188. The portrait-painter copies the colour of his object, but chooses
the medium through which that object is seen.
189. The mixtures that anticipate the beauties of time are big with the
seeds of premature decay.
190. The colours of health are neither cadaverous nor flushed like
meteors.
191. There are works whose effect is entirely founded on the contrast of
tints, of what is termed warm and cold colour, and on reflected hues:
strip them of this charm, reduce them to the principles of light and
shade and masses, and as far as the want of those can degrade a
picture, they will be fit to take their places on sign-posts.
192. Him who has freshness without frigidity, who glows without being
adust, whose tints luxuriate though not fermented by putrefaction; who
is juicy yet not clammy, though broad not empty, sharp without dryness,
clear not pellucid, airy not volatile, without being clumsy plump--him
you may venture to call a colourist.
193. Breadth is not vacuity--Breadth might easily be obtained if
emptiness could give it.
194. The forms of virtue are erect, the forms of pleasure undulate:
Minerva's drapery descends in long uninterrupted lines; a thousand
amorous curves embrace the limbs of Flora.
195. Subordination is the character of drapery. The heraldry of dress,
the rows of aggregated mitres and pontifical trappings, are noticed only
for the sake of their wearers in the compositions of the Vatican.
_Coroll._--The superiority of style in drapery over that of the limbs
which it covers in the earliest essays of art after its restoration, is
not accounted for by the assertion that it is transcribed from the
antique: if it is, by what unaccountable perverseness did the forms of
the nudities uniformly escape observation? In painting, this dissonance
continues more or less offensively from the epoch of Cimabue to that of
Masaccio, and, him excepted, down to Pinturicchio; and ceases not to
shock us in sculpture from the Pisani, to the appearance of Lorenzo
Ghiberti. Nor did that style of drapery mark only the productions of
Italian art; on this side of the Alps it invested that of Germany, from
the Angels and Madonnas of Martin Schongaver and Albert Durer, to those
of Aldegraver and Sebald Behm: in nearly all their performances, Trans
and Cisalpine, the wearer is the appendix of his garment, chucked into
vestments not his own, a dwarfish thief hid in a giant's robe.
196. Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character; in Michael Angelo
it envelopes grandeur; it is in Rubens the ponderous robe of pomp.
197. If Nature has not taught you to sketch, you apply in vain to art to
finish your work.[38]