Vastness of the field of painting: All that is visible is included in the science of painting.
But the spirit of the science of painting deals with all works, human as well as divine, which are terminated by their surfaces, that is, the lines of the limits of bodies by means of which the sculptor is required to achieve perfection in his art. She with her fundamental rules, i.e. drawing, teaches the architect how to work so that his building may be pleasant to the eye; she teaches the makers of diverse vases, the goldsmiths, weavers, embroiderers; she has found the characters with which diverse languages find expression; she has given symbols to the mathematicians; she has taught geometry its figures, and instructed the astrologers, the makers of machines and engineers.
Simonides calls painting silent poetry, and poetry speaking painting.
The memory of absent friends becomes dimmed, although not effaced by time. The distractions of our life, acquaintance with fresh objects, in short, every change in our condition, works upon our hearts as dust and smoke upon a painting, making the finely drawn lines quite imperceptible, whilst one does not know how it happens.
Thou sayest, O painter, that worship is paid to thy work, but impute not this power to thyself, but to the subject which such a picture represents. Here the painter makes answer: O thou poet, who sayest that thou also art an imitator, why dost thou not represent with thy words objects of such a nature that thy writings which contain these words may be worshipped also? But nature has favoured the painter more than the poet, {83} and it is fair that the works of the more greatly favoured one should be more honoured than those of the less favoured one. Therefore let us praise him who with words satisfies the hearing, and him who by painting affords perfect content to the eyes; but let the praise given to the worker in words be less, inasmuch as they are accidental and created by a less worthy author than the works of nature of which the painter is the imitator. And the existence of these works is confined within the forms of their surfaces.
Man is so prone to occupy himself with what is most common, the soul and the senses are so easily blunted to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that one ought by all means to preserve the capability of feeling it. We ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see an excellent painting, and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times they used the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.
We can safely say that those people are under a delusion who call that painter a good master who can only draw well a head or a figure. Certainly there is no great merit if, after studying a single thing during a whole lifetime, you attain to a certain degree of perfection in it. But knowing, as we do, that painting includes and comprehends all the works produced by nature, or brought about by the fortuitous action of man, and in fact everything that the eye can see, he seems to me to be a poor master who can only do one thing well. Now seest thou not how many and diverse acts are performed by men? Seest thou not how many various animals there are, and likewise trees, plants and flowers; what a variety of mountainous or level places, fountains, rivers, cities, public and private buildings, {92} instruments suitable for human use; how many diverse costumes and ornaments and arts? All these things should be considered of equal effect and value when used by the man who can be called a good painter.
If thou, O musician, sayest that painting is mechanical because it is wrought by the work of the hands, music is wrought by the mouth, but {88} not by the tasting faculties of the mouth; just and as the hand is employed indeed in the case of painting, but not for its faculties of touch. Words are less worthy than actions. But thou, writer of science, dost thou not copy with thy hand, and write what is in thy mind, as the painter does? And if thou wast to say that music is formed of proportion, by proportion have I wrought painting, as thou shalt see.
The only difference between painting and sculpture is that the sculptor accomplishes his work with the greater bodily fatigue, and the painter with the greater mental fatigue. This is proved by the fact that the sculptor in practising his art is obliged to exert his arms and to strike and shatter the marble or other stone, which remains over and above what is needed for the figure which it contains, by manual exercise, accompanied often by profuse sweating, mingled with dust and transforming itself into dirt; and his face is plastered and powdered with the dust of the marble, so that he has the appearance of a baker, and he is covered with minute chips, and it appears as if snow had fallen on him, and his dwelling is dirty and full of chips and the dust of stone.
Since we have concluded that the utmost extent of the comprehension of poetry is for the blind, and that of painting for the deaf, we will say that the value of painting exceeds that of poetry in proportion as painting gratifies a nobler sense than poetry does, and this nobility has been proved to be equal to that of three other senses, because we elect to lose our sense of hearing, smell and touch rather than our eyesight. For he who loses his sight is deprived of the beauty of the universe, and is like to one who is confined during his lifetime in a tomb, in which he enjoys life and motion.
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.
Because writers have had no knowledge of the science of painting, they have not been able to {61} describe its gradations and parts, and since painting itself does not reveal itself nor its artistic work in words, it has remained, owing to ignorance, behind the sciences mentioned above, but it has thereby lost nothing of its divinity. And truly it is not without reason that men have failed to honour it, because it does honour to itself without the aid of the speech of others, just as do the excellent works of nature. And if the painters have not described the art of painting, and reduced it to a science, the fault must not be imputed to painting and it is no less noble on that account, since few painters profess a knowledge of letters, as their life would not be long enough for them to acquire such knowledge. Therefore we ask, Is the virtue of herbs, stones and plants non-existent because men have been ignorant of it? Certainly not; but we will say that these herbs remained noble in themselves without the aid of human tongues or letters.
Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.
What poet will place before thee in words, O {69} lover, the true semblance of thy idea with such truth as will the painter? Who is he who will show thee rivers, woods, valleys and plains, which will recall to thee the pleasures of the past, with greater truth than the painter? And if thou sayest that painting is mute poetry in itself, unless there be some one to speak for it and tell what it represents--seest thou not, then, that thy book is on a lower plane? Because even if it have a man to speak for it, nothing of the subject which is related can be seen, as it is seen when a picture is explained. And the pictures, if the action represented and the mental attributes of the figures are in the true proportion one to another, will be understood in the same way as if they spoke.
I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me.
Neither painting nor fighting feed men; nor can capital, in the form of money or machinery, feed them.
And if thou, O poet, wishest to describe the works of nature by thine unaided art, and dost represent various places and the forms of diverse objects, the painter surpasses thee by an infinite degree of power; but if thou wishest to have recourse to the aid of other sciences, apart from poetry, they are not thy own; for instance, astrology, rhetoric, theology, philosophy, geometry, arithmetic and the like. Thou art not then a poet any longer. Thou transformest thyself, and art no longer that of which we are speaking. Now seest thou not that if thou wishest to go to nature, thou reachest her by the means of science, deduced by others from the effects of nature? And the painter, through himself alone, without the aid of aught appertaining to the various sciences, or by any other means, achieves directly the imitation of the things of nature. By painting, lovers are attracted to the images of the beloved to converse with the depicted semblance. By painting whole populations are led with fervent vows to seek the image of the deities, and not to see the books of poets which represent the same deities in speech; by painting animals are deceived. I once saw a picture which deceived a dog by the image of its master, which the dog greeted with great joy; and likewise I have seen dogs bark at and try to bite painted dogs; and a monkey make a number of antics in front of a painted monkey. I have seen swallows fly and alight on painted {68} iron-works which jut out of the windows of buildings.
If thou, O poet, dost represent the battle and its bloodshed enveloped by the obscure and dark air, amid the smoke of the terrifying and deadly engines, together with the thick dust which darkens the air, and the flight in terror of wretches panic-stricken by horrible death; in this case the painter will surpass thee, because thy pen will be used up before thou hast scarcely begun to describe what the art of the painter represents for thee immediately. And thy tongue shall be parched with thirst and thy body worn out with weariness and hunger before thou canst show what the painter will reveal in an instant of time. And in this painting there lacks nothing save the soul of the things depicted, and every body is represented in its entirety as far as it is visible in one aspect; and it would be a long and most tedious matter for poetry to enumerate all the movements of each soldier in such a war, and the parts of their limbs and their ornaments which the finished picture places before you with great accuracy and brevity; and to such a representation nothing is wanting save the noise of the engines, and the cries of the terrifying victors, {123} and the screams and lamentations of those awe-stricken; neither again can the poet convey these things to the hearing.
And I once chanced to paint a picture which represented a divine subject, and it was bought by the lover of her whom it represented, and he wished to strip it of its divine character so as to be able to kiss it without offence. But finally his conscience overcame his desire and his lust and he was compelled to remove the picture from his house. Now go thou, poet, and describe a beautiful woman without giving the semblance of {124} the living thing, and with it arouse such desire in men! If thou sayest: I will describe then Hell and Paradise and other delights and terrors,--the painter will surpass thee, because he will set before thee things which in silence will [make thee] give utterance to such delight, and so terrify thee as to cause thee to wish to take flight. Painting stirs the senses more readily than poetry. And if thou sayest that by speech thou canst convulse a crowd with laughter or tears, I rejoin that it is not thou who stirrest the crowd, it is the pathos of the orator, and his mirth. A painter once painted a picture which caused everybody who saw it to yawn, and this happened every time the eye fell on the picture, which represented a person yawning. Others have painted libidinous acts of such sensuality that they have incited those who gazed on them to similar acts, and poetry could not do this.
A science is more useful in proportion as its fruits are more widely understood, and thus, on the other hand, it is less useful in proportion as it is less widely understood. The fruits of painting can be apprehended by all the populations of the universe because its results are subject to the power of sight, and it does not pass by the ear to the brain, but by the same channel by which {62} sight passes. Therefore it needs no interpreters of diverse tongues, as letters do, and it has instantly satisfied the human race in the same manner as the works of nature have done. And not only the human race, but other animals; as was shown in a picture representing the father of a family to whom little children still in the cradle gave caresses, as did the dog and the cat in the same house; and it was a wonderful thing to see such a sight.
S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there forever, but more like … like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost
Portrait-painting may be to the painter what the practical knowledge of the world is to the poet, provided he considers it as a school by which he is to acquire the means of perfection in his art, and not as the object of that perfection.
The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the brain can most abundantly and splendidly contemplate the infinite works of nature; and the ear is the next in order, which is ennobled by hearing the recital of the things seen by the eye. If you, historians and poets, or mathematicians, had not seen things with the eyes, you could not report of them in writing. If thou, O poet, dost tell a story with thy painting pen, the painter will more easily give satisfaction in telling it with his brush and in a manner less tedious and more easily understood. And if thou callest painting mute poetry, the painter can call poetry blind painting. Now consider which is the greater loss, to be blind or dumb? Though the poet is as free as the painter in his creations and compositions, they are not so satisfactory to men as paintings, because if poetry is able to describe forms, actions and places in words, the painter deals with the very {65} semblance of forms in order to represent them. Now consider which is nearer to man, the name of man or the image of man? The name of man varies in diverse countries, but death alone changes his form. If thou wast to say that painting is more lasting, I answer that the works of a coppersmith, which time preserves longer than thine or ours, are more eternal still. Nevertheless there is but little invention in it, and painting on copper with colours of enamel is far more lasting.
I think sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners and abolish hurry.
Sunlight is painting.
Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting: there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.--_Dryden._
Sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners and abolish hurry.
Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.--_Mrs. Stowe._
A force de peindre le diable sur les murs, il finit par apparaitre en personne=--If you keep painting the devil on the walls, he will by and by appear to you in person.
Music should be given no other name than the sister of painting, inasmuch as it is subject to the hearing,--a sense inferior to the eye,--and it produces harmony by the unison of its proportioned parts, which are brought into operation at the same moment and are constrained to come to life and die in one or more harmonic times; and time is, as it were, the circumference of the parts which constitute the harmony, in the same way as the outline constitutes the circumference of limbs whence human beauty emanates.
Now seest thou not that the eye comprehends the beauty of the whole world? It is the head of astrology; it creates cosmography; it gives counsel and correction to all the human arts; it impels {84} men to seek diverse parts of the world; it is the principle of mathematics; its science is most certain; it has measured the height and the magnitude of the stars; it has discovered the elements and their abodes; it has been able to predict the events of the future, owing to the course of the stars; it has begotten architecture and perspective and divine painting. O most excellent above all the things created by God! What praise is there which can express thy nobility? What peoples, what tongues, are they who can perfectly describe thy true working? It is the window of the human body, through which the soul gazes and feasts on the beauty of the world; by reason of it the soul is content with its human prison, and without it this human prison is its torment; and by means of it human diligence has discovered fire by which the eye wins back what the darkness has stolen from it. It has adorned nature with agriculture and pleasant gardens. But what need is there for me to indulge in long and elevated discourse? What thing is there which acts not by reason of the eye? It impels men from the East to the West; it has discovered navigation; and in this it excels nature, because the simple products of the earth are finite and the works which the eye makes over to the hands are infinite, as the painter shows in his portrayal of countless forms of animals, herbs, plants and places.
With due lamentation Painting complains that it has been expelled from the liberal arts, because it is the true daughter of nature and is practised by means of the most worthy of the senses. Whence wrongly, O writers, you have excluded painting from the liberal arts, since it not only includes in its range the works of nature, but also infinite things which nature never created.
What a vanity is painting, which attracts admiration by the resemblance of things that in the original we do not admire!
And down the street―I'm not averting my eyes now―a man in a patched jumper is painting the door to his house sky blue. Two small boys, who have been walloping one another with sticks, are begging him to let them help. He is giving them a tiny brush apiece. So―perhaps there is an end to war.
Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of æsthetic beauty, concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination--sculpture, painting, written fiction--is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
We will say, therefore, that poetry is an art which is supremely potent for the blind, and the painting has the same result on the deaf. Painting, therefore, excels poetry in proportion as the sense to which it ministers is the nobler. The only true function of the poet is to represent the words of people who talk among each other, and these alone he represents to the hearing as if they were natural, because they are natural in themselves and created by the human voice; and in all other respects he is surpassed by the painter. Still more, incomparably greater is the width of range of painting than that of speech, because the painter can accomplish an infinity of things which speech will not be able to name for want of the appropriate terms. And seest thou not that if the painter wishes to depict animals and devils in Hell with what richness of invention he proceeds?
We by our art can be called the grandsons of God. If poetry deals with moral philosophy, painting deals with natural philosophy; if poetry describes the action of the contemplative mind, painting represents the effect in motion of the action of the mind; if poetry terrifies people with the pictures of Hell, painting does the same by depicting the same things in action. If a poet challenges the painter to represent beauty, fierceness, or an evil, an ugly or a monstrous thing, whatever variety of forms he may produce in his way, the painter will cause greater satisfaction. Are there not pictures to be seen so like reality that they deceive men and animals?