JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
Beauty is expression." Thus beauty is in the mind not in the body. Poussin wrote in the same way: "Beauty is altogether apart from the material body." And Lomazzo, the theorist of Michael Angelo's school, said: "La bellezza è lontana dalla materia."[1] Millet continues: "We may say that everything is beautiful if it comes in its right time and place, and on the contrary that nothing can be beautiful if it comes in the wrong place. Which is more beautiful, a straight tree or a twisted tree? That which best suits its position. I conclude this, then: The beautiful is the suitable" or in other words, is that which is in the right place and says well what it means to say.
It is evident that all this does not deal with plastic beauty. The only beauties that Millet seems to require from painting are clearness and force. "I would rather say nothing than express myself feebly." His are the conceptions of a writer, an orator, a man of action, a great intellectual artist whose aim is less to please by his work than to move men by his thought and his will.
- ↑ "Beauty is remote from matter."
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