er, are largely in the nature of outline drawings. This is a remarkable fact considering the somewhat remote relation line

lves to be caught up again later on and defined once more. Its relationship with visual appearances is not sufficient to justify the instinct for line drawing. It comes, I think, as has alread

power a line possesses of instinctively directing the eye along its course is of the utmost value also, enabling the artist to concentrate the attention of the beholder where he wishes. The

e visual knowledge was such a negligible quantity, but whose mental perceptions were so magnificent, was alw

re was an incised outline. After these incised lines some man of genius thought of cutting away the surface of the wall between the outlines and mode

d nothing else than an outline lightly shaded to indicate form. Light and shade were not seriously perceived until Leonardo da Vinci. And a wonderful discovery it was thought to be, and was, indeed, although it seems difficult to understand where men's eyes had been for so long wi

he outline demanded by this sense that the light and shade were to be introduced as something

t part of the art deserves the greatest praise,"[1] wrote Leonardo da Vinci, and the insistence on this "standing out" quality, with its appeal to the touch sense as

ci, Treatise on Pai

cquired to great certainty by dint of study; as the outlines of the human figure, particularly those which do not bend, are invariab

eat variety. So it cannot be the visual appearance he is speaking about. It can only refer to the mental idea of the shape of the members of the human figure. The remark "particularly those that do not bend" shows this also, for

te

BY W

the collection of Charles

o, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, and the Venetians were all faithful to it as the means of holding their pictures together; altho

were, another instrument to the orchestra at the disposal of the artist, enabling him to add to the somewhat crude directness and simplicity of the ear

is liable to be led away by side issues connected with the things represented, instead of seeing the emotional intentions of the artist expressed through them. The mind is apt to leave the picture and looking, as it were, not at it but through it, to pursue a train of thought associated with the objects represented as real objects, but alien to the artistic int

alistic movements of the nineteenth century brought to light is particularly liable at this time to obscure the simpler and more primitive qualities on which all good art is built. At the height of that movement line drawing went out of fashion, and charcoal, and an aw

ed to put new life and strength into the vagaries of natural

ce, and men like Rossetti and Burne-Jones found a better means of expressing the things that moved them in the technique of the fourteenth century. And it was no doubt a feeling of the weakening influence on art, as an expressive force, of the elaborate rea

the pavement artist. But without going to the extreme of flouting the centuries of culture that art inherits, as it is now fashionable in many places to do, students will do well to study at first the early rather than the late work of the different schools, so as to get in touc

ns of its architecture are of a refinement that is, I think, never even attempted in these days. What architect now thinks of correcting the poorness of hard, straight lines by very slightly curving them? Or of slightly sloping inwards the columns of his facade to add to the strength of its appearance? The amount of these variations is of

n is seen in the art of Michael Angelo. His followers adopted the big, muscular type of their master, but lost

strength and simplicity of early art are added the infinite refinements and gra

ial, to which must be added the knowledge we now have of the arts of the East, of China, Japan, and India, the modern artist has to select those things that appeal to him; has to select those elements that answer to his inmost need of expressing himself as an artist. No wonder a period of artistic dyspepsia is upon us, no wonder ou

line, and no work that aims at a sublime impression can dispens

to the painter, and the numerous drawings that exist by the grea

s to find a simpler convention founded on this basis, a