Seven Discourses on Art | Page 7

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
toil on in the drudgery of copying, and think they make a rapid progress
while they faithfully exhibit the minutest part of a favourite picture.
This appears to me a very tedious, and I think a very erroneous, method
of proceeding. Of every large composition, even of those which are
most admired, a great part may be truly said to be common-place. This,
though it takes up much time in copying, conduces little to
improvement. I consider general copying as a delusive kind of industry;
the student satisfies himself with the appearance of doing something;
he falls into the dangerous habit of imitating without selecting, and of
labouring without any determinate object; as it requires no effort of the
mind, he sleeps over his work; and those powers of invention and
composition which ought particularly to be called out and put in action
lie torpid, and lose their energy for want of exercise.
It is an observation that all must have made, how incapable those are of
producing anything of their own who have spent much of their time in
making finished copies.
To suppose that the complication of powers, and variety of ideas
necessary to that mind which aspires to the first honours ill the art of
painting, can be obtained by the frigid contemplation of a few single
models, is no less absurd than it would be in him who wishes to be a
poet to imagine that by translating a tragedy he can acquire to himself
sufficient knowledge