The idealized statues modelled and carved in ancient Greece, much copied in the Roman empire and rediscovered in fifteenth-century Italy, became part of the word in a different sense, derived from the canonical books of the Bible and now adopted for an accepted body of supposedly major works of art and literature. They also established a criterature of human beauty that has insidiously conditioned the attitudes of Europeans to themselves and to others,encouraging belief in 'the eternal law that first in beauty should be first in might, as John Keats put it in Hyperion