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It was in a wooded district in Hampshire, and there were old oak woods all round the church, with no other building in sight and seldom a sound of human life. There was an old road outside the gate, but few used it. The tombs and stones were many and nearly covered with moss and lichen and half-draped in creeping ivy.
There, on its half-draped pedestal, the Roman senator stood, dead white against the purple background, and there, close to the foot of it, the great bulk of the disproportionate nymph still sprawled, finished and whitewashed now, and looking even more of a monstrosity than ever in that waving light.
She was a very quiet and passive little model, and was not required to pose half-draped, Bianca having decided that, after all, "The Shadow" was better represented fully clothed; for, though she discussed the nude, and looked on it with freedom, when it came to painting unclothed people, she felt a sort of physical aversion.
As remembrances of these visions rushed through her mind the half-draped woman, with the face of the Madonna and the soul of the Universal Mother shining through every line of her beautiful body, no longer stood before her. It was a knight in glittering armor now, with drawn sword and visor up, beneath which looked out the face of a beautiful youth aflame with the fire of a holy zeal.
She lit a cigarette and leaned her half-draped elbows on the tea-table, and curved her ringed fingers, which had withstood time and fatigue much better than her face; and then she reclined again on the chaise-longue, on her back, and sent up smoke perpendicularly, and through the smoke seemed to be trying to decipher the enigmas of the ceiling. G.J. rose and stood over her in silence.
His imagination was as fertile as his pencil was facile. This vigorous print shows a half-draped female figure catching Charles James Fox by the ankle and Lord North by the throat; in this print he takes the same political attitude as his contemporary Gillray, whom he resembles, though far less virulently, in his anti-French prints, while he shows less marked hostility to the reigning house.
The nakedness of erotic passion in the drama of high æsthetic intent before a truly educated audience has not the slightest similarity to the half-draped chorus of sensual operetta before a gallery which wants to be tickled.
Those vile shambles by the water-side, growing out of the slime and filth of the river, and creeping like a noxious, unwholesome weed, up the shaded hill, and by narrow ruts and gullies into the open country. No! Those half-draped, yet gaping doors, have no attractions for us; those whining notes of soulless music find no echo in our ears or hearts.
There is a story that the original of the first two pictures was a girl of the people to whom Raphael was attached; and there is this to be said for the tradition, that there is an acknowledged coarseness in the very beauty of the half-draped Fornarina of the Barberini Palace.
There, on its half-draped pedestal, the Roman senator stood dead white against the purple background and there, close to the foot of it, the great bulk of the disproportionate nymph still sprawled, finished and whitewashed now, and looking even more of a monstrosity than ever in that waving light.
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