Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed, is the
true type or measure of perfected art. Therefore, although each art has
its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order of impressions, its
unique mode of reaching the "imaginative reason," yet the arts may be
represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of
music, to a condition which music alone completely realises; and one of
the chief functions of aesthetic criticism, dealing with the products of
art, new or old, is to estimate the degree in which each of those
products approaches, in this sense, to musical law.
By no school of painters have, the necessary limitations of the art of
painting been so unerringly though instinctively apprehended, and the
essence of what is pictorial in a picture so justly conceived, as by the
school of Venice; and the train of thought suggested in what has been
now said is, perhaps, a not unfitting introduction to a few pages about
Giorgione, who, though much has been taken by recent criticism from what
was reputed to be his work, yet, more entirely than any other painter,
sums up, in what we know of himself and his art, the spirit of the
Venetian school.
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