ear, there are many writers on our art who,
not being of the profession and consequently not knowing what can
or cannot be done, have been very liberal of absurd praises in their
description of favourite works. They always find in them what they
are resolved to find. They praise excellences that can hardly exist
together; and, above all things, are fond of describing with great
exactness the expression of a mixed passion, which more particularly
appears to me out of the reach of our art.(3)

'Such are many disquisitions which I have read on some of the Cartoons
and other pictures of Raffaelle, where the critics have described their
own imaginations; or indeed where the excellent master himself may have
attempted this expression of passions above the powers of the art, and
has, therefore, by an indistinct and imperfect marking, left room for
every imagination with equal probability to find a passion of his
own. What has been, and what can be done in the art, is sufficiently
difficult: we need not be mortified or discouraged at not being able
to execute the conceptions of a romantic imagination. Art has its
boundaries, though imagination has none. We can easily, like the
ancients, suppose a Jupiter to be possessed of all those powers and
perfections which the subordinate Deities were endowed with separately.
Yet when they employed their art to represent him, they confined his
character to majesty alone. Pliny, therefore, though we are under great
obligations to him for the information he has given us in relation
to the works of the ancient artists, is very frequently wrong when he
speaks of them, which he does very often, in the style of many of
our modern connoisseurs. He observes that in a statue of Paris,
by Euphranor, you might discover at the same time three different
characters: the dignity of a Judge of the Goddesses, the Lover of Helen,
and the Conqueror of Achilles. A statue in which you endeavour to
unite stately dignity, youthful elegance, and stern valour, must surely
possess none of these to any eminent degree.

'From hence it appears that there is much difficulty as well as danger
in an endeavour to concentrate in a single subject those various
powers which, rising from various points, naturally move in different
directions.'

What real clue to the art or sound principles of judging the student
can derive from these contradictory statements, or in what manner it is
possible to reconcile them one to the ot