A _good_ taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a _just_ taste discriminates the degree,—the _poco-più_ and the _poco-meno_. A _good_ taste rejects faults; a _just_ taste selects excellences. A _good_ taste is often unconscious; a _just_ taste is always conscious. A _good_ taste may be lowered or spoilt; a _just_ taste can only go on refining more and more.
Artists are interesting to me as men. Their work, as the product of mind, should lead us to a knowledge of their own being; else, as I have often said and written, our admiration of art is a species of atheism. To forget the soul in its highest manifestation is like forgetting God in his creation.
“Les images peints du corps humain, dans les figures où domine par trop le savoir anatomique, en révèlant trop clairement à l’homme les secrets de sa structure, lui en découvrent aussi par trop ce qu’on pourrait appeler le point de vue _matériel_, ou, si l’on veut, _animal_.”
This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have sometimes thought that his very materialism, so grand, and so peculiar in character, may have arisen out of his profound religious feeling, his stern morality, his lofty conceptions of our _mortal_, as well as _immortal_ destinies. He appears to have beheld the human form only in a pure and sublime point of view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation, fearfully and wondrously constructed, for the spirit of man,—
“The outward shape, And unpolluted temple of the mind.”
This is the reason that Michal-Angelo’s materialism affects us so differently from that of Rubens. In the first, the predominance of form attains almost a moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness. Michal-Angelo believed in the resurrection of THE BODY, emphatically; and in his Last Judgment the dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty to suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben’s picture of the same subject (at Munich) the bodily presence of resuscitated life is revolting, reminding us of the text of St. Paul—“Flesh and blood shall _not_ inherit the kingdom of God.” Both pictures are _æsthetically_ false, but _artistically_ miracles, and should thus be considered and appreciated.