The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c9.76.2

v1.c9.76.2

Phidias, carving his celebrated figure of Minerva, thirty-nine feet high, had to put on her hand a winged figure of victory, and this could be done by making a full-grown and fully-dressed woman stand on the open palm of another, but the unnatural arrangement nevcr deterred him from accomplishing the task he had undertaken. In later times, Michael Angelo was called upon, by the nature of his subject, to introduce a monster's head with the horns of a ram, at the bottom of his unrivalled work of art, the *Last Judgment*. In the creation of Eve in Wells Cathedral, there is a composition in which a human figure is shown leaning on a bench, and from his back projects the upper half of a female figure, i. e., a monster with two heads, and two trunks supported on one pair of legs The object of the artist, it is true, was only to represent a particular instant in the production of a natural being, but the resulting figure is abnormal for all that.