They leave us cold. We have a wholly different ideal, which in order to
interest us powerfully painting must illustrate--an ideal of more
pertinence and appositeness to our own moods and manner of thought and
feeling.
Ingres, a painter of considerably less force, I think, comes much nearer
to doing this. He is more elastic, less devoted to system. Without being
as free, as sensitive to impressions as we like to see an artist of his
powers, he escapes pedantry. His subject is not "The Rape of the
Sabines," but "The Apotheosis of Homer," academic but not academically
fatuitous. To follow the inspiration of the Vatican Stanze in the
selection and treatment of ideal subjects is to be far more closely in
touch with contemporary feeling as to what is legitimate and proper in
imaginative painting, than to pictorialize an actual event with a
systematic artificiality and conformity to abstractions that would
surely have made the sculptor of the Trajan column smile. Yet I would
rather have "The Rape of the Sabines" within visiting distance than "The
Apotheosis of Homer.
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