HELMHOLTZ ON AESTHETICS 



to feel that even in the obscure depths of a healthy 

 and harmoniously-developed human mind, which are 

 at least for the present inaccessible to analysis by con- 

 scious thought, there slumbers a germ of order that 

 is capable of rich intellectual cultivation, and we 

 learn to recognise and admire in the work of art, 

 though executed in unimportant material, the picture 

 of a similar arrangement of the universe, governed 

 by law and reason in all its parts. The contempla- 

 tion of a real work of art awakens our confidence 

 in the originally healthy nature of the human 

 mind when uncribbed, unharassed, unobscured and 

 unfalsified.' I 



In a series of lectures delivered in Cologne, Berlin, 

 and Bonn, and summarised in a paper on the relation 

 of optics to painting, 2 he demonstrates the limitations 

 imposed on truth to nature in artistic representations. 

 He shows how the painter finding that binocular 

 vision shows the flatness of a picture, carefully selects, 

 partly the perspective arrangement of his subject, its 

 position, and its aspect, and partly the lighting and 

 shading, in order to give an intelligible image of its 

 magnitude, shape and distance. He illustrates the 

 condition of securing a truthful representation of 

 aerial light, and how to transform the scale of 

 luminous intensity so as to secure proper shading of 

 colour. He then writes, * The artist cannot tran- 

 scribe nature ; he must translate her ; yet this 



1 Sensations of Tone, p. 571. a Lectures, p. 73. London, 1881. 



2 7 I 



