Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/469

449 DRAWING 449 the representation of the female form that the grace of the Greek line-drawing is most conspicuous and most unprece dented. There had been before some lithe feminine grace of motion eien in Egyptian art, but it is stiffness and awkwardness themselves in comparison with the Greek. The right progress of art-education in modern times could not be better assured than by following in the case of each individual student that course of development which humanity itself has followed. True and careful lines, in combination with the colouring of spaces in a few flat tints, are the natural beginning. What a child does with infantile unsuccess for its amusement the beginner in serious art should be taught to do carefully and well for his instruction. The accurate use of line is the first thing to be learned with. -the pencil point, and the equal laying of a flat tint is the first thing to be learned with the brush. Even at so early a stage in art as the use of the simple line, we find ourselves face to face with one of the most remarkable peculiarities of the fine as distinguished from the mechanical arts. It does not require much critical acumen to discover that accuracy is one thing in a line and beauty another. The student ought to work at first for accuracy, but from beautiful works of art which are not in themselves accurate copies of nature but copies idealized at least in some degree by the taste and feeling of the artist. All works of art that are worth studying are ideal in one way or another. We have spoken of the Greek line, which is one of the most highly idealized of all artistic expressions. The Greek artists when they outlined an object always greatly simplified the outline by omitting many minor accidents of angle and curvature which a modern picturesque artist would seek for because of their variety. But simplification does not explain all that the Greek mind did to alter nature in design. Its sense of beauty and elegance was so exquisite that it continually amplified what was meagre in the model, reduced what was superabundant, and corrected what was awkward. All this could be done, and was done, with the simple line alone without any help from chiaroscuro, and it is one of the most remarkable proofs of the expressional power of the line that it even suggests modelling in the blank spaces which are inclosed by it. Notwithstanding the excellence of Greek linear design it would be well that the student s attention should not be confined to it too exclusively. For, in the first place, we may remember that the vase-paintings which remain to us were not executed by the most eminent painters living at that time, but were only done by clever workmen in the artistic spirit which the eminent painters had rendered prevalent and fashionable ; whereas in modern art we can study the ipaissimce linece of truly great men, both in their drawings and in many cases more accessibly still in their etchings. Again, the Greek designers had certain ex cellencies, but not all excellencies, the remarkably liarmonious character of their work being, in fact, quite as much due to its absolute neglect of certain qualities of line as to its possession of other qualities. It is a narrow and limited kind of art, the singular perfection of it being due in great measure to that narrowness. Modern art, on the contrary, is infinitely vast and varied, full of imper fection, abounding in all conceivable kinds of error and failure, but also rich beyond all that a Greek could pos sibly have imagined in knowledge and sentiment of many Mnds. The Greek spirit passed through its first decadence in Roman art, and was at last degraded past recognition at Byzantium. A new spirit of linear design- arose in the northern countries during the Middle Ages, gradually forming what we call the Gothic schools of architecture and ornament. The mediaeval artists began exactly like the Median Greeks by the natural primitive process of line and flat drawing colouring of spaces, of which we have abundant examples in their illuminated manuscripts, and examples less abundant in the mural paintings which remain to us. Students who intend to qualify themselves for decorative work, or for carving, will do well to give earnest attention to mediaeval designs of ornament which abound in the richest and most fanciful invention ; but students of the figure have little to learn from the Middle Ages, for in those centuries the figure w r as very imperfectly understood. Sometimes we meet with a startling exception, with some instance of individual observation which strikes us because it looks like science ; but the plain truth is that the mediaeval artists of all classes were as inferior to the Greek in the knowledge of the human frame as they were superior to them in the capacity for inventing new and fanciful schemes of decoration. If the student wishes to learn the figure he may therefore pass at once from the period of decline in Greek art to the Renaissance, without concerning himself about the more or less successful attempts of the intervening ages, in which, indeed, may be found examples of quaintly rendered human character, but hardly any of well-studied human form. The best way is to go from antiquity to Kans Holbein the younger at once. He had Holbefc remarkable power and skill in the use of line, many of his best portraits being hardly anything more than a delicately true outline, with just enough shading to make us under stand the modelling, but nothing of what is commonly understood by chiaroscuro. As Holbein was much more of a realist than the Greeks were, his lines have more variety of curvature than theirs, and the forms inclosed by them are more individual. All that is best in the peculiar spirit of northern drawing at that time is to be found in Holbein s art, which is full of close observation, of calm sobriety, and unflinching truthfulness. In the south of Europe the Renaissance led to that artistic development of which the modern schools of figure design have inherited the ideas and principles. A certain period in the life of Raphael marks the transition from the old spirit to the new, and his great success in the application of the new principles led to their authoritative establishment in the schools of Europe. The Renaissance made drawing at the T1 ! e ^ ( same timo more scientific and more ideal. The artists naissan studied anatomy more than it had ever been studied before, and they gave a degree of attention to the whole of the human body which a mediaeval draftsman would have con centrated almost exclusively on the face. But they did not rest satisfied with copying the facts of nature and investigat ing the laws of construction and of action, they took that farther step which the Greeks had taken before them, and drew the figure not merely as it appeared to their bodily eyes, but with that more perfect beauty which was suggested to the eye in the artist s mind. Raphael openly affirmed this principle by declaring that he drew men and women, not as they were, but as they ought to be, and the process of idealization may be actually seen in what he did by comparing his studies with his completed works. We have hitherto spoken simply of the use of line, that being essentially drawing in the strict sense of delineation ; but when the European mind had reached the period of the Renaissance a new study took its rise chiaroscuro Chiur- which became so inextricably mingled with that of drawing oscuro - that it is impossible to speak adequately of the one without giving some account of the other. The increased know ledge of the muscular structure of the body led the artists to pay more attention to modelling than had ever been paid to it before, so that good modelling got to be considered an essential part of drawing. It may be necessary, for the uninstructed in artistic matters to explain in this place VII.