NOTES

ON THE

ART OF PAINTING.

The few Notes which the Translator

has inserted, and which are marked M, are

merely critical, and relate only to the author's text or his own version.

NOTE S

ΟΝ ΤΗΕ

ART OF PAINTING.

I

NOTE I. VERSE I.

Two Sister Muses, with alternate fire, &c.

M. DU PILES opens his annotations here,
with much learned quotation from Tertullian,
Cicero, Ovid, and Suidas, in order to shew the
affinity between the two arts.
But it may
perhaps be more pertinent to substitute in the
place of it all a single passage, by Plutarch
ascribed to Simonides, and which our author,
after having quoted Horace, has literally trans-
lated : Ζωγραφίαν είναι ΦΘΕΓΓΟΜΕΝΗΝ την
Ποιησιν, ποιησιν δε ΣΙΓΩΣΑΝ την ζωγραφίαν.
There is a Latin line somewhere to the same
purpose,
but I know not whether ancient or
modern :

Poema

Est Pictura loquens, mutum Pictura Poema. M.

1

NOTE II. VERSE 33.

Such powers, such praises, heav'n-born pair,belong To magick colouring, and persuasive song.

That is to say, they belong intrinsically and of right. Mr. Wills, in the preface to his version of our poet, first detected the false translations of Du Piles and Dryden, which say, "so much have these divine arts been honoured;" in consequence of which the Frenchman gives a note of four pages, enumerating the instances in which Painting and its Professors have been honoured by kings and great men, ancient and modern. Fresnoy had not this in his idea: He says, 66 tantus inest divis honor artibus atque potestas," which Wills justly and literally translates,

Such powers, such honours, are in arts divine.

NOTE III. VERSE 51.

'Tis Painting's first chief business to explore,
What lovelier forms in nature's boundless store,
Are best to art and ancient taste allied,
For ancient taste those forms has best applied.

M.

The Poet, with great propriety, begins, by declaring what is the chief business of Theory and pronounces it to be a knowledge of what is beautiful in nature:

That form alone, where glows peculiar grace,

The genuine Painter condescends to trace. v. g. There is an absolute necessity for the Painter to generalize his notions; to paint particulars is not to paint nature, it is only to paint circumstances. When the Artist has conceived in his imagination the image of perfect beauty, or the abstract idea of forms, he may be said to be admitted into the great Council of Nature, and to

Trace Beauty's beam to its eternal spring, And pure to man the fire celeftial bring. v. 19. To facilitate the acquisition of this ideal beauty, the Artist is recommended to a studious examination of ancient sculpture.

NOTE IV. VERSE 55.

Till this be learn'd, how all things difagree,
How all one wretched, blind barbarity!

R.

The mind is distracted with the variety of accidents, for so they ought to be called rather than forms; and the disagreement of