_Dives agris, dives positis in fœnore nummis_
may, without the least compunction for offending the rules of perspective, place figures of the smallest size above the vast doors of his apartments and salloons. I speak here of those ornaments which make part of the furniture; not of figures which are often, and for good reasons, set up promiscuously in collections.
The decorations of architecture are often as ill-chosen. Arms and trophies deck a hunting-house as nonsensically, as Ganymede and the eagle, Jupiter and Leda, figure it among the reliefs of the brazen gates of St. Peter’s church at Rome.
Arts have a double aim: to delight and to instruct. Hence the greatest landscape-painters think, they have fulfilled but half their task in drawing their pieces without figures.
Let the artist’s pencil, like the pen of Aristotle, be impregnated with reason; that, after having satiated the eye, he may nourish the mind: and this he may obtain by Allegory; investing, not hiding his ideas. Then, whether he chuse some poetical object himself, or follow the dictates of others, he shall be inspired by his art, shall be fired with the flame brought down from heaven by Prometheus, shall entertain the votary of art, and instruct the mere lover of it.
A LETTER, CONTAINING OBJECTIONS AGAINST The foregoing REFLEXIONS.
As you have written on the Greek arts and artists, I wish you had made your treatise as much the object of your caution as the Greek artists made their works; which, before dismissing them, they exhibited to publick view, in order to be examined by everybody, and especially by competent judges of the art. The trial was held during the grand, chiefly the Olympian, games; and all Greece was interested on Ætion’s producing his picture of the nuptials of Alexander and Roxana. You, Sir, wanted a Proxenidas to be judged by, as well as that artist; and had it not been for your mysterious concealment, I might have communicated your treatise, before its publication, to some learned men and connoisseurs of my acquaintance, without mentioning the author’s name.
One of them visited Italy twice, where he devoted all his time to a most anxious examination of painting, and particularly several months to each eminent picture, at the very place where it was painted; the only method, you know, to form a connoisseur. The judgment of a man able to tell you which of Guido’s altar-pieces is painted on taffeta, or linnen, what sort of wood Raphael chose for his transfiguration, &c. the judgment of such a man, I fancy, must be allowed to be decisive.