er successor, but her beautifully coloured skin
and hair, so that of the pleasing colour-impression will remain only as
much as was due to, and may have been retained with, the original
woman's clothes. But if we look for our third pleasurable impression,
our beautiful light, we shall find that unchanged, whether it fall upon
a magnificently arrayed goddess or upon a sordid slut And, conversely,
the beautiful woman, when withdrawn from that light and placed in any
other, will be equally lovely in form, even if we cast her in plaster,
and lose the colour of her skin and hair; or if we leave her not only
the beautiful tints of her flesh and hair, but her own splendidly
coloured garments, we shall still have, in whatsoever light, a
magnificent piece of colour. But if we recall the poor ugly creature who
has succeeded her from out of that fine effect of light, we shall have
nothing but a hideous form invested in hideous colour.

This rough diagram will be sufficient to explain my thought respecting
the relative degree to which the art dealing with linear form, that
dealing with colour and that dealing with light, with the medium in
which form and colour are perceived; is each respectively bound to be
idealistically or realistically decorative. Now painting was
aesthetically mature, possessed the means to achieve great beauty, at a
time when of the three modes of representation there had as yet
developed only those of linear form and colour; and the very possibility
and necessity of immediately achieving all that could be achieved by
these means delayed for a long time the development of the third mode of
representation: the representation of objects as they appear with
reference to the light through which they are seen. A beginning had
indeed been made. Certain of Correggio's effects of light, even more an
occasional manner of treating the flesh and hair, reducing both form and
colour to a kind of vague boss and vague sheen, such as they really
present in given effects of light, a something which we define roughly
as eminently modern in the painting of his clustered cherubs; all this
is certainly a beginning of the school of Velasquez. Still more so is it
the case with Andrea del Sarto, the man of genius whom critics love to
despatch as a mediocrity, because his art, which is art altogether for
the eyes, and in which he innovated more than any of his contemporaries,
does not afford any excuse for the irrelevancies of ornamen