Seven Discourses on Art | Page 9

learns, what requires the most attentive survey and the subtle
disquisition, to discriminate perfections that are incompatible with each
other.
He is from this time to regard himself as holding the same rank with
those masters whom he before obeyed as teachers, and as exercising a
sort of sovereignty over those rules which have hitherto restrained him.
Comparing now no longer the performances of art with each other, but
examining the art itself by the standard of nature, he corrects what is
erroneous, supplies what is scanty, and adds by his own observation
what the industry of his predecessors may have yet left wanting to
perfection. Having well established his judgment, and stored his
memory, he may now without fear try the power of his imagination.
The mind that has been thus disciplined may be indulged in the

warmest enthusiasm, and venture to play on the borders of the wildest
extravagance. The habitual dignity, which long converse with the
greatest minds has imparted to him, will display itself in all his
attempts, and he will stand among his instructors, not as an imitator,
but a rival.
These are the different stages of the art. But as I now address myself
particularly to those students who have been this day rewarded for their
happy passage through the first period, I can with no propriety suppose
they want any help in the initiatory studies. My present design is to
direct your view to distant excellence, and to show you the readiest
path that leads to it. Of this I shall speak with such latitude as may
leave the province of the professor uninvaded, and shall not anticipate
those precepts which it is his business to give and your duty to
understand.
It is indisputably evident that a great part of every man's life must be
employed in collecting materials for the exercise of genius. Invention,
strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images
which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory.
Nothing can come of nothing. He who has laid up no materials can
produce no combinations.
A student unacquainted with the attempts of former adventurers is
always apt to overrate his own abilities, to mistake the most trifling
excursions for discoveries of moment, and every coast new to him for a
new-found country. If by chance he passes beyond his usual limits, he
congratulates his own arrival at those regions which they who have
steered a better course have long left behind them.
The productions of such minds are seldom distinguished by an air of
originality: they are anticipated in their happiest efforts; and if they are
found to differ in anything from their predecessors, it is only in
irregular sallies and trifling conceits. The more extensive therefore your
acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled the more
extensive will be your powers of invention; and what may appear still
more like a paradox, the more original will be your conceptions. But
the difficulty on this occasion is to determine who ought to be proposed

as models of excellence, and who ought to be considered as the
properest guides.
To a young man just arrived in Italy, many of the present painters of
that country are ready enough to obtrude their precepts, and to offer
their own performances as examples of that perfection which they
affect to recommend. The modern, however, who recommends
HIMSELF as a standard, may justly be suspected as ignorant of the true
end, and unacquainted with the proper object of the art which he
professes. To follow such a guide will not only retard the student, but
mislead him.
On whom, then, can he rely, or who shall show him the path that leads
to excellence? The answer is obvious: Those great masters who have
travelled the same road with success are the most likely to conduct
others. The works of those who have stood the test of ages have a claim
to that respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend. The
duration and stability of their fame is sufficient to evince that it has not
been suspended upon the slender thread of fashion and caprice, but
bound to the human heart by every tie of sympathetic approbation.
There is no danger of studying too much the works of those great men,
but how they may be studied to advantage is an inquiry of great
importance.
Some who have never raised their minds to the consideration of the real
dignity of the art, and who rate the works of an artist in proportion as
they excel, or are defective in the mechanical parts, look on theory as
something that may enable them to talk but not to paint better, and
confining themselves entirely to mechanical practice, very assiduously