O barro resistente

(Foto: Reboliço, de um postal a reproduzir o quadro de Anders Zorn,
"Badande flickor ute" [Meninas a Tomar Banho ao Ar Livre], 1890, Atheneum, Helsínquia.)

"Mere portrayal is menial and low. You must recreate nature. If the tree or the man in front of you does not conform to that geometrical scaffolding now presented as the perfect canon, so much the worse for the tree or the man. The perfect painter is endowed with the gift of seeing the universal in the particular, of looking across the dross of matter at the 'essential form' which - in Aristotelian rather than in Platonic terms - shaped the resisting clay from within."

(Ernst Hans Joseph Gombrich, Art and Illusion -
A Study in the psychology of pictorial representation, 1956,
Sixth Impression 1988, Oxford, Phaidon Press, p. 134.)