moral qualities, merely protective and secondary in art, are developed
beyond the degree requisite for mere protection of the artistic
faculties (a degree small in proportion to the magnitude of the artistic
instinct), they become ruling characteristics of the whole individual
nature, and influence all the actions of the man as distinguished from
the artist: they make him as inflexible in the pursuit of the
non-artistic aims of life as in that of mere excellence in his own art.
The timorous and slothful Andrea del Sarto is quite as complete an
artist as the eager and inquisitive Lionardo da Vinci; but, whereas
Andrea's activity stops short at the limits of his powers of painting,
the increasing laboriousness and never satisfied curiosity of Lionardo
extend, on the contrary, to all manner of subjects quite disconnected
with his real art. When once the glorious fresco of the Virgin, seated
like a happier Niobe, by the mealsack, has been properly finished in the
cloister of the Servites, Andrea goes home and crouches beneath the
violence of his wife, or to the tavern to seek feeble consolation. But
when, after never-ending alterations and additional touches, Lionardo at
length permits Paolo Giocondo to carry home the portrait of his dubious,
fascinating wife, he sets about mathematical problems or chemical
experiments, offers to build fortresses for Caesar Borgia, manufactures
a wondrous musical instrument like the fleshless skull of a horse and
learns to play thereon, or writes treatises on anatomy: there is in
him a desire, a capacity for work greater than even his subtle and
fantasticating style of art can ever fully employ. Such are the
non-artistic qualities required, merely as protectors from interference,
for the production of a work of art: the same these, whatever the art,
as they are the same if, instead of art, we consider science, or
commerce, or any other employment. The artistic, the really directly
productive qualities, differ of course according to the art to which the
work belongs, differ not only in nature but also in number. For there
are some arts in which the work is produced by a very small number of
faculties; others where it requires a very complex machine, which we
call a whole individuality: and here we find ourselves back again before
our original question, to what extent the personality of an artist
influences the character of his work. We have got back to the anomaly
typified by Perugino; back to