One word more to close this discussion. No critic is so stupid as to
mean by "bad drawing," drawing that does not represent the model
correctly. The gods of the art schools, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Raffael,
&c. played the oddest tricks with anatomy. Everyone knows that Giotto's
figures are less accurately drawn than those of Sir Edward Poynter; no
one supposes that they are not drawn better. We do possess a criterion
by which we can judge drawing, and that criterion can have nothing to do
with truth to nature. We judge drawing by concentrating our aesthetic
sensibility on a particular part of design. What we mean when we speak
of "good drawing" and "bad drawing" is not doubtful; we mean
"aesthetically moving" and "aesthetically insignificant." Why some
drawing moves and some does not is a very different question. I have put
forward an hypothesis of which I could write a pretty sharp criticism:
that task, however, I leave to more willing hands. Only this I will say:
just as a competent musician knows with certainty when an instrument is
out of tune though the criterion resides nowhere but in his own
sensibility; so a fine critic of visual art can detect lines and colours
that are not alive. Whether he be looking at an embroidered pattern or
at a careful anatomical study, the task is always the same, because the
criterion is always the same. What he has to decide is whether the
drawing is, or is not, aesthetically significant.
Insistence on design is perhaps the most obvious characteristic of the
movement. To all are familiar those circumambient black lines that are
intended to give definition to forms and to reveal the construction of
the picture. For almost all the younger artists,--Bonnard is an obvious
exception--affect that architectural method of design which indeed has
generally been preferred by European artists. The difference between
"architectural design" and what I call "imposed design" will be obvious
to anyone who compares a picture by Cezanne with a picture by Whistler.
Better still, compare any first-rate Florentine of the fourteenth or
fifteenth century with any Sung picture. Here are two methods of
achieving the same end, equally good, so far as I can judge, and as
different as possible. We feel towards a picture by Cezanne or Masaccio
or Giotto as we feel towards a Romanesque church; the design seems to
spring upwards, mass piles itself on mass, forms balance each other
masonrywise: there is a sense of strain, and of strength to meet it.
Turn to a Chinese picture; the forms seem to be pinned to the silk or to
be hung from above. There is no sense of thrust or strain; rather there
is the feeling of some creeper, with roots we know not where, that
hangs itself in exquisite festoons along the wall. Though architectural
design is a permanent characteristic of Western art, of four periods I
think it would be fairly accurate to say that it is a characteristic so
dominant as to be distinctive; and they are Byzantine VIth Century,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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