Body painting

“ However, just as in painting every object should be represented as belonging to a wider whole of space, so in sculpture, every part of the body should be represented as belonging to the whole body. If, therefore, only a part of the body is sculptured, it should be evident that it is a part and not the whole. In the portrait statue, for example, if the head alone is represented, there should appear, along with the head, as much of the bust as will suggest attachment to the body, in order that it may not seem decapitated! ”

“ We note things that have significance for us for the first time—the fineness of the hair under the dark bonnet, the pressure of the body's weight on the arm supported by the railing, the relaxation of the arm holding the fan, and very clever painting by artists of less passionate sincerity takes on a meretricious look in contrast with this closeness of interpretation. ”

“ In particular, the mouth and eyes possess most mobility and resource in seizing and making apparent every shifting mood of soul-life. Changes of this character, which are compatible with the art of painting, the sculptor must exclude. Sculpture must rather concentrate its attention on the permanent traits of spiritual expression, and retain and disclose such in the posture and configuration of the body no less than in the face. ”

“ In literature alone of the arts, images from all departments of sense can be aroused. Visual images play a greater role there than in painting and sculpture, for the reason that, in the latter, visual sensations take their place—we do not image what we can see. In sculpture, the greater part of the imagery is of touch and motion—in the imagination, we feel the surfaces and move with the represented motions; the whiteness or blackness of the materials prevents the arousal of the image of the color of the body. ”

“ Besides, that is not painting, the whole of painting. We think we are artists because we can reproduce a face, and the face is only a part of the body. We tremble with fear at the thought of the nude. ”

“ To this must be added that certain less important parts which lie on the surface of the human body, as the veins, folds of the skin, etc., which change their appearance with every movement, and which owing to the pliancy of the skin become easily extended or contracted, are not expressed at all in the works of sculptors in general—though it is true that sculptors of high talent have marked them in some degree. ”

“ In the school of landscape painting emotion is created entirely by combinations of moving light and by the rhythms thus caused. In the school of the nude, which pictures the many shades of expression of the human body, the artist tries to show the human soul as expressed by physical forms, enlivened by the emotions of the moment, and at the same time the characteristics suitable to the individual and the race, such as they appear through momentary physical modifications. ”

“ As the light, with its ceaseless variety of tints and hues, is the most spiritual element of nature, and as the eye is the most spiritual of man’s senses, so painting, as concerned about these, is the most spiritual of the arts, and the one with which the symbolical spirit readily associates itself. Painting directs itself wholly to the eye, whereas sculpture appeals indeed to the eye, but only as the necessary medium for satisfying the corporeal sense and feeling. ”

“ CHAPTER XII SCULPTURE The sculptor has this advantage over all other artists, that his chief subject is the most beautiful thing in the world—the human body. In two ways the body is supremely beautiful: as an expression of mind and as an embodiment of sensuous charm. In the body mind has become actually incarnate; there purpose, emotion, and thought have taken shape and manifestation. And this shape, through its appeal to the amorous, parental, and gregarious feelings, and through the complete organization of its parts, has no rival in loveliness. ”

“ Discourse and action show man as he is, more directly than the springing of the muscles and the moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has command. Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of light in the eye—music, by its subtle range of tones—can refine most delicately upon a single moment of passion, unravelling its finest threads.
But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure form? Because, by this limitation, it becomes a perfect medium of expression for one peculiar motive of the imaginative intellect. ”

“ Colour and shadow, aërial perspective and complicated grouping, denied to sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, have their own significance, their real relation to feelings vaguer, but not less potent, than those which find expression in the simple human form. To painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensible by sculpture. ”

“ We state as a physiological fact, that a head so small, with a brow so receding, could not have belonged to any man who has made himself conspicuous in the world's history. Again, descending to mere matter of costume, there cannot be a doubt that the purple mantle flung on the psalmist's shoulders is wholly wanting in study of detail, and constitutes a blot on the landscape. Barring these oversights, the picture possesses merits."
At this period we hear the first critical murmurs against the artist's very deliberately chosen method of flesh-painting. ”

“ What has been said about sculpture will apply in a great measure to this art. The human form, the world around us, the works of man's hands, are represented in painting, not for their own sake merely, but with a view to bringing thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousness of the spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they have been impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculpture, can represent more complicated feelings, can suggest thoughts of a subtler intricacy. Through colour, it can play, like music, directly on powerful but vague emotion. ”

“ The slight inclination of a head, the shyness of a glance, the mobility of a mouth, the uneasiness of a hand, the nervous strain of a gesture are all turned to account in the ultimate result. Every tone of color in itself and in its relation to the other tones, every light in its relation to its shadow and to the other lights, every melting contour in contrast with every accented contour, and every texture in relation to every other texture—all are caught within the angle of the painter’s focus. ”

“ To give back nature just as she is seen, in a purely pictorial aspect, is the final achievement of the painter’s craft, but as the differences of tone and colour on which pictorial beauty depends are extremely subtle, so it is only by a skill of touch that seems like the most accomplished sleight of hand that the required illusion can be produced, and in this way the actual handling of the brush assumes in modern painting an importance which in the old days it never possessed. ”

“ We detect the greatest deficiency in those passing lines of thought and form, where little meets the outward sense, but in which the science and feeling of the artists are most surely displayed and most severely tried; the expression of the eyes are studied, and the eye-ball, with intent to produce an imposing look, is made larger than in nature. The hair, though skilfully massed, and fine in distant effect, is particularly heavy; indeed, the characteristic defect is harshness—an absence of those sweet and flowing lines which bring the contour fully, but graciously, upon the view. ”

“ I have escaped one mistake, into which the most famous painters have sometimes fallen; in my canvas the whiteness shines through the densest and most persistent shadow. I have not marked out the limits of my figure in hard, dry outlines, and brought every least anatomical detail into prominence (like a host of dunces, who fancy that they can draw because they can trace a line elaborately smooth and clean) , for the human body is not contained within the limits of line. In this the sculptor can approach the truth more nearly than we painters. ”

“ But the æsthetic faculty was thus stimulated into activity with results which tended to develop art in all its forms of carving, modelling, sculpture, and painting. An appreciation of colour, not merely for personal adornment, but in its artistic application—alike as a decorative art, and as the means whereby natural objects can be presented with vivid truthfulness to the eye,—is widely diffused; though the mastery of form by the modeller or sculptor long precedes that of chiaroscuro, or aerial perspective. ”

“ Only one painting served as a link to connect the past and present—a crafty, mysterious head with haggard and gaunt features, cheekbones punctuated with a comma of paint, the hair overspread with pearls, a painted neck rising stiffly from the fluted ruff. ”

“ But the painter can depict the human body not merely as something sensuously beautiful, but as expressive, through gesture and pose and countenance, of character and thought. The complex psychic life of man is thus open to him for delineation. In the portrait, through the attentive study of the many varying expressions of the inner life, leading to the selection of some characteristic pose or action, the artist concentrates into a single image what seems to him to be the distinctive nature of the man. ”

“ But sculpture, and, above all, painting, propose to themselves the imitation not only of the forms of nature, but of the characters and passions of the human soul. In those sublime arts the dexterity of the hand is of little avail, unless it is animated by fancy, and guided by the most correct taste and observation. ”

“ The smooth, hard, flat surface, which so many sculptors seem to think expressive of beauty, is a falsehood. To learn to see, and seeing to copy, the undulations and indentations of the human body which prove that blood and life are beneath the skin, is the secret of art. ”

“ The arts give back only so much of nature as the human eye has been able to master. The most primitive stage of drawing and sculpture presents man with his arms and legs, his ten fingers and ten toes, branching out into mid-air; the apperception of the body has been evidently practical and successive, and the artist sets down what he knows rather than any of the particular perceptions that conveyed that knowledge. ”

“ But the painting is far from being without faults;—the face is a good deal too round and plump, the nose is made slightly aquiline—a decided mistake,—and the neck is much too short, at least so it appears in the engraving. ”

“ The beauty of line in sculpture is, of course, no invention of the artist; for nature has created it in the body itself. The sculptor takes this beauty as the basis of his work, remodeling only by the elimination of details, through which purer effects of line are obtained, or by the selection and emphasis of pose, through which these effects are rendered more intensely expressive. ”

“ History painting must exhibit variety in its fullest extent. In temper, size, complexion, actions, plumpness, leanness, thick, thin, large, small, rough, smooth, old age and youth, strong and muscular, weak, with little appearance of muscles, cheerfulness and melancholy. Some should be with curled hair, and some with straight; some short, some long, some quick in their motions, and some slow, with a variety of dresses and colours, according as the subject may require. ”

“ In the same way the human skin, sensitive throughout in its minutest parts, reveals to us the morbidezza of its colouring, those tints of flesh-colour and vein-colour which are the despair of an artist. On the other hand, however much the human body presents, as the apparent mirror of Life, a contrast with that of animals, it undoubtedly expresses also the natural process of self-preservation in the subdivision of the skin, and the indentations, wrinkles, pores, small hairs and veins which we find attach thereto. ”

“ But if any one desire the meretricious painting of warm light and cool yet not hard shade, the effect of colour, with the twitching of triangles, the spangles glittering, and all the arrangement contrived to take the eye, then he can have it here as well as noble sculpture. ”

“ I believe you are taught anatomy in our school [Pg 13] more thoroughly than any other school to date, because we want you to carry a living picture of all or any part of the body in your mind as a ready painter carries the picture of the face, scenery, beast or any thing he wishes to represent by his brush. He would only be a waster of time and paint and make a daub that would disgust any one who would employ him. ”

“ Pure sculpture, as the ancients understood it, the art of form per se, demands the nude figure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it. The costume of to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlike mediæval armor, it has no beauty of its own. A painter may make it interesting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose it in shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a space of darkness. ”

“ The muscles delineate the form, and stamp it with energy and grace; and the soft substance which is spread over them smooths their ruggedness, and gives to the contours the gentle undulations of the line of beauty. Every organ of sense is a peculiar and separate ornament; and the skin, which polishes the surface, and gives it that charm of colouring so inimitable by art, finally conspires to render the whole the fairest work of the creation. ”

“ The figure of a man, completely nude and with shaven head and face, raises a libation-vase with a long spout, from which he is about to pour water into a vase holding two palm leaves and a flowering branch. [25] The goddess in whose honour the rite is being performed is seated in the mountains, represented as in later times by a number of small lozenges or half circles. While her feet and knees are in profile, the head is represented full-face, and the sculptor's want of skill in this novel treatment has led him to assign the head a size out of all proportion to the rest of the body. ”