an artist; such is what he says of the manner in which Protogenes
embodied his colours, though it may require the practice of an artist to
penetrate his meaning. No sculptor could describe better in many words
than he does in one, the manœuvre by which Nicias gave the decided line
of correctness to the models of Praxiteles; the word _circumlitio_,
shaping, rounding the moist clay with the finger, is evidently a term of
art. Thus when he describes the method of Pausias, who, in painting a
sacrifice, foreshortened the bull and threw his shade on part of the
surrounding crowd, he throws before us the depths of the scenery and
its forcible chiaroscuro; nor is he less happy, at least in my opinion,
when he translates the deep aphorism by which Eupompus directed Lysippus
to recur to Nature, and to animate the rigid form with the air of life.
In his dates he seldom errs, and sometimes adjusts or corrects the
errors of Greek chronology, though not with equal attention; for whilst
he exposes the impropriety of ascribing to Polycletus a statue of
Hephestion, the friend of Alexander, who lived a century after him, he
thinks it worth his while to repeat that Erynna, the contemporary of
Sappho, who lived nearly as many years before him, celebrated in her
poems a work of his friend and fellow-scholar Myron of Eleutheræ. His
text is at the same time so deplorably mutilated that it often equally
defies conjecture and interpretation. Still, from what is genuine it
must be confessed that he condenses in a few chapters the contents of
volumes, and fills the whole atmosphere of art. Whatever he tells,
whether the most puerile legend, or the best attested fact, he tells
with dignity.
Of Quintilian, whose information is all relative to style, the tenth
chapter of the twelfth book, a passage on Expression in the eleventh,
and scattered fragments of observations analogous to the process of his
own art, is all that we possess; but what he says, though comparatively
small in bulk with what we have of Pliny, leaves us to wish for more.
His review of the revolutions of style in painting, from Polygnotus to
Apelles, and in sculpture from Phidias to Lysippus, is succinct and
rapid; but though so rapid and succinct, every word is poised by
characteristic precision, and can only be the result of long and
judicious inquiry, and perhaps even minute examination. His theory and
taste savour neither of the antiquary nor the mere Dilettante; he
neither dwells on the infancy of art with doating fondness, nor melts
its essential and solid principles in the crucibles of merely curious or
voluptuous execution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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