de' Medici did not know what he was about?"

Truly, it appeared to me so; but Powers went on remorselessly, and
showed, in the first place, that the eye was not like any eye that Nature
ever made; and, indeed, being examined closely, and abstracted from the
rest of the face, it has a very queer look,--less like a human eye than a
half-worn buttonhole! Then he attacked the ear, which, he affirmed and
demonstrated, was placed a good deal too low on the head, thereby giving
an artificial and monstrous height to the portion of the head above it.
The forehead met with no better treatment in his hands, and as to the
mouth, it was altogether wrong, as well in its general make as in such
niceties as the junction of the skin of the lips to the common skin
around them. In a word, the poor face was battered all to pieces and
utterly demolished; nor was it possible to doubt or question that it fell
by its own demerits. All that could be urged in its defence--and even
that I did not urge--being that this very face had affected me, only the
day before, with a sense of higher beauty and intelligence than I had
ever then received from sculpture, and that its expression seemed to
accord with that of the whole figure, as if it were the sweetest note of
the same music. There must be something in this; the sculptor
disregarded technicalities, and the imitation of actual nature, the
better to produce the effect which he really does produce, in somewhat
the same way as a painter works his magical illusions by touches that
have no relation to the truth if looked at from the wrong point of view.
But Powers considers it certain that the antique sculptor had bestowed
all his care on the study of the human figure, and really did not know
how to make a face. I myself used to think that the face was a much less
important thing with the Greeks, among whom the entire beauty of the form
was familiarly seen, than with ourselves, who allow no other nudity.