ornamentation is, if you will examine it, more purely Greek in
spirit than the Apollo Belvedere.

You know I have told you, again and again, that the soul of Greece is
her veracity; that what to other nations were fables and symbolisms, to
her became living facts--living gods. The fall of Greece was instant
when her gods again became fables. The Apollo Belvedere is the work of a
sculptor to whom Apollonism is merely an elegant idea on which to
exhibit his own skill. He does not himself feel for an instant that the
handsome man in the unintelligible attitude,[AM] with drapery hung over
his left arm, as it would be hung to dry over a clothes-line, is the
Power of the Sun. But the Florentine believes in Apollo with his whole
mind, and is trying to explain his strength in every touch.

For instance; I said just now, "You see the sun's epaulets before the
sun." Well, _don't_ you, usually, as it rises? Do you not continually
mistake a luminous cloud for it, or wonder where it is, behind one?
Again, the face of the Apollo Belvedere is agitated by anxiety, passion,
and pride. Is the sun's likely to be so, rising on the evil and the
good? This Prince sits crowned and calm: look at the quiet fingers of
the hand holding the scepter,--at the restraint of the reins merely by a
depression of the wrist.

160. You have to look carefully for those fingers holding the scepter,
because the hand--which a great anatomist would have made so exclusively
interesting--is here confused with the ornamentation of the arm of the
chariot on which it rests. But look what the ornamentation is;--fruit
and leaves, abundant, in the mouth of a cornucopia. A quite vulgar and
meaningless ornament in ordinary renaissance work. Is it so here, think
you? Are not the leaves and fruits of earth in the Sun's hand?[AN]

You thought, perhaps, when I spoke just now of the action of the right
hand, that less than a depression of the wrist would stop horses such as
those. You fancy Botticelli drew them so, because he had never seen a
horse; or because, able to draw fingers, he could not draw hoofs! How
fine it would be to have, instead, a prancing four-in-hand, in the style
of Piccadilly on the Derby-day, or at least horses like the real Greek
horses of the Parthenon!

Yes; and if they had had real ground to trot on, the Florentine would
have shown you he knew how they should trot. But these have to make
their way up the hill-side of other lands. Look to the examp