On the above subject I must restrict myself here to these very general observations.
(_γ_) Having thus, _firstly_, dealt with the general types of pictorial composition, and, _secondly_, with a composition from the point of view of selection of situations, arrangement of motives and grouping, we will now add a few remarks upon the mode of _characterization_, by means of which painting is to be distinguished from sculpture and its ideal plastic character.
(_αα_) I have several times previously taken occasion to remark, that in painting the ideal and external _particularity_ of soul-life is admitted in its freedom, and consequently is not necessarily that typical beauty of individualization which is inseparable from the Ideal itself, but one which is suffered to expand in every direction of particular appearance, by virtue of which we obtain that which in modern parlance is called _characteristic._ Critics have generally referred to "the characteristic" thus understood as the distinctive mark of modern art in its contrast to the antique; and, in the significance we are here attaching to the term, no doubt the above contrast is just. According to our modern criterion Zeus, Apollo, Diana, and the rest are really not characters at all in this sense, although we cannot fail to admire their infinitely lofty, plastic, and ideal individualities. We already find a more articulate individualization is approached by the Homeric Achilles, the Agamemnon and Clytemnestra of Aeschylus[318], or the Odysseus, Antigone, and Ismene in the type of spiritual development which by word and deed Sophocles unfolds to us, a definition in which these figures subsist in what appears to be consonant with their substantive nature, so that we can no doubt discover the presentment of character in the antique if we are prepared to call such creations characters. Still in Agamemnon, Ajax, Odysseus, and the rest, the individualization remains throughout of a generalized type, the character of a prince, of frantic rage, of cunning in its more abstract determinacy. The individual aspect is in the result closely intertwined with the general conception, and the character is merged in an individualization of ideal import. The art of painting, on the contrary, which does not restrain particularity within the limits of such ideality, is more than anything else occupied with developing the entire variety of that aspect of particularization which is accidental, so that what we have now set before us, instead of those plastic ideals of gods and men, is _particular people_ viewed in all the varied appearance of their accidental qualities. Consequently perfection of corporeal form, and the fully realized consonancy of the spiritual or ideal aspect with its free and sane existence, in a word, all that in sculpture we referred to as ideal beauty, in the art of painting neither make the same claim upon us, nor generally are regarded as the matter of most importance, inasmuch as now it is the ideality of soul-life itself, and its manifestation as conscious life which forms the centre of interest. In this more ideal sphere that realm of Nature is not so profoundly insistent. Piety of heart, religion of soul can, no less than ethical sense, and activity in fact did in the Silenus face of Socrates, find a dwelling in a bodily form which, viewed on the outside simply, is ugly and distorted. No doubt in expressing spiritual beauty, the artist will avoid what is essentially ugly in external form, or will find a way to subdue and illumine it in the power of the soul which breaks through it, but he cannot for all that entirely dispense with ugliness[319]. For the content of painting, as we have above depicted it at length, includes within itself an aspect, for which it is precisely the abnormal and distorted traits of human figures and physiognomy, which are most able to express. This is no other than the sphere of what is bad and evil, which in religious subjects we find mainly represented by the common soldiers, who take a part in the passion of Christ, or by the sinners and devils in hell. Michelangelo was pre-eminent in his delineation of devils. In his imaginative realization, though we find he passes beyond the scale of ordinary human life, yet at the same time an affinity with it is retained. However much notwithstanding the impersonations which painting sets before us necessarily disclose an essentially complete whole of characteristic realization, we will not go so far as to maintain that we cannot find in them an analogue of that which we refer to as the Ideal in the most plastic type of art[320]. In religious subjects, no doubt, the feature of all importance is that of pure Love.