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Updated: June 13, 2025
It was a young man leaning against a tree trunk. On his arm he held a baby. "It is a model of the great marble Hermes in the temple of Hera, my little master," said the image maker. "Great Praxiteles made that one, poor Philo made this one." "It is beautiful," said Charmides and turned away, holding it tenderly in his hand. Glaucon waited a moment to pay for the figure.
These he fashions deftly, to entice the immediate pennies of the crowd; but when his wage is earned, he leaves his statues to be washed away by the next high surging of the tide. The sand-man is often a good artist; let us suppose he were a better one. Let us imagine him endowed with a brain and a hand on a par with those of Praxiteles.
She was rather fair, with a fine, small, oval, well-proportioned face, sparkling black and speaking eyes, good teeth, pretty red lips, very dark hair, and plenty of it, hanging over her face and neck in curls of every size; her arms and bust were such as Phidias and Praxiteles might have copied; her waist was slender; her hands and feet small and beautiful.
History says that the temples of the Acropolis were filled with the noblest works of Praxiteles and Phidias, and of many a great master in sculpture besides and surely these elegant fragments attest it. We walked out into the grass-grown, fragment-strewn court beyond the Parthenon.
For the causes which forced Greek sculpture along the line leading to Praxiteles and Lysippus were not yet at work; and had other forces, say, a preference for stone work instead of clay and bronze work, a habit of Persian or Gaulish garments, of Lydian effeminate life instead of Dorian athleticism, supervened, had satraps ordered rock-reliefs of battles instead of burghers ordering brazen images of boxers and runners, Praxiteles and Lysippus might have remained in mente Dei, if, indeed, even there.
This "Venus" is the prototype of all other Venetian versions; it is in painting what the "Aphrodite" of Praxiteles was in sculpture, a perfect creation of a master mind. Scarcely less wonderful than the "Venus," and even surpassing it in solemn grandeur of conception, is the "Judith" at St. Petersburg.
After him plastic art rapidly degenerated, since it appealed to passion, especially under Praxiteles, who was famous for his undraped Venuses and the expression of sensual charms. The decline of Art was rapid as men became rich, and Epicurean life was sought as the highest good.
Had I possessed the genius of a Praxiteles I might have given to the world a masterpiece of beauty to replace his vanished Venus of Cnidus; but, as it happened, I was only a humble blacksmith, and she a fair woman who sighed, and nibbled her pen, and sighed again. "What is it, Charmian?"
It was reserved for the age of Praxiteles and Scopas to represent the Goddess of Love in the guise of a nude woman; and Praxiteles made an apology for the innovation by introducing the motive of bathing as an explanation and a palliation. And even the Aphrodite of Praxiteles is remarkably free from all attempt at sensuous attraction, or self-consciousness.
It was the bust of a Venus, united to a form, to create which would have taxed the imaginative powers of a Praxiteles a form so faultlessly moulded that every movement presented some new and unpremeditated grace.
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