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In aristocracies a few great pictures are produced; in democratic countries, a vast number of insignificant ones. In the former, statues are raised of bronze; in the latter, they are modelled in plaster.
When I arrived for the first time at New York, by that part of the Atlantic Ocean which is called the Narrows, I was surprised to perceive along the shore, at some distance from the city, a considerable number of little palaces of white marble, several of which were built after the models of ancient architecture. When I went the next day to inspect more closely the buildings which had particularly attracted my notice, I found that its walls were of whitewashed brick, and its columns of painted wood. All the edifices which I had admired the night before were of the same kind.
The social condition and the institutions of democracy impart, moreover, certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts which it is easy to point out. They frequently withdraw them from the delineation of the soul to fix them exclusively on that of the body: and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and thought: in a word, they put the Real in the place of the Ideal.
I doubt whether Raphael studied the minutest intricacies of the mechanism of the human body as thoroughly as the draftsmen of our own time.[1] He did not attach the same importance to rigorous
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[I trust I may be allowed to enter a protest against an opinion which
some readers will perhaps agree with me in thinking a mistaken one.
Whoever has examined the accurate study, the close fidelity to nature, and
the profound scientific knowledge of Raphael and of almost all the great
masters of art, in their drawings, (where the means by which their perfect
works were achieved are more easily discernible than amidst the total
splendour of those works themselves,) will, I think, prefer them to the crude
design or the pedantic modelling of more recent times. Nor has the
industry of the elder artists in these details ever been surpassed. For instance,
in the series of sketches for Raphael's finest works, one represents the
skeletons of the whole group, in perfect and not unmeaning osteology; a
second reproduces the same group fleshed with complete anatomical science;
in a third, the artist proceeds to put drapery on his figures. To compare
the drawing of Raphael with that of David, is to compare the science of a
surgeon with that of a butcher. The former penetrated by his art into the
hidden beauty and truth of nature : the latter dragged nature to the easel,
and deprived her at once of life, truth, and freedom.
I would be understood to confine this remark to the illustration here, as
