attempt to unite contrary excellences (of form, for instance) in a
single figure, can never escape degenerating into the monstrous, but by
sinking into the insipid, taking away its marked character, and weakening
its expression.

This remark is true to a certain degree with regard to the passions. If
you mean to preserve the most perfect beauty in its most perfect state,
you cannot express the passions, which produce (all of them) distortion
and deformity, more or less, in the most beautiful faces.

Guido, from want of choice in adapting his subject to his ideas and his
powers, or in attempting to preserve beauty where it could not be
preserved has in this respect succeeded very ill. His figures are often
engaged in subjects that required great expression: yet his "Judith and
Holofernes," the "Daughter of Herodias with the Baptist's Head," the
"Andromeda," and even the "Mothers of the Innocents," have little more
expression than his "Venus attired by the Graces."

Obvious as these remarks appear, there are many writers on our art, who,
not being of the profession, and consequently not knowing what can or
what cannot be done, have been very liberal of absurd praises in their
descriptions of favourite works. They always find in them what they are
resolved to find. They praise excellences that can hardly exist
together, and above all things are fond of describing with great
exactness the expression of a mixed passion, which more particularly
appears to me out of the reach of our art.

Such are many disquisitions which I have read on some of the cartoons and
other pictures of Raffaelle, where the critics have described their own
imagination; or indeed where the excellent master himself may have
attempted this expression of passions above the powers of the art; and
has, therefore, by an indistinct and imperfect marking, left room for
every imagination, with equal probability to find a passion of his own.
What has been, and what can be done in the art, is sufficiently
difficult; we need not be mortified or discouraged for not being able to
execute the conceptions of a romantic imagination. Art has its
boundaries, though imagination has none. We can easily, like the
ancients, suppose a Jupiter to be possessed of all those powers and
perfections which the subordinate Deities were endowed with separately.
Yet, when they employed their art to represent him, they confined his
character to majesty alone. Pliny, therefore,