1
The Claims of Decorative Art
66
beauty and expressiveness of a drawing by Mantegna or Albert Diirer, and do not ask for colour, or for more heightened and
This seems to graphic expression than their pen lines convey. show how little the highest artistic and intellectual expressiveness is dependent on close or literal imitation of nature. To mock nature
doubt
is if,
one thing, to read and to express her, quite another. even with the photograph and the modern literalist,
I
we
could get on without line to make clear the nature of many things disguised in the illusory actuality of light and shadow:
of construction, for instance, facts of growth, facts of texture and character, can all be made more emphatic and expressed facts
clearer in a line use, this
is,
;
and, apart from individual skill in
perhaps, largely owing to
which sounds a
drawing
capacity of abstraction
—
A
paradox drawing in line is the result of a treaty between the mind and nature, signed by the
like a
convention —
its
its
!
hand of the designer, and sealed by the understanding and Nothing shows so completely the quality and imagination.
free
resources of a master as his perception and treatment of the value
nothing more eloquently and distinctly speaks of the vigorous or enervated condition of art in any period than its line Line is the nerve-fibre of art, knitting and controlling drawings. of line
:
the whole body, but flaccid and meaningless in
its
day of
decline.
Compare, for instance, the woodcuts of the early sixteenth century with those of the later or of the next century, and the difference corresponds with the vigour and decline of the Renaissance impulse in design.
The in
indifference to the value of line as a
our day
is
means of expression
an ominous sign of the state of the arts
—
despite the