"Phidias" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... established only in proportion as the positive religions connected with it lose their power. Great religions outlive their altars and their priests. Hellenism, abolished, counts less skeptics to-day than in the days of Socrates and Anaxagoras. The gods of Homer died when Phidias carved them in marble, and now they are immortally enthroned in the thought and heart of Europe. The Cross may crumble into dust, but there were words spoken under its shadow in Galilee, the echo of which will forever vibrate in the human conscience. And when the nation who made ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... at first, but took A second awed and wondering look (As turned, perchance, the eyes of Greece On Phidias' unveiled masterpiece); Whose words in simplest homespun clad, The Saxon strength of Caedmon's had, With power reserved at need to reach The Roman forum's loftiest speech, Sweet with persuasion, eloquent In passion, cool in argument, Or, ponderous, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... end, when the engine started, it would move surely and unswervingly along the appointed grooves. In his wealth of hair; in his wide eyes, like the mysterious blanks of a marble statue; in his huge frame, gnarled and wasted to the strange, impressive, powerful age-quality of Phidias's old men, he seemed to us to deserve a wreath and a marble seat with strange inscriptions and the graceful half-draperies of another time and a group of old Greeks like himself with whom to exchange ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... was capsized in a double-squall. I have seen her do ninety feet and bring up pearl shell in each hand. She was wonderful. As a woman she was ravishing, sublime. I have said she was a sea-goddess. She was. Oh, for a Phidias or a Praxiteles to have made the wonder of ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... the Aryan form by studying the Aryan form. Phidias never had a finer model, and he has not ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... the 6th and the early part of the 5th century B.C. He was specially noted for his statues of Olympic victors (of 520, 516, 508 B.C.); also for a statue at Messene of Zeus, copied on the coins of that city. Ageladas was said to have been the teacher of Myron, Phidias and Polyclitus; this tradition is a testimony to his wide fame, though historically doubtful. We have no work of Ageladas surviving; but we have an inscription which contains the name of his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Naples had inherited the masterpieces of antiquity; and the manuscripts of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had come (thanks to the conquest of Mahomet II) to rejoin the statue of Xanthippus and the works of Phidias and Praxiteles. The principal sovereigns of Italy had come to understand, when they let their eyes dwell upon the fat harvests, the wealthy villages, the flourishing manufactories, and the marvellous churches, ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... emulate their virtues. On contemplating these masterpieces of art, which were so truly exquisite that the very coldest spectator was unable to resist their almost magical influence, the vicious were reclaimed, and the ignorant stood abashed. Indeed, it has often been asserted, that the statues by Phidias and Praxiteles were so inimitably executed, that the people of Paros adored them as living gods. Those artists who performed such extraordinary wonders as these were held in an esteemed light, of which we cannot form the least idea. We are certain they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... beginning was made in many branches of plastic art. There were statues in metal and marble, bas-reliefs in various kinds of stone and marble, as well as some chryselephantine statues. This kind of work is often said to have been invented by Phidias, but the truth seems to be that he was not its inventor, but carried it to great perfection. These chryselephantine statues were made of wood and then covered with ivory and gold; the ivory was used for the flesh parts of the statue, and gold for the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... Temple of Diana, at Ephesus; the magnificent sepulchre of the king Mausolus, from whence is derived the word mausoleum; the bronze Colossus of the Sun, in Rhodes; the statue of Jupiter Olympius, of gold and ivory, formed by the masterly hand of Phidias, the first of architects; the palace of Cyrus, King of Media, built by Memnon of stones united by gold; the walls of Babylon, constructed by Semiramis of brick, pitch, and iron; the pyramids of Egypt, the shadows of which do not extend beyond the space ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... and shattered as it is by time and man it is still one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. It was built in the time of Pericles, from about 460 to 435 B.C., and the work was superintended by Phidias, who did much of the work himself and left the mark of ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... regal state sits Pericles, president of the assembly, soldier, statesman, orator, ruler, and "sole master of Athens." By his side sits his beautiful partner, the learned and queenly Aspasia. Phidias, one of the greatest sculptors, if not the greatest the world has known, who "formed a new style characterized by sublimity and ideal beauty," is there. Near him is Sophocles, the greatest of the tragic poets. Yonder we catch a glimpse of a face and form ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... shrewd-looking little fellow poring over his book; his features seem represented by acute angles, and his head, which appears too heavy for his body, represents all the thoughtfulness of age, like an ancient fragment of Phidias or Praxiteles placed upon new shoulders by some modern bust carver. Dick is the son of an eminent solicitor in a borough town, who has raised himself into wealth and consequence by a strict attention to the principles of interest: sharp practice, heavy mortgages, loans ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... which the sculptor carves becomes a fit vehicle for his thought through its resistance to his chisel; it sustains the impress of his imagination solely through its unwillingness to receive the same. Not chalk, not any loose and friable material, does Phidias or Michel Angelo choose, but ivory, bronze, basalt, marble. It is quite the same whether we seek expression or uses. The stream must be dammed before it will drive wheels; the steam compressed ere it will compel the piston. In fine, Potentiality combines with Hindrance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting. Gazing at Michelangelo's prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias. Titian's "Virgin Received into Heaven," soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... that beauty is not the same as faith. There is, in one sense, far more faith in some hideous miracle-working icon which sends out starving peasants to massacre Jews than in the Athena of Phidias. Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, there is religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery; the ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... every side of "the true, the beautiful, and the good," it is obvious that the outward conditions under which this Athenian genius developed deserve our respectful attention. For assuredly such personages as Sophocles, Plato, and Phidias were not isolated creatures, who developed their genius apart from, or in spite of, the life about them, but rather were the ripe products of a society, which in its excellences and weaknesses presents some of the most interesting pictures and examples ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... did devise, All that which Greece their temples to embrave, After th'Ionicke, Atticke, Doricke guise, Or Corinth skil'd in curious workes to grave, All that Lysippus practike* arte could forme, Apelles wit, or Phidias his skill, Was wont this auncient citie to adorne, And the heaven it selfe with her wide wonders fill. All that which Athens ever brought forth wise, All that which Afrike ever brought forth strange, All that which Asie ever had of prise, Was here to see. O mervelous great change! Rome, living, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... became more and more distinct, and he fancied that the form was actually naked. Then the truth became apparent: it was a native of the forest, in his summer garb, who had thrown aside his blanket, and stood in his leggings, naked. Phidias could not have cut in stone a more faultless form; for active, healthful youth had given to it the free and noble air of manly but ...
— The Lake Gun • James Fenimore Cooper
... remain unapproached and unapproachable in their excellence, so out of the mystery plays arose the English drama, represented in its final completeness by the creations of a poet who, it now begins to be supposed, stands alone among mankind. We allow ourselves to think of Shakspeare or of Raphael or of Phidias, as having accomplished their work by the power of their own individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and forms the environment in which it grows. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... them is true, in a lesser degree, of men in general. There is in the work of every great sculptor, painter, writer, composer, architect, a distinctive and individual manner so marked and unmistakable as to identify the man whenever and wherever a bit of his work appears. If a statue of Phidias were to be found without any mark of the sculptor upon it, there would be no delay in determining whose work it was; no educated musician would be uncertain for a moment about a composition of Wagner's if he heard it for the first ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... which transmitted a very pleasant light, gave it an appearance far superior to a marble building and one might survey it with feelings somewhat akin to those produced by the contemplation of a Grecian temple reared by Phidias; both are triumphs of art, inimitable in ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... the image is not sought to be placed before the beholder's eyes, but painted as it were in his mind. Henceforth, suggestion only is aimed at, not representation; the cooeperation of the spectator is relied upon as the indispensable complement of the design. The Zeus of Phidias seemed to the Greeks, Plotinus says, Zeus himself, as he would be, if he chose to appear to human eyes. But a Crucifixion is of itself not at all what the artist meant. It is not the agony of the flesh, but the triumph ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... signature of death writ in her whole fair frame. She lies upon her ivory bed, robed in the soft stuffs of Tyre, as if new-cut from Pentelikon by Phidias, or spread upon the wood by the magic brush of Zeuxis, seeming as much alive as this, no more, no less. There is no beat of heart ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... mental view and temperament of Israel, when Israel was his truest self, needed to be qualified and corrected by another mental view and temperament—that of the Greeks, when the Greeks were their truest selves. And if there were here any descendant of Pericles or Sophocles or Phidias, I should similarly say to him that, though I feel the keenest zest of admiration for the many sublime things which his Athenian ancestors did and wrote and wrought, yet the full perfection of human character and life was not reached by ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... for he had, as his contemporaries, Pericles the famous statesman; the poets AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Pindar; the philosopher Socrates, with his disciples Xenophon and Plato; the historians Herodotus and Thucydides; and Phidias the ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... 'When Phidias formed his Jupiter, he had no living model before his eyes, but having conceived an idea of perfect beauty in his soul, he labored only to imitate it, to produce it in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... looketh he upon the matter thereof, but upon itselfe. Therefore neither pouerty nor doulour, nor any other thing which turneth back the unskilfull, and driuest them headlong, hindereth them. Hast thou rather he should be pressed? He maketh use of it. Not only of iuorie did Phidias know how to make images: he made them of brasse. If marble were unto him, if thou hadst offered baser matter, he would haue made such a one thereof, as could be made of that which was ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element-emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen—all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... be long past the noon of life; but instead, I saw a woman who could not have been over thirty-five or forty, with a figure of regal magnificence, and a face that would have been, but for one circumstance, beautiful beyond description. Apelles never drew and Phidias never chiselled nose or brow of more classic perfection, and I have never seen the bow of Cupid in the mouth of any woman more ravishingly shown than in that feature of ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... this principle, nations guard the manuscript of the sage, the sword of the general, the flag stained with heroes' blood. Memorable forever the little room where Milton wrote, the cottage where Shakespeare dwelt, the spot where Dante dreamed, the ruin where Phidias wrought. But no building ever showed such comely handiwork as the temple built by divine skill. God hath made the soul's house fair to look upon. Death may close its doors, darken its windows, and pull down its pillars; still, its very ruins are precious, to be guarded with ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... statue of the Olympian Zeus was that by the famous Athenian sculptor Phidias, which was forty feet high, and stood in the temple of Zeus at Olympia. It was formed of ivory and gold, and was {29} such a masterpiece of art, that it was reckoned among the seven wonders of the world. It represented ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... share The palm, he shares the peril, and dejected Faints o'er the labour unapproved—Alas! Despair and Genius are too oft connected. Within the ages which before me pass 40 Art shall resume and equal even the sway Which with Apelles and old Phidias She held in Hellas' unforgotten day. Ye shall be taught by Ruin to revive The Grecian forms at least from their decay, And Roman souls at last again shall live In Roman works wrought by Italian hands, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... further application, extension, or variation? Have we conceived the utmost limits of its abstractions? Have we examined the powers of all its terms with equal care? In one sense, we may never get beyond a Phidias or a Canova—in another, beyond a Woollet or a Bartolozzi—or, in a third, beyond a Corregio or a David;—but have we sufficiently examined and husbanded the abstractions of Thoth or Cadmus?—Ought not the signs of ideas, ere this, to have become abstract representations; ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... with thy praising voice! Forth with thy flute! Loiterer! why sittest thou Sunk in thy dream? Tempts not the bright new age? Shines not its stream? Look, ah, what genius, Art, science, wit! Soldiers like Caesar, Statesmen like Pitt! Sculptors like Phidias, Raphaels in shoals, Poets like Shakespeare— Beautiful souls! See, on their glowing cheeks Heavenly the flush! —Ah, so the silence was! ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... familiar Venuses and Apollos. All the later complications—the archaic and archaistic conundrums; the influences of Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting attributions and the wrangles of the erudite—still slumbered in the bosom of the future "scientific critic." Greek art in those days began with Phidias and ended with the Apollo Belvedere; and a child could travel from one to the other without ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... Majestick Air that appeared in one of [Lysippus's [3]] Statues of Alexander, tho' no bigger than the Life, than he might have been with Mount Athos, had it been cut into the Figure of the Hero, according to the Proposal of Phidias, [4] with a River in one Hand, and a ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... was Grecian to the core, and out of place and puzzled and very lonely in a sordid, bustling world; and he assured Patricia—she did not object if he called her Patricia?—that her own soul possessed all the beauty and purity and calm of an Aphrodite sculptured by Phidias. It was such a soul as Horace might have loved, as Theocritus might have hymned in glad Greek song. Patricia ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... greatest pleasure to compare them, as existing in the uncultivated savage of the north, and when they are found in the darling of an enlightened people, who has added the height of gymnastic skill to the most distinguished natural qualities, such as we can now only see in the works of Phidias and Praxiteles—or in our living model of the gymnastic champions ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... architects hitherto known in the world were Phidias, Giotto, and Michael Angelo; with all of whom, architecture was only their play, sculpture and painting their work. All great works of architecture in existence are either the work of single sculptors or painters, or of societies of sculptors ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... greater enthusiasm, a more living sympathy, might surely have been provoked by the sight of the blue sea where Themistocles repulsed the navies of Persia, and the glorious hill on whose crest St. Paul spake to the wondering Athenians, and the monuments of the genius of Praxiteles and Phidias. Lady Brassey, however, is not at her best when treating of the places and things which antiquity has hallowed: it is the aspects of the life of to-day and the picturesque scenes of savage lands that arrest ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... and at his feet the eagle, and the same form would serve for Jupiter the Thunderer, except only that to the countenance of the Jewish prophet there has been imparted a rapt and inspired look, wholly beyond any that even Phidias could have fixed upon the face of Jove. He who wrought this head must have believed in the sublimities of the religion whose chief minister he has made so to speak them forth, in the countenance and in the form; and yet who has ever ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... of St. Peter's; he looks out from the Pincian hill, and sees Nivea Soracte as Horace beheld it; and he is overawed (if Hawthorne could be) by the Forum of Trajan and the Column of Antoninus. He makes a great discovery, or rediscovery, that Phidias's colossal statues of Castor and Pollux on the Monte Cavallo are the finest figures in Rome. They are late Roman copies, but probably from Phidias,—not by Lysippus or Praxiteles; and he felt the presence of Michel Angelo in the Baths of Diocletian. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Athens as the champion of all Hellas, resulted in a splendid reconstruction of the Attic monuments as well as a revival of building activity in Asia Minor. By the wise administration of Pericles and by the genius of Ictinus, Phidias, and other artists of surpassing skill, the Acropolis at Athens was crowned with a group of buildings and statues absolutely unrivalled. Chief among them was the Parthenon, the shrine of Athena Parthenos, which the critics of all schools have agreed in considering the most faultless ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... rhetoricians of antiquity, are continually enforcing this position, that all the arts receive their perfection from an ideal beauty, superior to what is to be found in individual nature. They are ever referring to the practice of the painters and sculptors of their times, particularly Phidias (the favourite artist of antiquity), to illustrate their assertions. As if they could not sufficiently express their admiration of his genius by what they knew, they have recourse to poetical enthusiasm. They call it inspiration; a gift from heaven. The ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... homey words are steeped and perfumed with beautiful associations. He knew that words are fossil poetry. What would one not give for the old cloak that Paul had from Troas, a piece of the marble by Phidias, the old threshold worn by the feet of Socrates, an old missal illuminated by Bellini, an old note-book in which Shakespeare wrote the first outline of Hamlet! And the old, sweet, home words with which a mother soothes her babe, with which a lover woos his bride, the old words of God, and ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and variety of statues of bronze and of marble which had been erected in the various temples and upon the different platforms were very great. There was one, a statue of Minerva, which was executed by Phidias, the great Athenian sculptor, after the celebrated battle of Marathon, in the days of Darius, which, with its pedestal, was sixty feet high. It stood on the left of the grand entrance, towering above the buildings ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... snow. If she had no time to scramble through a volume of a new poet, she could still learn line by line some favorite old poem, and let it sink into her heart, so that it did its work thoroughly. If she could not find time to learn the history of all the artists from the time of Phidias to the last New York exhibition, yet when a beautiful picture was before her she could look at it thoughtfully without feeling that she must hurry on to the next. In this way, perhaps, she gained a more absolute culture than ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... style. It is because his art is so old that it was "too new" for even Corot to understand it; because he harked back beyond the pseudoclassicism of his time to the great art of the past, and was classic as Phidias and Giotto and Michelangelo were classic, that he seemed strange to his contemporaries. In everything he was conservative. He hated change; he wanted things to remain as they had always been. He did not especially pity the hard lot of the peasant; he considered ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... prosopopoeia of Fabricius could not explain. It is not the cultivation of the arts which corrupts morals, but their degradation, induced by inactive and luxurious opulence. The instinct of property is to make the industry of Daedalus, as well as the talent of Phidias, subservient to its own fantastic whims and disgraceful pleasures. Property, not wealth, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... in the art of Greece. Fortunately we are there able to see how a single theme is treated, in the first place, in poetry,—the interpreter of the popular beliefs,—and afterwards in art; we can discover how Phidias and Praxiteles, to speak only of sculptors, treated the types created by Homer and Hesiod. In the case of Chaldaea we have no such opportunity. She has left us neither monuments of sacerdotal theology like those we have inherited in such countless numbers ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... had received a liberal education. The buildings of the new city were executed by such artificers as the reign of Constantine could afford; but they were decorated by the hands of the most celebrated masters of the age of Pericles and Alexander. To revive the genius of Phidias and Lysippus, surpassed indeed the power of a Roman emperor; but the immortal productions which they had bequeathed to posterity were exposed without defence to the rapacious vanity of a despot. By his commands the cities of Greece and Asia were despoiled of their most valuable ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Head," placed side by side with the "Head of one of the Horses ... now at Venice," subscribes the following critical note: "It is astonishing that the great principles of nature should have been so nearly lost in the time between Phidias and Lysippus. Compare these two heads. The Elgin head is all truth, the other all manner." Hobhouse pronounces the "Horses" to be "irrevocably Chian," but modern archaeologists regard both "school" ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... pearl-like teeth. Her chin was pear-shaped, and revealed decision of character. Her whole appearance gave one the impression of intelligence, purity, and benevolence. She was of medium height, and her figure would have served as a model for the skill of a Phidias. Her greatest accomplishment was music. Her voice was a high soprano, and its naturally pure tone was improved by cultivation under ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... stood in a corner with that of good old Bishop Jewel, and one of ivory, which had belonged to Papirius, the Roman senator. The ponderous club of Hercules was close at hand. The virtuoso showed me the chisel of Phidias, Claude's palette, and the brush of Apelles, observing that he intended to bestow the former either on Greenough, Crawford, or Powers, and the two latter upon Washington Allston. There was a small vase of oracular gas ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... English, and the Turks. The French officer carried her off like another Helen, and she was given to Paris, old Louis Philippe being bridegroom by proxy. Savans refer the statue to the time of Phidias; and as this is a pleasant idea to me, I go a little further, and ascribe her ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Blondel asserted it was harmonic proportions; Peter Leigh speaks of it as the music of the eye. Yet everybody understands what beauty is, and that it is derived from Nature, agreeable to the purest models which Nature presents. Such was the ideal of Phidias. Such was it to the minds of the Greeks, who united every advantage, physical and mental, for the perfection of art. Nor could art have been so wonderfully developed had it not been for the influence which the great ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... in the Villa Albani, was characterized as the Goddess of Wisdom by an aged countenance. Phidias reformed this idea, and gave to her beauty and youth. Previous artists had imitated Nature too carelessly,—not deeply perceiving that wisdom and virtue, striving in man to resist senescence and decay, must in a goddess accomplish their purpose, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... leaving your own country and the people of your house; neither shall all men praise you for your talk.[116] And you must not despise this rude serviceableness of my body, neither this meanness of my dusty dress; for, pushing on in their strength from such things as these, that great Phidias revealed Zeus, and Polyclitus wrought out Hera, and Myron was praised, and Praxiteles marvelled at: therefore are these men worshipped with ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to be careful; for the fact which has to be related has been living, natural, and harmonious. If we do not succeed in rendering it such by the recital, it is surely because we have not succeeded in seeing it aright. Suppose that, in restoring the Minerva of Phidias according to the texts, we produced a dry, jarring, artificial whole; what must we conclude? Simply that the texts want an appreciative interpretation; that we must study them quietly until they dovetail and furnish a whole in which all the parts are ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Museum; and though the statue itself is gone, still seals and gems remain, made to imitate it, and showing the perfect beauty of the ivory and gold statue of Athene herself, which was carved by the great sculptor Phidias, and placed within the temple. When there was a question whether this figure should be made of marble or of ivory, and Phidias recommended marble as the cheapest, the whole assembly of Athenians ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deeper relief than the base: but, even so, the extraordinary delicacy of this unique carving was utterly wasted, since the technical treatment of the marble was wholly unsuited to its emplacement. The amazing beauty of the sculpture and the unsurpassed skill of Phidias were never fully revealed until its home had been changed ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... 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. I used often to think it was a great pity that such a love as she was should not be matched with some equally good specimen of ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... they done but render it more immortal! The work does not perish that a scoundrel has struck. Ask Phidias, then, or ask of Rodin if before bits of his work men no longer say, "It is his!" The fortress dies when once dismantled, but the temple shattered lives but the more nobly; and our eyes, of a sudden, remember the roof with disdain and prefer to see the sky in the lace work ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... vogue not long since at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Place de la Bourse, is one we can scarcely imagine successful in another city, at least to such a degree. It was Les Filles de Marbre; and this is the plot. The opening scene is at Athens, in the studio of Phidias. It is the day after that on which Alcibiades cut off his dog's tail; and, exulting in the effect produced by that exploit, he enters with the rich Gorgias, who has ordered and paid Phidias in advance for statues of his three friends, Lais, Phryne, and Aspasia. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... buildings of the Parthenon, rich with the statues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming white against the blue sky, with the huge bronze statue of Athene Promachos, fifty feet in height, towering up among the temples and colonnades. In front, and far below, gleams the blue sea, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... of the metopes; but he tells us that the sculptures of the eastern pediment were the work of Paeonius of Mende, an indisputable statue by whom is known (cf. page 213), and those of the western by Alcamenes, who appears elsewhere in literary tradition as a pupil of Phidias. On various grounds it seems almost certain that Pausanias was misinformed on this point. Thus we are left without trustworthy testimony as to the affiliations of the artist or artists to whom the sculptured decoration ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... see the work of Phidias; and each of you holds it a misfortune not to have beheld these things before you die. Whereas when there is no need even to take a journey, but you are on the spot, with the works before you, have you no care to contemplate and ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... about things of little or no use, an evidence against himself of his negligence and indisposition to what is really good. Nor did any generous and ingenuous young man, at the sight of the statue of Jupiter at Pisa, ever desire to be a Phidias, or, on seeing that of Juno at Argos, long to be a Polycletus, or feel induced by his pleasure in their poems to wish to be an Anacreon or Philetas or Archilochus. For it does not necessarily follow, that, if a piece of work please for its gracefulness, therefore ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... England; the Bears at Berne and the Wolf in the Roman Capitol are the most venerable local insignia; the carvings of Gibbons, in old English manor-houses, outrival all the luxurious charms of modern upholstery; Phidias is a more familiar element in Grecian history than Pericles; the moral energy of the old Italian republics is more impressively shadowed forth and conserved in the bold and vigorous creations of Michel Angelo than in the political annals of Macchiavelli; and it is the massive, uncouth sculptures, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... hear her descant; demonstrating by the brilliancy of her ideas the possibility of the one, and by the fluency of her language her acquaintance with the other. She is much younger than her husband, and, though not exactly a model for Phidias, a fascinating woman. Variety is the talisman by which she commands all hearts and gained her monarch's. She is only consistent in being delightful; but, though changeable, she is not capricious. Each day displays a new ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... used except in musical application, and now for the first time applied to material form, and with a beauty-giving touch that Phidias might be proud of. I know not how I quote; such is my best memory of the stanza, and here, that is more important than the stanza itself. And that other stanza, "The Châtelaine and the Page"; and that other, "The Doves"; and that other, "Romeo and Juliet," and the exquisite cadence of the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... ripple of these strong, justly modeled sinews were like the play of steel under satin and their smoothness was as rhythmic and full of power as some young gladiator's, who might have stirred the appreciation of Phidias or Praxiteles. When at last he had burned his mental restlessness into physical weariness, Burton halted and stood with his shoulders thrown back and his head erect, the breathing of chest and abdomen as regular and deep as the sequence of waves at flood tide. Yamuro went out into still another ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... contrast are omitted as superfluous. Whereas in Sophocles, it is at once the finish of the chief figure and the studied harmony of the whole, which have led his work to be compared with that of his contemporary Phidias. Such comparison, however, is useful by way of illustration merely. It must never be forgotten that, as Lessing pointed out to some who thought the Philoctetes too sensational, analogies between the arts are limited by essential differences of material and of scope. All poetry ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... painter, landscape painter, marine painter, flower painter, portrait painter, miniature painter, miniaturist, scene painter, sign painter, coach painter; engraver; Apelles^; sculptor, carver, chaser, modeler, figuriste^, statuary; Phidias, Praxiteles; Royal Academician. photographer, cinematographer, lensman, cameraman, camera technician, camera buff; wildlife photographer. Phr. photo ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... incapable of making the sacrifice to humanity of pursuing an occupation that depresses me so. I have a riotous imagination. Perhaps I could be a writer. But I am determined to become a sculptor. While I was sick, especially at the end of the second week, I remodelled all the works of Phidias and Michael Angelo. Don't misunderstand me, Eva. In becoming a sculptor, I am no longer ambitious of distinction. I shall merely be rendering homage to the greatness of art. While remaining a faithful ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... the excitement of the imagination to rouse it into activity, to one monotonous standard of formal propriety? Only let the image duly perform its task, and bring the divine idea with vividness and truth before the mental eye; if this be effected, whether by the art of Phidias, the poetry of Homer, the Egyptian Hieroglyph, or the Persian element, we need not cavil at external differences, or lament the seeming fertility of unfamiliar creeds, so long as the great essential is attained, THAT MEN ARE MADE TO ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... there are in our nature distinct energies,—by the one of which we discover and seize, as it were, on sciences and theorems with almost intuitive rapidity, by another, through which high art is accomplished, like the statues of Phidias,—proceeded to state that "enthusiasm, in the true acceptation of the word, is, when that part of the soul which is above intellect is excited to the gods, and thence ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... beauty, and the breasts from which were modelled cups of gold for the service of the gods. We have only paintings on vases, or work on gems, which, though graceful, is conventional and might represent any other heroine, Polyxena, or Eriphyle. No Helen from the hands of Phidias or Scopas has survived to our time, and the grass may be growing in Therapnae over the shattered ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... system of medicine was not established, until Hippocrates of Cos, the "father of medicine," came upon the scene. In an age that produced Phidias, Lysias, Herodotus, Sophocles, and Pericles, it seems but natural that the medical art should find an exponent who would rise above superstitious dogmas and lay the foundation for a medical science. His rejection of the supernatural alone stamps the greatness of his genius. But, besides ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... minute passed in silence, and still her eyes were fixed upon the Stone. Her face became like that of a beautiful masterpiece of Phidias: pure, cold, and true. A feeling of something like awe crept over him as he watched her, and he found himself asking whether, after all, Phadrig's story might have been true. But, true or not, there was the fascination which, as Phadrig had told him, had lured Isaac Josephus to his self-inflicted ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... comprehensive text of the Hebrew preacher,' the invariable 'vanity of vanities,' is alike inscribed upon all the vestiges of human greatness. For the rest, a serene and touching beauty lingers around and hallows every relic which attests the hand of Phidias, or marks the country of Pericles and Epaminondas. No lapse of time, no process of decay, will ever wholly exorcise that spirit of stateliness and command which sits enthroned amid the ruins of the 'Eternal City,' as her ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... came in what is known as the Age of Pericles, who was the master mind at Athens from 459 to 431 B.C. During the fifth century B.C. such names as Themistocles and Pericles in government, Phidias and Myron in art, Herodotus and Thucydides in historical narrative, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in tragic drama, and Aristophanes in comedy, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... heard a discussion in Germany among three art-teachers,—two of them with a world-wide fame,—that was as new to me as it was amazing. They seemed to agree that the art of the sculptor reached its height in the Age of Phidias; that never again would men give shape to figures fit to be put, let us say, beside the Elgin Marbles. As some nineteen centuries passed by, another art came to its finest flowering in the Italian Cinquecento, when Raphael, Da Vinci, ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... form, and fell behind her in a flowing train. A broad necklace of pearls and diamonds set off her superb neck; bracelets of the same kind encircled her arms, that might have served as a model for Phidias. A diadem of costly gems was glittering on her expansive forehead. It was a truly royal toilet, and in former days the queen herself would have rejoiced in it; but to-day no gladness was in her face—her cheeks were pallid, her lips quivering, and ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... old Greek bathers, into whose hands were delivered Pericles, and Alcibiades, and the perfect models of Phidias. They had daily before their eyes the highest types of Beauty which the world has ever produced; for of all things that are beautiful, the human body is the crown. Now, since the delusion of artists has been overthrown, and we know that Grecian Art is but the simple reflex of Nature—that ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... years of age, was richly dressed, with an exuberant mass of yellow hair falling over her shoulders. Her large, lustrous eyes were of a deep blue, her complexion as rich and pink as the lining of a sea shell, and her features as winsome as any that Phidias himself ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis
... the other, and clothed in neat white stockings, and boots. A black silk cravat formed the girdle which fastened the shirt round the wasp-like waist of Rose-Pompon, just above those hips, worthy of the enthusiasm of a modern Phidias, and which gave to this style of dress a grace ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... to Olympia to see the work of Phidias, and all of you think it a misfortune to die without having seen such things. But when there is no need to take a journey, and where a man is, there he has the works (of God) before him, will you not desire to see and understand them? Will you not perceive ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... change the Iron to a Golden Age, and it is to thoughts rather than their great embodiments that earnest art-worshippers now bow. And yet men fancy they are artists, dream of a fame glorious as that of Phidias! Why there's young Acajou, who chiselled a very respectable hound out of a stray lump of marble, stealthily, by a candle, or more probably a spirit lamp, in his father's cellar—was discovered and straightway heroized. I don't say the boy hasn't talent, genius if you will; ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... only, not these only, not only the writers are under the ban. Here is Phidias, gorgeous sculptor in gold and ivory, giant dreamer of the Infinite in marble; but he will not use the fig-leaf. Here is Rembrandt, who paints the Holland landscape, the Jew, the beggar, the burgher, in lights and glooms of Eternity; and his pictures have been called 'indecent,' ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... the city of the SAMMIANS. The same man, stimulated by private pique against the MEGARENSIANS,(2) another nation of Greece, or to avoid a prosecution with which he was threatened as an accomplice of a supposed theft of the statuary Phidias,(3) or to get rid of the accusations prepared to be brought against him for dissipating the funds of the state in the purchase of popularity,(4) or from a combination of all these causes, was the primitive author of that famous ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... race which are very rare, but which, when seen, are the nearest approach to physical and mental perfection that is ever attained in this world. He was about five feet ten inches in height, and with body and limbs in as perfect proportion as the chisel of Phidias ever carved from marble. Even his long, black hair, which hung luxuriantly and loosely about his shoulders, was of softer texture than is the rule with his people. Several stained eagle feathers slanted ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... for its completion. They see that the edifice must be reared of blocks cut out of the quarry; and they fix their attention on the quarriers who loosen them from the rock, without considering that the soul of Phidias or Michael Angelo is required to arrange them in the due proportion in the immortal structure. What makes great and durable works of history so rare is, that they alone, perhaps, of any other production, require for their formation a combination ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought; Never from lips of cunning fell The thrilling Delphic oracle; Out from the heart of nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old; The litanies of nations came, Like the volcano's tongue of flame, Up from the burning core below,— The canticles of love and ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... great deal of feeling, Phidias," said Homer, gravely. "Have they done anything to ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... you; desires only to live for you, only to die for you, only to lie at your feet afterward—that is nothing to you. You do not even care to listen. You would rather hear through a braggart, indecent mouth that ought to be sewed up what Rodin said about Phidias. It seems finer to you to be an artist than a woman, and you so ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... heroes of poetry, painting, sculpture and music who were natives of Italy, or for foreigners, celebrated for their excellence in those arts, who have died in Rome. Here are for instance, tablets to the memory of Metastasio, Rafael Mengs, Sacchini, Poussin, Winckelmann; the Phidias of modern days, the illustrious Canova, has recommended the placing in the Pantheon of the busts in marble of all the great men who have flourished in Italy, as the most appropriate ornament to this temple. He himself with a princely liberality has ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... 1830, has an Ionic portico of white marble, with a group of allegorical figures representing Sculpture and the kindred arts. On each side of the portico there are three niches in the front, containing on one side Pericles, Phidias and Vulcan; on the other, Hadrian, Prometheus and Daedalus. The whole building forms a hollow square and is lighted entirely from the inner side. There are in all twelve halls, each containing the remains of a particular era in the art, and arranged according to time; so that, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... to herself. Then without the least apparent relevance, "He had been smoking." Again her words broke her revery, and she took up the unfinished braid of hair. When she did so, she caught a glimpse of her arm which was as perfectly rounded as the fairest marble of Phidias. She stretched the arm to its full length that the mirror might reflect its entire beauty. Again she thought aloud: "I wish he could see my arm. Perhaps some day—" But the words ceased, and in their place came a flush that ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... assistant in the duties of his office. My childish faith was all he could wish it; I reverenced a religion which had nurtured virtues like his. In process of time, I became myself a father. Four children, more beautiful than ever visited the dreams of Phidias, made my dwelling a portion of Elysium, as I then thought. Their mother—but why should I speak of her? It is enough to say, she was a Roman mother. At home, it was my supreme happiness to sport with my little ones, or initiate them into the elements of useful knowledge. And often, when at the ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... him for a Hebrew, even had the young man worn the garb of a Jew instead of that of a Grecian. The exquisitely-formed features of the stranger were those which have been made familiar to us by the masterpieces of antiquity treasured in our museums. Lycidas might well have served as model to Phidias for a statue of Endymion. His form was of faultless proportions, remarkable rather for symmetry and grace than for strength; and his face might have been deemed too feminine in its beauty, but for the stamp of intellect on it. That young ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... where she has been dabbling, and goes ashore and up the sand, a bedraggled-looking creature, and conceited at that! Next comes a Burmese mother and her two young daughters, their bathing dress a smile and a Christmas orchid in the hair. The eldest is a thing of beauty, with lines to delight a Phidias. Alas! why must we hide all beauty of form except that of animals—hide fearfully God's image? Men, women, and children here all seem fit and fairly well shaped; you rarely see a deformity, except at show places such ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... will has nothing to do with it,—"it can only have arisen through inspiration from the Unconscious." He would extend the name of mystic to "eminent art-geniuses who owe their productions to inspirations of genius, and not to the work of their consciousness (e.g. Phidias, AEeschylus, Raphael, Beethoven)", and even to every "truly original" philosopher, for every high thought has been first apprehended by the glance of genius. Moreover, the relation of the individual to the Absolute, an essential theme of philosophy, can only be mystically apprehended. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... trumpeters who blew with might and main upon their long tubes, which gleamed under the sunlight. The horses of these warriors were all white as the feet of Thetis, and might have served, by reason of their noble paces and purity of breeds, as models for those which Phidias at a later day sculptured upon the ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... than the thought he shapes. For if the stock out of which the work is wrought be ever more valuable than the workman's skill, then let canvas and paint-pots impeach the fame of Raphael; rough blocks from Paros and Pentelicus, the gold and ivory of the Olympian Jove; tear from the brow of Phidias the laurel wreath with which the world has crowned him. Supply of raw material is little without the ability to use it. Furnish three men with stone and mortar, and while one is building an unsightly heap of clumsy masonry, the architect will rear up a magnificent ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... they ornament now, rather than create; cut drapery, rather than marble. Our poems remind me of the ancient statues. Phidias made them, and Bubo and Bombax dressed them in purple. But this does not apply to young Pope, who has shown in this very poem that he can work the quarry as well as choose the gems. But see, the carriage awaits us. I have worlds to do; first there ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with it through time the memory of all its deeds and imaginations, and it burdens itself only in a new era with what was highest among the imaginations of the ancestors. What is essentially noble is never out of date. The figures carved by Phidias for the Parthenon still shine by the side of the greatest modern sculpture. There has been no evolution of the human form to a greater beauty than the ancient Greeks saw and the forms they carved ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... guards the flame, so the bare, marble halls Of the Parthenon keep, in their desolate space, The memory of Phidias enshrined in their walls. And Praxiteles' child, the young Venus, yet calls From the altar, where, smiling, she still holds her place, The centuries ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... creations out of the most durable material, many combinations of wood, stone, and metal were used, which would sadly shock the modern sculptor's eye;—wooden figures burnished with gold, and with painted vermilion faces, were fashioned in the age of Phidias; and it is believed by some, that this immortal sculptor helped to produce a statue of Jupiter, the face of which was of ivory and gold, and the body of gypsum and clay. Phidias may be fairly acknowledged as the first great Greek sculptor, of whose career and whose works we have indisputable ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... hearths. On the other hand, though sensible of the honor attached to being bit by a flea lineally descended from an Athenian flea that in one day may possibly have bit three such men as Pericles, Phidias, and Euripides, many quiet unambitious travellers might choose to dispense with 'glory,' and content themselves with the view of Greek external nature. To these persons we would recommend the plan of carrying amongst their baggage a tent, with portable camp-beds; one ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... une lampe une flamme fidele, Au fond du Parthenon le marbre inhabite Garde de Phidias la memoire eternelle, Et la jeune Venus, fille de Praxitele, Sourit encor, debout dans sa divinite, Aux siecles impuissants ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... commanded your architect to set aside simple grandeur, and to build this gaudy monstrosity, which is no more like the banqueting-hall of a Pericles than I or you, Cleopatra, in all our finery, are like the simply clad gods and goddesses of Phidias. I mean not to offend you, Cleopatra, but I must say this; I am writing now on the subject of harmony, and perhaps I shall afterwards treat of justice, truth, virtue; although I know full well that they are pure abstractions which occur neither in nature nor in human life, and which ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... often absent from them all; too seldom present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic. Fiction is the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element which enters largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose that either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr. James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Building, Foulkes and Hogue of Portland, architects, imitates, though it does not reproduce, the Parthenon of the Athenian Acropolis. (p. 191.) Doric marble is replaced by the natural columns of the great trees of Oregon, and the frieze of Phidias, by the fretwork of the bark of pine and fir. There are forty-eight of the great columns, the same number as in the outer colonnade of the Parthenon, and, coincidentally, one for each State of the Union. They were cut from among the largest of trees. The Douglas ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... great period of Athenian literature and art: of the Parthenon and Phidias; of AEschylus, the soldier of Marathon; then Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; finally, of Socrates, not himself an author, but the inspirer of Plato, and the founder of ethical science; according to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... centre of art and learning, adorns our collection with Athens, the Acropolis and Parthenon, the latter almost completely and shamefully bereft of those famous marbles, chiseled by Phidias nearly ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... between the works of the Greek artists and poets—between Homer, Sophocles, and Phidias on the one hand, and the Alexandrian Theocritus and Kallimachos and the Pergamos sculptures on the other—is greater than lies between the Nibelungenlied and the Minnesingers, and Dante and Petrarch. In both cases one finds oneself in a new world of thought ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... her head back on the pillow, and closed her eyes. A more noble, beautiful, virginal head it would be impossible to imagine. Phidias would have asked ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... the happy-faced maiden are ever increasing to be repaid by the sweetest of smiles. Evelyn Verne appeared in a heavy garnet silk with bodice and draperies of the same shade in velvet. Her elbow sleeves reveal arms that would rival in miniature those of the master-piece of Phidias—the Pallas Athena—which graced the Parthenon in by-gone ages. Her hair, of purplish blackness, gives effect to the creamy tints of her complexion, and heightens the damask tinge of the beautifully-rounded cheeks. One glance at this magnificent looking form and you are victimized by her charms; ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... strait peaceful now, flushed with pink and white blossoms of fruit and almond trees; to sit on the cliff-throne whence a Persian King had looked down upon a Salamis fought and lost.... In that port-hole glimpse a Themistocles was revealed, a Socrates, a Homer and a Phidias, an AEschylus, and a Pericles; yes, and a John brooding Revelations on his sea-girt rock as twilight falls over ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Aeschines fall fittingly into that period of Greek history when the free spirit of the people which had created the arts of Pindar and Sophocles, Pericles, Phidias, and Plato, was becoming the spirit of slaves and of savants, who sought to forget the freedom of their fathers in learning, luxury, and the formalism of deducers of rules. To this slavery Aeschines himself contributed, both in action with Philip of Macedon ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... thence to London, and sets out in a few days. I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing Sartor themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. Instantly I wondered why I ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... genius is, a superlative borrower. The state of a civilization at a given time will gauge the poet's concept. He can not pass beyond the world's noblest notions to his hour. If Greece and Rome produced no man, settle to it that Greek and Roman literatures will produce no man. Sculptor, as Phidias; statesman, as Pericles; dramatist, as Aeschylus; general, as Themistocles; stern justice, as Aristides,—Greece can show; and such characters the historians, dramatists, and epic poets will delineate and celebrate. Horace is a looking-glass, and holds his ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... view of these facts, does it not appear that if there is any one distinctively feminine characteristic, it is the mother-instinct for government? But now with clearer vision we reread the record of the past. True, we find no Raphael or Beethoven, no Phidias or Michael Angelo among women. No woman has painted the greatest picture, carved the finest statue, composed the noblest oratorio or opera. Not many women's names appear after Joan of Arc's in the long list of warriors; but, as a ruler, woman stands ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... The illustrations to "Punch," for example, are often as good as anything that can be imagined. We know of nothing like them in any past age or country. This is the one kind of art—and it is a very good one—in which we excel as distinctly as the age of Phidias excelled in sculpture. Leonardo da Vinci would never have succeeded in getting his drawings accepted at 85 Fleet Street, any more than one of the artists on the staff of "Punch" could paint a fresco which should hold its own against Da Vinci's Last Supper. Michael Angelo again and Titian ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... torso, or mutilated trunk of a statue, which is called the school of Michael Angelo, I had not time to consider it attentively; nor taste enough to perceive its beauties at first sight. The famous horses on Monte Cavallo, before the pope's palace, which are said to have been made in emulation, by Phidias and Praxiteles, I have seen, and likewise those in the front of the Capitol, with the statues of Castor and Pollux; but what pleased me infinitely more than all of them together, is the equestrian statue of Corinthian brass, standing in the middle ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... coincidences between certain great political and intellectual periods and the appearance of illustrious medical reformers and teachers. It was in the age of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato, of Phidias, that Hippocrates gave to medical knowledge the form which it retained for twenty centuries. With the world-conquering Alexander, the world-embracing Aristotle, appropriating anatomy and physiology, among his manifold ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... price for the deed, Hippocrates was unable to produce any parchment showing his title to the vale. And when he was unable to do that, Hipparchus would not pay down his silver, until he could make further inquiry. The next day, we all, meeting at the house of Phidias, fell to debating whether Hippocrates owned the land and could sell it to Hipparchus. And some said one thing and some another, and in the end we agreed that when some of us were next together, we would go to the house of Socrates, and if he were content, we would discuss the matter with him. ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... the outer portico was a second, also formed of isolated columns, but elevated two steps higher than the first; from thence the interior of the temple was entered, which contained the famous statue of Minerva in gold and ivory, by Phidias. This famous temple was built entirely of white marble, and from its elevated position, could be seen from an immense distance. On a nearer approach, it was admired for the elegance of its proportions, and the beauty of the bas-reliefs ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... ascribed to Phidias and Alcamenes. Phidias is said to have formed the images of gods and men most perfectly, and to have far surpassed his rivals, especially in ivory. One would form this judgment even if he had designed nothing else than the Minerva of Athens or the Olympian Jupiter at Elis, the beauty of which was ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the process of his own art, is all that we possess; but what he says, though comparatively small in bulk, with what we have of Pliny, leaves us to wish for more. His review of the revolutions of style in painting, from Polygnotus to Apelles, and in sculpture, from Phidias to Lysippus, is succinct and rapid; but though so rapid and succinct, every word is poised by characteristic precision, and can only be the result of long and judicious enquiry, and perhaps even minute examination." Still less have we scattered in the writings of Cicero, who, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... comprehended, all the arts were destroyed at once, and would not grant that mere probability was a sufficient foundation for art; so I now reply to you, that art cannot exist without knowledge. Would Zeuxis, or Phidias, or Polycletus allow that they knew nothing, when they were men of such marvellous skill? But if any one had explained to them how much power knowledge was said to have, they would cease to be angry; they would not even be offended with us, when they had learnt that we were only putting ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... the majesty of his art, and not of himself—a poor clerk of the court, whose business it is to have ink in his pen, to listen to the gentleman on the bench, and take down the sayings of each witness in this case. He is responsible for workmanship, Nature for the rest, since from the Venus of Phidias the Athenian, down to the little old fellow, Godenot, commonly called the Sieur Breloque, a character carefully elaborated by one of the most celebrated authors of the present day, everything is studied from the eternal model of human imitations which belongs to all. At ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... of that wonderful people, serves also to show how different were the associations with which, among them, that class was connected. Can we wonder at this? Under that glorious heaven, such women might, when they chose, behold the statues of Phidias and the pictures of Zeuxis; they could listen to the wisdom of Socrates, or they might form part of the crowd, hushed in raptured silence, round the rhapsodist, as he recited the immortal lines of Homer—or round Demosthenes, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... twelve years to build it and after standing fifty-six years it was overthrown by an earthquake and after nearly a thousand years the metal was used for other purposes. The other ancient wonders were the Statue of Jupiter that was made of ivory and gold by Phidias, and the Mausoleum of Artemisia. Both of these have long since passed ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... tender crescent-moon, thy slave, Sleeping above her robe as buoyed by clouds, Refines upon the women of my youth. What, and the soul alone deteriorates? I have not chanted verse like Homer, no— Nor swept string like Terpander, no—nor carved 140 And painted men like Phidias and his friend; I am not great as they are, point by point. But I have entered into sympathy With these four, running these into one soul, Who, separate, ignored each other's art. Say, is it nothing that I know them all? The wild flower ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... inheritor of a shapeless mythology and a rude tradition, Homer emerges as the first artist in European poetry, giving clear outline and beautiful form to types of godhead and heroism. The successor to schools which had rather combated than conquered their material, Phidias, is recalled as the first poet in European art, creating a visible embodiment for the Homeric vision of those imperial brows which made Olympus to tremble ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... certain epochs, and in its nature is necessarily transitory. Where belief is consciously gone the artist has no reverence for his work, and therefore can inspire none. The greatest genius in the world could not reproduce another Athene like that of Phidias. But neither must the belief be too complete. The poet's tongue stammers when he would bring beings before us who, though invisible, are awful personal existences, in whose stupendous presence we one day expect to stand. As long as the ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... hearken to my words, if you want to know why she was lost to you. The start of our misfortunes was the exile of Phidias;[311] Pericles feared he might share his ill-luck, he mistrusted your peevish nature and, to prevent all danger to himself, he threw out that little spark, the Megarian decree,[312] set the city aflame, and blew up the conflagration with a hurricane of war, so that the smoke drew tears from all ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... stoned by Paul, and that, nevertheless, both are now honored as saints and prayed to as such. I mean, that Socrates was not damned because he lived before Christ, and so could not be acquainted with his religion; and that Horace and Julius Caesar, Phidias and Plato, must yet be called great and noble spirits, even though they were heathen. Yes, my lord and husband, I mean that it behooves us well to exercise gentleness in matters of religion, and that faith is not to be obtruded on men by main force as a burden, but ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... are Athena and Hermes, in the types attained about the time of Phidias; but, of course, rudely drawn on the vase, and still more rudely in this print from Le Normant and De Witte. For it is impossible (as you will soon find if you try for yourself) to give on a plane surface the grace of figures drawn on one of solid ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... thrust the spear of question through the shield and heart of falsehood—was present when the great man drank hemlock and met the night of death tranquil as a star meets morning. He has followed the peripatetic philosophers, and has been puzzled by the sophists. He has watched Phidias, as he chiseled shapeless stone to forms of love and awe. He has lived by the slow Nile, amid the vast and monstrous. He knows the very thought that wrought the form and features of the Sphinx. He has heard great Memnon's morning song, has laid him down with the embalmed dead, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... this seems mainly to have been achieved by a close observance of nature. As in philosophy the genius of Bacon, by investigating the phenomena of visible objects, put to flight and dissipated the learned dogmas of the school of Aristotle, so in sculpture the purity and simplicity of the forms of Phidias established a line of demarcation between his own works and those of the formal, symmetrical, and dry sculpture of his predecessors. Sculpture, till then, lay fettered and bound up in the severity of Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Likewise we perceive the ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... some things which you do not execute as well as your brother, man; no, nor ever will. Pardon me if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great scholar. By which last is meant—not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... year 1755. While I was looking very intently at it, the good verger gently put a printed description of it into my hands, on a loose quarto sheet. I trust to be forgiven if I read only its first sentence:—Cette grande composition reunit aux richesse de l'art des Phidias et des Bouchardon, les traits de la grande poesie." "Take any shape but this"—thought I to myself—and, folding it up as gently as it had been delivered to me, I put it into my pocket. My good friend, I do beseech you to hear me out—when I preface my remarks by saying, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... saw two pictures. One was of a woman. You would not mistake it for any of the Greek goddesses. It had a splendor and majesty such as Phidias might have given to a woman Jupiter. But not terrible. The culmination of the awful beauty was in an expression of matchless compassion. If there had been other figures, they must have been ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... the Doric order at Athens, dedicated to Athena, and constructed under Phidias of the marble of Pentelicus, and regarded as the finest specimen of Greek architecture that exists; it is 228 ft. in length and 64 ft. in height. Parthenon means the chamber of the maiden ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... more importance, the poet of less; and that the relations between the men who are the types and firstfruits of the age in word and work,—namely, Scott and Turner,—will be, in many curious respects, different from those between Homer and Phidias, or Dante and Giotto.[119] ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... wealthy citizens. The public surroundings of an influential Athenian were therefore in direct contrast to the simplicity of his home, which contained the most meagre supply of chairs and tables, while the chef d'oeuvres of Phidias adorned the Senate House, the Theatre, ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... laws, in arts, and in literature: but the bulk of the people must possess at least the sense and appreciation of virtue in order to such national greatness. When that sense is lost, the nation is undone and become impotent, for art no less than for empire. Thus the Greece of Pericles and of Phidias fell, to be ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... merchant caravans to Central Asia in one direction, and her navigators into the Atlantic Ocean in another direction, and 500 years of prosperity, dead. Dead, answer the "Pillars of Hercules" and the rocks on which the Tyrian fishermen spread their nets. Athens—after Phidias, after Demosthenes, after Miltiades, after Marathon—dead. Sparta—after Leonidas, after Eurybiades, after ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... appear to be the primitive Mycenean sculptor's first essay. But rude as they are, and childish as they look, these primitive productions of Greek art are of paramount interest to science, because we see in them the great-grandfathers of the masterpieces of Phidias and Praxiteles; they prove to us in the most certain manner that the artistic genius of the epoch of Pericles did not come suddenly down from heaven like Minerva from the head of Jove, but that it was the result of a school of artists, which had gradually ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... painter, and when Apelles was sent by the Athenians to Paulus Emilius to adorn his triumph he remained to teach philosophy to the general's sons. Sculpture was thus generally practised in Greece, where there flourished a number of excellent artists, among them being Phidias of Athens, Praxiteles and Polycletus, very great masters. Lysippus and Pyrgoteles who were of considerable skill in engraving, and Pygmalion in ivory carving in relief, it being recorded of him that he obtained life by his prayers for the figure of a maid carved by him. The ancient Greeks ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... the Olympian Jupiter by Phidias was considered the highest achievement of this department of Grecian art. It was of colossal dimensions, and was what the ancients called "chryselephantine;" that is, composed of ivory and gold; the parts ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon. Yet no era has been wholly dark, nor will we too hastily submit to the historian, and congratulate ourselves on a blaze of light. If we could pierce the obscurity of those remote years, we should find it light enough; only there is not our day. Some creatures are made ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau |
