allegory of the ideal union which the true theory and practice of art alike inculcate. When Lucian, in order to describe the beauty of Panthea, brings together, in order to compose her portrait, the separate parts that were most vaunted in the Sosandra of Calamis, the Lemnian of Phidias, the Venus of Praxiteles, and in that of Alcamenes, it is only a hyperbolical simile of the author. Devoid of means to make the image of corporeal beauty sensible to the eye, he has recourse to this imaginary assemblage in order to compel the reader to raise within himself the idea of a com

founded on any one of the dicta of the schools, in order, by mingling the true with the imaginary, to give consistence to a merely theoretical notion. Thus we find different versions of this story. According to Pliny, the circumstances occurred at Agrigentum, on the picture of Helen which he destined for the temple of Juno Lacinia. Dionysius of Halicarnassus relates the same fact; but according to him it took place at Crotona. Cicero assigns this anecdote to the same city, and enters into some particulars which evince to us what great facilities the Greeks possessed for drawing the parallels so requisite to a knowledge of the ideal in the imitation of the human body.

The least dubious consequences resulting from these different accounts, are, on the one hand, the doctrine of the imperfection of individual models; on the other, the theory of the art of generalizing, an operation of the understanding, although the mind in order to render its combined and systematic workings intelligible in language, is compelled to borrow from matter the idea of a union and assemblage of parts, an idea which has too often been taken in the sense of absolute reality, and, so taken, may have given rise to the story of the five models of Zeuxis.

plete beauty, by the remembrance of several others particularly beautiful. But Lucian, like the sculptor, (and he had been one in his youth) would have refrained from realizing in any one single figure, that actual union of the beautiful parts of several different statues, which he invites his readers to assort together in a mental composition.

A whole thus made up of different parts as understood in a matter-of-fact and rigorous sense would be but a mass of discordancies beauty of every part of a whole, immeasurably depends on the relations uniting it to that whole, which relations can never be transferred along with the part when separated from its collective whole. It would be very possible to make a most ridiculous figure from a number of beautiful parts taken from as many different figures, even though they were copied with the greatest exactitude. The truth is, that a beautiful figure must be conceived, imagined, and composed for itself alone, apart from all others, and this should be done without the aid of any union understood as actual and real. Otherwise it would be but an assem

blage of beautiful fragments.

When the painter Eupompus said, in answer to the sculptor Lysippus, that the model he ought to follow was the multitude, and that by so doing he might learn to imitate nature, dixisse demonstrata hominum multitudine, naturam ipsam imitandam esse (Plin. 1. 34.), he certainly did not mean that the

artist ought to take each individual of the multitude as a model for any proposed work, that is, by choosing as many separate persons as his figure has parts (for what limit would there be to the number?) Eupompus meant, firstly, that the artist should study his art in the works of nature rather than in those of artists and of his masters: secondly, that he ought, like them, to study nature in the greatest possible number of individuals. In fact, the question mooted by Lysippus in the above passage, does not concern any particular figure but, generally, the course of study to be followed. Now we repeat that it was by this kind of study, so easily attainable in Greece, that ideal perfection in art was attained. (Eupompus, therefore, revealed to Lysippus the secret, and taught him, in a few words, the means by which N to generalize imitation P's

P's Cin't do this

We cannot then admit as really applicable to the practice of imitation any actual union of parts taken, that is, copied, from different individuals in order to compose one figure. It is very true that we see the artist after he has conceived, invented, and determined on, the style, character, form, and entire aspect of a figure, set himself to observe and compare different parts of models, which may appear to him congenial with those of the being he is about to represent, in order to guide him in the details, and in the practical or executive department, of imitation. The artist

will undoubtedly make use of several models, but not in imagining his figure; that already exists, and ought to exist, whole and entire in his imagination; and thus a choice and union has already in idea been brought about by his mind. Without that, the models he might resort to in order to aid him in his creation, would be fitted only to impede his endeavours by their differences. A new proof that the greater part of those operations is wholly intellectual, and rather serves to explain the ways of proceeding in practice, than allows of explanation by them.

We may go yet farther and ask, what the artist does when, in the execution of what he has conceived, he makes use of several models? Does he copy exactly, does he unite in a faithful imitation the parts he has chosen from each just as they are seen in reality, and so that the originals may be rediscovered in their copies? Certainly not; the artist seeks in his models, truths of which the living being is the only source of inspiration, he looks to them for points of detail and form, for relative proportions, and for the impressions of sentiment, motion, harmony, and partial beauties, which he assimilates to the type his imagination has already formed. But he does it by a process that baffles all analysis. Who can say whether he transforms the substance of what he has conceived into that of what he sees, or whether the contrary.

Very frequently both is the case, but the nature of this operation, so difficult to describe in words, is such, that when a work is finished, the artist may frequently point to the models he has made use of without our being able to recognize wherein he has imitated them. So true is this, that were the same models imitated by another, in the same subject figure, the result would afford other forms, other unions of parts, and other effects of tint and colour. This is a consequence of that elaborating process by which every one transforms what he imagines into what he sees, and what he sees into that which he imagines, as, in another order of things, is the case with the physical assimilations proceeding from the natural operation of the digestive organs, and which no theory is fully capable of analyzing. Here in like manner metaphysical analysis is at fault.

When the artist sees in imagination the figure which it is his wish, though at the same time he despairs of being able, to execute, what does he require in order to realize it as promptly and as completely as it has been created in thought? What but a means of execution as rapid. Time is, however, of no importance; what matter though Phidias were years in embodying his ideal of Jupiter? If he had not from the very first conceived it as a whole, if he had not formed it in idea, if he had not seen it velut tonantem, all the so pretended positive ways of proceeding by