The Unknown Masterpiece Read Online Free PDF

who, without copying it exactly, can represent its movement and its life. It’s our task to seize the physiognomy, the spirit, the soul of our models, whether objects or living beings. Effects! Effects! But they’re just the accidents of life, not life itself. A hand—to continue with my example—a hand isn’t just attached to an arm, and that arm to a body; no, it expresses and continues an idea that must be seized and rendered. Neither painter, nor poet, nor sculptor can separate effect from cause, they’re invincibly united! That’s your real struggle! Many painters succeed instinctively, without ever knowing this theme of art. You draw a woman, but you don’t see her! That’s not the way to penetrate nature’s secrets. With no thought on your part, your hand reproduces the model you’ve copied in your life-drawing class. You don’t delve deeply enough into the intimacies of form. You don’t pursue them with sufficient love and perseverance in all their disguises and evasions. Beauty is something difficult and austere which can’t be captured that way: you must bide your time, lie in wait, seize it, and hug it close with all your might in order to make it yield. Form’s a Proteus much more elusive and resourceful than the one in the myth—only after a long struggle can you compel it to reveal its true aspect. Artists like you are satisfied with the first likeness it yields, or at most the second or third; that’s not the way this victory is won! The victorious painter is never deceived by all those subterfuges, he perseveres until nature’s forced to show herself stark naked, in her true spirit. That was Raphael’s way,” the old man said, removing his black velvet cap to express his respect for this monarch of art. “His supremacy’s due to that intimate sense which apparently seeks to break Form. In Raphael’s figures, Form is what it is in all of us: an intermediary for the communication of ideas and sensations, a vast poetry! Each figure is a world, a portrait whose model has appeared in a sublime vision, colored by light, drawn by an inner voice, examined by a celestial hand which has revealed the sources of expression in an entire existence. You people make lovely gowns of flesh for your women, elegant draperies of hair, but where’s the blood which creates peace or passion, which causes particular effects? Your saint’s a brunette, yet
this
, my poor Porbus, this belongs to a blonde! And so your figures are tinted phantoms you parade before our eyes, and you call that painting, you call that art! Because you’ve made something that looks more like a woman than a house, you think you’ve achieved your goal, and because you no longer need to scribble under your figures
currus venustus
or
pulcher homo
, like the earliest painters, you now suppose you’re wonderful artists! Ha, ha! Not so fast, my brave friends: forests of pencils and acres of canvas must be used up before you’re there. Of course, of course! A woman tilts her head this way, she holds her skirt like that, her eyes melt with a look of submissive sweetness, the shadow of her lashes trembles just so on her cheeks! That’s it—and that’s not it. What’s lacking? A trifle that’s nothing at all, yet a nothing that’s everything. You’ve got the appearance of life, but you don’t express its overflowing abundance, that je ne sais quoi which might even be the soul, floating like a cloud over the envelope of flesh. You know, that bloom of life that Titian and Raphael caught. Starting from where you’ve left off, some excellent painting may be done; but you exhaust yourself too soon. The crowd admires, and the true connoisseur smiles. Oh Mabuse, Oh my master!” added this singular creature, “what a thief you are, taking life with you when you left us!— All the same,” he interrupted himself, “your painting’s worth more than the daubs of that imposter Rubens with his mountains of Flemish meat sprinkled with