From Ainsworth's Magazine.
ART EXPRESSION.
"What is the highest degree of expression that art can delineate?" said Piombino. "Sleep," replied the master, to the surprise of all present, not excepting Leonardo. "I will explain," resumed Michael Angelo, "lest you should have misapprehended me. When I say that sleep is the highest expression that artist can put into form, I mean that it is the last and crowning effort of art; that it is the figure surmounting the pyramid on whose sides are prefigured life's many phases—all passion, emotion, thought. And to elevate the idea to its highest limit, it is necessary to depict it in youth—witness the Venus asleep—in order that man may feel how turbulent a sea of life is calmed under its spell." "But would not death itself express as much—a peace to the same passions, a peace more lasting?" said Piombino. "No," said Michael Angelo, "the passions live in sleep; are growing; in death they are at an end; hence in sleep the eye is closed to hide the naked forms of passion that lie within; in death the eye is open and sightless, a circumstance so effectually related in marble—a material in which the open eye has a look of death united to immortality."...
"But you have not told us," said Leonardo da Vinci, on observing that Piombino was satisfied, "in what consists this long debated notion which we call the fine ideal?" "By the fine ideal," said Michael Angelo. "I presume we both understand not the work of art itself, but the conception out of which it springs. Art is the exercise of an imitative faculty upon visible things; but fine art is the transcendental idea entertained after the study of nature, and transferred from the mind itself to the canvas or marble." "How is that idea acquired?" asked Leonardo. "The study of unsophisticated nature yields the ideal, or similitude of things seen; and this study, impressing the recollection, affords in due time a conception of abstract beauty itself to curious and sensitive minds." "By what process can such conception be achieved?" "Alas! to make real progress in this enterprise demands, on setting out, the possession of the finest faculties; powers so transcendental as few are able to value. Such is, however, the prospect of all who deserve success in the highest departments of knowledge." "Let us suppose one to be thus endowed; what then?" "Well, let him go forth in a genial mood and make himself master of the real; this done, he will have observed the groupings of inanimate forms, and have learned nature's failures and successes in giving features to the world. He will then ask what each feature would express, whether it be not something spiritual which lies deeper than the outer shape. Does the human face alone give utterance through its lineaments to thought and feeling? are not those of the landscape also pregnant with meaning?"