41. Beauty, whether individual or ideal, consists in the concurrence of parts to one end, or the union of the simple and the various.
Coroll.—Whatever be your powers, assume not to legislate on beauty: though always the same herself, her empire is despotic, and subject to the anarchies of despotism, enthroned to-day, dethroned to-morrow: in treating subjects of universal claim, most has been done by leaving most to the reader's and spectator's taste or fancy. "It is difficult," says Horace, "to pronounce exactly to every man's eye and mind, what every man thinks himself entitled to estimate by a standard of his own."[6] The Apollo and Medicean Venus are not by all received as the canons of male and female beauty; and Homer's Helen is the finest woman we have read of, merely because he has left her to be made up of the Dulcineas of his readers.
42. Beauty alone, fades to insipidity; and like possession cloys.
43. Grace is beauty in motion, or rather grace regulates the air, the attitudes and movements of beauty.
44. Nature makes no parade of her means—hence all studied grace is unnatural.
Coroll.—The attitudes of Parmegiano are exhibitions of studied grace. The grace of Guido is become proverbial, but it is the grace of the art.