Nothing New Under the Sun*

ArtemisEphesus

The caption in a Wikipedia article on Xoanon:

Synthesizing the Lady of Ephesus as Diana Aventina: a Roman marble copy of a Greek replica of a lost Geometric period xoanon (18th-century engraving).

An engraving of a copy of a replica of a sculpture. Apparently museums come by the tradition of reusing other people’s good ideas honestly.

[Thanks to intrepid world-traveler Patricia Walker, who knew the caption would give me a giggle.]

*The title is funny if you know that xoana were associated with Daedalus, if you know that Daedalus was the father of Icarus, and if you know that Icarus flew too close to the sun. So, the title really isn’t funny.

2 thoughts on “Nothing New Under the Sun*

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s