e, _par excellence_, types of visual
susceptibility to the forms and colors of their environment, capable
of perceiving its harmonies and contrasts; and it is by refining his
powers of observation that the artist finally perfects himself and
succeeds in creating a masterpiece. The immortal art of Greece was
above all an art based on observation; the scanty clothing which was
the fashion of his day enabled the Greek artist to contemplate the
human form freely; and the exquisite sensibility of his eye enabled
him to distinguish the beautiful body from that which lacked harmony,
until under the impulse of genius, he was able to create the ideal
figure, conceived by the fusion of individual beauties chosen from
details in the sensorial storehouse of the mind. The artist, when he
creates certainly does not compose by putting together the parts which
are to form the whole as in a mosaic; in the ardor of inspiration he
sees the complete _new figure_, born of his genius; but details he has
accumulated have served to nourish it, as the blood nourishes the new
man in the bosom of his mother.

Raphael continually visited the Trastevere, a popular quarter where
the most beautiful women in Rome were to be found, in order to seek
the type of a Madonna. It was here he became acquainted with the
Fornarina and his models. But when he painted the Madonna he
reproduced "the image of his soul." We are told that Michelangelo
would spend entire evenings gazing into space; and when they asked him
at what he was gazing, he replied: "I see a dome." It was after this
form, so marvelously created within him, that the famous cupola of St.
Peter's in Rome was fashioned. But it could never have been born, even
in the mind of Michelangelo, if his architectural studies had not
prepared the material for it.

No genius has ever been able to create the absolutely new. We have
only to think of certain forms much used in art, and heavy and
grotesque as the human fancy which is incapable of rising above the
earth. It seems to me amazing that the figure of the winged angel
should still persist, and that no artist should have yet improved upon
it. To represent a being more diaphanous than man, and without
corporeal weight, we have robust beings whose backs are furnished with
colossal wings covered with heavy feathers. Strange indeed is this
fusion in a single creature of such incompatible natural features as
hair and feathers, and this attribution to a huma