Questions sur le beau  

"This famous thing, the Beautiful," Delacroix had once written, "must be--every one says so--the final aim of art. But if it be the only aim, what then are we to make of men like Rubens, Rembrandt, and, in general, all the artistic natures of the North, who preferred other qualities belonging to their art? Is the sense of the beautiful that impression which is made upon us by a picture by Velasquez, an etching by Rembrandt, or a scene out of Shakespeare? Or again, is the beautiful revealed to us by the contemplation of the straight noses and correctly disposed draperies of Girodet, Gérard, and others of David's pupils? A satyr is beautiful, a faun is beautiful. The antique bust of Socrates is full of character, notwithstanding its flattened nose, swollen lips, and small eyes. In Paul Veronese's 'Marriage at Cana' I see men of various features and of every temperament, and I find them to be living beings, full of passion. Are they beautiful? Perhaps. But in any case there is no recipe by means of which one can attain to what is called the ideally beautiful. Style depends absolutely and solely upon the free and original expression of each master's peculiar qualities. Wherever a painter sets himself to follow a conventional mode of expression he will become affected and will lose his own peculiar impress; but where, on the contrary, he frankly abandons himself to the impulse of his own originality, he will ever, whether his name be Raphael, Michael Angelo, Rubens, or Rembrandt, be sure master of his soul and of his art." --tr. Richard Muther