calm forms

Still others owe their beauty to human violence: the push toppling them from their pedestals or the iconoclast’s hammer has made them what they are. The classical work of art is thus infused with pathos: the mutilated gods have the air of martyrs. Sometimes, erosion of the elements and the brutality of man unite to create an unwonted appearance which belongs to no school or time: headless and armless, separated from her recently discovered hand, worn away by all the squalls of the Sporades, the Victory of Samothrace has become not so much a woman as pure sea-wind and sky.

[…]

A world of violence turns about these calm forms.

—Margeurite Yourcenar, title essay of That Might Sculptor, Time (FSG, 1992), translation by Walter Kaiser.