For tears the eyebrows contract; for laughter they expand.
The Master goes gladly with those condemned to death, watching in their faces the degrees of their agony and terror; and the very executioners wonder at him, when he makes a study of the last quivering of the muscles.
'Nay, Giovanni, you understand not the man he is!' cried Cesare. 'He will lift a worm from the path lest his foot crush it; but if his own mother were a-dying he would watch the contracting of her eyebrows, the wrinkling of her forehead, the drooping of the corners of the mouth.'
'Note the expression and the gestures of deaf-mutes.'
'When you watch persons, do it without letting them know; so shall their movements, their laughter, and their tears be more natural.'
'An artist whose own hands are angular and bony, is apt to depict people with angular and bony hands; for every man likes the faces and the bodies which resemble his own. The ugly painter will choose ugly models, and vice versâ. Let not the men and the women whom you paint seem your blood-brothers either in beauty or in deformity. This is a fault which attaches to many Italian artists. In painting there is no error more treacherous. I consider the temptation arises from the fact that the soul makes the body which belongs to it. Of old it shaped and fashioned it in its own likeness; and now when again it is called upon to fashion a new body with brushes and paint, it yearns to reproduce the shape in which it has long had its habitation.'