In the 1980s and indeed for many years past, the old and traditional bond between art and the stage has been virtually severed. An occasional artist like David Hockney ·will be asked to design The Magic Flute, but the now infrequent incursions of the artist into the theatre are confined to opera rather than· the dramatic stage. The last flowering of the relationship between artist and theatre occurred in the first quarter of this century, when painters such as Picasso, Miro, Braque, Gris, and Bakst experimented with stage and costume design for plays, operas, and ballets alike. Here, though, and even in the 1890s in England when a completely different kind of pictorial artist worked for the commercial stage, the emphasis was on design, on the scenic environment of the actor, on the clothes he wore, on the properties he used. The pictorial relationship between actor and the design was important and must be considered, but a much older relationship was that between art and the actor himself, irrespective of the scene and the stage world in which he moved. It was not really until the late seventeenth century that people began to write seriously about the art of stage acting, and from that time, in France, England, and finally Germany, a considerable body of critical theory and specific reference to actual stage performance, much of it consisting of guidelines and instructions to the actor, existed to illuminate both the prevailing attitudes to and the actual nature of the actor's art. Very simply, this art was thought to fall into two parts: comic acting, which reflected in a life-like technique exaggerated for stage and satiric effect the real manners of the day, and tragic acting, an ideal art and much larger than life; its technique had nothing to do with social manners and daily existence. It was the greater art, tragic acting, that attracted the majority of comment and the weight of intellectual argument, and it was also the art that aimed consciously at the physical communication, insofar as the imperfect human form would allow, of ideal beauty. The way in which tragic acting was an art of platonic ideality is well illustrated by the remarks of John Hill in 1750, in a book called The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing, an adaptation to the English stage of Le Comedien (1747), a work by Remond de Sainte