they may be
superficially in drawing, caress the eye as music finds and satisfies
the soul. When such is his power over us, it is difficult to say that
Botticelli had not some measure of the truth. The world of the
Venetians sang full-sounding harmonies of glorious color.
Velasquez saw everything laved around with a flood of silver quiet
atmosphere. All in their own way have found and shown to us a
truth.

To render what he has seen and felt in the essence and meaning of it,
the artist seeks to disengage the shaping principle of the particular
aspect of truth, which has impressed him, from all accidents in its
manifestation. To make this dominant character salient beyond
irrelevant circumstance, art works by selection. Art is necessarily a
compromise. It isolates some elements and sacrifices others; but it is
none the less true on that account. The mere material of the object is
more or less fixed, but the relations which the object embodies are
capable of many combinations and adjustments, according to the
mind and temperament of the individual artist who is moved by it.
All art is in a certain sense abstraction; all art in a measure idealizes.
It is abstraction in the sense that it presents the intrinsic and
distinctive qualities of things, purged of accident.

Art does not compete with nature; it is a statement of the spirit and
intention of nature in the artist's own terms. The test of the work is
not apparent and superficial likeness, but truth. Art idealizes in the
measure that it disengages the truth. In this aspect of it the work is
ideal as distinct from merely actual. There is a practice in art which
draws its standard of beauty, its ideal, not from nature but from
other art, and which seeks to "improve nature" by the combination
of arbitrarily chosen elements and by the modification of natural
truth to fit a preconceived formula. The Eclectics of Bologna, in the
seventeenth century, sought to combine Raphael's perfection of
drawing and composition, Michelangelo's sublimity and his mastery
of the figure, and Correggio's sweet sentiment and his supremacy in
the rendering of light and shade, fondly supposing thus that the sum
of excellent parts is equivalent to an excellence of the whole. This is
false idealism. The Greeks carried their research for certain truths of
the human form to the point of perfection and complete realization.
The truth of the Greeks was mistaken by the pseudo-classicists and
misapplie