o come, every form must be beautiful from every point; but
in proportion as the new elements of painting enter, in proportion as
the actual linear form and boss is marked and helped out by grouping,
colour, and light and shade, does the actual perfection of the model
become less important; until, under the reign of light as the chief
factor, it becomes altogether indifferent. In this fact lies the only
rational foundation for the notion, made popular by Hegel, that painting
is an art in which beauty is of much less account than in sculpture;
failing to understand that the sum total of beauty remained the same,
whether dependent upon the concentration of a single element or obtained
by the co-operation of several consequently less singly important
elements.

But to return to the question of portrait art. From what we have seen,
it is clear that art which requires perfection of form will be reduced
to ugliness if cramped in the obtaining of such perfection, whereas art
which can obtain beauty by other means will still have a chance when
reduced to imitate ugly object? Hence it is that while the realistically
decorative art of the seventeenth century can make actually beautiful
things of the portraits of ugly people, the idealistically decorative
art of the Renaissance produces portraits which are cruelly ugly in
proportion as the art is purely idealistic. Yet even in idealism there
are degrees: the more the art is confined to mere linear form, to the
exclusion of colour, the uglier will be the portraits. With Michael
Angelo the difficulty was simplified to impossibility: he could not
paint portrait at all; and in his sculptured portraits of the two
Medicean dukes at S. Lorenzo he evaded all attempt at likeness, making
those two men into scarcely more than two architectural monsters,
half-human cousins of the fantastic creatures who keep watch on the
belfries and gurgoyles of a Gothic cathedral. It is almost impossible to
think of Michael Angelo attempting portrait: the man's genius cannot be
constrained to it, and what ought to be mere ugliness would come out
idealized into grandiose monstrosity. Men like Titian and Tintoret are
at the other end of the scale of ideal decoration: they are bordering
upon the domain of realism. Hence they can raise into interest, by the
mere power of colour, many an insignificant type; yet even they are
incapable of dealing with absolute ugliness, with absence of fine
colour, or, if they do