Pictor in fabula

That he built both[[5:grace of conception and refinement of taste.]] not on the precarious and volatile blandishments of colour, or the delusive charms of light and shade, but on the solid foundation of form, acquired by precision and obedience of hand – not only the confessed inability of succeeding artists to finish his ultimate Venus, but his well-known contest of lines with Protogenes (the correctest finisher of this time), not  legendary tale, but a well attested fact, irregragably proves. The panel on which the were drawn made part of the Imperial collection in the Palatium, existed in the time of Pliny, and was inspected by him; their evanescent subtlety, the only trait by which he mentions them, was not, as it appears, the effect of time, but a delicacy, sweep, and freedom of hand nearly miraculous. What they were, drawn in different colours, and with the point of a brush, one upon the other, or rather within each other, it would be equally unavailing and useless for our purpose to inquire; but the corollaries we may deduce from the contest are obviously these: that all consists of elements; that the schools of Greece concurred in one elemental principle – fidelity of eye, and obedience of hand; that these form precision, precision proportion, proportion symmetry, and symmetry beauty: that it is the “little more or less”, imperceptible to vulgar eyes, which constitutes grace, and establishes the superiority of one artist over another: that the knowledge of the degrees of things, or taste, resupposs a comparative knowledge of things themselves: that colour, gace, and taste are companions, not substitues of form, expression, and character, and when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid faults.