The Artistic Masterpieces Dearest to Me

I do not consider myself able to prefer one masterpiece over another, for a masterpiece may excel in one merit or several while lacking others. This would appear plainly to you if all the canvases counted as masterpieces were spread before you in an exhibition and you contemplated them one after another.

It is very rare indeed for a single masterpiece to fulfill all the conditions of perfection, for perfection is a lofty summit whose peak no one attains. Neither lines nor colors nor words nor melodies can bring the soul to fathom infinite beauty.

Man has left behind what masterpieces he could in his artistic production; every generation has its masterpieces, every school its masterpieces, and every tendency its masterpieces. Many are the masterpieces I love in every generation, every school, and every tendency — above all in the two tendencies, the representational and the impressionist. The elements which art requires to be gathered in a canvas before it may be counted among the masterpieces are three: soundness of drawing, splendor of composition, and mastery of coloring. The first element consists in rendering form in its various states in a manner that accords with truth in a clear and well-proportioned harmony. The second is the arrangement of diverse lines and differing, discordant shapes in an order in which they become organized, interlacing with a winding grace, embracing at their ease — and all of it in a captivating pattern. The third is the ability to translate the sensations aroused by the splendor of nature, and the inward impressions arising from those sensations, into an expression in which the different colors are wedded in a happy union that pleases the eye.

In one masterpiece the soundness of the drawing may be what I love best in it; in another the splendor of the composition may be what I love best; and I may find the drawing feeble and the composition middling in a masterpiece whose colors nevertheless have their vitality and their music — and then the colors are what I love best in it.

Among artists are those who excelled supremely in the first and second elements, such as Michelangelo and Gustave Doré; there are artists who astonished the world by the splendor of their composition and mastered coloring besides, as appears in the canvases of the Italian Titian and the Spaniard Murillo; there are artists who wished to join splendid coloring to soundness of drawing and gave results belonging first to the art of drawing alone, as is evident in the works of Ingres and David; and others possessed no skill at all in drawing and composition, yet were led by their native instinct to fine coloring, and seasoned their productions with an overall wash of joyous colors that gladden the eye, like the productions of Behzad and his contemporaries in Persian art.

What has been said above shows the difficulty of preferring. For while I prefer one masterpiece that seems dearest to me for its excellence in one or two of the three elements mentioned, behold, another masterpiece contends with my inclination, urging me to prefer it for its excellence in the third. But the request addressed to me by The Woman's Voice magazine — to write a piece on the subject of "the artistic masterpieces dearest to me" — must be answered.

At the dawn of the Renaissance there is a masterpiece I admired intensely, and it is, as it appears to me now, "the artistic masterpiece dearest to me" of that age and of some of the ages that followed it: the Birth of Venus, goddess of beauty, by the painter Botticelli.

I loved everything in it: the boldness and the innovation, which reached with Botticelli limits no artist afterward attained, despite the progress of art. In portraying the goddess, Botticelli reached the sensitive point of celestial beauty. Botticelli played it upon strings of decorative lines, leaving illusions for the ears: whenever the eyes gaze at her gentle head, one imagines a musical strain ringing in the mind, coming from the waves of her gilded hair — flying loose on one side like tongues of blazing fire upon the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and winding with shyness and cunning about the neck and shoulder on the other, like the serpent of Paradise. I do not think a human hand has been able to create its like. Her long neck, like a neck craning upward, to which the lines of the cheeks yield all the way to the middle of the luminous brow, rounded and curving — what wonder of composition! She has two eyes that tell of melancholy even as she smiles — two bewildered eyes casting their glances without aim, as though she knew what she dreams and dreamed what she does not know. She has a mouth which the stirrings of youth are on the point of driving to utter "no" and "yes" at one and the same moment. She has two long, pale cheeks in which there is no color of passion nor of vengeance, in which modesty prevails over effrontery, while the nose stands between them, balancing the two qualities and holding them even.

Botticelli created a lofty ideal of beauty, so that it seems to me — I who was molded of dust — that this beauty belongs to a world other than ours. Ever since I came to know this masterpiece of Botticelli's, I have contemplated it, and I count myself then a wanderer in one of the beautiful spots of Paradise.

And yet — despite my admiration for Botticelli's masterpiece, as I have said — I hold that perfect ideal beauty cannot possibly be revealed in its entirety in any masterpiece of man's, because ideal beauty is infinite; and however great the efforts an artist expends, and whatever pains he takes to perfect his production, it remains impossible for him, with the work of his two finite hands, to represent infinite beauty completely.