Let Raphael be imitated in his best manner, and when in his prime; those works want no apology: it was to no purpose to produce Parrhasius and Zeuxis in order to excuse Him, and the Dutch proportions! ’Tis true, the passage of Pliny[176], which you quote concerning Parrhasius, meets commonly with the same interpretation, viz. _that, shunning corpulency he fell into leanness_[177]. But supposing Pliny to have understood what he wrote, we must clear him of contradicting himself. A little before he allowed to Parrhasius a superiority in the contour, or in his own words, _in the outlines_; and in the passage before us, _Parrhasius, compared with himself, seems, in POINT OF THE MIDDLE PARTS, to fall short of himself_. The question is, what he means by middle parts? Perhaps the parts bordering on the outlines: but is not the designer obliged to know every possible attitude of the frame, every change of its contour? If so, it is ridiculous to give this explication to our passage: for the middle parts of a full face are the outlines of its profile, and so on. Consequently, there is no such thing as middle parts to be met with by a designer: the idea of a painter, well-skilled in the contour of the outlines, but ignorant of their contents, is an absurd one. Parrhasius perhaps either wanted skill in the Chiaroscuro, or Keeping in the disposition of his limbs, and this seems the only explication, which the words of Pliny can reasonably admit of. Unless we choose to make him another La Fage, who, though a celebrated designer, never failed spoiling his contours with his colours. Or, perhaps, to indulge another conjecture, Parrhasius smoothed the outlines of his contour, where it bordered on the grounds, in order to avoid being rough; a fault committed, as it seems, by his contemporaries, and by the artists who flourished in the beginning of the sixteenth century, who circumscribed their figures, as it were with a knife; but those smooth contours wanted the support of keeping, and of masses gradually rising or sinking, in order to become round, and to strike the eye: by failing in which, his figures got an air of flatness; and thus Parrhasius fell short of himself, without being either too corpulent or too lean. We cannot conclude, from the Homeric shape which Zeuxis gave his female figures, that he raised them, like Rubens, into flesh-hills. There is some reason to believe, from the education of the Spartan ladies, that they had something of a masculine vigour, though they were the chief beauties of Greece; and such a one is the Helena of Theocritus.