Author:

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2018-01-13

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 9780483004245

Excerpt from The International Review, 1880, Vol. 8 I have mentioned by accident the tableaux vivants got up at public festivals in the time of Rubens, and this reminds me of a very par ticular merit in his compositions, which is, that, although the subjects so often approach perilously near to the subjects of tableaux viz/ants, the pictures themselves are always quite distinct from a mere con catenation of natural objects. The quality which so separates them from mere Nature is the fusing power of genius which unites things together in one whole. It is a quality by no means equally possessed by great artists. For example, Holbein and Albert Diirer were great artists, but they are famous for other merits; they scarcely had this quality at all. Even Raphael, though he had much more of it than these two, had much less of it than Rubens. It is difficult to men tion other artists who were fully equal to Rubens in this respect, except Correggio and Reynolds. The quality is essentially modern, if we date modernism from the Italian renaissance. You will not find it at all among the mediaeval artists who drew their objects one by one Without considering the effect of groups upon the eye, the most striking example being the delicate care they could give to a single leaf and their incapacity to deal with landscape. You Will not find it in the remnants of antique painting which have come down to us the ancient Egyptian, the ancient Greek, would put a certain definite number of objects into his picture, but he would paint them as if they were presented in isolation. In Rubens nothing is isolated. His sketches Show this fine quality of synthesis even better than the finished pictures upon which his assistants had worked. He had magnificent skill in various different kinds of sketching, but more particularly in Oil. There is a lightness of hand, there is a sureness and at the same time an evanescence of touch in the Oil Sketches of Rubens which are the delight of artists, and which greatly contribute to that pictorial unity we have been talking about, or at least render it technically easier when the mind of the painter has completely conceived it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.