How slight the apparent support need be, is indicated in Bouguereau's Aurora and Twilight. Each figure is represented by a nude woman holding a light scarf, the first rapidly, and the second slowly, skimming the surface of a stream of water with soft touches of the feet, and yet there is no anomaly that strikes the mind. A still more daring device is used by Battistello, though quite successfully. He places two wingless putti in the air, but one holds up the other, and this action seems to sustain them both.[a] Another amazing design is from the hand of A. P. Roll, who shows a nude-man in the air clutching another, and apparently struggling to pull him down, yet the action seems perfectly natural.[b]
[a] Adoration of the Shepherds, San Martino, Naples.
It is usual and proper to distinguish three kinds of beauty in painting, namely, of colour, of form, and of expression. But form must be defined by tones, and colour without form is meaningless: hence in the general consideration of the painter's art, it is convenient to place form and colour together as representing the sensorial element of beauty. Nevertheless colour and form are not on the same plane in regard to sense perception. Harmony of colour is distinguished involuntarily by nerve sensations, but in the case of harmony of form there must be a certain consideration before its æsthetic determination. The recognition of this harmony commonly appears to be instantaneous, but still it is delayed, the delay varying with the complexity of the signs, that is to say, with the quality of the beauty.
Benedetto Croce, the inventor of the latest serious æsthetic system, talks of the "science of art," but he says[a]:
Science--true science, is a science of the spirit--Philosophy. Natural sciences spoken of apart from philosophy, are complexes of knowledge, arbitrarily abstracted and fixed.
It is perhaps needless to say that Croce's æsthetic system, like all the others, collapses on a breath of inquiry. On the purely philosophical side of it, further criticism is unnecessary, and its practical outcome from the point of view of art is not far removed from the amazing conclusions of Hegel. From the latter philosopher we learn that an idol in the form of a stone pillar, or an animal set up by the primitive races, is higher art than a drama by Shakespeare, or a portrait by Titian, because it represents the Idea (Hegel's unintelligible abstraction--see Note 5), while Croce tells us that "the art of savages is not inferior, as art, to that of civilized peoples, provided it be correlated to the impressions of the savages." Clearly if this be so, we are not surprised to learn from Croce that Aristotle "failed to discern the true nature of the æsthetic." Nevertheless, whatever be the outcome of Croce's arguments, his system is at least more plausible than that of either Hegel or Schopenhauer, for while these two invent highly improbable abstractions upon which to base their systems, Croce only gives new functions to an old and reasonable abstraction.