JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
fine, clear, strong and expressive utterance: this was their ideal. The word "style" is never more fitly employed than in speaking of Mantegna, Michael Angelo and Poussin, and of this last in particular. Poussin himself in speaking of his works, said: "those who know how to read them properly." And Bernini, enraptured with Poussin's Extreme Unction, says that "it produced the same effect as a fine sermon, to which the hearer listens with very great attention and from which he goes away in silence but feeling the effect within."[1] Poussin and Mantegna unhesitatingly sacrifice beauty to style, and neither Poussin nor Mantegna, nor yet Michael Angelo is, truly speaking, a colourist; their colour is their weak point and Poussin, who recognizes this, does not hesitate to hold colour very cheap. "The singular application bestowed on the study of colour," said he, "is an obstacle which prevents people from attaining the real aim of painting; and the man who attaches himself to the main thing
- ↑ "Journal of the Travels in France of the Cavalière Bernini," by M. de Chantelou ("Gazette des Beaux Arts," 1877-85).
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