PAINTER PUGG RECONSIDERED
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and the forge shall be at your service; you shall draw out your plates
of glass and beat out your bars of iron till you have encompassed us
all-if your style is of the practical kind-with endless perspectives of
black skeleton and blinding square. . . . And still, I ask you, what
after this?" And perhaps Le Corbusier has already given the answer:
"Amis, la nature nous fait: 'Psst-psstl'
''
But the tum is one that was
already advocated, in part explicitly and in part implicitly, by Hogarth
in
The Analysis of Beauty.
For, in spite of the fact that we primarily associate
The Analysis of
Beauty
with an emphasis on the beauty and fitness of the serpentine
line, the important note struck by Hogarth, even in his own day, was
something considerably subtler. The serpentine line, the "'s' line of
beauty" was for Hogarth the symbol, the concrete expression of his aes–
thetic. It was, in his own view of it, a popular "bait" to the consider–
ation of his work.-"The bait soon took," he wrote of the frontispiece he
made in 1745 for his engraved works in which he had drawn a serpen–
tine line on a painter's palette with the words under it,
The Line of
Beauty.
"And no Egyptian hieroglyph," he added, "ever amused more
than it did for a time." Painters and sculptors came to ask the meaning
of it, "being as much puzzled by it as other people, till it came to have
some explanation; then indeed, but not till then, some found it to be
an old acquaintance."
And it was Hogarth's explanation of this cryptic inscription which
eventually took permanent form as
Th e Analysis of Beauty-"a
treatise,"
according to the title page, "written with a view to fix the fluctuating
ideas of taste."
The fate of the book was what might have been expected. By the
painter's friends and adherents it was praised as the last word on aesthe–
tics; by his enemies and professional rivals it was made the subject of
endless ridicule and caricature. It was not a major contribution to
aesthetics but it left a deep mark on the history of taste. And in the
end it did so not through an academic insistence on the rejection of
the straight line in favor of the curved line, but through what this
emphasis led to in Hogarth's reasoning: a fresh acknowledgement of
the aesthetic value of "intricacy"-the power of "variety." "This love
of pursuit," "this pleasing labour of the mind to solve the most diffi–
cult problems," this sort of enjoyment the mind has "in winding walks
and serpentine rivers," all entered into his concept of "intricacy in
form" which, he felt, "from the pleasure it gives the mind entitles it
to the name of beautiful."
Perhaps "variety" does not describe Hogarth's real meaning as
