The easily scandalous inquiries, "Who?" "When?" "Where?" have assumed an
impertinent predominance. When I hear people very decidedly asserting
that such a picture was painted by such an one, not generally supposed
to be the author, at such a time, &c. &c., I often feel uneasy in the
same way as one does on being addressed in a loud voice in a church or a
picture gallery, where other persons are absorbed in an acknowledged and
respected contemplation or study. I feel inclined to blush and whisper,
for fear of being supposed to know the speaker too well. It is an
awkward moment with me, for I am in fact very good friends with many
such persons. "Sovereign skill consists in thoroughly understanding the
value of things"--not their commercial value only, though that is
sovereign skill on the Exchange, but their value for those whose chief
riches are within them. The value of works of art is an intimate
experience, and cannot be estimated by the methods of exact science as
the weight of a planet can. There are and have been forgeries that are
more beautiful, therefore more valuable, than genuine specimens of the
class of work which they figure as. I feel that the specialist, with his
special measure and point of view, often endangers the fair name and
good repute of the real estimate; and that nothing but the dominion and
diffusion of general ideas can defend us against the specialist and keep
the specialist from being carried away by bad habits resulting from his
devotion to a single inquiry.

There was one general idea, of the greatest importance in determining
the true value of things, which preoccupied Duerer's mind and haunted his
imagination: the idea of proportion. I propose therefore to attempt to
make clear to myself and my readers what the idea of proportion really
implies, and of what service a sense for proportion really is; secondly,
to determine the special use of the term in relation to the appreciation
of works of art; thirdly, in relation to their internal