is properly a graphic rather than a plastic principle, among sculptors
or among draughtsmen. The above are cases in which the relief
sculptor exercises his liberty in the introduction of other objects
besides human figures into his sculptured compositions. But there is
another kind of relief sculpture in which the artist has less choice.
That is, the kind in which the sculptor is called in to decorate with
carved work parts of an architectural construction which are not
adapted for the introduction of figure subjects, or for their introduction
only as features in a scheme of ornament that comprises many
other elements. To this head belongs most of the carving of capitals,
mouldings, friezes (except the friezes of Greek temples), bands,
cornices, and, in the Gothic style, of doorway arches, niches, canopies,
pinnacles, brackets, spandrels and the thousand members and parts
of members which that style so exquisitely adorned with true or
conventionalized imitations of natural forms. This is no doubt a
subordinate function of the art; and it is impossible, as we have seen
already, to find a precise line of demarcation between carving, in this
decorative use, which is properly sculpture, and that which belongs
properly to architecture.
Leaving such discussions, we may content ourselves with the definition of sculpture as a shaping art, of which the business is to express and arouse emotion by the imitation of natural objects, and principally the human body, in solid form, reproducing either their true proportions in three dimensions, Definition of sculpture. or their proportions in the two dimensions of length and breadth only, with a diminished proportion in the third dimension of depth or thickness.
In considering bas-relief as a form of sculpture, we have found ourselves approaching the confines of the second of the shaping imitative arts, the graphic art or art of painting. Painting, as to its means or instruments of imitation, dispenses with the third dimension altogether. It imitates natural Painting as an imitative art. objects by representing them as they are represented on the retina of the eye itself, simply as an assemblage of variously shaped and variously shaded patches of colour on a flat surface. Painting does not reproduce the third dimension of reality by any third dimension of its own whatever; but leaves the eye to infer the solidity of objects, their recession and projection, their nearness and remoteness, by the same perspective signs by which it also infers those facts in nature, namely, by the direction of their several boundary lines, the incidence and distribution of their lights and shadows, the strength or faintness of their tones of colour.
Hence this art has an infinitely greater range and freedom than any form of sculpture. Near and far is all the same to it, and whatever comes into the field of vision can come also into the field of a picture; trees as well as persons, and clouds as well as trees, and stars as well as clouds; the Range of objects imitable by painting. remotest mountain snows, as well as the violet of the foreground, and far-off multitudes of people as well as one or two near the eye. Whatever any man has seen, or can imagine himself as seeing, that he can also fix by painting, subject only to one great limitation,—that of the range of brightness which he is able to attain in imitating natural colour illuminated by light. In this particular his art can but correspond according to a greatly diminished ratio with the effects of nature. But excepting this it can do for the eye almost all that nature herself does; or at least all that nature would do if man had only one eye since the three dimensions of space produce upon our binocular machinery of vision a particular stereoscopic effect of which a picture, with its two dimensions only, is incapable. The range of the art being thus almost unbounded, its selections have naturally been dictated by the varying interest felt in this or that subject of representation by the societies among whom the art has at various times been practised. As in sculpture, so in painting, the human form has always held the first place. For the painter, the intervention of costume between man and his environment is not a misfortune in the same degree as it is for the sculptor. For him, clothes of whatever fashion or amplitude have their own charm; they serve to diversify the aspect of the world, and to express the characters and stations, if not the physical frames, of his personages; and he is as happy or happier among the brocades of Venice as among the bare limbs of the Spartan palaestra. Along with man, there come into painting all animals and vegetation, all man’s furniture and belongings, his dwelling-places, fields and landscape; and in modern times also landscape and nature for their own sakes, skies, seas, mountains and wildernesses apart from man.
Besides the two questions about any art, what objects does it imitate, and by the use of what means or instruments, Aristotle proposes (in the case of poetry) the further question, which of several possible forms does the imitation in any given case assume? We may transfer very nearly the The chief forms or modes of painting: line, light-and-shade and colour. same inquiry to painting, and may ask, concerning any painter, according to which of three possible systems he works. The three possible systems are (1) that which attends principally to the configuration and relations of natural objects as indicated by the direction of their boundaries, for defining which there is a convention in universal use, the convention, that is, of line; this may be called for short the system of line; (2) that which attends chiefly to their configuration and relations as indicated by the incidence and distribution of their lights and shadows—this is the system of light-and-shade or chiaroscuro; and (3) that which attends chiefly, not to their configuration at all, but to the distribution, qualities and relations of local colours upon their surface—this is the system of colour. It is not possible for a painter to imitate natural objects to the eye at all without either defining their boundaries by outlines, or suggesting the shape of their masses by juxtapositions of light and dark or of local colours. In the complete art of painting, of course, all three methods are employed at once. But in what is known as outline drawing and outline engraving, one of the three methods only is employed, line; in monochrome pictures, and in shaded drawings and engravings, two only, line with light-and-shade; and in the various shadeless forms of decorative painting and colour-printing, two only, line with colour. Even in the most accomplished examples of the complete art of painting, as was pointed out by Ruskin, we find that there almost always prevails a predilection for some one of these three parts of painting over the other two. Thus among the mature Italians of the Renaissance, Titian is above all things a painter in colour, Michelangelo in line, Leonardo in light-and-shade. Many academic painters in their day tried to combine the three methods in equal balance; to the impetuous spirit of the great Venetian, Tintoretto, it was alone given to make the attempt with a great measure of success. A great part of the effort of modern painting has been to get rid of the linear convention altogether, to banish line and develop the resources of the oil medium in imitating on canvas, more strictly than the early masters attempted, the actual appearance of things on the retina as an assemblage of coloured streaks and patches modified and toned in the play of light-and-shade and atmosphere.
It remains to consider, for the purpose of our classification, what are the technical varieties of the painter’s craft. Since we gave the generic name of painting to all imitation of natural objects by the assemblage of lines, colours and lights and darks on a single plane, we must logically include as varieties of Technical varieties of the painter’s craft. painting not only the ordinary crafts of spreading or laying pictures on an opaque surface in fresco, oil, distemper or water-colour, but also the craft of arranging a picture to be seen by the transmission of light through a transparent substance, in glass painting; the craft of fitting together a multitude of solid cubes or cylinders so that their united surface forms a picture to the eye, as in mosaic; the craft of spreading vitreous colours in a state of fusion so that they form a picture when hardened, as in enamel; and even, it would seem, the crafts of weaving, tapestry, and embroidery, since these also yield to the eye a plane surface figured in imitation of nature. As drawing we must also count incised or engraved work of all kinds representing merely the outlines of objects and not their modellings, as for instance the graffiti on Greek and Etruscan mirror-backs and dressing-cases; while raised work in low relief, in which outlines are plainly marked and modellings neglected, furnishes, as we have seen, a doubtful class between sculpture and painting. In all figures that are first modelled in the solid and then variously coloured, sculpture and painting bear a common share; and by far the greater part both of ancient and medieval statuary was in fact tinted so as to imitate or at least suggest the colours of life. But as the special characteristic of sculpture, solidity in the third dimension, is in these cases present, it is to that art and not to painting that we shall still ascribe the resulting work.
With these indications we may leave the art of painting defined in general terms as a shaping or space art, of which the business is to express and arouse emotion by the imitation of all kinds of natural objects, reproducing on a plane surface the relations of their boundary lines, lights and shadows, or colours, or Definition of painting. all three of these appearances together.
The next and last of the imitative arts is the speaking art of poetry. The transition from sculpture and painting to poetry is, from the point of view not of our present but of our first division among the fine arts, abrupt and absolute. It is a transition from space into time, from the sphere of material forms Poetry as an imitative art. to the sphere of immaterial images. Following Aristotle’s method, we may define the objects of poetry’s imitation or evocation, as everything of which the idea or image can be called up by words, that is, every force and phenomenon of nature, every operation and result of art, every fact of life and history, or every imagination of such a fact, every thought and feeling of the human spirit, for which mankind in the course of its long evolution has been able to create in speech an explicit and appropriate sign. The means or instruments of poetry’s imitation are these verbal signs or words, arranged in lines, strophes or stanzas, so that their sounds have some of the regulated qualities and direct emotional effect of music.
The three chief modes or forms of the imitation may still be defined as they were defined by Aristotle himself. First comes the epic or narrative form, in which the poet speaks alternately for himself and his characters, now describing their situations and feelings in his own words, and anon making The chief forms or modes of poetry. each of them speak in the first person for himself. Second comes the lyric form, in which the poet speaks in his own name exclusively, and gives expression to sentiments which are purely personal. Third comes the dramatic form, in which the poet does not speak for himself at all, but only puts into the mouths of each of his personages successively such discourse as he thinks
