The Beautiful! ’Tis but beauty seen through the eyes of the soul.
Common
or plainly genuine truths cannot be the object of art. Illusion upon a true
foundation: that is the secret of the fine arts.
There
are many beauties which would not be natural were it not for the efforts of
art.
The object
of art is to unite matter with forms, which are the truest, fairest and purest
things in nature.
Beautiful
lines are the foundation of all beauty. There are arts in which they must be
visible, such as architecture, which is happy to flaunt them. There are others,
such as sculpture, in which one ought to disguise them with care. In painting,
they are always sufficiently veiled by colour. Nature hides them, buries and
covers them, in living beings. The latter, if they are to be beautiful, must
show their lines but little: for the skeleton is in the line and life in the
contour.
