not moved by the contours of the forms that make
up the work of art. The causes of bad drawing and bad design I believe
to be similar. A form is badly drawn when it does not correspond with a
part of an emotional conception. The shape of every form in a work of
art should be imposed on the artist by his inspiration. The hand of the
artist, I believe, must be guided by the necessity of expressing
something he has felt not only intensely but definitely. The artist must
know what he is about, and what he is about must be, if I am right, the
translation into material form of something that he felt in a spasm of
ecstasy. Therefore, shapes that merely fill gaps will be ill-drawn.
Forms that are not dictated by any emotional necessity, forms that state
facts, forms that are the consequences of a theory of draughtsmanship,
imitations of natural objects or of the forms of other works of art,
forms that exist merely to fill spaces--padding in fact,--all these are
worthless. Good drawing must be inspired, it must be the natural
manifestation of that thrill which accompanies the passionate
apprehension of form.

One word more to close this discussion. No critic is so stupid as to
mean by "bad drawing," drawing that does not represent the model
correctly. The gods of the art schools, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Raffael,
&c. played the oddest tricks with anatomy. Everyone knows that Giotto's
figures are less accurately drawn than those of Sir Edward Poynter; no
one supposes that they are not drawn better. We do possess a criterion
by which we can judge drawing, and that criterion can have nothing to do
with truth to nature. We judge drawing by concentrating our aesthetic
sensibility on a particular part of design. What we mean when we speak
of "good drawing" and "bad drawing" is not doubtful; we mean
"aesthetically moving" and "aesthetically insignificant." Why some
drawing moves and some does not is a very different question. I have put
forward an hypothesis of which I could write a pretty sharp criticism:
that task, however, I leave to more willing hands. Only this I will say:
just as a competent musician knows with certainty when an instrument is
out of tune though the criterion resides nowhere but in his own
sensibility; so a fine critic of visual art can detect lines and colours
that are not alive. Whether he be looking at an embroidered pattern or
at a careful anatomical study, the task is always the same, because the
criterion is