The Laws Of Fesole

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE THREE DIVISIONS OF THE ART OF PAINTING. I. TN order to produce a completely representa- tive picture of any object on a flat surface, we must outline it, colour it, and shade it. Accordingly, in order to become a complete artist, you must learn these three following modes of skill completely. First, how to outline spaces with accurate and delicate lines. Secondly, how to fill the outlined spaces with accurate, and delicately laid, colour. Thirdly, how to gradate the coloured spaces, so as to express, accurately and delicately, relations of light and shade. 2. By the word 'accurate' in these sentences, I mean nearly the same thing as if I had written ' true;' but yet I mean a little more than verbal truth: for, in many cases, it is possible to give the strictest truth in words without any painful care; but it is not possible to be true in lines, without constant care, or ' accuracy.' We may say, for instance, without laborious attention, that thetower of Garisenda is a hundred and sixty feet high, and leans nine feet out of the perpendicular. But we could not draw the line representing this relation of nine feet horizontal to a hundred and sixty vertical, without extreme care. In other cases, even by the strictest attention, it is not possible to give complete or strict truth in words. We could not, by any number of words, describe the colour of a riband so as to enable a mercer to match it without seeing it. But an 'accurate' colourist can convey the required intelligence at once, with a tint on paper. Neither would it be possible, in language, to explain the difference in gradations of shade which the eye perceives between a beautifully rounded and dimpled chin, and a more or less determinedly angular one. But on the artist's 'accuracy' in distingu...

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