File:The life, letters and work of Frederic Leighton (1906) (14594940308).jpg

Identifier: lifelettersworko01barr (find matches)
Title: The life, letters and work of Frederic Leighton
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Barrington, Russell, Mrs., d. 1933
Subjects: Leighton of Stretton, Frederic Leighton, Baron, 1830-1896
Publisher: New York : Macmillan
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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t and this mediaeval art; though thefact of the latter being fired with an ecstasy of spiritualemotion of which the Greek had no experience, may dis-guise the link where feeling in art is of more interest thanform. There is the same detachment of one form fromanother, each being given its full expression and intention—which induces a feeling of simplicity and serenity in thegreatest work. The form of the head is not smudged intothe throat, nor the throat into the chest, nor the chest intothe arms. Even in the smallest Greek coin or intaglio ofthe best period this separate individuality of form in eachpart of the human frame is accentuated, and with it a senseof size and breadth. The same fundamental principles also,adhered to by the great Greek workmen in their treatmentof drapery, is to be traced in the work of Giotto. But the great Greeks did not invent the beauty theyimmortalised, any more than did Leighton and Watts; thePheidian school intuitively chose the noblest form it found
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T\8i 4 PORTRAIT OF MISS MABEL MILLS (THE HON.MRS. GRENFELL). 1877 WATTS—SUCCESS—FAILURE 229 in nature.^ The notable gift with which nature endowed theartists of the Periclean epoch consisted of eyes to perceive,and taste to prefer^ the form which, intrinsically and mostconvincingly, inspires admiration in those imbued with thefinest sense of beauty—not a gift to invent something newand different from nature. In like manner the gift naturebestowed on Leighton and Watts was the same, a percep-tion and a preference for noble form ; and in this choice theyhad been educated by legacies ffom Pheidias and his school,but only so far as these legacies induced them to seek andperceive in nature herself the elements of such nobility. Inpainting the magnificent head and shoulders entitled Ata-lanta,^ or the reclining figures in Idyll, ^ Leighton copiedas directly from nature as when he painted the portrait ofMiss Mabel Mills, ^ where a similar beauty of form in thethroat existed as in Miss

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