James Ward

“ But even here in London, if you see paraphrases of Greek architecture just painted white on a clear sunshiny day, you will see a faint reflex of its pristine glory. The rising moon that the sun makes on the echinus, contrasted with soft graduated warm shades and sharp blue shadows, is the finest thing an architect has ever compassed. The splendid sculpture that adorned its metopes may be seen in the Elgin room of the British Museum. ”

“ Though we may all love colour, there are very few amongst us who have the courage to advocate its use in the decoration of buildings. We visit Italy, France, Germany, and the East, and admire the many and beautifully decorated churches, palaces, city halls and other public and private buildings, but the lessons we may have learned are lost to us, for we come back to our country to still hug our ancient prejudice against the use of colour, and are contented with the greyness of life, and with the dreariness and drab of our great manufacturing cities. ”

“ But intellect does much more than devise and contrive in unquestioning subservience to the impulse of the moment, like some demon of Eastern fable; even the brutes, whose cunning is on the whole of this sort, are not without traces of self-control. As motives conflict and the evils of hasty action recur to mind, deliberation succeeds to mere invention and design. In moments of leisure, the more imperious cravings being stilled, besides the rehearsal of failures or successes in the past, come longer and longer flights of imagination into the future. ”

“ The notions of form, adaptation and control here force themselves upon our notice in contrast to matter and its blind, purposeless collisions. Undeterred by this amazing contrast, however, those who uphold the theory that Nature is really a closed mechanism must, and do, refuse to draw any line: living and lifeless, artificial and natural, are distinctions of no account from the point of view of the mechanical whole: life and mind are the concomitants of certain of its workings but the determinants of none. ”

“ There are some fine passages of luminous and harmonious colouring in the draperies, the faces of the figures have a tenderness and purity of expression, and the whole work is a convincing example of the master at his best. Being on a level with the eye, and in a good light, one is enabled to see in this fresco that Luini’s method of painting consisted in his first modelling the forms in a solid impasto, and afterwards finishing his work, like the majority of Italian fresco painters, by shading transparently in finely hatched lines. ”

“ If we love to see colours in nature and in pictures, why should we not also love to see a beautiful, a commonplace, or even any badly designed building decorated in pleasant schemes of harmonious colouring? We are quite prepared to hear the modern critic, as well as the modern “cubist,” reply to this, that “art is art because it is not nature,” that “it is absurd for an artist to worship, or to represent Beauty,” or they may use any other convenient shibboleth, to protest against the representation of nature in art either in form or colour. ”

“ It is quite impossible for us now to imagine the effects of years of experience removed, or to picture the character of our infantile presentations before our interests had led us habitually to concentrate attention on some and to ignore others. In place of the many things which we can now see and hear, not merely would there then be a confused presentation of the whole field of vision and of a mass of undistinguished sounds, but even the difference between sights and sounds themselves would be without its present distinctness. ”

“ The three absolute essentials of ancient and mediæval painting, which also characterized the best work of the Renaissance, appear to have been a striving after the symbolic expression of the spirit of the subject, a restfulness and dignity of form, and the beauty of colour. Whatever else we look for, we ought to find these three essentials in a successful work of monumental painting. In this kind of art, and indeed in all art, small things should be sacrificed to great, and the commonplace or matter-of-fact to the rendering or expression of the idea ”