Page:Thoughts on art and life.djvu/123

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metic deals with discontinuous quantities, paint- ing deals with all quantities and the qualities of the proportions of shadows, lights and distances, in its perspective.

26.

The musician says that his art can be compared with that of the painter because by the art of the painter a body of many members is com- posed, and the spectator apprehends its grace in as many harmonious rhythms ... as there are times in which it lives and dies; and by these rhythms ... its grace plays with the soul, which dwells in the body of the spectator. But the painter replies that the body composed of hu- man limbs does not afford the delectable har- monious rhythms in which beauty must live and die, but renders it permanent for many years, and is of such great excellence that it preserves the life of this harmony of concordant limbs which nature with all her force could not pre- serve.

How many pictures have preserved the sem- blance of divine beauty of which time or death had in a brief space, destroyed the living ex- ample; and the work of the painter has become more honoured than that of nature, his master!

If thou, O musician, sayest that painting is me- chanical because it is wrought by the work of the hands, music is wrought by the mouth, but

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