TRTR chapter 5 partial census

[Michael Bailey]

a-and poor Otto trying to work in his quote about Praxiteles and
Cicero.  The kid is a laugh a minute, even if you sympathize with him,
and I do.

anyway, the admirable reader's guide triangulates the quotation,
apparently there was a story retailed by - ah, I'll just lift it:

http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/I3anno3.shtml
In Paradoxa, a collection of philosophical thoughts called Socratic in
style by Cicero [106-43 B.C.], [...] Cicero has the courage to write
the following paragraph in defense of Carneades, who maintained that a
head of a Faun had been found in the raw marble of a quarry at Chios:

"One calls the thing imaginary, a freak of chance, just as if marble
could not contain the forms of all kinds of heads, even those of
Praxiteles. It is a fact that these heads are made by taking away the
superfluous marble, and in modelling them even a Praxiteles does not
add anything of his own, because when much marble has been taken away
one reaches the real form, and we see the accomplished work which was
there before. This is what may have happened in the quarry of Chios."

Nobili ridicules such an attitude, but Wyatt approves and adds
Cicero's questionable aesthetics to his own concept of "recognition."
------------------------------------

so this is Otto hearkening back at the party to the notion and
believing it as useful as Uccello's solids as a topic.  It's as hard -
impossible - for him to get a break in the conversation to squeeze
that in, as it was earlier to get the admiration he'd imagined for his
brown skin.

anyway, how about that notion: within the marble is the actual
sculpture and the sculptor just removes everything superfluous.

Now, empirical evidence suggests that marble is (barring consideration
of texture, grain, internal patterns (marbling?) and so forth)
actually pretty fungible - if it's anything like wood, most people
know from experience that you can whittle the same piece down through
a series of intermediate forms until you have a pile of shavings, and
it's easy to imagine that then with some glue you could form that into
a variety of different things.

So suggesting that "art" is finding something unique in the raw
material, well, this is a pretty romantic notion, in common parlance,
or maybe fanciful is a better term.

And yet, it does have a certain appeal.

Personally, I tend to credit a heavy involvement on the part of the
"eye of the beholder", but, by George and by Jeffrey G, where did the
gleam in that eye come from, eh, tell me that?  Maybe it sparked over
on the ether of innate fitness from the form within the raw material?