Again, there is capability of representing the essential character,
form, and color of an object, without external texture. On this point
much has been said by Reynolds and others, and it is, indeed, perhaps
the most unfailing characteristic of great manner in painting. Compare a
dog of Edwin Landseer with a dog of Paul Veronese. In the first, the
outward texture is wrought out with exquisite dexterity of handling, and
minute attention to all the accidents of curl and gloss which can give
appearance of reality, while the hue and power of the sunshine, and the
truth of the shadow on all these forms is necessarily neglected, and the
large relations of the animal as a mass of color to the sky or ground,
or other parts of the picture, utterly lost. This is realism at the
expense of ideality, it is treatment essentially unimaginative.[71] With
Veronese, there is no curling nor crisping, no glossiness nor sparkle,
hardly even hair, a mere type of hide, laid on with a few
scene-painter's touches. But the essence of dog is there, the entire
magnificent, generic animal type, muscular and living, and with broad,
pure, sunny daylight upon him, and bearing his true and harmonious
relation of color to all color about him. This is ideal treatment.
The same treatment is found in the works of all the greatest men, they
all paint the lion more than his mane, and the horse rather than his
hide; and I think also they are more careful to obtain the right
expression of large and universal light and color, than local tints; for
the warmth of sunshine, and the force of sunlighted hue are always
sublime on whatever subject they may be exhibited; and so also are light
and shade, if grandly arranged, as may be well seen in an etching of
Rembrandt's of a spotted shell, which he has made altogether sublime by
broad truth and large ideality of light and shade; and so I have seen
frequent instances of very grand ideality in treatment of the most
commonplace still life, by our own Hunt, where the petty glosses and
delicacies, and minor forms, are all merged in a broad glow of suffused
color; so also in pieces of the same kind by Etty, where, however,
though the richness and play of color are greater, and the arrangement
grander, there is less expression of light, neither is there anything in
modern art that can be set beside some choice passages of Hunt in this
respect.
Sec. 12. Abstraction or typical representation of animal form.
Again, it is possible to represent objects capable of various accidents
in generic or symbolical form.
Sec. 13. Either when it is symbolically used.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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