The impression such make on us is that of a complete personality. We get from them an idea of spiritual vitality, such as actual experience is unable to supply. The effect is similar to that afforded by the description of great actions and events in the hands of a truly artistic historian. We obtain from such a much loftier and vitally true picture of the facts than any we could have taken from the direct evidence of our senses. Concrete reality is so overburdened with the phenomenal, that is incidental or accidental detail, that we frequently cannot see the forest for the trees, and often the most important fact slips by us as a thing of common or daily occurrence. It is the indwelling insight and genius of the writer which first adds the quality of greatness to events or actions, presenting them fully in a truly historical composition, which rejects what is purely external, and only brings into prominence that through which that ideal substance is vitally unfolded. In this way, too, the painter should place before us the mind[325] and character of the impersonation by means of his art. If success is fully attained we may affirm that a portrait of this qualify is more to the mark, more like the personality thus conceived than the real man himself is. Albrecht Dürer has also executed portraits of this character. With a few technical means the traits are emphasized with such simplicity, definition, and dignity, that we wholly believe ourselves to be facing spiritual life itself. The longer we look at such a picture, the more profoundly we penetrate into it, the more it is revealed to us. It reminds one of a clear-cut drawing, instinct with genius, which completely gives expression to the characteristic, and for the rest is merely executive in its colour and outlines in so far as the same may make the characterization more intelligible, apparent, and finished as a whole, without entering into all the importunate detail of the facts of natural life. In the same way also Nature in her landscape paints every leaf, branch, and blade to the last shadow of a line or tint. Landscape painting, on the contrary, has no business to attempt such elaboration, but may only follow her subject to a principle of treatment, in which the expression of the whole is involved, which emphasizes detail, but nevertheless does not copy slavishly such particulars in all their threads, irregularities and so forth, assuming it is to remain essentially characteristic and individual work. In the human face the drawing of _Nature_ is the framework of bone in its harsh lines, around which the softer ones are disposed and continue in various accidental details. Truly characteristic _portraiture_, however, despite all the importance we may rightly attach to these well defined lines, consists in other traits indicated with equal force, the countenance in short as _elaborated by the creative artist._[326] In this sense we may say of the portrait