Apollo at Greenville

There was an old sculptor named Phidias Whose statues were perfectly hideous. He made Aphrodite Without any nightie Which shocked the ultrafastidious.

Last week, a replica of the famed Apollo Belvidere* was placed in the Greenville, S. C., Museum of Art. The citizens of Greenville gazed at it in dismay. Then they went home and wrote letters, begging officials to swaddle the statue because its nakedness offended them.

Such behavior may now seem frivolous and insane to all civilized persons; it would have seemed totally incredible to any Greek, at the time when the unknown sculptor made his statue. To the wise Greeks, who lacked the prurient estheticism of modern magazine cover art, the male face or figure was, in its more austere and tempered contours, perhaps a trifle more beautiful than its female counterpart. Either one, when dexterously transmuted into marble, could be regarded with an impersonal regard for its objective beauty. They, the sculptor himself, would not have regarded the performance of Greenville's citizens as obscene or grotesque; they, like the citizens, would have failed to understand.

*The original has been attributed, on no very good evidence, to Leochares.