there. _Antiochus Epiphanes_, by ordering shews of Roman gladiators, first presented them with such unhappy victims; and custom and time, weakening the pangs of sympathizing humanity, changed even these games into schools of art. There _Ctesias_ studied his dying gladiator, in whom you might descry “how much life was still left in him[4].” These frequent occasions of observing Nature, taught the Greeks to go on still farther. They began to form certain general ideas of beauty, with regard to the proportions of the inferiour parts, as well as of the whole frame: these they raised above the reach of mortality, according to the superiour model of some ideal nature. Thus _Raphael_ formed his Galatea, as we learn by his letter to Count Baltazar Castiglione[5], where he says, “Beauty being so seldom found among the fair, I avail myself of a certain ideal image.” According to those ideas, exalted above the pitch of material models, the Greeks formed their gods and heroes: the profile of the brow and nose of gods and goddesses is almost a streight line. The same they gave on their coins to queens, &c. but without indulging their fancy too much. Perhaps this profile was as peculiar to the antient Greeks, as flat noses and little eyes to the Calmucks and Chinese; a supposition which receives some strength from the large eyes of all the heads on Greek coins and gems. From the same ideas the Romans formed their Empresses on their coins. Livia and Agrippina have the profile of Artemisia and Cleopatra. We observe, nevertheless, that the Greek artists in general, submitted to the law prescribed by the Thebans: “To do, under a penalty, their best in imitating Nature.” For, where they could not possibly apply their easy profile, without endangering the resemblance, they followed Nature, as we see instanced in the beauteous head of Julia, the daughter of Titus, done by _Euodus_[6]. But to form a “just resemblance, and, at the same time, a handsomer one,” being always the chief rule they observed, and which _Polygnotus_ constantly went by; they must, of necessity, be supposed to have had in view a more beauteous and more perfect Nature. And when we are told, that some artists imitated _Praxiteles_, who took his concubine _Cratina_ for the model of his Cnidian Venus; or that others formed the graces from _Lais_; it is to be understood that they did so, without neglecting these great laws of the art. Sensual beauty furnished the painter with all that nature could give; ideal beauty with the awful and sublime; from that he took the _Humane_, from this the _Divine_.