As for the hands
themselves, and indeed all the hands and feet throughout the picture,
there is not one which is even tolerably drawn if judged by the
standard which Royal Academicians apply to Royal Academy students
now.
Granted that this is an early work, nevertheless I submit that the
drawing here is not that of one who is going to do better by and by,
it is that of one who is essentially insincere and who will never aim
higher than immediate success. Those who grow to the best work
almost always begin by laying great stress on details which are all
they as yet have strength for; they cannot do much, but the little
they can do they do and never tire of doing; they grow by getting
juster notions of proportion and subordination of parts to the whole
rather than by any greater amount of care and patience bestowed upon
details. Here there are no bits of detail worked out as by one who
was interested in them and enjoyed them. Wherever a thing can be
scamped it is scamped. As the whole is, so are the details, and as
the details are, so is the whole; all is tainted with eye-service and
with a vulgarity not the less profound for being veiled by a due
observance of conventionality.
I shall be told that Raffaelle did come to draw and paint much better
than he has done here. I demur to this. He did a little better; he
just took so much pains as to prevent him from going down-hill
headlong, and, with practice, he gained facility, but he was never
very good, either as a draughtsman or as a painter.
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