"In the museums of Rome, darkness fills the rooms that house the masterpieces: The Sleeping Fury, The Hermaphrodite, The Anadyomene Venus, The Dying Gladiator, marble blocks obeying the great general laws that rule the equilibrium, the weight, the density, the dilation, and the contraction of stones; they will never know that artisans, dead for thousands of years, fashioned their surface to the image of creatures or another realm."
Maguerite Yourcenar,
A Coin in Nine Hands
Calpurnia here, my wife stays me at home.
She dreamt tonight she saw my statue,
Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts,
Did run pure blood, and many lusty Romans
Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
