_Coroll._--Satan summoning the Princes of Hell stretched over the fiery
flood; or the giant snake of the Norway seas hovering over a storm-vexed
vessel, by Gerard Douw, or Vanderverf--are incongruous ideas; would be
incongruous though Michael Angelo had planned their design and Rembrandt
massed their light and shade.
128. It has been said, but let us repeat it: the proportion of will and
power is not always reciprocal. A copious measure of will is sometimes
assigned to ordinary and contracted minds; whilst the greatest faculties
as frequently evaporate in indolence and languor.
129. Mighty execution of impotent conception, and vigour of conception
with trembling execution, are coalitions equally deplorable.
130. He is a prince of artists and of men who knows the moment when his
work is done. On this Apelles founded his superiority over his
contemporaries; the knowledge when to stop, left Sylla nothing to fear,
though disarmed; the want of knowing this, exposed Cæsar to the dagger
of Brutus.
131. Next to him who can finish, is he who has hid from you that he
cannot.
132. If finishing be to terminate all the parts of a performance in an
equal degree, no artist ever finished his work. A great part of
conception or execution is always sacrificed to some individual
excellence which either he possesses or thinks he possesses. The
colourist makes lines only the vehicle of colour; the designer
subordinates hue to his line; the man of breadth or chiaroscuro
overwhelms sometimes both, and the subject itself to produce effect.
133. The fewer the traces that appear of the means by which any work has
been produced, the more it resembles the operations of Nature, and the
nearer it is to sublimity.
134. Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to
mediocrity.
_Coroll._--Take the design of Rome, Venetian motion and shade,
Lombardy's tone of colour, add the terrible manner of Angelo, Titian's
truth of nature, and the supreme purity of Corregio's style; mix them up
with the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, with the learned invention of
Primaticcio, and a few grains of Parmegiano's grace: and what do you
think will be the result of this chaotic prescription, such elemental
strife? Excellence, perhaps, equal to one or all of the names that
compose these ingredients? You are deceived, if you fancy that a
multitude of dissimilar threads can compose a uniform texture--that
dissemination of spots will make masses, or a little of many things
produce a whole. If Nature stamped you with a character, you will either
annihilate it by indiscriminate imitation of heterogeneous excellence,
or debase it to mediocrity and add one to the ciphers of art. Yet such
is the prescription of Agostino Carracci,[27] and such in general must
be the dictates of academics.
135. If you mean to reign dictator over the arts of your own times,
assail not your rivals with the blustering tone of condemnation and
rigid censure;--sap with conditional or lamenting praise--confine them
to unfashionable excellence--exclude them from the avenues of fame.
136. If you wish to give consequence to your inferiors, answer their
attacks.
_Coroll._--Michael Angelo, advised to resent the insolence of some
obscure upstart who was pushing forward to notice by declaring himself
his rival, answered: "Chi combatte con dappochi, non vince a nulla:" who
contests with the base, loses with all!
137. Genius knows no partner. All partnership is deleterious to poetry
and art: one must rule.[28]
138. The wish of perpetuating a name by enlisting under the banners of
another, is the ambition of inferior minds: biography, with all its
branches of "Ana," translation and engraving, however useful to man or
dear to art, is the unequivocal homage of inferiority offered by taste
and talent to the majesty of genius.
139. Dive in the crowd, meet beauty: follow vigour, compare character,
snatch the feature that moves unobserved and the sudden burst of
passion--and you are at the school of nature with Lysippus.[29]
140. The lessons of disappointment, humiliation and blunder, impress
more than those of a thousand masters.
141. There are artists, who have wasted much of life in abstruse
theories on proportion, who have measured the Antique in all its forms
and characters, compared it with Nature, and mixed up amalgamas of both,
yet never made a figure stand or move.
_Coroll._--"The Apollo is altogether composed of lines sweetly convex,
of very small obtuse angles, and of flats, but the soft convexities
predominate the character of the figure, being a compound of strength,
dignity and delicacy. The artist has expressed the first by convex
outlines, the second by their uniformity, and the third by undulation of
forms. The convex line predominates in the Laocoon, and the forms of the
muscles are angular at their insertions and ends to express agitation;
for by these means the nerves and tendons become more visible, straight
lines meeting with concave and convex ones, form those angles which
produce violence of action. The sculptor of the Farnesian Hercules
invented a style totally different; to obtain fleshiness, he composed
the figure of round and convex muscles, but made their insertions flat
to signify that they are nervous and unincumbered with fat, the
characteristic of strength."
"In the Gladiator there is a mixture of the Herculean and the Laocoontic
forms, the muscles in action are angulated, whilst those at rest are
short and round, a variety conformable to nature," &c.
Opere di A.R. MENGS, t. i. p. 203.
142. Neither he who forms lines without the power of embodying them, nor
he who floats on masses, can be said to draw: the one is the slave of a
brush, the other of a point.
143. Pulp without solidity absorbs, and relentless tension tears
character.
144. In following too closely a model, there is danger in mistaking the
individual for Nature herself; in relying only on the schools, the
deviation into manner seems inevitable: what then remains, but to
transpose _yourself_ into your subject?
145. Style is the selection of forms and groups and tones to suit a
subject.
_Coroll._--The Italian _Style Grandioso_, the French _Il y a du style_,
the English _great style and breadth_, when applied to a performance,
only mean, that the artist followed those who have enlarged the
principles of imitation and execution.