Piles, in his lives of the painters, is still more contradictory, where he says, "that a painter can only have it (meaning grace) from nature, and doth not know that he hath it, nor in what degree, nor how he communicates it to his works: and that grace and beauty are two different things; beauty pleases by the rules, and grace without them."

All the English writers on this subject have echoed these passages; hence Je ne sçai quoi, is become a fashionable phrase for grace.

By this it is plain, that this precept which Michael Angelo delivered so long ago in an oracle-like manner, hath remained mysterious down to this time, for aught that has appeared to the contrary. The wonder that it should do so will in some measure lessen when we come to consider that it must all along have appeared as P. viii full of contradiction as the most obscure quibble ever delivered at Delphos, because, winding lines are as often the cause of deformity as of grace, the solution of which, in this place, would be an anticipation of what the reader will find at large in the body of the work.

There are also strong prejudices in favour of straight lines, as constituting true beauty in the

the illuminations of an excellent mind, (but not to be acquired) by which we give an certain turn to things, which makes them pleasing."

human form, where they never should appear. A middling connoisseur thinks no profile has beauty without a very straight nose, and if the forehead be continued straight with it, he thinks it is still more sublime. I have seen miserable scratches with the pen, sell at a considerable rate for only having in them a side face or two, like that between fig. 22, and fig. 105, plate 1, which was made, and any one might do the same, with the eyes shut. The common notion that a person should be straight as an arrow, and perfectly erect, is of this kind. If a dancingmaster were to see his scholar in the easy and gracefully-turned attitude of the Antinous (fig. 6, plate 1,) he would cry shame on him, and tell him he looked as crooked as a ram's horn, and bid him hold up his head as he himself did. See fig. 7, plate 1.

The painters, in like manner, by their works, seem to be no less divided upon the subject than the authors. The French, except such as have imitated the antique, or the Italian school, seem to have studiously avoided the serpentine line in all their pictures, especially Anthony Coypel, history painter, and Rigaud, principal portrait painter to Lewis the 14th.

Rubens, whose manner of designing was P. ix quite original, made use of a large flowing line as a principle, which runs through all his works,

P. x

and gives a noble spirit to them; but he did not seem to be acquainted with what we call the precise line; which hereafter we shall be very particular upon, and which gives the delicacy we see in the best Italian masters; but he rather charged his contours in general with too bold and S-like swellings.

Raphael, from a straight and stiff manner, on a sudden changed his taste of lines at sight of Michael Angelo's works, and the antique statues; and so fond was he of the serpentine line, that he carried it into a ridiculous excess, particularly in his draperies: though his great observance of nature suffered him not long to continue in this mistake.

Peter de Cortone formed a fine manner in his draperies of this line.

We see this principle no where better understood than in some pictures of Corregio, particularly his Juno and Ixion: yet the proportions of his figures are sometimes such as might be corrected by a common sign painter.

Whilst Albert Durer, who drew mathematically, never so much as deviated into grace, which he must sometimes have done in copying the life, if he had not been fettered with his own impracticable rules of proportion.

But that which may have puzzled this matter most, may be, that Vandyke, one of the best

portrait painters in most respects ever known, plainly appears not to have had a thought of this kind. For there seems not to be the least grace in his pictures more than what the life chanced to bring before him. There is a print of the Dutchess of Wharton (fig. 52, plate 2,) engraved by Van Gunst, from a true picture by him, which is thoroughly divested of every elegance. Now, had he known this line as a principle, he could no more have drawn all the parts of this picture so contrary to it, than Mr. Addison could have wrote a whole Spectator in false grammar; unless it were done on purpose. However, on account of his other great excellencies, painters chuse to style this want of grace in his attitudes, &c. simplicity, and indeed they do often very justly merit that epithet.

Nor have the painters of the present times been less uncertain and contradictory to each other, than the masters already mentioned, whatever they may pretend to the contrary: of this I had a mind to be certain, and therefore, in the year 1745, published a frontispiece to my engraved works, in which I drew a serpentine line lying on a painter's pallet, with these words under it, THE LINE OF BEAUTY. The bait soon took; and no Egyptian hieroglyphic ever amused more than it did for a time, painters and sculptors came to me to know the meaning of it, P. xi

being as much puzzled with it as other people, till it came to have some explanation; then indeed, but not till then, some found it out to be an old acquaintance of theirs, though the account they could give of its properties was very near as satisfactory as that which a day-labourer who constantly uses the leaver, could give of that machine as a mechanical power.

Others, as common face painters and copiers of pictures, denied that there could be such a rule either in art or nature, and asserted it was all stuff and madness; but no wonder that these gentlemen should not be ready in comprehending a thing they have little or no business with. For though the picture copier may sometimes to a common eye seem to vie with the original he copies, the artist himself requires no more ability, genius, or knowledge of nature, than a journeyman-weaver at the goblins, who in working after a piece of painting, bit by bit, scarcely knows what he is about, whether he is weaving a man or a horse, yet at last almost insensibly turns out of his loom a fine piece of tapestry, representing, it may be, one of Alexander's battles painted by Le Brun.

As the above-mentioned print thus involved me in frequent disputes by explaining the qualities of the line, I was extremely glad to find it (which I had conceived as only part of a system