It appears to me that Sir Joshua ought to have added at the end of his condemnation of “singular forms, particularities, and details of every kind,” the words, “when they are mean or trivial.” Forms may be full of character, and even beautiful, though singular. Many of the antique fawns’ heads, though singular enough, have the elements of style in them. Raffaelle’s cripple at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple is singular to the verge of grotesqueness, but he in no way detracts from the grand style of the cartoon. Many other examples of singular forms might be given from the works of acknowledged masters of style.
Then, again, if by “details” ugly details are meant, I quite agree with Sir Joshua in thinking them incompatible with a grand style, but it is detail which gives individuality to a figure; and in the fighting gladiator, the dancing fawn, and indeed in all the masterpieces of antiquity, the detail is most elaborate.
Neglect of detail is the besetting sin of those painters who aim at the grand style. They fail to see that the same process of selection may be applied to the detail, as well as to the general proportions of the figure.
In a portrait you must of course copy your sitter. You must take him as you do a wife, for better, for worse. He may have a cast in his eye or a conspicuous pimple on his nose, which, of course, as a faithful portraitist you are bound to reproduce. You are under no such obligation if you are painting an ideal head from the same individual. You may omit the pimple, and make him look straight. But your same sitter may have finely-formed furrows across his brow, or delicate expressive wrinkles extending from the corners of his eyes. Are you, in painting an ideal head, to neglect these landmarks of age and wisdom? I say, by no means, neither in painting nor sculpture.
The word “ideal,” from a misconception of its meaning, has come to be almost a term of reproach, and at a recent lecture at the Royal Institution some ridiculous parody of Canova was nick-named “Ideal,” and contrasted unfavorably with a masterly portrait bust by Donatello.
This is about as fair as if I, holding a brief on the other side, were to produce the Theseus as a specimen of the ideal, and Madame Tussaud’s effigy of the Claimant, of the realistic.
The “ideal,” or what Sir Joshua calls the grand style, means a generalization of beautiful forms, but it has nothing to do with neglect of detail, except when such detail is trivial, ugly, or superfluous.
It must also be remembered that detail does not mean furrows, wrinkles, and veins alone; it means also minute correctness in rendering of form.
The outward contour of any portion of the human form is never perfectly spherical, nor perfectly elliptic, nor perfectly straight, and it is the delicate perception and artistic execution of form which constitutes beauty.
Take the original of “The Laocoon,” and a common fourth-rate garden cast of the statue which has stood half-a-dozen English winters, and has had the benefit of several good coats of paint. In this cast all the beautiful passages of the original have disappeared, and the neglecters of detail get what they think so desirable, namely, a general want of precision and individuality. Michael Angelo himself, who is Sir Joshua’s high-priest of the grand style, gives plenty of detail whenever his work is not meant to be seen at a distance. In his “Moses” and other statues even the veins are carefully studied.