PROFESSOR AT HEIDELBERG 241 



of the great masters, but, further, that the investigation of the 

 laws of sensation and perception are useful to the theory of 

 art, and to its right application. 



Helmholtz came by the circuitous route of the physiology 

 of the senses to his artistic studies, and compares himself 

 'with a traveller who has made his way into the lovely land 

 of art, across a sterile, stony mountain barrier, but in so doing 

 reached many points which gave him good views of the country 

 below him '. He does not conceive it to be his task to furnish 

 instructions by which the artist is to work, but would endeavour 

 to understand the problems which he must solve, and the ways 

 in which he attempts to arrive at his goal ; l the artist cannot 

 transcribe Nature, he must translate her/ 



But this translation is effected not by any conscious logical 

 activity of the mind, but with the help of the most refined and 

 accurate observation of sensory impressions, and of a specially 

 exact memory for retaining these impressions, which (since what 

 he can fix by hasty sketches at the moment is but scanty) must 

 be more exact in regard to the details of the phenomenon than 

 it is for the majority of people. In his Sensations of Tone 

 Helmholtz had pointed out the extraordinary development of 

 memory in musicians, who, without any notes before them, can 

 execute countless compositions on their instruments ; and it is 

 in the relative importance assigned to memory that he places 

 the main divergence in the paths of investigator and artist, as 

 he says in his splendid Goethe Lecture at Weimar : 



1 That which we can express in words can be fixed in writing ; 

 it is only the first creative idea that must always be formed and 

 emerge in the same way in both modes of activity, and this in 

 the first instance can only happen after a fashion analogous to 

 artistic intuition as the apprehension of a new law of nature/ 



The first and greatest difficulty for the painter is to enable his 

 spectator to estimate the depth of the objects represented in his 

 painting, since the binocular vision of solid objects is here 

 wanting. To this end he has to make a careful selection in 

 arranging the perspective objects, their position and aspect, their 

 light and shade ; above all, aerial perspective, or the artistic 

 representation of the opacity of the air, will be his great help in 

 indicating exactly the relative distances by the greater or less 

 >redominance of the colour of the air over the colour of the 



