Essays in Portraiture Defended (23)

Perhaps, then, you may say—indeed, you have already said—that you concede my right to praise you for your beauty, but that I should have made my praise unexceptionable and should not have compared a mortal woman with goddesses. As a matter of fact (now she is going to make me speak the truth!) it was not with goddesses I compared you, my dear woman, but with masterpieces of good craftsmen, made of stone or bronze or ivory; and what man has made, it is not impious, I take it,

to compare with man. But perhaps you have assumed that what Phidias fashioned is Athena, and that what Praxiteles made in Cnidus not many years ago is Heavenly Aphrodite? Come now, would it not be unworthy to hold such beliefs about the gods, whose real images I for my part assume to be unattainable by human mimicry?