From the start one feels that design is his principal
preoccupation, that he is thinking mainly of the pattern of the whole,
its decorative effect and play of line, its beauty of masses and spaces,
its fitness for its place and its surroundings; in a word, its
composition. In the beginning, as a workman in the shop of the cameo
cutter, he was concerned with a kind of art in which perfection of
composition is almost the sole claim to serious consideration. Then he
produces a multiplicity of small reliefs, dainty, exquisite, infallibly
charming in their arrangement--things which are so dependent on design
for their very existence that they seem scarcely modelled at all. He
goes on to decorative figures in the round, to heroic statues, to
monumental groups, but always it is design that he thinks of first and
last--design, now, in three dimensions rather than in two--design
properly sculptural rather than pictorial, in so much as it deals with
bosses and concaves, with solid matter in space--but still design. This
power of design rises to higher uses as time goes on, is bent to the
interpretation of lofty themes and the expression of deep emotions, but
it is in its nature the same power that produced the delicate, ethereal
beauty of the reliefs. The infinite fastidiousness of a master designer,
constantly reworking and readjusting his design, that every part shall
be perfect and that no fold or spray of leafage shall be out of its
proper place, never satisfied that his composition is beyond improvement
while an experiment remains untried--this is what cost him years of
labor.
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