A picture over-finished fails in its effect. If the hand of the artist cannot leave it, how much beauty may it undo! yet still he is lingering, still strengthening the weak, still subduing the daring, still searching for that single idea which awakens so many in the minds of others, while often, as it once happened, the dash of despair hangs the foam on the horse's nostrils.
There he could study Stephan Lochner's precursor, Master Wilhelm the first early German painter whose name is known and in this again he found the look of elaborate chubbiness as in the Dombild. Wilhelm's Virgin was indeed less vulgar than the Virgin of the cathedral; but in feeling she was equally insipid, over-finished, and even more simperingly pretty.
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