chap, i Imperfect forms of Painting 139
have served their time of apprenticeship that they reveal
to us the magic of their art. It is in their mature and
later work that we find the free and masterly rendering
spoken of above. The same phenomenon meets us in the
history of the graphic art in general. The earliest painters
did not look at the whole face of nature, but only had eyes
for a few near objects ; even these they did not apprehend
as a whole, as a show of tone and colour, but rather as
forms, and in rendering them as forms attended, like the
beginner at the modern art school, only to the outlines.
The outline filled in with simple tints, with no variety of
internal markings or indication of the thickness of objects
and their comparative remoteness, is the standard form of the
graphic art in ancient Egypt and in Greece, though in the
latter country it was carried some steps further in advance.
The same character belongs to the art during the Middle
Ages, and it was not till the fifteenth century that it began
to come to a knowlege of its own capabilities. Graphic
delineation then advanced rapidly through certain stages that
will be described in detail in the chapter on Painting Old
and New, and attained perfection in the hands of the great
masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who
are able at last to give an artistic rendering of the aspect
of the world in all its painterlike charm. It seems, in fact,
to be a necessity of the case that analysis should precede
synthesis, and the/ar/j of painting should be attended to
first rather than the whole. There is accordingly one kind
of undeveloped painting that gives us only outlines, another
kind that reproduces for us in a clear-cut mechanical way
the impression of solid forms, a third that gives us light-
and-shade, a fourth that emphasises colour, while perfect
painting will render directly tone and colour and texture all
at once, and will convey thereby an indirect but true im-
pression of form and distance.