CANTO IV.]
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.
445
Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore
The worship of the place, or the mere praise
Of Art and its great Masters, who could raise
What former time, nor skill, nor thought could plan:[1]
The fountain of Sublimity displays
Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of Man[2]
Its golden sands, and learn what great Conceptions can.[3]
CLX.
Or, turning to the Vatican, go see
- ↑ What Earth nor Time—nor former Thought could frame.—[MS. M. erased.]
- ↑ Before your eye—and ye return not as ye came.—[MS. M. erased.]
- ↑ In that which Genius did, what great Conceptions can.—[MS. M. erased.]
- ↑ [Pliny tells us (Hist. Nat., xxxvi. 5) that the Laocoon which stood in the palace of Titus was the work of three sculptors, natives of Rhodes; and it is now universally admitted that the statue which was found (January 14, 1516) in the vineyard of Felice de' Freddi, not far from the ruins of the palace, and is now in the Vatican, is the statue which Pliny describes. M. Collignon, in his Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque, gives reasons for assigning the date of the Laocoon to the first years of the first century B.C. It follows that the work is a century later than the frieze of the great altar of Pergamos, which contains the figure of a young giant caught in the toils of Athena's serpent—a theme which served as a model for later sculptors of the same school. In 1817 the Laocoon was in the heyday of its fame, and was regarded as the supreme achievement of ancient art. Since then it has been decried and dethroned. M. Collignon protests against this excessive depreciation, and makes himself the mouthpiece of a second and more temperate reaction: "On peut ... gôuter mediocrement le mélodrame, sans méconnaître pour cela les réelles qualités du groupe. La composition est d'une structure irréprochable, d'une harmonie de lignes qui défie toute critique. Le torse du Laocoon trahit une science du nu peu commune" (Hist. de la Sculp. Grecque, 1897, ii. 550, 551).]
