Albrecht von Brandenburg as St. Erasmus

Abstract

And there is consolation, even for archaeologists. No truth of theirs can be quite so deadening as not to reveal or provoke some freak of the imagination. It is not so very long ago that they shocked the world and themselves by discovering that Greek sculpture was coloured ; whereupon one of them is reported to have said : " I am afraid it is true, but I hate to think of it." The words, translated into the proper jargon, might have come from a great classical actor of the grandiloquent style who had been told that Julius Caesar was clean-shaven and bald. These conceits of our imagination are signs of both our frailty and our strength. Viewed sub specie aternitatis, they may seem to make men behave like fools, yet it is they who, sub specie temporis, keep gods and heroes alive.'