ere leaving out
the detail constituted grandeur, any one could do this: the greatest
dauber would at that rate be the greatest artist. A house or sign
painter might instantly enter the lists with Michael Angelo, and might
look down on the little, dry, hard manner of Raphael. But grandeur
depends on a distinct principle of its own, not on a negation of the
parts; and as it does not arise from their omission, so neither is it
incompatible with their insertion or the highest finishing. In fact, an
artist may give the minute particulars of any object one by one and with
the utmost care, and totally neglect the proportions, arrangement,
and general masses, on which the effect of the whole more immediately
depends; or he may give the latter, viz. the proportions and arrangement
of the larger parts and the general masses of light and shade, and leave
all the minuter parts of which those parts are composed a mere blotch,
one general smear, like the first crude and hasty getting in of the
groundwork of a picture: he may do either of these, or he may combine
both, that is, finish the parts, but put them in their right places, and
keep them in due subordination to the general effect and massing of the
whole. If the exclusion of the parts were necessary to the grandeur of
the whole composition, if the more entire this exclusion, if the
more like a _tabula rasa,_ a vague, undefined, shadowy and abstracted
representation the picture was, the greater the grandeur, there could be
no danger of pushing this principle too far, and going the full length
of Sir Joshua's theory without any restrictions or mental reservations.
But neither of these suppositions is true. The greatest grandeur may
coexist with the most perfect, nay with a microscopic accuracy of
detail, as we see it does often in nature: the greatest looseness and
slovenliness of execution may be displayed without any grandeur at
all either in the outline or distribution of the masses of colour. To
explain more particularly what I mean. I have seen and copied portraits
by Titian, in which the eyebrows were marked with a number of small
strokes, like hairlines (indeed, the hairs of which they were composed
were in a great measure given)--but did this destroy the grandeur of
expression, the truth of outline, arising from the arrangement of these
hair-lines in a given form? The grandeur, the character, the expression
remained, for the general form or arched and expanded outline remai