WOMAN IN ART
In one brief hour, with poison drunk—
That moral poison that ends all.
Was she then better than her slave?
And had the Ptolemic Queen a soul to save?
Why is the spirit of the period and the woman so truthfully portrayed in the painting? It is one man's ideal of Cleopatra. The artist was thoroughly equipped for his chosen task. Gerome was one of four noted modern painters of women. His four most noted paintings represent soulless women who lived in the days of polytheism or heathenism; the other three are "Phryne Before the Areopagus"; she being accused of impiety was brought to trial before the tribunal. In the picture she is represented at the moment that her defender puts into his action his idea of saving her, of her idea of saving herself, by snatching aside her drapery, revealing her wonderful figure. The universal sway of beauty asserted itself and she was acquitted by the judges. Pliny tells us she was a poor girl gathering and vending capers, but in Athens as a courtesan she debased her beauty. At the festival of Pascidon she laid aside her garments, let down her abundant hair, and stepped into the sea in sight of all the people. This act gave to the great artist Appeles the idea of his most wonderful picture, "Aphrodite Rising From the Sea."
Gerome's third and lower type of woman is "A Singer and Dancer in Cairo." The fourth, "A Slave Market," tells its own tale of moral degradation, and of a people who declared that woman had no soul. It has been said that this painter saw no divinity in woman, that in early life he headed a delegation petitioning for the abolition of marriage in France.
"Christian Martyr" was another canvas of this type of subject on which the artist worked for twenty years, repainting it three times,—a monument on canvas of an unspeakable epoch of human history. How could a man with a heart and soul dwell on such subjects; yet they record history. Is not the man somewhat expressed in his work?
The art expression of every age, whatever its classification, bears the stamp of its environment, and is developed only so far as the people are developed who produce it.
Then we have the ideal, the conception of a thing in its most perfect state or form, a love for the pure and beautiful entering into such expression.
A subject is modeled or pictured in the mind of an artist before he touches clay or canvas worthily or unworthily.
While the wave of Egyptian greatness was slanting downward, the next wave of mentality and art was rising to high tide on the shores of Greece. Greek ex-
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