There were only two distinct faces in Assyrian art—one with and one without a beard. Neither of them was a portrait except as attributes or inscriptions designated. The type was unendingly repeated. Women appeared in only one or two isolated cases, and even these are doubtful.

Decline of Italian painting
There was nothing more to do (...) For the men that came after Michael Angelo and Tintoretto there was nothing. All that they could do was to repeat what others had said, or to recombine the old thoughts and forms. This led inevitably to imitation, over-refinement of style, and conscious study of beauty, resulting in mannerism and affectation. Such qualities marked the art of those painters who came in the latter part of the sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth. They were unfortunate men in the time of their birth. No painter could have been great in the seventeenth century of Italy.

Not impartial, not objective, but a very humorous and living History of Art by J.C. van Dyke, 1909

Now, from the same book (  www.gutenberg.org/files/26638/26638-h/26638-h.html   )
here are some BAD compositions from the great masters

 

Raphael's Madonna with the Blue Diadem: "Irrelevancy of subject and background, main lines of the latter repelling cohesion"
Annunciation by Botticelli: "Subject disturbed by lack of reserve in background, the vision drawn across the foreground by continuing verticals"

    
The Last Judgement by Michaelangelo: "Composition in three tiers and subdivided vertically, a strain to unity."
Birth of the Virgin Mary by Durer: "Subject relegated to background, picture divided through centre."
And, finally, Teniers goes down:

I replaced the poor reproductions from the original (except the last one) by the images from the Web Gallery of Art ( www.wga.hu/ )
 

Art vs nature

"The first stage of the art collector is that in which his admiration dwells on imitation such as the still-life painter gives him, but soon (...)  he seeks the constructive sense of the man who paints the picture.
In the same manner does the student usually develop. With the book of nature before him he is eager to sit down anywhere and read, attracted by each separate item of the vast pattern, but he finds he has opened nature's dictionary and that to make poetry or even good prose he must put the separate words and phrases together."

"Good art, of the gallery, is the best guide to a trip afield"

"Personality in 99 cases out of a hundred is a graft. The forms of artistic expression have been pre-empted long ago."

That's from "Pictorial Composition" by H.R. Poore, published in 1903. Digitized by Gutenberg project:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26638/26638-h/26638-h.html

Hanoi, Vietnam

I took these a year or two ago.