PAINTING AND SCULPTURE
65
... to make something 'that hardly resembles a man. The value
of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest
head cut upon a carrot.") Leonardo opposes the verdict of Michael
Angelo on broader but hardly more enlightened grounds; in his
Notebooks
he confesses to being a reliable authority on the sub–
ject,
as he has pursued both art-forms equally,-and, he leaves
no room for douht,-painting is very much greater than sculp–
ture.
His point resolves into claims (which would certainly have
confused the Iconoclasts) that it is
painting
which presents so
many possibilities for naturalistic effects, such as light and the
weather, and these are denied to sculpture; Leonardo's closing
sentence I find significant, not only for the trend of his particular
tradition, but for the subject before us as well: "the lines of
sculptors do not seem in any way true; those of painters may
appear to extend a hundred miles beyond the work itself."
Qualitative comparisons here seem beyond the point, as on
such grounds the two have always been, for me at least, incom–
parable. By thus contrasting them, however, Leonardo has hinted
at something that I do not feel in any way makes painting
greater
than sculpture*, as he suggests, but can nevertheless unfold a
crucial divergence. We might designate it as the "possibilities
of scale." For painting, scale is illimitable, and this is indeed
a resource to which sculpture cannot pretend. A statue is always
fated to remain the size that it actually is. The Statue of Liberty,
for
inst~mce,"
expressively may achieve nothing more than a shallow
prettiness, yet I never saw anyone who did not realize at a glance
that it was very big; the same goes for every colossus from the
Sphinx
to Gutzon Borglum. Such an interpretation of scale has
nothing to do with grandeur or nobility,-it signifies merely that
sculpture is always a part of the world, and the world provides
other objects, if only the spectator himself, that will eventually
reveal the actual size. This may be disguised through an exag–
serated
mise-en-scene,
as in the sculptures on St. Peter's. For
a while the eye can be deceived into ignoring the great size of
'I have always been surprised at the lack of esthetic analysis in this highly in–
tellectual period; the
Notebooks
practically ignore any internal properties of art.
Presumably, such qualities as composition and plastic organization had become
eecond-nature to an age that was esthetically grounded to so sure an extent; ex–
pre88ionist and realistic devices were the exciting discoveries for the artists of that
lime.
The nineteenth century, however, has surfeited us of these, and so we now
emphasize anew the long-neglected field of esthetics.
