But if we ask what this system is, which provides our canon ...

But if we ask what this system is, which provides our canon

of valuation, I do not believe we can

yet go further than to say, it is the picture as the individual observer sees it.

If we trespass across

this boundary, we may find

ourselves insensibly succumbing to one of the most insidious vices of the human mind: what the Germans in their terse and sparkling way call the hypostatization of methodological categories, or the habit of treating a mental convenience as if it were an objective thing.

'Painting , Constable once said, 'is a science of which pictures are the experiments.' That there is a painter's eye, an attitude or disposition recognizable as such in Giotto and Gauguin, no one will question.

Yet Giotto and Gauguin confronted with the same object will make very different pictures, of which no one can say that one is truer than the other: and to impose an Interpretation of History on history is, to my mind, to fall into the error, or to commit the presumption, of saying that all Virgins must look like Piero's, or that, if we were sufficiently enlightened, we should see all chairs as Van Gogh saw them.

...next: >>