The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
828.
In regard to the painter: _Tous ces modernes sont des poètes qui ont voulu être peintres, L'un a cherché des drames dans l'histoire, l'autre des scènes de mœurs, celui ci traduit des religions, celui là une philosophie._ One imitates Raphael, another the early Italian masters. The landscapists employ trees and clouds in order to make odes and elegies. Not one is simply a painter; they are all archæologists, psychologists, and impresarios of one or another kind of event or theory. They enjoy our erudition and our philosophy. Like us, they are full, and too full, of general ideas. They like a form, not because it is what it is, but because of what it expresses. They are the scions of a learned, tormented, and reflecting generation, a thousand miles away from the Old Masters who never read, and only concerned themselves with feasting their eyes.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.