Du Piles is justly censured for his recipe of grace and dignity. "If,"
says he, "you draw persons of high character and dignity, they ought to
be drawn in such an attitude that the portraits must seem to speak to
us of themselves, and as it were to say to us, 'Stop, take notice of
me--I am the invincible king, surrounded by majesty.' 'I am the valiant
commander who struck terror every where,' 'I am that great minister, who
knew all the springs of politics.' 'I am that magistrate of consummate
wisdom and probity.'" This is indeed affectation, and a very vulgar
notion of greatness. We are reminded of Partridge, and his admiration of
the overacting king. All the characters in thus seeming to say, would be
little indeed. Not so Raffaelle and Titian understood grace and dignity.
Simplicity he holds to be "our barrier against that great enemy to truth
and nature, affectation, which is ever clinging to the pencil, and ready
to drop and poison every thing it touches." Yet that, "when so very
inartificial as to seem to evade the difficulties of art, is a very
suspicious virtue." Sir Joshua dwells much upon this, because he thinks
there is a perpetual tendency in young artists to run into affectation,
and that from the very terms of the precepts offered them. "When a young
artist is first told that his composition and his attitudes must be
contrasted; that he must turn the head contrary to the position of the
body, in order to produce grace and animation; that his outline must be
undulating and swelling, to give grandeur; and that the eye must be
gratified with a variety of colours; when he is told this with certain
animating words of spirit, dignity, energy, greatness of style, and
brilliancy of tints, he becomes suddenly vain of his newly-acquired
knowledge, and never thinks he can carry those rules too far. It is then
that the aid of simplicity ought to be called in to correct the
exuberance of youthful ardour." We may add that hereby, too, is shown
the danger of particular and practical rules; very few of the kind are
to be found in the "Discourses." Indeed the President points out, by