From these two commentators we have a history of the progression of the
arts toward the Ideal. Mengs states that the Greeks and the Etruscans
have given rules of proportion and style. But progression, proportion,
style,--all of which proceeding from a fixed standard of beauty may
guide artists--the perception even of the ideal which each one
interprets in his own way--cannot be assimilated to that original law
which carries in itself all the reasons of the concept, that which
contains all conditions and means of a true execution,--_individual even
to the perfection of each type, general and varied as the infinite
shades of nature_.
In response to the allegation of Mengs, that "the sciences and
philosophy must necessarily have preceded the Beautiful in the arts," I
would call attention to the fact that celebrated artists--as Phidias and
Zeuxis for example--had produced their works long before the dialogues
between Socrates, Protagoras, Hippias and others, upon the True, the
Good and the Beautiful. The great painter and the great sculptor could
only have proceeded by the intuition of their genius, knowing nothing of
a law of aesthetics.
In that which remains to us of antiquity, I find nothing which implies
such an application of the human organism to the arts as that whose
discovery, promulgation, exemplification and teaching we owe to
Delsarte.
M. Eugene Veron, writer of our day, and author of remarkable works on
art, far from recognizing among the Greeks a law of aesthetics, writes
of Plato: "He considered ideas as species of divine beings, intermediate
between the Supreme Deity and the world.
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