Art Principles with Special Reference to Painting: Together with Notes on the Illusions Produced by the Painter — John Shaqi
Art Principles with Special Reference to Painting: Together with Notes on the Illusions Produced by the PainterGovett, Ernest
Philosophy
Art Principles with Special Reference to Painting: Together with Notes on the Illusions Produced by the Painter
Govett, Ernest
Art; Painting
In other grades of these arts also, the artist has to use special means
to maintain a due balance between the two kinds of beauty. Shakespeare
could not give men and women of every-day experience the wisdom, the
judgment, and the foresight necessary for the presentation of the
powerful pictures which some of his characters throw upon the mind, so
he raises them above the level of life by according them greater virtues
and nobler passions than are to be found in people of actual experience.
The supreme emotional effects he produces seem perfectly appropriate
therefore to the intellectual appeals. In the next lower form of art,
where the representation does not go beyond life experience, the
emotional appeal is of still greater relative importance because the
appeal to the mind is rarely striking. The emotional effect here may
indeed be so overpowering that the purely mental considerations are
lost sight of, and we observe that in all the greater works of art in
the division, whether of poetry, painting, sculpture, or fiction, the
intellectual appeal is vastly exceeded by the emotional. When we reach
the grade which deals with subjects inferior to the average level of
human life, as the representation of animals, landscape, humour,
still-life, the sensorial effect must be exceedingly strong relatively,
otherwise the art would scarcely be recognizable, the appeal to the mind
being necessarily weak.
It is clearly compulsory then that the Associated Arts, all of which may
appeal to the mind as well as to the senses, should be separated into
divisions for the purpose of applying the Law of Recognition, and these
divisions are obvious, for they are marked by the strongest natural
boundary lines. They are: 1. The art which deals with divinities. 2.
That which exhibits beauty above life experience, but does not reach the
divine. 3. That which represents life. 4. That which produces
representations inferior to life. This separation corresponds with that
applied by Aristotle to poetry and painting, except that he joined the
two first sections into one, which he described as better than life. But
the division of the great philosopher, while being sufficient for his
purpose, is hardly close enough for the full consideration of the kinds
of beauty, since it puts in the same class, representations of the
divinity and the superman--joins Homer and Phidias with Praxiteles and
Raphael. In dealing with the divine the artist need place no limit to
his imagination in the presentation of his picture, whereas with the
superman he must circumscribe his fancy within the limits of what may
appear to the senses to be possibly natural. It is true that the poet
may use the supernatural as distinguished from the divine, to enable him
to extend his imaginative scope, and so give us beautiful pictures which
would be otherwise unpresentable. Shakespeare makes us imagine Puck
encircling the earth in forty minutes, and Shelley shows us iron-winged
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