The text discusses the artistry in ancient statues, highlighting the challenge of combining multiple models to achieve perfection. It emphasizes understanding nature to create harmonious figures. Additionally, the text details the structure of specific sculptures, such as the Faun of the Villa Borghese, categorized into sections for detailed study.
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full of truths analogous to nature. It is also one of the beauties admired in ancient statues, that even though they had to use multiple models (because it is hardly presumed that they found men who combined all the perfections seen in such beautiful figures), yet all the parts appear perfectly analogous to the same nature, and they carry the same character throughout. This perfection is rarer than imagined, and there are few figures by sculptors afterward that can withstand a rigorous examination on this point. It requires a great understanding of nature, so that once an assumption is made, and one part is given, all the others are exactly of the same kind.
Moreover, it is worth noting that this difficulty becomes very great, especially when one wants to make a figure beautiful in all its parts; because if one is content to copy nature with its imperfections, a single model suffices, and generally one is more certain that the same character will reign; but when one proposes to assemble beauties found in different models, the union of these scattered beauties is very difficult to achieve in such a way that all the parts are perfectly relative to the whole.
The first three Figures of Plates 73 & 74, represent the small Faun of the Villa Borghese viewed from the front, back, and side. The entire statue is assumed to be divided into twenty-five parts or sections, usually subdivided into six others. On the second Figure of the plate 74, there are studies of hands of different figures previously mentioned, with their particular measurements.
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