This same line may become almost unpleasing when the figure is too much in profile and the head bends forward, as does Mary Magdalene’s in Titian’s Dresden Madonna. I mention this because it is repeated in the Medea by Feuerbach, who is very faithful to Titian’s ideal. He is, moreover, one of the vanguard of German artists who are leading the way to the new idealism—a thing as yet more hoped for than realized. And just here I have a word to say. An essential of ideal art is that, as opposed to naturalistic reproduction, it _plays_ with conventionalized form and subordinates reality to it. While at the height of the renaissance marvellous effects were achieved by mingled and contrasted curves, such as astonish us in the work of Raphael and sometimes of Rubens, of our modern idealism we may say: if we are justified at all in calling its developments new, it is because, from the standpoint of form, it does possess one unique and original characteristic—namely, that in it for the first time straight lines, and especially the perpendicular, are dominant in a well-mastered technique, which is no longer primitive. There are many traces of this principle in Feuerbach’s work, and it is still more strikingly shown in that of Böcklin, who has close kinship with the Venetians. The tensely upstretched necks of the swans in the Island of the Blest is a perfect example of the new style. It comes out again in the stiff little trees of his spring landscape, in the abrupt lines of the drapery of a Muse at the Arethusan spring, in the perpendicular line extending from the shoulder of the musical shepherd boy quite to his foot, and in many other pictures. Max Klinger is partial to the horizontal, and much of the characteristic power of his Pieta is due to his employment of these lines; three stone steps, the outstretched body of the Redeemer, the stretch of a wall in the background, the straight lines of a thick wood, in contrast to these the upright half figures of John and Mary. Many of our modern idealistic painters have unfortunately abandoned the use of this “line of Praxiteles,” which imparts so finely poised a position to the head and body and that peculiar mysterious dignity and air of detachment to the whole figure—“schöne, stille Menschen.” In the industrial arts this preference for straight lines is most conspicuous in what we wish to appear as new and original, and even in the newest styles for men it gives us the creased trousers, the waistless coat, and the stiff, high hat. These phenomena, however, we will not presume to attribute to the influence of ideal art. (_d_) Perception of Movement