Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 7, 2025
On reaching home he had to prepare "The Eagle's Nest" for publication; in the preface he gave special importance to Botticelli, and amplified it in lectures on early engraving, that Autumn; in which I remember his quoting with appreciation the passage on the Venus Anadyomene from Pater's "Studies in the Renaissance" just published.
His pretty French wife, who knows no English, charmingly dishevelled, uncorseted, free, in a dubious peignoir trimmed with artificial lace she who moulded in mirific tights, sea-green with reflections of mother-of-pearl, like Venus Anadyomene, does the tight rope act every afternoon and evening sits a little way apart, busy with needle and thread repairing a sorry handful of garments which to-night will be tense with some portion of her shapely body.
Seated on one of the white marble steps for the audience, was an Arles mother with a royal face, in the quaintly beautiful costume the women of all classes still affect, and she had spread her mantle over the shoulders of a girl of fourteen, sick, with face of the purest alabaster, and of features as fine as were ever traced for Venus Anadyomene, with large, solemn, dreamy eyes, watching a robin that was perched on the proscenium and was twittering.
Gorgeous in purple and green, in shadowy blue and flashing gold, it seemed to Malcolm, as if at any moment the ever newborn Anadyomene might lift her shining head from the wandering floor, and float away in her pearly lustre to gladden the regions where the glaciers glide seawards in irresistible silence, there to give birth to the icebergs in tumult and thunderous uproar.
Painter, seize thy brush and palette and paint the Maenade but not her who treads the winebag, whilst her hair flutters in the wind, and she sings ecstatic songs. No, but the Maenade that ascends from Bellmann's steaming bowl is the Punch's Anadyomene she, with the high heels to the red shoes, with rosettes on her gown and with fluttering veil and mantilla fluttering, far too fluttering!
To the Daily Telegraph Sir Edwin Arnold contributed a poem entitled "Aphrodite Anadyomené; or, Venus at the Round Pond." My mother can remember only the last stanza, which ran as follows: "Though I fly to Fushiyama, Steeped in opalescent Karma, I shall ne'er forget my charmer, My adorable Khansamah. Though I fly to Tokio, Where the sweet chupatties blow, I shall ne'er forget thee, no!
Yes, she had begun, and she must follow to the end.... And, after all, what were the lives of those few semi-brutes, returning thus a few years earlier to the clay from which they sprang, compared with the regeneration of a world?.... And it would be over in a few minutes more, and that black writhing heap be still for ever, and the curtain fall .... And then for Venus Anadyomene, and art, and joy, and peace, and the graceful wisdom and beauty of the old Greek art, calming and civilising all hearts, and softening them into pure devotion for the immortal myths, the immortal deities, who had inspired their forefathers in the glorious days of old.... But still the black heap writhed; and she looked away, up, down, and round, everywhere, to avoid the sickening sight; and her eye caught Philammon's gazing at her with looks of horror and disgust.... A thrill of shame rushed through her heart, and blushing scarlet, she sank her head, and whispered to Orestes
It was the signature of that Ideal, known to the antique world by its wider developments in the famous pictures of the Venus Anadyomene, and Alexander with the Thunderbolt, hung in the temple of Diana at Ephesus. The gravity with which this apparently trifling anecdote is given us from antiquity evidently proves that it was one of the household tales of old Greece.
This may be, if your painter, as many of them do, affect the antique; but if he be another sort of guess person, it may be worse still with you. You may not have to make your bow to a Venus Anadyomene but how will you be able to face the whole Muggletonian synod?
Its sigh is the spirit that moves over the ocean, and arouses the Anadyomene into life. Therefore is it that MIND produces affections deeper than those of external form; therefore it is that women are worshippers of glory, which is the palpable and visible representative of a genius whose operations they cannot always comprehend.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking