THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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“The science of drawing or of outline is the essence of painting and of all the fine arts, and the root of all the sciences. He who can raise himself to the point of mastering it possesses a great treasure. Drawing embraces everything; it is used for machines, for plans, for building, for the ordering of battles, etc., so that in looking at all varieties of human work you will find each to consist wholly or in part of drawing.”

Let us then establish at once that by drawing we mean the graphic represen­tation on a plane (flat or smooth surface) of all kinds of solid forms, with the varying aspects they present, according to the point from which we look at them, their dis­tance from us and from each other, and their own actual position, etc. “All drawing is founded on a right knowledge of perspective,” says Leonardo da Vinci. The word per­spective, dictionaries tell us, comes from roots meaning to see through, or to see thoroughly. This definition can not, however, be considered altogether satisfactory, because thorough seeing implies quite different things according to the end we have in view when looking. A paper-hanger or a shop assistant, whose eye is well trained and who sees thoroughly, will, when looking at a large roll of paper or wire or woolen goods, be able to say within a little how many yards go to make up the piece, or how many rolls are required to paper a room. A modeler, or a sculptor, who is going to copy in wax or in clay a certain vase, a head or a whole figure, must rightly see and imitate the shape and the literal or proportional bulk of each part.

Drawing, then, deals with appearances, and whether we are going to make a draw­ing of a single object ora landscape, to do a portrait from life or to sketch an interior, our first aim must be to rightly see, and our second, to rightly record the actual appearance of the subject from our chosen point of view. The better we see and the more accurately we record it, the truer will our drawing be. Leonardo did not con­tent himself with telling his pupils to learn perspective—he gave them a great many practical hints on the subject, and the first thing he advised them to study, until they understood it properly, was their own eye, and its working.

The first thing Leonardo da Vinci suggests as a help in the translation of the appearance of solid forms on to a plane surface (Treatise on Painting) is the use of a piece of glass fixed upright at a convenient distance from the eye. “To make sure your perspective is right,” says he, “ fix a sheet of glass before your eye, between it and the thing you intend to make a portrait of; fix your head so that you can not move it at all; close and cover one eye, and with pen or pencil trace on the glass what you see before you. You can afterward take it off on thin tracing paper, and transfer it to another surface for painting pay great attention then to the aerial perspective.” This passage, as well as many others in the remarkable work, goes far to prove how well dis­posed was Leonardo, at least toward the use of everything capable of helping the student to use to the utmost his own individual powers of judgment and criticism. With him all means are good and admissible be they scientific, common-sense, or distinctively mechanical and commonplace, provided they tend toward the true seeing and the intelligent rendering of those appearances of forms in space which it is the sole province of drawing to deal with. Starting with the use of Leonardo’s glass plane, or rather the practical realization of his vague suggestion, we found that all the ele­mentary facts of perspective can be clearly demonstrated, and more, made absolutely tangible by the intelligent use of the apparatus we had made, and which we call a philograph, so that the beginner, instead of hearing of mathematical theories, and given a number of tiresome diagrams to work out, could learn the groundwork of perspec­tive directly from nature, and with proper guidance find out, so to say for himself, the first facts of the science on which the whole of linear perspective is built up, and with this advantage, that he only learns theoretically what he learns practically, and the theory after and in proof of the practice.

Next we made quite clear to ourselves that a much more important point has been attained; namely, we can do the same for the perspective of irregular forms, or organic or living bodies and figures, as for the lines and planes of linear perspective.