Before Verrocchio, his precursors, first Aless...o...b..ldovinetti and then Pollaiuolo, had attempted to treat landscape as naturalistically as painting would permit. Their ideal was to note it down with absolute correctness from a given point of view; their subject almost invariably the Valdarno; their achievement, a bird"s-eye view of this Tuscan paradise. Nor can it be denied that this gives pleasure, but the pleasure is only such as is conveyed by tactile values. Instead of having the difficulty we should have in nature to distinguish clearly points near the horizon"s edge, we here see them perfectly and without an effort, and in consequence feel great confirmation of capacity for life. Now if landscape were, as most people vaguely believe, a pleasure coming through the eyes alone, then the Pollaiuolesque treatment could be equalled by none that has followed, and surpa.s.sed only by Rogier van der Weyden, or by the quaint German "Master of the Lyversberg Pa.s.sion,"
who makes us see objects miles away with as great a precision and with as much intensity of local colour as if we were standing off from them a few feet. Were landscape really this, then nothing more inartistic than gradation of tint, atmosphere, and _plein air_, all of which help to make distant objects less clear, and therefore tend in no way to heighten our sense of capacity. But as a matter of fact the pleasure we take in actual landscape is only to a limited extent an affair of the eye, and to a great extent one of unusually intense well-being. The painter"s problem, therefore, is not merely to render the tactile values of the visible objects, but to convey, more rapidly and unfailingly than nature would do, _the consciousness_ of an unusually intense degree of well-being. This task--the communication by means purely visual of feelings occasioned chiefly by sensations non-visual--is of such difficulty that, until recently, successes in the rendering of what is peculiar to landscape as an art, and to landscape alone, were accidental and sporadic. Only now, in our own days, may painting be said to be grappling with this problem seriously; and perhaps we are already at the dawn of an art which will have to what has. .h.i.therto been called landscape, the relation of our music to the music of the Greeks or of the Middle Ages.
[Page heading: VERROCCHIO"S LANDSCAPES]
Verrocchio was, among Florentines at least, the first to feel that a faithful reproduction of the contours is not landscape, that the painting of nature is an art distinct from the painting of the figure.
He scarcely knew where the difference lay, but felt that light and atmosphere play an entirely different part in each, and that in landscape these have at least as much importance as tactile values. A vision of _plein air_, vague I must grant, seems to have hovered before him, and, feeling his powerlessness to cope with it in full effects of light such as he attempted in his earlier pictures, he deliberately chose the twilight hour, when, in Tuscany, on fine days, the trees stand out almost black against a sky of light opalescent grey. To render this subduing, soothing effect of the coolness and the dew after the glare and dust of the day--the effect so matchlessly given in Gray"s "Elegy"--seemed to be his first desire as a painter, and in presence of his "Annunciation" (in the Uffizi), we feel that he succeeded as only one other Tuscan succeeded after him, that other being his own pupil Leonardo.
X.
[Page heading: GENRE ARTISTS]
It is a temptation to hasten on from Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio to Botticelli and Leonardo, to men of genius as artists reappearing again after two generations, men who accomplished with scarcely an effort what their precursors had been toiling after. But from these it would be even more difficult than at present to turn back to painters of scarcely any rank among the world"s great artists, and of scarcely any importance as links in a chain of evolution, but not to be pa.s.sed by, partly because of certain qualities they do possess, and partly because their names would be missed in an account, even so brief as this, of Florentine painting. The men I chiefly refer to, one most active toward the middle and the other toward the end of the fifteenth century, are Benozzo Gozzoli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Although they have been rarely coupled together, they have much in common. Both were, as artists, little more than mediocrities with almost no genuine feeling for what makes painting a great art. The real attractiveness of both lies entirely outside the sphere of pure art, in the realms of _genre_ ill.u.s.tration. And here the likeness between them ends; within their common ground they differed widely.
[Page heading: BENOZZO GOZZOLI]
Benozzo was gifted with a rare facility not only of execution but of invention, with a spontaneity, a freshness, a liveliness in telling a story that wake the child in us, and the lover of the fairy tale. Later in life, his more precious gifts deserted him, but who wants to resist the fascination of his early works, painted, as they seem, by a Fra Angelico who had forgotten heaven and become enamoured of the earth and the spring-time? In his Riccardi Palace frescoes, he has sunk already to portraying the Florentine apprentice"s dream of a holiday in the country on St. John"s Day; but what a _naf_ ideal of luxury and splendour it is! With these, the glamour in which he saw the world began to fade away from him, and in his Pisan frescoes we have, it is true, many a quaint bit of _genre_ (superior to Teniers only because of superior a.s.sociations), but never again the fairy tale. And as the better recedes, it is replaced by the worse, by the bane of all _genre_ painting, non-significant detail, and positive bad taste. Have London or New York or Berlin worse to show us than the jumble of buildings in his ideal of a great city, his picture of Babylon? It may be said he here continues mediaeval tradition, which is quite true, but this very fact indicates his real place, which, in spite of his adopting so many of the fifteenth-century improvements, is not with the artists of the Renaissance, but with the story-tellers and costumed fairy-tale painters of the transition, with Spinello Aretino and Gentile da Fabriano, for instance. And yet, once in a while, he renders a head with such character, or a movement with such ease that we wonder whether he had not in him, after all, the making of a real artist.
[Page heading: GHIRLANDAIO]
Ghirlandaio was born to far more science and cunning in painting than was current in Benozzo"s early years, and all that industry, all that love of his occupation, all that talent even, can do for a man, they did for him; but unfortunately he had not a spark of genius. He appreciated Masaccio"s tactile values, Pollaiuolo"s movement, Verrocchio"s effects of light, and succeeded in so sugaring down what he adopted from these great masters that the superior philistine of Florence could say: "There now is a man who knows as much as any of the great men, but can give me something that I can really enjoy!" Bright colour, pretty faces, good likenesses, and the obvious everywhere--attractive and delightful, it must be granted, but, except in certain single figures, never significant. Let us glance a moment at his famous frescoes in Santa Maria Novella. To begin with, they are so undecorative that, in spite of the tone and surface imparted to them by four centuries, they still suggest so many _tableaux vivants_ pushed into the wall side by side, and in tiers. Then the compositions are as overfilled as the sheets of an ill.u.s.trated newspaper--witness the "Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents," a scene of such magnificent artistic possibilities. Finally, irrelevant episodes and irrelevant groups of portraits do what they can to distract our attention from all higher significance. Look at the "Birth of John"; Ginevra dei Benci stands there, in the very foreground, staring out at you as stiff as if she had a photographer"s iron behind her head. An even larger group of Florentine housewives in all their finery disfigures the "Birth of the Virgin," which is further spoiled by a _bas relief_ to show off the painter"s acquaintance with the antique, and by the figure of the serving maid who pours out water, with the rush of a whirlwind in her skirts--this to show off skill in the rendering of movement. Yet elsewhere, as in his "Epiphany" in the Uffizi, Ghirlandaio has undeniable charm, and occasionally in portraits his talent, here at its highest, rises above mediocrity, in one instance, the fresco of Sa.s.setti in Santa Trinita, becoming almost genius.
XI.
[Page heading: LEONARDO]
All that Giotto and Masaccio had attained in the rendering of tactile values, all that Fra Angelico or Filippo had achieved in expression, all that Pollaiuolo had accomplished in movement, or Verrocchio in light and shade, Leonardo, without the faintest trace of that tentativeness, that painfulness of effort which characterised his immediate precursors, equalled or surpa.s.sed. Outside Velasquez, and perhaps, when at their best, Rembrandt and Degas, we shall seek in vain for tactile values so stimulating and so convincing as those of his "Mona Lisa"; outside Degas, we shall not find such supreme mastery over the art of movement as in the unfinished "Epiphany" in the Uffizi; and if Leonardo has been left far behind as a painter of light, no one has succeeded in conveying by means of light and shade a more penetrating feeling of mystery and awe than he in his "Virgin of the Rocks." Add to all this, a feeling for beauty and significance that have scarcely ever been approached. Where again youth so poignantly attractive, manhood so potently virile, old age so dignified and possessed of the world"s secrets! Who like Leonardo has depicted the mother"s happiness in her child and the child"s joy in being alive; who like Leonardo has portrayed the timidity, the newness to experience, the delicacy and refinement of maidenhood; or the enchantress intuitions, the inexhaustible fascination of the woman in her years of mastery? Look at his many sketches for Madonnas, look at his profile drawing of Isabella d"Este, or at the _Belle Joconde_, and see whether elsewhere you find their equals. Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross-section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever trans.m.u.ted it into life-communicating values; and all without intention, for most of these magical sketches were dashed off to ill.u.s.trate purely scientific matter, which alone absorbed his mind at the moment.
And just as his art is life-communicating as is that of scarcely another, so the contemplation of his personality is life-enhancing as that of scarcely any other man. Think that great though he was as a painter, he was no less renowned as a sculptor and architect, musician and improviser, and that all artistic occupations whatsoever were in his career but moments s.n.a.t.c.hed from the pursuit of theoretical and practical knowledge. It would seem as if there were scarcely a field of modern science but he either foresaw it in vision, or clearly antic.i.p.ated it, scarcely a realm of fruitful speculation of which he was not a freeman; and as if there were hardly a form of human energy which he did not manifest. And all that he demanded of life was the chance to be useful! Surely, such a man brings us the gladdest of all tidings--the wonderful possibilities of the human family, of whose chances we all partake.
Painting, then, was to Leonardo so little of a preoccupation that we must regard it as merely a mode of expression used at moments by a man of universal genius, who recurred to it only when he had no more absorbing occupation, and only when it could express what nothing else could, the highest spiritual through the highest material significance.
And great though his mastery over his craft, his feeling for significance was so much greater that it caused him to linger long over his pictures, labouring to render the significance he felt but which his hand could not reproduce, so that he rarely finished them. We thus have lost in quant.i.ty, but have we lost in quality? Could a mere painter, or even a mere artist, have seen and felt as Leonardo? We may well doubt.
We are too apt to regard a universal genius as a number of ordinary brains somehow conjoined in one skull, and not always on the most neighbourly terms. We forget that genius means mental energy, and that a Leonardo, for the self-same reason that prevents his being merely a painter--the fact that it does not exhaust a hundredth part of his energy--will, when he does turn to painting, bring to bear a power of seeing, feeling, and rendering, as utterly above that of the ordinary painter as the "Mona Lisa" is above, let us say, Andrea del Sarto"s "Portrait of his Wife." No, let us not join in the reproaches made to Leonardo for having painted so little; because he had much more to do than to paint, he has left all of us heirs to one or two of the supremest works of art ever created.
XII.
[Page heading: BOTTICELLI]
Never pretty, scarcely ever charming or even attractive; rarely correct in drawing, and seldom satisfactory in colour; in types, ill-favoured; in feeling acutely intense and even dolorous--what is it then that makes Sandro Botticelli so irresistible that nowadays we may have no alternative but to worship or abhor him? The secret is this, that in European painting there has never again been an artist so indifferent to representation and so intent upon presentation. Educated in a period of triumphant naturalism, he plunged at first into mere representation with almost self-obliterating earnestness; the pupil of Fra Filippo, he was trained to a love of spiritual _genre_; himself gifted with strong instincts for the significant, he was able to create such a type of the thinker as in his fresco of St. Augustin; yet in his best years he left everything, even spiritual significance, behind him, and abandoned himself to the presentation of those qualities alone which in a picture are _directly_ life-communicating, and life-enhancing. Those of us who care for nothing in the work of art but what it represents, are either powerfully attracted or repelled by his unhackneyed types and quivering feeling; but if we are such as have an imagination of touch and of movement that it is easy to stimulate, we feel a pleasure in Botticelli that few, if any, other artists can give us. Long after we have exhausted both the intensest sympathies and the most violent antipathies with which the representative elements in his pictures may have inspired us, we are only on the verge of fully appreciating his real genius. This in its happiest moments is an unparalleled power of perfectly combining values of touch with values of movement.
Look, for instance, at Botticelli"s "Venus Rising from the Sea."
Throughout, the tactile imagination is roused to a keen activity, by itself almost as life heightening as music. But the power of music is even surpa.s.sed where, as in the G.o.ddess" mane-like tresses of hair fluttering to the wind, not in disorderly rout but in ma.s.ses yielding only after resistance, the movement is directly life-communicating. The entire picture presents us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and of movement. How we revel in the force and freshness of the wind, in the life of the wave! And such an appeal he always makes. His subject may be fanciful, as in the "Realm of Venus" (the "Spring"); religious, as in the Sixtine Chapel frescoes or in the "Coronation of the Virgin"; political, as in the recently discovered "Pallas Taming a Centaur"; or even crudely allegorical, as in the Louvre frescoes,--no matter how unpropitious, how abstract the idea, the vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life-communicating movement is always there. Indeed, at times it seems that the less artistic the theme, the more artistic the fulfilment, the painter being impelled to give the utmost values of touch and movement to just those figures which are liable to be read off as mere empty symbols. Thus, on the figure representing political disorder--the Centaur--in the "Pallas,"
Botticelli has lavished his most intimate gifts. He constructs the torso and flanks in such a way that every line, every indentation, every boss appeals so vividly to the sense of touch that our fingers feel as if they had everywhere been in contact with his body, while his face gives to a still heightened degree this convincing sense of reality, every line functioning perfectly for the osseous structure of brow, nose, and cheeks. As to the hair--imagine shapes having the supreme life of line you may see in the contours of licking flames, and yet possessed of all the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to its own desire!
[Page heading: LINEAL DECORATION]
In fact, the mere subject, and even representation in general, was so indifferent to Botticelli, that he appears almost as if haunted by the idea of communicating the _unembodied_ values of touch and movement. Now there is a way of rendering even tactile values with almost no body, and that is by translating them as faithfully as may be into values of movement. For instance:--we want to render the roundness of a wrist without the slightest touch of either light or shade; we simply give the movement of the wrist"s outline and the movement of the drapery as it falls over it, and the roundness is communicated to us almost entirely in terms of movement. But let us go one step further. Take this line that renders the roundness of the wrist, or a more obvious example, the lines that render the movements of the tossing hair, the fluttering draperies, and the dancing waves in the "Birth of Venus"--take these lines alone with all their power of stimulating our imagination of movement, and what do we have? Pure values of movement abstracted, unconnected with any representation whatever. This kind of line, then, being the quintessence of movement, has, like the essential elements in all the arts, a power of stimulating our imagination and of directly communicating life. Well! imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences of movement-values, and you will have something that holds the same relation to representation that music holds to speech--and this art exists, and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro Botticelli may have had rivals in j.a.pan and elsewhere in the East, but in Europe never. To its demands he was ready to sacrifice everything that habits acquired under Filippo and Pollaiuolo,--and his employers!--would permit. The representative element was for him a mere _libretto_: he was happiest when his subject lent itself to translation into what may be called a lineal symphony. And to this symphony everything was made to yield; tactile values were translated into values of movement, and, for the same reason--to prevent the drawing of the eye inward, to permit it to devote itself to the rhythm of the line--the backgrounds were either entirely suppressed or kept as simple as possible. Colour also, with almost a contempt for its representative function, Botticelli entirely subordinated to his lineal scheme, compelling it to draw attention to the line, rather than, as is usual, away from it.
This is the explanation of the value put upon Botticelli"s masterpieces.
In some of his later works, such as the Dresden _predelle_, we have, it is true, baccha.n.a.ls rather than symphonies of line, and in many of his earlier paintings, in the "_Fortezza_," for instance, the harness and trappings have so disguised Pegasus that we scarcely know him from a cart horse. But the painter of the "Venus Rising from the Sea," of the "Spring," or of the Villa Lemmi frescoes is the greatest artist of lineal design that Europe has ever had.
XIII.
[Page heading: POPULARISERS OF ART]
Leonardo and Botticelli, like Michelangelo after them, found imitators but not successors. To communicate more material and spiritual significance than Leonardo, would have taken an artist with deeper feeling for significance; to get more music out of design than Botticelli, would have required a painter with even greater pa.s.sion for the re-embodiment of the pure essences of touch and movement. There were none such in Florence, and the followers of Botticelli--Leonardo"s were all Milanese, and do not here concern us--could but imitate the patterns of their master: the patterns of the face, the patterns of the composition, and the patterns of the line; dragging them down to their own level, sugaring them down to their own palate, slowing them down to their own insensitiveness for what is life-communicating. And although their productions, which were nothing but translations of great man"s art into average man"s art, became popular, as was inevitable, with the average man of their time, (who comprehended them better and felt more comfortable in their presence than in that of the originals which he respectfully admired but did not so thoroughly enjoy), nevertheless we need not dwell on these popularisers nor on their popularisations--not even on Filippino, with his touch of consumptive delicacy, nor Raffaelino del Garbo, with his glints of never-to-be-fulfilled promise.
[Page heading: FRA BARTOLOMMEO]
Before approaching the one man of genius left in Florence after Botticelli and Leonardo, before speaking of Michelangelo, the man in whom all that was most peculiar and much that was greatest in the striving of Florentine art found its fulfilment, let us turn for a moment to a few painters who, just because they were men of manifold talent, might elsewhere almost have become masters. Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and Bronzino were perhaps no less gifted as artists than Palma, Bonifazio Veronese, Lotto, and Tintoretto; but their talents, instead of being permitted to flower naturally, were scorched by the pa.s.sion for showing off dexterity, blighted by academic ideals, and uprooted by the whirlwind force of Michelangelo.
Fra Bartolommeo, who in temperament was delicate, refined, graceful, and as a painter had a miniaturist"s feeling for the dainty, was induced to desert his lovely women, his exquisite landscape, and his gentleness of expression for figures constructed mechanically on a colossal scale, or for effects of the round at any cost. And as evil is more obvious than good, Bartolommeo, the painter of that masterpiece of colour and light and shade, of graceful movement and charming feeling, the "Madonna with the Baptist and St. Stephen" in the Cathedral at Lucca, Bartolommeo, the dainty deviser of Mr. Mond"s tiny "Nativity," Bartolommeo, the artificer of a hundred masterpieces of pen drawing, is almost unknown; and to most people Fra Bartolommeo is a sort of synonym for pomposity. He is known only as the author of physically colossal, spiritually insignificant prophets and apostles, or, perchance, as the painter of pitch-dark altar-pieces: this being the reward of devices to obtain mere relief.
[Page heading: ANDREA DEL SARTO]
Andrea del Sarto approached perhaps as closely to a Giorgione or a t.i.tian as could a Florentine, ill at ease in the neighbourhood of Leonardo and Michelangelo. As an artist he was, it is true, not endowed with the profoundest sense for the significant, yet within the sphere of common humanity who has produced anything more genial than his "Portrait of a Lady"--probably his wife--with a Petrarch in her hands? Where out of Venetia can we find portraits so simple, so frank, and yet so interpretive as his "Sculptor," or as his various portraits of himself--these, by the way, an autobiography as complete as any in existence, and tragic as few? Almost Venetian again is his "St. James"
caressing children, a work of the sweetest feeling. Even in colour effect, and technique, how singularly close to the best Venetian painting in his "Dispute about the Trinity"--what blacks and whites, what greys and purplish browns! And in addition, tactile values peculiar to Florence--what a back St. Sebastian"s! But in a work of scarcely less technical merit, the "Madonna of the Harpies," we already feel the man not striving to get the utmost out of himself, but panting for the grand and magnificent. Even here, he remains almost a great artist, because his natural robustness comes to his rescue; but the "Madonna" is too obviously statuesque, and, good saints, pray why all these draperies?
The obviously statuesque and draperies were Andrea"s devices for keeping his head above water in the rising tide of the Michelangelesque. As you glance in sequence at the Annunziata frescoes, on the whole so full of vivacity, gaiety, and genuine delight in life, you see from one fresco to another the increased attention given to draperies. In the Scalzo series, otherwise masterpieces of tactile values, the draperies do their utmost to smother the figures. Most of these paintings are closed in with ponderous forms which have no other purpose than to serve as a frame, and as clothes-horses for draperies: witness the scene of Zacharias in the temple, wherein none of the bystanders dare move for fear of disturbing their too obviously arranged folds.
Thus by constantly sacrificing first spiritual, and then material significance to pose and draperies, Andrea loses all feeling for the essential in art. What a sad spectacle is his "a.s.sumption," wherein the Apostles, the Virgin herself, have nothing better to do than to show off draperies! Instead of feeling, as in the presence of t.i.tian"s "a.s.sunta,"
wrapt to heaven, you gaze at a number of tailor"s men, each showing how a stuff you are thinking of trying looks on the back, or in a certain effect of light. But let us not end on this note; let us bear in mind that, despite all his faults, Andrea painted the one "Last Supper" which can be looked at with pleasure after Leonardo"s.
[Page heading: PONTORMO]
Pontormo, who had it in him to be a decorator and portrait-painter of the highest rank, was led astray by his awe-struck admiration for Michelangelo, and ended as an academic constructor of monstrous nudes.
What he could do when expressing _himself_, we see in the lunette at Poggio a Caiano, as design, as colour, as fancy, the freshest, gayest, most appropriate mural decoration now remaining in Italy; what he could do as a portrait-painter, we see in his wonderfully decorative panel of Cosimo dei Medici at San Marco, or in his portrait of a "Lady with a Dog" (at Frankfort), perhaps the first portrait ever painted in which the sitter"s social position was insisted upon as much as the personal character. What Pontormo sank to, we see in such a riot of meaningless nudes, all caricatures of Michelangelo, as his "Martyrdom of Forty Saints."
[Page heading: BRONZINO]
Bronzino, Pontormo"s close follower, had none of his master"s talent as a decorator, but happily much of his power as a portrait-painter. Would he had never attempted anything else! The nude without material or spiritual significance, with no beauty of design or colour, the nude simply because it was the nude, was Bronzino"s ideal in composition, and the result is his "Christ in Limbo." But as a portrait-painter, he took up the note struck by his master and continued it, leaving behind him a series of portraits which not only had their effect in determining the character of Court painting all over Europe, but, what is more to the point, a series of portraits most of which are works of art. As painting, it is true, they are hard, and often timid; but their air of distinction, their interpretive qualities, have not often been surpa.s.sed. In his Uffizi portraits of Eleanora di Toledo, of Prince Ferdinand, of the Princess Maria, we seem to see the prototypes of Velasquez" queens, princes, and princesses: and for a fine example of dignified rendering of character, look in the Sala Baroccio of the Uffizi at a bust of a young woman with a missal in her hand.
XIV.
[Page heading: MICHELANGELO]
The great Florentine artists, as we have seen, were, with scarcely an exception, bent upon rendering the material significance of visible things. This, little though they may have formulated it, was the conscious aim of most of them; and in proportion as they emanc.i.p.ated themselves from ecclesiastical dominion, and found among their employers men capable of understanding them, their aim became more and more conscious and their striving more energetic. At last appeared the man who was the pupil of n.o.body, the heir of everybody, who felt profoundly and powerfully what to his precursors had been vague instinct, who saw and expressed the meaning of it all. The seed that produced him had already flowered into a Giotto, and once again into a Masaccio; in him, the last of his race, born in conditions artistically most propitious, all the energies remaining in his stock were concentrated, and in him Florentine art had its logical culmination.
[Page heading: ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ART]
Michelangelo had a sense for the materially significant as great as Giotto"s or Masaccio"s, but he possessed means of rendering, inherited from Donatello, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio and Leonardo,--means that had been undreamt of by Giotto or even by Masaccio. Add to this that he saw clearly what before him had been felt only dimly, that there was no other such instrument for conveying material significance as the human nude. This fact is as closely dependent on the general conditions of realising objects as tactile values are on the psychology of sight. We realise objects when we perfectly translate them into terms of our own states, our own feelings. So obviously true is this, that even the least poetically inclined among us, because we keenly realise the movement of a railway train, to take one example out of millions, speak of it as _going_ or _running_, instead of _rolling on its wheels_, thus being no less guilty of anthropomorphising than the most unregenerate savages. Of this same fallacy we are guilty every time we think of anything whatsoever with the least warmth--we are lending this thing some human attributes. The more we endow it with human attributes, the less we merely know it, the more we realise it, the more does it approach the work of art. Now there is one and only one object in the visible universe which we need not anthropomorphise to realise--and that is man himself. His movements, his actions, are the only things we realise without any myth-making effort--directly. Hence, there is no visible object of such artistic possibilities as the human body; nothing with which we are so familiar; nothing, therefore, in which we so rapidly perceive changes; nothing, then, which if represented so as to be realised more quickly and vividly than in life, will produce its effect with such velocity and power, and so strongly confirm our sense of capacity for living.
[Page heading: VALUE OF THE NUDE IN ART]