"Take away from Apollo his lyre, from Bacchus his thyrsus and
vine-leaves, and from Meleager the boar's head, and there will remain
little or no difference in their characters." John di Bologna, he tells
us, after he had finished a group, called his friends together to tell
him what name to give it: they called it the "Rape of the Sabines." A
similar anecdote is told of Sir Joshua himself, that he had painted the
head of the old man who attended him in his studio. Some one observed
that it would make a Ugolino. The sons were added, and it became the
well-known historical picture from Dante. He comments upon the
ineffectual attempts of modern sculptors to detach drapery from the
figure, to give it the appearance of flying in the air; to make
different plans on the same bas-relievos; to represent the effects of
perspective; to clothe in a modern dress. For the first attempt he
reprehends Bernini, who, from want of a right conception of the province
of sculpture, never fulfilled the promise given in his early work of
Apollo and Daphne. He was ever attempting to make drapery flutter in the
air, which the very massiveness of the material, stone, should seem to
forbid. Sir Joshua does not notice the very high authority for such an
attempt--though it must be confessed the material was not stone, still
it was sculpture, and multitudinous are the graces of ornament, and most
minutely described--the shield of Hercules, by Hesiod; even the noise of
the furies' wings is affected. The drapery of the Apollo he considers to
have been intended more for support than ornament; but the mantle from
the arm he thinks "answers a much higher purpose, by preventing that
dryness of effect which would inevitably attend a naked arm, extended
almost at full length; to which we may add, the disagreeable effect
which would proceed from the body and arm making a right angle." He
conjectures that Carlo Maratti, in his love for drapery, must have
influenced the sculptors of the Apostles in the church of St John
Lateran. "The weight and solidity of stone was not to be overcome."