8 THE STONES OF VENICE

music, he permits the momentary crimson and azure, and the whole canvas is in a flame.

§ 8. Again, in curvature, which is the cause of loveliness in all form;¹ the bad designer does not enjoy it more than the great designer, but he indulges in it till his eye is satiated, and he cannot obtain enough of it to touch his jaded feeling for grace. But the great and temperate designer does not allow himself any violent curves; he works much with lines in which the curvature, though always existing, is long before it is perceived. He dwells on all these subdued curvatures to the uttermost, and opposes them with still severer lines to bring them out in fuller sweetness; and, at last, he allows himself a momentary curve of energy, and all the work is, in an instant, full of life and grace.

The curves drawn in Plate 7, opposite p. 268 of the first volume, were chosen entirely to show this character of dignity and restraint, as it appears in the lines of nature, together with the perpetual changefulness of the degrees of curvature in one and the same line; but although the purpose of that plate was carefully explained in the chapter which it illustrates, as well as in the passages of Modern Painters therein referred to,² so little are we now in the habit of considering the character of abstract lines, that it was thought by many persons that this plate only illustrated Hogarth’s reversed line of beauty,³ even although the curve of the salvia leaf, which was the one taken from that plate for future use, in architecture, was not a reversed or serpentine curve at all. I shall now, however, I hope, be able to show my meaning better.

§ 9. Fig. 1, in Plate 1, opposite, is a piece of ornamentation from a Norman-French manuscript of the thirteenth

¹ [See Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 87).]

² [The references to the present edition are: Vol. IV. pp. 87, 88.]

³ [In Hogarth’s portrait of himself in the National Gallery (No 112), there is a palette with the “Line of Beauty and Grace” marked upon it, and the date 1745. He explained the mystery in 1753 by publishing his Analysis of Beauty, in which he propounded the doctrine that “a winding or serpentine line was the source of all that is beautiful in works of art.” “No Egyptian hieroglyphic,” he there says, “ever amused more than my ‘Line of Beauty’ did for a time. Painters and sculptors came to me to know the meaning of it, being as much puzzled with it as other people.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]