No More Learning

For they both invent, feign and devise many things, and accommodate all
they invent to the use and service of Nature. Yet of the two, the pen is
more noble than the pencil; for that can speak to the understanding, the
other but to the sense. They both behold pleasure and profit as their
common object; but should abstain from all base pleasures, lest they
should err from their end, and, while they seek to better men's minds,
destroy their manners. They both are born artificers, not made. Nature
is more powerful in them than study.

_De pictura_. --Whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth and all
the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention of heaven, the most
ancient and most akin to Nature. It is itself a silent work, and always
of one and the same habit; yet it doth so enter and penetrate the inmost
affection (being done by an excellent artificer) as sometimes it
overcomes the power of speech and oratory. There are divers graces in
it, so are there in the artificers. One excels in care, another in
reason, a third in easiness, a fourth in nature and grace. Some have
diligence and comeliness, but they want majesty. They can express a
human form in all the graces, sweetness, and elegancy, but, they miss the
authority. They can hit nothing but smooth cheeks; they cannot express
roughness or gravity. Others aspire to truth so much as they are rather
lovers of likeness than beauty.
Zeuxis and Parrhasius are said to be
contemporaries; the first found out the reason of lights and shadows in
picture, the other more subtlely examined the line.

_De stylo_. --_Pliny_. --In picture light is required no less than shadow; so
in style, height as well as humbleness. But beware they be not too
humble, as Pliny pronounced of Regulus's writings. You would think them
written, not on a child, but by a child. Many, out of their own obscene
apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words--as occupy, Nature, and the
like; so the curious industry in some, of having all alike good, hath
come nearer a vice than a virtue.

_De progres. picturae_. {93} Picture took her feigning from poetry; from
geometry her rule, compass, lines, proportion, and the whole symmetry.
Parrhasius was the first won reputation by adding symmetry to picture; he
added subtlety to the countenance, elegancy to the hair, love-lines to
the face, and by the public voice of all artificers, deserved honour in
the outer lines. Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers and other
elegancies. From the optics it drew reasons, by which it considered how
things placed at distance and afar off should appear less; how above or
beneath the head should deceive the eye, &c. So from thence it took
shadows, recessor, light, and heightnings. From moral philosophy it took
the soul, the expression of senses, perturbations, manners, when they
would paint an angry person, a proud, an inconstant, an ambitious, a
brave, a magnanimous, a just, a merciful, a compassionate, an humble, a
dejected, a base, and the like; they made all heightnings bright, all
shadows dark, all swellings from a plane, all solids from breaking. See
where he complains of their painting Chimaeras {94} (by the vulgar unaptly
called grotesque) saying that men who were born truly to study and
emulate Nature did nothing but make monsters against Nature, which Horace
so laughed at.