And what would you say if all the English bishops, backed by the
English people, came down from Exeter Hall to the Royal Academy one
day and took off Sir Frederick Leighton in a prison van to Newgate
on the charge of having allowed you to make use of the living model
in your designs for sacred pictures?
Would you not cry out against the barbarism and the Puritanism of
such an idea? Would you not explain to them that the worst way to
honour God is to dishonour man who is made in His image, and is the
work of His hands; and, that if one wants to paint Christ one must
take the most Christlike person one can find, and if one wants to
paint the Madonna, the purest girl one knows?
Would you not rush off and burn down Newgate, if necessary, and say
that such a thing was without parallel in history?
Without parallel? Well, that is exactly what the Athenians did.
In the room of the Parthenon marbles, in the British Museum, you
will see a marble shield on the wall. On it there are two figures;
one of a man whose face is half hidden, the other of a man with the
godlike lineaments of Pericles. For having done this, for having
introduced into a bas relief, taken from Greek sacred history, the
image of the great statesman who was ruling Athens at the time,
Phidias was flung into prison and there, in the common gaol of
Athens, died, the supreme artist of the old world.
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