3767. The first point of judgment would be about the thrust
of the entire work and the effect it had as a whole. Regardless of the
precision of the anatomy of a figure, the artist was asked if the work, in its
totality, when seen from a great distance, was a triangle, a rectangle, or a
square.
3768. If a student, lulled by the rhetorical trick of the
question, answered by choosing any of those three shapes, he found himself to
be instantly in the wrong. “No,” the master would shout, “the totality of a
piece of sculpture can never be a square, but only a cube. The totality of a
work can never be a triangle, but only some form of a pyramid.”
3769. In this way, from the beginning, a student in Ivan’s
father’s studio learned to think always in three dimensions, and not in the two
dimensions of drawing and painting.
3770. The criticism Ivan had to digest after he listen to
the conversation next to the equestrian statue of his Grandfather’s was of an
entirely different kind, and of a different magnitude. There are two types of
criticism in this world. There is the criticism that strives to instruct the
student in how to accomplish the longing of the artist heart. Then there is
another form of criticism, more drastic and pernicious.
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