the Madonnas according as their pose agrees with or varies from the Cimabue patent. One may also enjoy a diversion by classifying the distortions in anatomy as much from the Pharaonic, the Aegean, Korean, Japanese and Hindu executions as from the statues on the facade of the treasury at Delphi or from those on the portals and tympanum of the cathedrals in France.
But the multitude of specimens and the plurality of types, inevitable as they are, compel us at, last to come down to the fundamentals of beauty and truth in shilpa and to try to decipher the alphabet of plastic and pictorial art.
13. The Alphabet of Beauty.
Drawing, painting, bas relief and sculpture deal with the subject-matter of anatomy, botany, and the other branches of natural history, but they are not governed by these sciences. These arts are regulated by the science of space, geometry, the vidyâ of rupam, the knowledge of form, morphology.
The language of the painter and the sculptor is, therefore, point, line, angle, cone, square, curve, mass, volume. The creators of beauty speak the vocabulary of positions, magnitudes, dimensions, perspectives. If we are to associate with the manipulators of these forms we must learn how to employ the terminology of obliques and parallelograms, prisms and pentagons. We must also have to practise understanding the message, which in every instance is spiritual, of the lumps, patches, contours, balls, depths, and heights.
We can only make ourselves a nuisance in the company of painters and sculptors if we speak a jargon which is utterly incomprehensible to them. Such jargons, not to be found in the dictionary of art, are the technical terms known as the tibia, the clavicle, the cerebellum, the stirnum, the pelvic girdle. Other jargons like these are the dicotyledons, the conifers, the palmates, the pinnates. More such jargons are love, anger, hatred, malice, compassion, and the rest of the rasas, whatever be their number according to the latest experiments in "individual psychology."
To a shilpin there is only one organ of sense, and that is the eye. The artist does not, however, view the world as a theatre of minerals, plants, and animals, nor of the races of men with their physical, mental or emotional characteristics. In the geology and anthropo-geography of art there are recorded only the forms (and also the colours). The optic nerves, or for that matter, the entire sensibility of the artist as artist can not respond to anything but
