"The head is of the highest beauty. It has a close helmet from which
the hair, delicately parted on the forehead, half escapes. The attitude
gives entire effect to the perfect form of the neck, and to that full
and beautiful moulding of the lower part of the face and mouth, which
is in living beings the seat of the expression of a simplicity and
integrity of nature. Her face, upraised to heaven, is animated with a
profound, sweet, and impassioned melancholy, with an earnest, and
fervid and disinterested pleading against some vast and inevitable
wrong. It is the joy and poetry of sorrow making {93} grief beautiful,
and giving it that nameless feeling, which, from the imperfection of
language, we call pain, but which is not all pain, though a feeling
which makes not only its possessor, but the spectator of it, prefer it
to what is called pleasure, in which all is not pleasure. It is
difficult to think that this head, though of the highest ideal beauty
is the head of Minerva, although the attributes and attitude of the
lower part of the statue certainly suggest that idea.
"The Greeks rarely in their representations of the characters of their
Gods--unless we call the poetic enthusiasm of Apollo a mortal
passion--expressed the disturbance of human feeling; and here is deep
and impassioned grief animating a divine countenance. It is indeed
divine. The drapery of the statue, the gentle beauty of the feet, and
the grace of the attitude, are what may be seen in many other statues
belonging to that astonishing era which produced it: such a countenance
is seen in few."