If Ulysses had been killed at Troy, yet AEneas
must have gone to sea, or he could never have arrived in Italy; but
the designs of the two poets were as different as the courses of
their heroes--one went home, and the other sought a home.
To return to my first similitude. Suppose Apelles and Raffaelle had
each of them painted a burning Troy, might not the modern painter
have succeeded as well as the ancient, though neither of them had
seen the town on fire? For the drafts of both were taken from the
ideas which they had of nature. Cities have been burnt before
either of them were in being. But to close the simile as I began
it: they would not have designed it after the same manner; Apelles
would have distinguished Pyrrhus from the rest of all the Grecians,
and showed him forcing his entrance into Priam's palace; there he
had set him in the fairest light, and given him the chief place of
all his figures, because he was a Grecian and he would do honour to
his country. Raffaelle, who was an Italian, and descended from the
Trojans, would have made AEneas the hero of his piece, and perhaps
not with his father on his back, his son in one hand, his bundle of
gods in the other, and his wife following (for an act of piety is
not half so graceful in a picture as an act of courage); he would
rather have drawn him killing Androgeus or some other hand to hand,
and the blaze of the fires should have darted full upon his face, to
make him conspicuous amongst his Trojans.
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