DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.75271#0017
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indications of the mind, and illustrates what the historian says more
expressly and particularly. Let a man read a character in my Lord
Clarendon (and certainly never was there a better painter in that
kind) he will find it improved, by seeing a picture of the same per-
son by Van Dyck. Painting relates the hikories of past and present
times, the fables of the poets, the allegories of moralists, and the
good things of religion: and consequently a pislure, besides its
being a pleasant ornament, is useful to instruX and improve our
minds, and to excite proper sentiments and reflexions, as a history,
a poem, a book of ethics, or divinity: the truth is, they mu-
tually assist one another..
By reading, or discourse, we learn some particulars which we
cannot have otherwise; and by Painting we are taught to form ideas
of what we read ; we see those things as the painter saw them, or
has improved them, with much care and application; and if he be
a Rafaelle, a Giulio Romano, or some such great genius, we see
them better than any one of an inferior character can, or even than
one of their equals, without that degree of reflection they had made,
possibly could. After having read Milton, one sees nature with
better eyes than before; beauties appear, which else had been un-
regarded : so by conversing with the works of the bed masters in
Painting, one forms better images whilst we are reading or think-
ing. I see the divine airs of Rafaelle when I read any history of
our Saviour, or the Blessed Virgin; and the awful ones he gives an
apostle when I read of their aXions, and conceive of those a&ions,
that he and other great men describe in a nobler manner than other-
wise I should ever have done. When I think of the great aXion of
the Decii, or the three hundred Lacedemonians at Thermopylae, I
see them with such faces and attitudes, as Michelangelo or Giulio
Romano would have given them; and Venus and the Graces I see
of the hand of Parmeggiano; and so of other subjeXs.
And'
indications of the mind, and illustrates what the historian says more
expressly and particularly. Let a man read a character in my Lord
Clarendon (and certainly never was there a better painter in that
kind) he will find it improved, by seeing a picture of the same per-
son by Van Dyck. Painting relates the hikories of past and present
times, the fables of the poets, the allegories of moralists, and the
good things of religion: and consequently a pislure, besides its
being a pleasant ornament, is useful to instruX and improve our
minds, and to excite proper sentiments and reflexions, as a history,
a poem, a book of ethics, or divinity: the truth is, they mu-
tually assist one another..
By reading, or discourse, we learn some particulars which we
cannot have otherwise; and by Painting we are taught to form ideas
of what we read ; we see those things as the painter saw them, or
has improved them, with much care and application; and if he be
a Rafaelle, a Giulio Romano, or some such great genius, we see
them better than any one of an inferior character can, or even than
one of their equals, without that degree of reflection they had made,
possibly could. After having read Milton, one sees nature with
better eyes than before; beauties appear, which else had been un-
regarded : so by conversing with the works of the bed masters in
Painting, one forms better images whilst we are reading or think-
ing. I see the divine airs of Rafaelle when I read any history of
our Saviour, or the Blessed Virgin; and the awful ones he gives an
apostle when I read of their aXions, and conceive of those a&ions,
that he and other great men describe in a nobler manner than other-
wise I should ever have done. When I think of the great aXion of
the Decii, or the three hundred Lacedemonians at Thermopylae, I
see them with such faces and attitudes, as Michelangelo or Giulio
Romano would have given them; and Venus and the Graces I see
of the hand of Parmeggiano; and so of other subjeXs.
And'