same excellence. … But when they came to examine more of those works, they found the antients had not confined themselves to any such laws; and therefore that it was impossible to build such rules upon their works. … The young student is confused by reading a variety of authors on the subject. Among a number of the best of these each delivers what he esteems to be the most true and perfect proportion, but in each this differs. All have founded their maxims upon something in the antique, but, some having taken in the same order one piece, and some another, these proportions vary extremely; for the antients so varied in their works. Palladio is understood to be the best and greatest of these authors, we shall therefore deliver his as the general and received proportion in each order; but upon a general review of the several remains in which that order is preserved, we shall add what is the mean or middle proportion of the several parts, calculating from them all. The modern architects too strictly and scrupulously follow these antients; they did not so closely or servilely copy one another."[1] Such recognition of the difference between the theorists' rules of the orders and the ancient orders themselves is rare in the modern literature of architecture. But the remedy proposed to relieve the student from the confusion arising from the perusal of different authors each of whom "delivers what he esteems to be the most true and perfect proportion" is of little efficacy in practice; for the mean or middle proportion would still impose a fixed rule, and the true artist does not work by rules of any sort. The proportions of a genuine work of art are determined by a sense of proportion that is governed by laws too fine to be formulated, and which no rules can reach. It is his natural sense of proportion, developed by observation and exercise, that more than anything else makes an artist. Prescription may serve in mechanical processes, but not in the production of works of art. We may get Palladian formalism by rules, but no architecture of vital character. A system of proportions that may be good in one case cannot be good in any other, and therefore it is that "the antients " so varied in their works. That rules are useless to an artist the Italian writer Baldinucci, in his book on the proportions of the human figure,[2] has well remarked. He says
