134 THE MODEL 



and most impassioned deed ; as you do this ignobly, you 

 will suggest evil lusts, animal grossness, or contemptible 

 deformities. The artist, owing to the conditions under which 

 he works, cannot fail to be an interpreter ; unable to reproduce 

 the object as it is, he must reproduce what his own self 

 brings to it. 



Style is thus an all-important factor in what I have called 

 interpretation, and upon which the ideal element of art 

 depends. Style has been denned as equivalent to the specific 

 qualities of the individual Le style c'est Vhomme. Style has 

 also been described as a recasting or remoulding of the stuff 

 of thought. In the figurative arts, style passes form through 

 the crucible of a mind which perceives its qualities in some 

 specific way ; style infuses the man, the spiritual nature of 

 the artist, into his reproduction of the object. Style is what 

 a sentient being, when he tries to imitate, cannct help adding 

 to the thing he renders ; it is what obliges the artistic 

 transcript to affect our minds quite otherwise than the thing 

 in nature does. 



These considerations might be pursued into the subtlest 

 and remotest regions. Art being essentially { form-giving,' 

 and the form being determined by the artist's specific power 

 of selection, and preference for some one aspect or another 

 of the material supplied by nature, it follows that no two 

 men can treat the same subject in the same way. Each 

 individual, to put this point somewhat differently, has his 

 own style ; and the exercise of style renders his work not 

 only a copy cf the thing perceived, but also an expression 

 of character in the perceiving person. To eliminate the 

 mental element from art, the element of style, the element of 

 interpretation, is therefore utterly impossible. What we call 

 the successive manners of the same master are mainly the 

 result of changes in his way of thinking and feeling, which 

 have necessitated corresponding changes in his interpretation 

 of nature. Compare Raphael's treatment of the female nude 

 in his small panel of the Three Graces (once in Lord 

 Dudley's, now in the Due d'Aumale's possession) with his 

 treatment of the female nude in the Farnesina frescoes, and 



