From Robert W. Carden, _Michelangelo, a Record of his Life_, Boston and New York, 1913, a book which from Michelangelo’s letters gives a very intimate view of the sculptor’s character. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS ON THE GRAND STYLE No critic of art has better expressed the ideal of the Grand Style than Sir Joshua Reynolds. I quote from the third of his _Discourses_, in the admirable edition of Roger E. Fry, New York, 1906. pp. 51 ff. “Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The _gusto grande_ of the Italians, the _beau idéal_ of the French and the _great style_, _genius_ and _taste_ among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing. It is this intellectual dignity, they say, that ennobles the Painter’s Art; that lays the line between him and the mere mechanic: and produces those great effects in an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts, are scarcely able to retain....” [The grand style is seen to rest upon a sort of generalizing tendency.] “The whole beauty and grandeur of the Art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every kind.” [The artist] “being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and, what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object.” [Sir Joshua advocates the study of the antique, not to imitate any single work, but to master the principle that underlies them all.] “Beauty and simplicity have so great a share in the composition of the great style, that he who has acquired them has little else to learn. It must not, indeed, be forgotten that there is a nobleness of conception, which goes beyond any thing in the mere exhibition of perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of philosophic wisdom, or heroic virtue. This can only be acquired by him that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of ancient and modern poetry.” KENYON COX ON THE CLASSIC SPIRIT The ideals of the High Renaissance are eloquently, if incidentally, defined by the late Kenyon Cox in _The Classic Point of View_, New York, 1911. pp. 3–5.