"Phidias" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old when Confucius died. Themistocles was preparing the way for Pericles; for then was being collected the treasure of Delos, which made Phidias and the Parthenon possible. During the life of Confucius lived Leonidas, Miltiades, Cyrus the Great, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes. And then quite naturally occurred the battles of Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae. Then lived Buddha-Gautama, Lao-tsze, Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... of the garden of the Colonna Palace, under whose roof I had been sleeping; and passing out from it at its summit, I found myself on Monte Cavallo. The fountain sparkled in the sun; the obelisk above pierced the clear dark-blue air. The statues on each side, the works, as they are inscribed, of Phidias and Praxiteles, stood in undiminished grandeur, representing Castor and Pollux, who with majestic power tamed the rearing animal at their side. If those illustrious artists had in truth chiselled these forms, how many passing generations had their giant proportions outlived! ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... left, above and below, but the dirtiest room of all was that in which lumps of clay lay casually about on tables and rests and on the floor, where embryonic things perched upon tripods, like antediluvian birds and saurians, and where the daughters of Praxiteles and sons of Phidias pursued their claggy but fascinating studies under a sculptor who possessed the inestimable gift of teaching more than he knew himself. It was all very unromantic. Strange how ugliness is the mother of beauty, and the sacred fairy-winged scarab ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... loveliness in their statues of the Divine, because through the satisfaction which came to them from such exquisite figures their souls were soothed and uplifted. They have left on record how the calm and majestic expression of a face carved by a Phidias quieted, charmed, strengthened them. Dion Chrysostom says of the figure of the Olympian Zeus, "Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image, methinks, must utterly forget ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... parson who did not do the duty; and he loved the clerk and the sexton and the parish beadle with his broad gold-laced hat, and cane of striking authority; and he loved the watchmen and their drowsy drawl of "past umph a' clock;" he loved the charity schools and admired beyond all the sculpture of Phidias, or the marble miracles of the Parthenon, the two full-length statues about three feet each in length and two feet six inches each in breadth, representing a charity boy and a charity girl, standing over the door of the parish school; he loved the city companies, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... Bargello, is not only joy-giving but refreshing too. The soft contours soothe as well as enrapture the eye: the tenderness of the Madonnas, the gentleness of the Florentine ladies and youths, as Verrocchio and Mino da Fiesole, Donatello, and Pollaiuolo moulded them, calm one where the perfection of Phidias and Praxiteles excites. Hence the very special charm of the Bargello, whose plastic treasures are comparatively few and picked, as against the heaped profusion of paint in the Uffizi and the Pitti. It pairs off rather with the Accademia, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... 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. ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Phidias, full of majesty and of grandeur as they are—the matchless finish of the works of Apelles and Praxiteles, ravishing the senses with their carnal beauty, still lacked one element, without which art can never reveal itself in the full perfection of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... true enough that the Assyrians and Egyptians used colour, but not in the sense of the modern easel painter. We are also informed, rather less than more reliably, that a gentleman by the name of Apelles, in the days of Phidias, painted still-lifes so naturally that birds were tempted to peck at them, and we know much more accurately of the many delightful bits of wall-painting the rich man of Pompeii and Herculaneum used to have put on his walls, but the easel painting ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... 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 ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... painting that begins with Rembrandt and includes men like Velasquez and Giotto. We have long known that there is no German sculptor of the first class nor a German sculptor that is within ten thousand leagues of Rodin, Michael Angelo or Phidias. We have long known that Schubert and Schumann and Rubinstein and Haydn and Chopin were all Jews, and that three-fourths of the other so-called German musicians were Jews whose ancestors suffered such frightful political disabilities in Germany and were so regularly looted of all their ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... appeared at an early period, there also came the first beginnings, so far as we know, of a really scientific theory of medicine. Five hundred years before Christ, in the bloom period of thought—the period of Aeschylus, Phidias, Pericles, Socrates, and Plato—appeared Hippocrates, one of the greatest names in history. Quietly but thoroughly he broke away from the old tradition, developed scientific thought, and laid the foundations of medical science upon experience, observation, and reason so deeply and broadly that ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... harmony and proportion, that the mind of the sculptor would sometimes escape from the absorption of the astrologer and Volktman would gaze upon her with the same admiration that he would have bestowed, in spite of the subject, on the goddess-forms of Phidias or Canova. But then, this beauty was accompanied with such endless variety of gesture, often so wild, though always necessarily graceful, that the eye ached for that repose requisite for ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... principles of demonstrative science. It is among the infallible faculties of the mind, together with Judiciousness, Science, and Philosophy. Each of these terms connotes truth and accuracy (VI.). Wisdom in the arts is the privilege of the superlative artists, such as Phidias in sculpture. But there are some men wise, not in any special art, but absolutely; and this wisdom [Greek: sophia] is Philosophy. It embraces both principles of science (which Aristotle considers to come under the review ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and metre. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could never ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... 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 ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... "They have," said Phidias. "I have just returned from a tour of the world. I have seen the things they call sculpture in these degenerate days, and I must confess—who shouldn't, perhaps—that I could have done better work with a baseball-bat for a chisel and putty for the ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 safari; with ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... England, all flourished in a single period, blossomed in one soil; the sculptures of antiquity represented the classic spirit, and have never been equalled since, because they were the legitimate product of that classic spirit. You cannot have another Phidias till man again believes in Jupiter. The Gothic architecture, how meanly is it imitated now! What cathedrals built in this century rival those of Milan or Strasbourg or Notre Dame? Ah! there is no such Catholicism to inspire the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... world through in whatsoever part, And scan each best known masterpiece of art, In Phidias or Praxiteles or Apelles, You will find nothing that ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... broken now or altogether gone, and the color has changed from white to this soft golden yellow tint. The carved marble frieze, which, over five hundred feet in length, extended around the building, was the work of Phidias and has never been surpassed in beauty by any sculpture of the kind in the world. And these fluted columns are, in grace and proportion, the noblest examples of the Doric ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, thought, aspirations, and habits were mediaeval, opposed to the open-air life, the physical training, and the materialistic religion of antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio and of Signorelli, nay, even of Raphael, were very different from those of Phidias or Praxiteles. Let us think what were the daily and hourly impressions given by the Renaissance to its artists. Large towns, in which thousands of human beings were crowded together, in narrow, gloomy streets, with but a strip of blue visible between the projecting ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Island of Milos. There was quite a struggle for her between a French naval officer, the 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 ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... big marbles in the British Museum are the last significant examples of Greek art; the frieze, of course, proves nothing, being mere artisan work. But the man who made what one may as well call "The Theseus" and "The Ilissus," the man whom one may as well call Phidias, crowns the last vital movement in the Hellenic slope. He is a genius, but he is no oddity: he falls quite naturally into his place as the master of the early decadence; he is the man in whom runs ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... at Athens in that glorious age of Pericles and the succeeding generation, the age of the great tragedians, of Thucydides, of Aristophanes and of Phidias. It was so—though with men of less original genius—in the Augustan Rome of Virgil, Horace and Livy. It was so in the rich and ardent cities of Renaissance Italy, where Da Vinci, Raphael, Michel Angelo, and Titian flourished in the same space of thirty years. It was so in the France ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... 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 ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... material and intellectual elements of civilization at the seat of empire. Literature and art had been carried to the utmost perfection possible to human genius. Art was represented by the inimitable creations of Phidias and Polygnotus. The drama was illustrated by the incomparable tragedies of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and by the comedies of Aristophanes, while the writing of the world's annals had become an art in the graceful ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... through the French provinces. The staff of Peter the Hermit 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 from Delphos, which I trust will be submitted to the ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... opera house the petals trace For modesty a fitting aureole; An alabaster wreath to lay, methought, In dusky hair o'er some fair woman's face Which kindles ev'n such love within the soul As sculptured marble forms by Phidias wrought. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... The sculptor, Phidias, was the friend and adviser of Pericles and to him was given the general charge of all matters relating to art. Under him were grouped architects, sculptors, and artisans of all schools and trades—Ictinus and Calicrates as architects ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 08, August 1895 - Fragments of Greek Detail • Various
... 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 metopes ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... 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 ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... excessive vagueness and shiftiness of these terms cover any amount of sophism. The pots and pans of Teniers and Van Mieris are natural; the passions and humours of Shakspeare and Moliere are natural; the angels of Fra Angelico and Luini are natural; the Sleeping Fawn and Fates of Phidias are natural; the cows and misty marshes of Cuyp and the vacillations of Hamlet are equally natural. In fact the natural means TRUTH OF KIND. Each kind of character, each kind of representation, must be judged by itself. Whereas the vulgar error of criticism is to judge ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... occupations produces, in the very pains he takes 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 Pliletas or Archilochus. But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration of ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... 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 ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... 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 slow sentences on the body politic. Indeed, the ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... 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)
... men of old, he goes on to say, reached each at one point, the outside verge that rounds our faculty, and where they reached, who could do more than reach? I have not chaunted, he says, verse like Homer's, nor swept string like Terpander, nor carved 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 arts. The wild flower was the larger— I have dashed rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup's honey ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Parrhasius appear to have been much the same as those of Zeuxis. He was particularly celebrated for the accuracy of his drawing, and the excellent proportions of his figures. For these he established a canon, as Phidias had done in sculpture for gods, and Polycletus for the human figure, whence Quintilian calls him the legislator of his art. His vanity seems to have been as remarkable as that of Zeuxis. Among the most celebrated of his works was a portrait of the personified Athenian Demos, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... the wall still remaining there are fragments of excellent designs in basso-relievo, representing the combat of the Athenians with the Amazons; besides six columns, white as snow, and of the finest architecture. Near the Propylaea stood the celebrated colossal statue of Minerva, executed by Phidias after the battle of Marathon, the height of which, including the pedestal, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Raphael, Bramante, and Michael Angelo were now living. Rome, Florence, and 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
... 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 ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... spot on classic ground; And soon, vain hope! I form a grand design; Languor succeeds, and all my pow'rs decline. If science open not her richest vein, Without materials all our toil is vain. A form to rugged stone when Phidias gives— Beneath his touch a new creation lives. Remove his marble, and his genius dies: With nature then no breathing statue vies. Whate'er I plan, I feel my pow'rs confin'd By fortune's frown, and penury of mind. I boast no knowledge, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... going among such people,—in fact, no one who has any reverence left in him for the TRUTH of Art CAN mix with those whose profession of it is a mere trade and hypocritical sham. Such dunderheads would see no artistic difference between Phidias and the man of to-day who hews out and sets up a common marble mantel- piece! I'm not a fellow to moan over the 'good old times,'—no, not a bit of it, for those good old times had much in them that was decidedly bad,—but I wish progress would ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... husbandmen, 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 ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... 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 ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... in your mind Carlyle's general symbol of the best attainments of northern religious sculpture,—"three whalecubs combined by boiling," and reflecting that the mental history of all northern European art is the modification of that graceful type, under the orders of the Athena of Homer and Phidias. ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... interested in Art; yet few of us have taken pains to justify the delight we feel in it. No philosophy can win us away from Shakspeare, Plato, Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, Phidias,—from the masters of sculpture, painting, music, and metaphor. Their truth is larger than any other,—too large to be stated directly and lodged in systems, theories, definitions, or formulas. They suggest and assure to us what cannot be spoken. They communicate life, because ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... deaf and dumb to all else. Her heart cried, up on the World's four corners of the Way, and to it came the Vision Splendid. She gossiped with old Herodotus across the earth to the black and blameless Ethiopians; she saw the sculptured glories of Phidias marbled amid the splendor of the swamp; she listened to Demosthenes and walked the Appian Way with Cornelia—while all New York ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... side, before the entrance, and when Pius the Sixth changed their position and turned them round, the ever conservative and ever discontented Roman people were disgusted by the change. On the pedestal of one of them are the words, 'Opus Phidiae,' 'the work of Phidias,' A punning placard was at once stuck upon the inscription with the legend, 'Opus Perfidiae Pii Sexti'—'the work of perfidy ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of older ancestry; you cannot, however bursting with emotion, embody your feelings in forms like those of Phidias, of Michelangelo, of Bach, or Mozart, unless such forms have come ready to hand through the long, steady working of generations of men: Phidias and Bach in person, cut off from their precursors, would ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... 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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... to far other intuitions and far other sympathies than these, is as absolutely wrong, as demonstrably inferior, as any picture or as any carving which may be so degenerate and so debased as to concern itself with a story or a subject. Assuredly Phidias thought of other things than "arrangements"[34] in marble—as certainly as AEschylus thought of other things than "arrangements" in metre. Nor, I am sorely afraid, can the adored Velasquez be promoted to a seat "at the foot of Fusi-yama." Japanese art is ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... Here is the Acropolis, with its snow-white temples and propylaeum, fair and chaste as though they had been built in heaven and gently lowered to this Attic mound by the hands of angels. There in the Parthenon are the sculptures of Phidias, and yonder in the temple of the Dioscuri, the paintings of Polygnotus,—ideal beauty bodied forth to lure the souls of men to unseen and eternal worlds. If they turn to the east, the isles of the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... 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
... the Temple of Athena Nike, and close at hand is the site of Phidias' colossal statue of Athena Promachos, the "fighter of the van," made of the spoils taken from the Persians at the battle of Marathon; sixty-six feet high, in full armor, her poised lance was always a landmark for ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... 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 and feeling, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... her reverently, as of old the sculptor Phidias might have stood in awe before the vision which he saw in ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... unlimited power over the property of all 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
... perhaps, a Man would have been more astonished with the 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 City in ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... 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 her attention most ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... indeed, are not so impressed with their idiosyncrasy as the countrymen of Pericles and Phidias. They do not fully comprehend the position which they occupy. It is the philosopher alone who can conceive the grandeur of Manchester, and the immensity of its future. There are yet great truths to tell, if we had either the courage ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... by the liberality of an old lady, who, in a summer visit to Feltonville, had been attracted by his talent for modelling in clay, he had avoided as far as possible all intercourse with his townspeople. The old lady, who took much innocent pleasure in imagining herself the patroness of a future Phidias, died suddenly one day, leaving the will by which provision was made for young Stanton's future unhappily without signature; a fact which ever after furnished him with definite grounds upon which to found his accusations ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... by, before you are finished, and Alexander stands you up before the back of a chair. Then he takes you in his hands—his very powerful, sensitive and discerning hands and begins—quite literally begins reshaping you like Phidias. You begin to feel him doing you off as if you were going to be some new beautiful living statue yourself before ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... orators, and 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 ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... amongst thick clouds of impossibility that had gathered through three-and-twenty centuries—for seeing a Grecian tragedy presented on a British stage, and with the nearest approach possible to the beauty of those Athenian pomps which Sophocles, which Phidias, which Pericles created, beautified, promoted. I protest, when seeing the Edinburgh theatre's programme, that a note dated from the Vatican would not have startled me more, though sealed with the seal of the fisherman, and requesting the favor of my company to take coffee with the Pope. Nay, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... or taverns, tap-rooms, or in the farm-house kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage the entire drama of the Christian Faith. We allow ourselves to think of Shakespeare 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. No single mind in single ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 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 conquered to ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... and the selection which he made from all the beauties of Crotona, in order to combine their several points of perfection in his portrait of Helen; he refers more than once, and always in language which implies an appreciation of the artist, to the works of Phidias, especially that which is said to have cost him his life—the shield of Minerva; and he discusses, though it is but by way of illustration, the comparative points of merit in the statues of Calamis, and Myron, and Polycletus, and in the paintings of the earlier ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic. Fiction is in 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, regarded as a definition, is both ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... between the Centaurs and Lapithae, are now in the British 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 voted ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... consumed in a moment; the soul of genius evaporated in smoke; and the remnant of base metal was coined into money for the payment of the troops. Bronze is not the most durable of monuments: from the marble forms of Phidias and Praxiteles, the Latins might turn aside with stupid contempt; [99] but unless they were crushed by some accidental injury, those useless stones stood secure on their pedestals. [100] The most enlightened of the strangers, above the gross and sensual ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... new marble 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 ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... eleven 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 ever ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis
... his precious sceptre wield, His beard was gray, his looks severe and grave, And from his eyes, not yet made dim with eild, Sparkled his former worth and vigor brave, His gestures all the majesty upheild And state, as his old age and empire crave, So Phidias carved, Apelles so, pardie, Erst painted Jove, Jove thundering down ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... 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! So ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... us still to look back for revelations in the realm of creative personality. Some things have been done in history, like the sculptures of Phidias, that never have been done so well since and that perhaps never will be done so well again. As for the Bible, we may well look back to that. There is no book to compare with it in the realm of religion. Most of the books we read are like the rainwater that fell last night, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... 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 ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... may be called her university existence. Pericles, who succeeded Cimon, both in the government and in the patronage of art, is said by Plutarch to have entertained the idea of making Athens the capital of federated Greece; in this he failed; but his encouragement of such men as Phidias and Anaxagoras led the way to her acquiring a far more lasting sovereignty over a far wider empire. Little understanding the sources of her own greatness, Athens would go to war; peace is the interest of a seat of commerce ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... he been interrupted by his friend, whose indignation being kindled by the irreverence with which he mentioned the Greeks, he called him blasphemer, Goth, Boeotian, and, in his turn, asked with great vehemence, which of those puny moderns could match with Panaenus of Athens, and his brother Phidias; Polycletus of Sicyon; Polygnotus, the Thracian; Parrhasius of Ephesus, surnamed Abrodiaitos, or the Beau; and Apelles, the prince of painters? He challenged him to show any portrait of these days that could vie with the Helen of Zeuxis, the ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett |
