Page:The Monthly anthology, and Boston review, volume 9.djvu/215

1810.] admirably characteristick of Minerva Sospila. Next to this is a funeral urn of high antiquity and rare beauty, ornamented with equestrian and pedestrian combatants. An exquisite statue of a canephora (4) demands particular attention. Here are also some beautiful Candelabra, and two fine vases (7 and 9,) ornamented all round with bacchanalian figures, and handles springing from the necks of swans. The figures of the bacchantes and dancing nymphs are truly beauty personified. The statue of Venus (8,) naked to the waist, and thence downwards covered with drapery, was found in the maritime baths of Claudius at Ostia. This figure is colossal, and rather clumsy, and very inferiour to the Mediccan Venus.

The third room is devoted to Gredi and Roman sculpture. The walls are embellished with basso-relievos of larger dimensions than those in the first room. In the centre of a very fine piece (3,) is a pilaster pedestal supporting a vase, the handles of which are composed of griffins' heads. Several mythological symbols on this monument are particularly valuable, as illustrations of the ancient poets and historians. The Museum has the good fortune to possess several representations of that much disputed figure, the Indian Bacchus. One of the six in this room is a basso-relievo, of large size (4,) representing the god received as a guest by Icarus. The Indian Bacchus is neither the jolly boy of Anacreon, nor the beautiful youth of the Greek sculptors, but a colossal old man, with a venerable beard, and a profusion of hair, both of which are formally arranged in curls. He is clothed from head to feet in immense folds of drapery, which leave only bis right hand at liberty. Nest to this is an exquisitely designed basso-relievo, in marble (5,) which appears to have been a funeral monument to a father and his two sons, who are in Roman dresses. The attendant figures are the guardian deities of the family. The inscription in Greek is unfortunately almost obliterated. No. 9, a very fine basso-relievo, is divided into three compartments. In the upper, the infant Jupiter is represented riding on the Amalthean goat; in the middle, a Triton is seizing a bull by the horns; and in the lower, two men are carrying a hog toward an elevated spot to be sacrificed. A fine bacchanalian group of three figures (12,) deserves our attention: the first figure is a bacchante playing on a tambourin; the second a Faun playing on the double pipe ; and the third an intoxicated Faun holding a Thyrsus. No. 13 is a