Note 16 — HOGARTH.
Reading edition
Of this figure he thus writes in his chapter on Compositions with the Serpentine Line:—
"We have had recourse to the works of the ancients, not because the moderns have not produced some as excellent, but because the works of the former are more generally known; nor would we have it thought that either of them has ever yet come up to the utmost beauty of nature. Who but a bigot to the antiques will say, that he has not seen faces and necks, hands and arms, in living women, that even the Grecian Venus doth but coarsely imitate?"