The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 3 (of 3). Fuseli Henry

in the crowd, meet beauty: follow vigour, compare character, snatch the feature that moves unobserved and the sudden burst of passion – and you are at the school of nature with Lysippus.29

      140. The lessons of disappointment, humiliation and blunder, impress more than those of a thousand masters.

      141. There are artists, who have wasted much of life in abstruse theories on proportion, who have measured the Antique in all its forms and characters, compared it with Nature, and mixed up amalgamas of both, yet never made a figure stand or move.

      Coroll.– "The Apollo is altogether composed of lines sweetly convex, of very small obtuse angles, and of flats, but the soft convexities predominate the character of the figure, being a compound of strength, dignity and delicacy. The artist has expressed the first by convex outlines, the second by their uniformity, and the third by undulation of forms. The convex line predominates in the Laocoon, and the forms of the muscles are angular at their insertions and ends to express agitation; for by these means the nerves and tendons become more visible, straight lines meeting with concave and convex ones, form those angles which produce violence of action. The sculptor of the Farnesian Hercules invented a style totally different; to obtain fleshiness, he composed the figure of round and convex muscles, but made their insertions flat to signify that they are nervous and unincumbered with fat, the characteristic of strength."