Multiple choice

Michael Angelo said, one paints, not with one's hands, but with one's brain. Leonardo shocked the Prior of the Convent Delle Grazie by standing for days together opposite the Last Supper without touching it with the brush. The painter is a painter, because he sees what others only feel or catch a glimpse of, but do not see. We think we see a smile, but in reality we have only a vague impression of it, we do not perceive all the characteristic traits from which it results, as the painter perceives them after his internal meditations, which thus enable him to fix them on the canvas. The illusion is less easy as regards musical expression; because it would seem strange to everyone to say that the composer had added or attached notes to the motive, which is already in the mind of him who is not the composer. As if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony were not his own intuition and his own intuition the Ninth Symphony.

What is the underlying theme of the passage?

  1. There is the illusion that we possess a more complete intuition of reality than we really do.

  2. If people had thoughts and ideas, they would have coined them into beautiful words or images.

  3. All of us ordinary men imagine and have intuitions of our own.

  4. A painter is a painter because he has a better imagination than normal humans.

  5. Creating something requires prodigious amount of talent.
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A Correct answer
Explanation

The passage explains how we feel we could have made what an artist has composed or created but in reality, we cannot do so because we cannot see things from the viewpoint of the artist. It is only after seeing something that we feel that we could have done the same. 

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