[a] The design for this picture was probably suggested by Longepied's fine sculptured group of Immortality at the Louvre, the idea of which was no doubt drawn from Canova's L'Amour et Psyche. There are Tangara groups and fragments of larger works in existence showing that the Greeks executed many designs of a similar character.
[b] See also Girodet's Burial of Atala, and Le Brun's Death of Cato.
Limitations of the landscape painter--Illusion of opening distance--Illusion of motion in landscape--Moonlight scenes--Transient conditions.
Considered as a separate branch of the painter's art, landscape is on a comparatively low plane, because the principal signs with which it deals, and the arrangement of them to form a view, may be varied indefinitely without a sense of incongruity arising. Thus there can be no ideal in the art; that is to say, no ideal can be conceived which is general in its character. The artist can aspire to no definite goal: his imagination is limited to the arrangement of things which are inanimate and expressionless. He may produce sensorial, but not intellectual, beauty. The nobler human attributes and passions, as wisdom, courage, spiritual exaltation, patriotism, cannot be connected with landscape, and so it is unable to produce in the mind the elevation of thought and grandeur of sentiment which are the sweetest blossoms of the tree of art.[60]
Another drawback in landscape is the necessity for painting it on an extraordinarily reduced scale. Because of this the highest qualities of beauty in nature--grandeur and sublimity--can only with difficulty be suggested on canvas, for actual magnitude is requisite for the production of either of these qualities in any considerable degree. A volcano in eruption has no force at all in a painting, a result which is due, not so much to the inability of the painter to represent moving smoke and fire, as to the impossibility of depicting their enormous masses. The disability of the painter in respect of the representation of magnitude is readily seen in the case of a cathedral interior. This may or may not have the quality of grandeur, but a picture cannot differentiate between one that has, and one that has not, because no feeling of grandeur can arise in looking at a painted interior, the element of actual space being absent.