Raphael was a great designer, but there are a purity and a passion in
Ingres' line for the like of which we have to go back to the Greeks.
Apelles could not have realised more exquisite simplifications, could
not have dreamed into any of his lost works a purer soul of beauty
than Ingres did into the head, arms, and torso of "La Source". The
line that floats about the muscles of an arm is illusive, evanescent,
as an evening-tinted sky; and none except the Greeks and Ingres have
attained such mystery of line: not Raphael, not even Michael Angelo in
the romantic anatomies of his stupendous creations. Ingres was a
Frenchman animated by the soul of an ancient Greek, an ancient Greek
who lost himself in Japan. There is as much mystery in Ingres' line as
in Rembrandt's light and shade. The arms and wrists and hands of the
lady seated among the blue cushions in the Louvre are as illusive as
any one of Mr. Whistler's "Nocturnes". The beautiful "Andromeda", head
and throat leaned back almost out of nature, wild eyes and mass of
heavy hair, long white arms uplifted, chained to the basalt,--how rare
the simplifications, those arms, that body, the straight flanks and
slender leg advancing,--are made of lines simple and beautiful as
those which in the Venus of Milo realise the architectural beauty of
woman. We shrink from such comparison, for perforce we see that the
grandeur of the Venus is not in the Andromeda: but in both is the same
quality of beauty. In the drawing for the odalisque, in her long back,
wonderful as a stem of woodbine, there is the very same love of form
which a Greek expressed with the benign ease of a god speaking his
creation through the harmonious universe.
But the pure, unconscious love of form, inherited from the Greeks,
sometimes turned to passion in Ingres: not in "La Source", she is
wholly Greek; but in the beautiful sinuous back of the odalisque we
perceive some of the exasperation of nerves which betrays our century.
If Phidias' sketches had come down to us, the margin filled with his
hesitations, we should know more of his intimate personality. You
notice, my dear reader, how intolerant I am of criticism of my idol,
how I repudiate any slight suggestion of imperfection, how I turn upon
myself and defend my god. Before going to bed, I often stand, candle
in hand, before the Roman lady and enumerate the adorable perfections
of the drawing. I am aware of my weakness, I have pleaded guilty to an
idolatrous worship, but, if I have expressed myself as I intended, my
great love will seem neither vain nor unreasonable. For surely for
quality of beautiful line this man stands nearer to the Greeks than
any other.