Then light-and-shade begins to be studied for its
own sake; color, no longer pure and bright, but deep and resonant, comes
in again; the line vanishes altogether, and even form becomes
secondary. The last step is taken by Rembrandt, and even color is
subordinated to light-and-shade, which exists alone in a world of
brownness. At every step there has been progress, but there has also
been regress. Perhaps the greatest balance of gain against loss and the
nearest approach to a complete art of painting were with the great
Venetians. The transformation is still going on, and in our own day we
have conquered some corners of the science of visible aspects which were
unexplored by our ancestors. But the balance has turned against us; our
loss has been greater than our gain; and our art, even in its scientific
aspect, is inferior to that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
And just because there never has been a complete art of painting,
entirely rounded and perfected, it is the clearer to us that the final
value of a work in that art never has depended on its approach to such
completion. There is no one supreme master of painting but a long
succession of masters of different yet equal glory. If the masterpieces
of architecture are everywhere because there has often been a complete
art of architecture, the masterpieces of painting are everywhere for the
opposite reason.
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