Venus

The ancients have obtained by a minimum of gesture, by their modelling, both the individual character and the grace borrowed from grandeur that relates the human form to the forms of the universal life. The modelling of the human being has with them all the beauty of the curved lines of flowers. And the profiles are secure, ample like those of great mountains; it is architecture. Above all they are simple; they are calm like the serpents of Apollo.

Perhaps it is the terms of anatomy that have had the deplorable effect of imposing on the mind the prejudice toward the division of the shapes 

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of the body. The great geometric and magnetic line of life hence remains as if broken in the regard of the passer-by. This theoretical analysis has altered among the uninitiated the sense of the truth.

The work of art protests against this false and factitious idea of division. Those concordant shapes that pass one into the other as undulate the knots of the reptile, and that suddenly penetrate, they are the body in its magnificent unity.

Left to themselves the ignorant see only the apparent details of things; the source of expression, the synthesis alone eloquent, escapes them. It is lamentable that anatomic description gives in some measure support to the 

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plastic ignorance of the multitude, in calling attention, through its terms, to the different parts of which the architecture of the body is composed. Those pedantic words, biceps, triceps, brachial or crural, and so many others, those current words, arms, legs, plastically have no significance. In the synthesis of the work of art, the arms, the legs, count only when they meet in accordance with the planes that associate them in a same effect, and it is thus in nature, who cares not for our analytical descriptions. The great artists proceed as nature composes and not as anatomy decrees. They never sculpture any muscle, any nerve, any bone for itself; it is the whole at which they aim, 

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and which they express; it is by large planes that their work vibrates in the light or enters into the shadow.