“Leon Battista Alberti tells us, that we ought not so much to love the likeness as the beauty, and to choose from the fairest bodies severally the fairest parts. Leonardo da Vinci instructs the painter to form this idea to himself; and Raffaelle, the greatest of all modern masters, writes thus to Castiglione, concerning his Galatea: ‘To paint a fair one, it is necessary for me to see many fair ones; but because there is so great a scarcity of lovely women, I am constrained to make use of one certain idea, which I have formed to myself in my own fancy.’ Guido Rheni sending to Rome his St Michael, which he had painted for the church of the Capuchins, at the same time wrote to Monsignor Massano, who was _Maestro di Casa_, (or Steward of the House,) to Pope Urban the Eighth, in this manner: ‘I wish I had the wings of an angel, to have ascended into Paradise, and there to have beheld the forms of those beautiful spirits, from which I might have copied my archangel. But not being able to mount so high, it was in vain for me to search his resemblance here below; so that I was forced to make an introspection into my own mind, and into that idea of beauty which I have formed in my own imagination. I have likewise created there the contrary idea of deformity and ugliness; but I leave the consideration of it, till I paint the devil; and in the mean time, shun the very thought of it as much as possibly I can, and am even endeavouring to blot it wholly out of my remembrance.’ “There was not any lady in all antiquity, who was mistress of so much beauty as was to be found in the Venus of Gnidus, made by Praxiteles, or the Minerva of Athens, by Phidias; which was therefore called the _beautiful form_. Neither is there any man of the present age equal in the strength, proportion, and knitting of his limbs, to the Hercules of Farnese, made by Glycon; or any woman, who can justly be compared with the Medicean Venus of Cleomenes. And upon this account, the noblest poets and the best orators, when they desired to celebrate any extraordinary beauty, are forced to have recourse to statues and pictures and to draw their persons and faces into comparison. Ovid, endeavouring to express the beauty of Cyllarus, the fairest of the Centaurs, celebrates him as next in perfection to the most admirable statues: _Gratus in ore vigor, cervix, humerique, manusque,_ _Pectoraque artificum laudatis proxima signis._ A pleasing vigour his fair face expressed; His neck, his hands, his shoulders, and his breast, Did next, in gracefulness and beauty, stand To breathing figures of the sculptor’s hand. In another place he sets Apelles above Venus: _Si Venerem Cous nunquam pinxisset Apelles,_ _Mersa sub æquoreis illa lateret aquis._ Thus varied: One birth to seas the Cyprian goddess owed, A second birth the painter’s art bestowed: Less by the seas than by his power was given; They made her live, but he advanced to heaven.