"
Hawthorne was an idealist, and he idealized the materials in Story's
studio, for literary purposes, just as Shakespeare idealized Henry V.,
who was not a magnanimous monarch at all, but a brutal, narrow-minded
fighter. The discourse on art, which he develops in this manner, forms
one of the most valuable chapters in the "Marble Faun." It assists us in
reading it to remember that Story was not the model for Hawthorne's
"Kenyon," but a very different character. The passage in which he
criticises the methods of modern sculptors has often been quoted in later
writings on that subject; and I suppose the whole brotherhood of artists
would rise up against me if I were to support Hawthorne's condemnation of
nude Venuses and "the guilty glimpses stolen at hired models."
They are not necessarily guilty glimpses. To an experienced artist the
customary study from a naked figure, male or female, is little more than
what a low-necked dress would be to others. Yet the instinct of the age
shrinks from this exposure. We can make pretty good Venuses, but we
cannot look at them through the same mental and moral atmosphere as the
cotemporaries of Scopas, or even with the same eyes that Michael Angelo
did. We feel the difference between a modern Venus and an ancient one.
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