Lucian Pro imaginibus 23

[23] Perhaps, then, you may say—indeed, you have already said—that you concede my right to praise you for your beauty, but that I should have made my praise unexceptionable and should not have compared a mortal woman with goddesses. As a matter of fact (now she is going to make me speak the truth!) it was not with goddesses I compared you, my dear woman, but with masterpieces of good craftsmen, made of stone or bronze or ivory; and what man has made, it is not impious, I take it, to compare with man. But perhaps you have assumed that what Phidias fashioned is Athena, and that what Praxiteles made in Cnidus not many years ago is Heavenly Aphrodite? Come now, would it not be unworthy to hold such beliefs about the gods, whose real images I for my part assume to be unattainable by human mimicry?

[23] Now you will perhaps say—nay, you have said already— Praise my beauty, if you will; but the praise should not have been of that invidious kind which compares a woman to Goddesses. Well, I will keep truth at arm’s length no longer; I did not, dear lady, compare you to Goddesses, but to the handiwork in marble and bronze and ivory of certain good artists. There is no impiety, surely, in illustrating mortal beauty by the work of mortal hands—unless you take the thing that Phidias fashioned to be indeed Athene, or Praxiteles’s not much later work at Cnidus to be the heavenly Aphrodite. But would that be quite a worthy conception of divine beings? I take the real presentment of them to be beyond the reach of human imitation.