There is however another character of artificial productions, to which these
terms have partial reference, which it is of some importance tonote,that of finish, exactness, or refinement, which are commonly desired in the
works of men, owing both to their difficulty of accomplishment and consequent
expression of care and power (compare Chapter on Ideas of Power, Part I. Sect, i.,)
and from their greater resemblance to the working of God, whose "absolute
exactness," says Hooker, "all things imitate, by tending to that which is most
exquisite in every particular." And there is not a greater sign of the
imperfection of general taste,
art oil painting for sale, than its capability of contentment with forms and
things which, professing completion, are yet not exact nor complete, as in the
vulgar with wax and clay and china figures, and in bad sculptors with an
unfinished and clay-like modelling of surface, and curves and angles of no
precision or delicacy; and in general, in all common and unthinking persons with
an imperfect rendering of that which might be pure and fine, as church-wardens
are content to lose the sharp lines of stone carving under clogging
obliterations of whitewash, and as the modern Italians scrape away and polish
white all the sharpness and glory of the carvings on their old churches, as most
miserably and slurred painting, merely for the sake of its coarseness,as of Spagnoletto,
[Page 83] Salvator, or Murillo, opposed to the divine
finish which the greatest and mightiest of men disdained not, but rather wrought
out with painfulness and life spending; as Leonardo and Michael Angelo, (for the
latter, however many things he left unfinished, did finish, if at all, with a
refinement that the eye cannot follow, but the feeling only, as in the Pieta of
Genoa,) and Perugino always, even to the gilding of single hairs among his angel
tresses, and the young Raffaelle, when he was heaven taught, and Angelico, and
Pinturicchio, and John Bellini, and all other such serious and loving men. Only
it is to be observed that this finish is not a part or constituent of beauty,
but the full and ultimate rendering of it, so that it is an idea only connected
with the works of men, for all the works of the Deity are finished with the
same, that is, infinite care and completion: and so what degrees of beauty exist
among them can in no way be dependent upon this source, inasmuch as there are
between them no degrees of care. And therefore, as there certainly is admitted a
difference of degree in what we call chasteness, even in Divine work, (compare
the hollyhock or the sunflower with the vale lily,) we must seek for it some
other explanation and source than this.
oil painting online
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