The Marble Faun; Or, the Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 1
1860
The Marble Faun; Or, the Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 1
1860
Four American artists wander the ancient galleries of Rome, their pursuit of beauty interrupted by a startling discovery: Donatello, their young Italian companion, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Marble Faun of Praxiteles. There is something primitive and innocent in his face, a likeness that both charms and unsettles. But as Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon trace sculptures through sunlit courtyards and shadowed catacombs, the pastoral idyll fractures. Miriam carries a secret, a figure from her past who has followed her across the ocean. When tragedy erupts in the Roman darkness, the four friends discover that innocence, once lost, cannot be recovered. Hawthorne weaves a haunting parable about art and guilt, the corruption that lurks beneath marble beauty, and the terrible weight of choice. The Old World of Rome, with its pagan statues and crumbling churches, becomes a mirror for the Fall itself. For Victorian readers, it was a guidebook to Rome. For us, it remains a dark fairy tale about what we sacrifice when we taste forbidden fruit.
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“A forced smile is uglier than a frown.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such things. Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist, therefore, as you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I believe, with tobacco juice), and all other nudities of to-day, I really do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be glad to see as many heaps of quicklime in their stead.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“It is the surest test of genuine love, that it brings back our early simplicity to the worldliest of us.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Oh Hilda, what a treasure of sweet faith and pure imagination you hide under that little straw hat!””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“They stopped on the bridge to look into the swift eddying flow of the yellow Tiber, a mud puddle in strenuous motion;””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“It depresses me to look at old frescos," responded the Count; "it is a pain, yet not enough of a pain to answer as a penance.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“And, in truth, while our friend smiled at these wild fables, he sighed in the same breath to think how the once genial earth produces, in every successive generation, fewer flowers than used to gladden the preceding ones. Not that the modes and seeming possibilities of human enjoyment are rarer in our refined and softened era,”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are conscious of a social warmth from each other's presence and contiguity. They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun; Or, the Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 1. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-marble-faun-or-the-romance-of-monte-beni-volume-1-fbae3199-b1d0-470f-8adf-7be82a1a048a.Hawthorne, N. (1860). The Marble Faun; Or, the Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 1. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-marble-faun-or-the-romance-of-monte-beni-volume-1-fbae3199-b1d0-470f-8adf-7be82a1a048aHawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun; Or, the Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 1. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-marble-faun-or-the-romance-of-monte-beni-volume-1-fbae3199-b1d0-470f-8adf-7be82a1a048a.
