SCENE: The main hall of the Accademia in Venice.
Time: Noon of a July day.
Dramatis personae: A guide; two drab-colored and tired men; a
group of women, of various ages, equipped with red-covered little
volumes, and severally expressive of great earnestness, wide-eyed
rapture, and giggles.
_The guide, in strident, accentless tones:_ Last work of Titian.
Ninety-nine years old. He died of smallpox.
_A woman:_ Is that it?
_A high voice on the outskirts:_ I'm going to get one for forty
dollars.
_Another voice:_ Well, I'm not going to pay more than fifty for
mine.
_A straggler:_ Eliza, look at those people. Oh, you missed it!
_(Stopping suddenly?)_ My, isn't that lovely!
_Chorus:_ Yes, that's Paris Bordone. Which one is that? He has
magnificent color.
_The guide:_ The thing you want to look at is the five figures in
front.
_A voice:_ Oh, that's beautiful. I love that.
_A man:_ Foreshortened; well, I should say so! But I say, you can't
remember all these pictures.
_The other man:_ Let's get out of this!
_The guide, indicating a picture of the Grand Canal:_ This one has
been restored.
_A girl's voice:_ Why, that's the house where we are staying!
_The guide:_ The next picture . . .
The squad shuffles out of range.
This little comedy, enacted in fact and here faithfully reported, is not
without its pathos. These people are "studying art." They really want
to understand, and if possible, to enjoy. They have visited galleries
and seen many pictures, and they will visit other galleries and see
many more pictures before their return home. They have read
guide-books, noting the stars and double stars; they have dipped into
histories of art and volumes of criticism. They have been told to
observe the dramatic force of Giotto, the line of Botticelli, the
perfect composition of Raphael, the color of Titian; all this they
have done punctiliously. They know in a vague way that Giotto was
much earlier than Raphael, that Botticelli was rather pagan than
Christian, that Titian belonged to the Venetian school. They have
come to the fountain head of art, the very works themselves as
gathered in the galleries; they have tried to remember what they
have read and to do what they have been told; and now they are left
still perplexed and unsatisfied.
The difficulty is that these earnest seekers after knowledge of art
have laid hold on partial truths, but they have failed to see these
partial truths in their right relation to the whole. The period in which
an artist lived means something. His way of thinking and feeling
means something. The quality of his color means something. But
what does his _picture_ mean? These people have not quite found
the key by which to piece the fragments of the puzzle into the
complete design. They miss the central fact with regard to art; and as
a consequence, the ways of approach to the full enjoyment of art,
instead of bringing them nearer the centre, become for them a
network of by-paths in which they enmesh themselves, and they are
left to wander helplessly up and down and about in the blind-alleys
of the labyrinth. The central fact with regard to art is this, that a
work of art is the expression of some part of the artist's experience
of life, his vision of some aspect of the world. For the appreciator,
the work takes on a meaning as it becomes for him in his turn the
expression of his own actual or possible experience and thus relates
itself by the subtle links of feeling to his own life. This is the central
fact; but there are side issues. Any single work of art is in itself
necessarily finite. Because of limitations in both the artist and the
appreciator the work cannot express immediately and completely of
itself all that the author wished to convey; it can present but a single
facet of his many-sided radiating personality. What is actually said
may be reinforced by some understanding on the beholder's part of
what was intended. In order to win its fullest message, therefore, the
appreciator must set the work against the large background out of
which it has proceeded.
A visitor in the _Salon Carré_ of the Louvre notes that there are
arrayed before him pictures by Jan van Eyck and Memling, Raphael
and Leonardo, Giorgione and Titian, Rembrandt and Metsu, Rubens
and Van Dyck, Fouquet and Poussin, Velasquez and Murillo. Each
one bears the distinctive impress of its creator. How different some
of them, one from another,--the Virgin of Van Eyck from the
Virgin of Raphael, Rembrandt's "Pilgrimsat Emmaus" from the
"Entombment" by Titian. Yet between others there are common
elements of likeness. Raphael and Titian are distinguished by an
opulence of form and a luxuriance of color which reveal supreme
technical accomplishment in a fertile land under light-impregnated
skies. The rigidity and restraint of Van Eyck and Memling suggest
the tentative early efforts of the art of a sober northern race. To a
thoughtful student of these pictures sooner or later the question
comes, Whence are these likenesses and these differences?
Hitherto I have referred to the creative mind and executive hand as
generically _the artist._ I have thought of him as a type,
representative of all the great class of those who feel and express,
and who by means of their expression communicate their feeling.
Similarly I have spoken of _the work of art,_ as though it were
complete in itself and isolated, sprung full-formed and panoplied
from the brain of its creator, able to win its way and consummate its
destiny alone. The type is conceived intellectually; in actual life the
type resolves itself into individuals. So there are individual artists,
each with his own distinctive gifts and ideals, each with his own
separate experience of life, with his personal and special vision of
the world, and his characteristic manner of expression. Similarly, a
single work of art is not an isolated phenomenon; it is only a part of
the artist's total performance, and to these other works it must be
referred. The kind of work an artist sets himself to do is determined
to some extent by the period into which he was born and the country
in which he lived. The artist himself, heir to the achievements of his
predecessors, is a development, and his work is the product of an
evolution. A work of art, therefore, to be judged aright and truly
appreciated, must be seen in its relation to its background, from
which it detaches itself at the moment of consideration,--the
background of the artist's personality and accomplishment and of the
national life and ideals of his time.
If the layman's interest in art is more than the casual touch-and-go of
a picture here, a concert there, and an entertaining book of an
evening, he is confronted with the important matter of the study of
art as it manifests itself through the ages and in diverse lands. It is
not a question of practicing an art himself, for technical skill lies
outside his province. The study of art in the sense proposed has to
do with the consideration of an individual work in its relation to all
the factors that have entered into its production. The work of an
artist is profoundly influenced by the national ideals and way of life
of his race and of his age. The art of Catholic Italy is ecclesiastical;
the art of the Protestant North is domestic and individual. The actual
form an artist's work assumes is modified by the resources at his
disposal,--resources both of material and of technical methods.
Raphael may have no more to say than Giotto had, but he is able to
express himself in a fuller and more finished way, because in his
time the language of painting had become richer and more varied
and the rhetoric of it had been carried to a farther point of
development. Finally, as all art is in essence the expression of
personality, a single work is to be understood in its widest intention
and scope by reference to the total personality of the individual artist
as manifested in his work collectively, and to be interpreted by the
appreciator through his knowledge of the artist's experience of life.
In order to wrest its fullest expressiveness from a work of art it is
necessary as far as possible to regard the work from the artist's own
point of view. We must try to see with his eyes and to feel with him
what he was working for. To this end we must reconstruct
imaginatively on a basis of the facts the conditions in which he lived
and wrought. The difference between Giotto and Raphael is a
difference not of individuality only. Each gives expression to the
ideals and ways of thought of his age. Each is a creative mind, but
each bases his performance upon what has gone before, and the
form of their work is conditioned by the resources each had at his
disposal. To discover the artist's purpose more completely than he
was able to realize it for himself in the single work,--that is the aim
and function of the historical study of art. A brief review of the
achievement of Giotto and of Raphael may serve to illustrate
concretely the application of the principle and to fix its value to
appreciation.
In the period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire art passed
from Rome to Byzantium. The arts of sculpture and painting were
employed in the service of the Church, imposing by its magnificence
and all-powerful in its domination over the lives and minds of men.
The function of art was to teach; its character was symbolic and
decorative. Art had no separate and independent existence. It had no
direct reference to nature; the pictorial representation of individual
traits was quite outside its scope; a few signs fixed by convention
sufficed. A fish--derived from the acrostic _ichtbus--_symbolized
the Saviour; a cross was the visible token of redeeming grace. And
so through several hundred years. The twelfth century saw the
beginnings of a change in the direction of spiritual and intellectual
emancipation. The teachings and example of Francis of Assisi
brought men to the consciousness of themselves and to a realization
of the worth and significance of the individual life. The work of
Giotto is the expression in art of the new spirit.
Of necessity Giotto founded his work upon the accepted forms of
the Byzantine tradition. But Giotto was a man of genius and a
creative mind. In the expression of his fresh impulse and vital
feeling, the assertion of new-found individuality, he tried to
_realize_ as convincingly and vividly as possible the situation with
which he was dealing; and with this purpose he looked not back
upon art but out upon nature. Where the Byzantine convention had
presented but a sign and remote indication of form by means of flat
color, Giotto endows his figures with life and movement and
actuality by giving them a body in three dimensions; his forms exist
in the round. Until his day, light and shade had not been employed;
and such perspective as he was able to achieve he had to discover
for himself. For the first time in Christian painting a figure has
bodily existence. Giotto gives the first evidence, too, of a sense of
the beauty of color, and of the value of movement as a means of
added expressiveness. His power of composition shows an immense
advance on his predecessors. In dealing with traditional subjects, as
the Madonna and child, he follows in general the traditional
arrangement. But in those subjects where his own inventiveness is
given free play, as in the series of frescoes illustrating the life of St.
Francis, he reveals an extraordinary faculty of design and a dramatic
sense which is matched by a directness and clarity of expression.
Not only in the technique of his craft was Giotto an innovator, but
also in the direction of naturalness and reality of feeling. He was the
first to introduce portraits into his work. His Madonnas and saints
are no longer mere types; they are human and individual, vividly felt
and characterized by immediate and present actuality. Giotto was
the first realist, but he was a poet too. His insight into life is
tempered by a deep sincerity and piety; his work is genuinely and
powerfully felt. As a man Giotto was reverent and earnest, joyous
and beautifully sane. As a painter, by force of the freshness of his
impulse and the clarity of his vision, he created a new manner of
expression. As an artist he reveals a true power of imaginative
interpretation. The casual spectator of to-day finds him naive and
quaint. In the eyes of his contemporaries he was anything but that;
they regarded him as a marvel of reality, surpassing nature itself.
When judged with reference to the conditions of life in which he
worked and to the technical resources at his command, Giotto is
seen to be of a very high order of creative mind.
The year 1300 divides the life of Giotto into two nearly equal parts;
the year 1500 similarly divides the life of Raphael. In the two
centuries that intervene, the great age of Italian painting, initiated by
Giotto, reaches its flower and perfection in Michelangelo, Leonardo,
and Raphael. The years which followed the passing of these
greatnesses were the years of decadence and eclipse. If we are to
understand and justly appreciate the work of each man in its own
kind, the painting of Giotto must be tried by other standards than
those we apply to the judgment of Raphael. Giotto was a pioneer;
Raphael is a consummation. The two centuries between were a
period of development and change, a development in all that regards
technique, a change in national ideals and in the artist's attitude
toward life and toward his art. A quick survey of the period, if so
hasty a generalization permits correctness of statement, will help us
in the understanding of the craft and art of Raphael.
Giotto was succeeded by a host of lesser men, regarded as his
followers, men who sought to apply the principles and methods of
painting worked out by the master, but who lacked his inspiration
and his power. Thus it was for nearly a hundred years. The turn of
the fourteenth century into the fifteenth saw the emergence of new
forces in the science and the mechanics of painting. The laws of
perspective and foreshortening were made the object of special
research and practice by men like Uccello (1397-1475), Piero dei
Franceschi (1416-1492), and Mantegna (1431-1506). "Oh, what a
beautiful thing this perspective is!" Uccello exclaimed, as he stood
at his desk between midnight and dawn while his wife begged him
to take some rest. In the first thirty years of the fifteenth century,
Masaccio contributed to the knowledge of anatomy by his painting
of the nude form; and the study of the nude was continued by
Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli, in the second half of the century.
Masaccio, also, was the first to place his figures in _air,_ enveloping
them in atmosphere. Verrocchio, a generation later than Masaccio,
was one of the first of the Florentines to understand landscape and
the part played in it by air and light. The realistic spirit, which
suffices itself with subjects drawn from every-day actual experience,
finds expression in the first half of the fifteenth century in the work
of Andrea del Castagno. And so down through that century of spring
and summer. Each painter in his own way carries some detail of his
craft to a further point of development and prepares the path for the
supreme triumphs of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael.
The growing mastery of the principles and technique of painting
accompanied a change in the painter's attitude toward his art.
Originally, painting, applied in subjection to architecture and
employed in the service of the Church, was decorative in scope; its
purpose was illustration, its function was to teach. As painters, from
generation to generation, went deeper into the secrets of their craft,
they became less interested in the didactic import of their work, and
they concerned themselves more and more with its purely artistic
significance. Religious subjects were no longer used merely as
symbols for the expression of piety and as incitements to devotion;
they became inherently artistic motives, valued as they furnished the
artist an opportunity for the exercise of his knowledge and skill and
for the exhibition of lovely color and significant form. A change in
the mechanical methods of painting, also, had its influence on a
change in the conception of the function of art. With a very few
exceptions, the works of Giotto were executed in fresco as wall
decorations. The principles of mural painting require that the
composition shall be subordinated to the architectural conditions of
the space it is to fill and that the color shall be kept flat. The fresco
method meets these requirements admirably, but because of its
flatness it has its limitations. The introduction of an oil vehicle for
the pigment material, in the fifteenth century, made possible a much
greater range in gradated color, and reinforcing the increased
knowledge of light and shade, aided in the evolution of decoration
into the "easel picture," complete in itself. Released from its
subjection to architecture, increasing its technical resources, and
widening its interests in the matter of subject so as to include all life,
painting becomes an independent and self-sufficing art.
Coincident with the development of painting as a craft, a mighty
change was working itself out in the national ideals and in men's
ways of thought and feeling. Already in Giotto's time the spirit of
individualism had begun to assert itself in reaction from the
dominance of an all-powerful restrictive ecclesiasticism, but the age
was still essentially pietistic and according to its lights, religious.
The fifteenth century witnessed the emancipation from tradition.
The new humanism, which took its rise with the rediscovery of
Greek culture, extended the intellectual horizon and intensified the
enthusiasm for beauty. Men's interest in life was no longer narrowly
religious, but human; their art became the expression of the new
spirit. Early Christianity had been ascetic, enjoining negation of life
and the mortification of the flesh. The men of the Renaissance, with
something of the feeling of the elder Greeks, glorified the body and
delighted in the pride of life. Pagan myths and Greek legends take
their place alongside of Bible episodes and stories of saints and
martyrs, as subjects of representation; all served equally as motives
for the expression of the artist's sense of the beauty of this world.
To this new culture and to these two centuries of growth and
accomplishment in the practice of painting Raphael was heir. With a
knowledge of the background out of which he emerges, we are
prepared now to understand and appreciate his individual
achievement. In approaching the study of his work we may ask,
What is in general his ideal, his dominant motive, and in what
manner and by what means has he realized his ideal?
How much was already prepared for him, what does he owe to the
age and the conditions in which he worked, and what to the common
store has he added that is peculiarly his own?
Whereas Giotto, the shepherd boy, was a pioneer, almost solitary, by
sheer force of mind and by his sincerity and intensity of feeling
breaking new paths to expression, for Raphael, on the contrary, the
son of a painter and poet, the fellow-worker and well-beloved friend
of many of the most powerful artistic personalities of his own or any
age, the way was already prepared along which he moved in
triumphant progress. The life of Raphael as an artist extends through
three well-defined periods, the Umbrian, the Florentine, and the
Roman, each one of which contributed a distinctive influence upon
his development and witnessed a special and characteristic
achievement.
To his father, who died when the boy was eleven years old, Raphael
owed his poetic nature, scholarly tastes, and love of beauty, though
he probably received from him no training as a painter. His first
master was Timoteo Viti of Urbino, a pupil of Francia; from him he
learned drawing and acquired a "certain predilection for round and
opulent forms which is in itself the negation of the ascetic ideal." At
the age of seventeen he went from Urbino to Perugia; there he
entered the workshop of Perugino as an assistant. The ideal of the
Umbrian school was tenderness and sweetness, the outward and
visible rapture of pietistic feeling; something of these qualities
Raphael expressed in his Madonnas throughout his career. Under the
teaching of Perugino he laid hold on the principles of "space
composition" which he was afterwards to carry to supreme
perfection.
From Perugia the young Raphael made his way to Florence, and
here he underwent many influences. At that moment Florence was
the capital city of Italian culture. It was here that the new humanism
had come to finest flower. Scholarship was the fashion; art was the
chief interest of this beauty-loving people. It was the Florentines
who had carried the scientific principles of painting to their highest
point of development, particularly in their application to the
rendering of the human figure. In Florence were collected the art
treasures of the splendid century; here Michelangelo and Leonardo
were at work; here were gathered companies of lesser men. By the
study of Masaccio Raphael was led out to a fresh contact with nature.
Fra Bartolomeo revealed to him further possibilities of composition
and taught him some of the secrets of color. In Florence, too, he
acknowledged the spell of Michelangelo and Leonardo. But though
he learned from many teachers, Raphael was never merely an
imitator. His scholarship and his skill he turned to his own uses; and
when we have traced the sources of his motives and the influences
in the moulding of his manner, there emerges out of the fusion a
creative new force, which is his genius. What remains after our
analysis is the essential Raphael.
Raphael's residence in Florence is the period of his Madonnas. From
Florence Raphael, twenty-five years old and now a master in his
own right, was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II; and here he
placed his talents and his mastership at the disposal of the Church.
He found time to paint Madonnas and a series of powerful and
lovely portraits; but these years in Rome, which brought his brief
life to a close, are preeminently the period of the great frescoes,
which are his supreme achievement. But even in these mature years,
and though he was himself the founder of a school, he did not cease
to learn. Michelangelo was already in Rome, and now Raphael came
more immediately under his influence, although not to submit to it
but to use it for his own ends. In Rome were revealed to him the
culture of an older and riper civilization and the glories and
perfectness of an elder art. Raphael laid antiquity under contribution
to the consummation of his art and the fulfillment and complete
realization of his genius.
This analysis of the elements and influences of Raphael's career as
an artist--inadequate as it necessarily is--may help us to define his
distinctive accomplishment. A comparison of his work with that of
his predecessors and contemporaries serves to disengage his
essential significance. By nature he was generous and tender; the
bent of his mind was scholarly; and he was impelled by a passion for
restrained and formal beauty. Chiefly characteristic of his mental
make-up was his power of assimilation, which allowed him to
respond to many and diverse influences and in the end to dominate
and use them. He gathered up in himself the achievements of two
centuries of experiment and progress, and fusing the various
elements, he created by force of his genius a new result and stamped
it with the seal perfection. Giotto, to whom religion was a reality,
was deeply in earnest about his message, and he phrased it as best he
could with the means at his command; his end was expression.
Raphael, under the patronage of wealthy dilettanti and in the service
of a worldly and splendor-loving Church, delighted in his
knowledge and his skill; he worshiped art, and his end was beauty.
The genius of Giotto is a first shoot, vigorous and alive, breaking
ground hardily, and tentatively pushing into freer air. The genius of
Raphael is the full-blown flower and final fruit, complete, mature.
The step beyond is decay.
By reference to Giotto and to Raphael I have tried to illustrate the
practical application of certain principles of art study. A work of art
is not absolute; both its content and its form are determined by the
conditions out of which it proceeds. All judgment, therefore, must
be comparative, and a work of art must be considered in its relation
to its background and its conventions. Art is an interpretation of
some aspect of life as the artist has felt it; and the artist is a child of
his time. It is not an accident that Raphael portrayed Madonnas,
serene and glorified, and Millet pictured rude peasants bent with toil.
Raphael's painting is the culmination of two centuries of eager
striving after the adequate expression of religious sentiment; in
Millet's work the realism of his age is transfigured. As showing
further how national ideals and interests may influence individual
production, we may note that the characteristic art of the Italian
Renaissance is painting; and Italian sculpture of the period is
pictorial rather than plastic in motive and handling. Ghiberti's doors
of the Florence Baptistery, in the grouping of figures and the three
and four planes in perspective of the backgrounds, are essentially
pictures in bronze. Conversely, in the North the characteristic art of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is carving and sculpture; and
"the early painters represented in their pictures what they were
familiar with in wood and stone; so that not only are the figures dry
and hard, but in the groups they are packed one behind another,
heads above heads, without really occupying space, in imitation of
the method adopted in the carved relief." Some knowledge of the
origin and development of a given form of technique, a knowledge
to be reached through historical study, enables us to measure the
degree of expressiveness of a given work. The ideas of a child may
be very well worth listening to, though his range of words is limited
and his sentences are crude and halting, A grown man, having
acquired the trick of language, may talk fluently and say nothing. In
our endeavor to understand a work of art, a poem by Chaucer or by
Tennyson, a picture by Greco or by Manet, a prelude by Bach or a
symphony by Brahms, we may ask, Of that which the artist wanted
to say, how much could he say with the means at his disposal? With
a sense of the artist's larger motive, whether religious sentiment, or a
love of sheer beauty of color and form, or insight into human
character, we are aided by a study of the history of technique to
determine how far the artist with the language at his command was
able to realize his intention.
But not only is art inspired and directed by the time-spirit of its age.
A single work is the expression for the artist who creates it of his
ideal. An artist's ideal, what he sets himself to accomplish, is the
projection of his personality, and that is determined by many
influences. He is first of all a child of his race and time; inheritance
and training shape him to these larger conditions. Then his ideal is
modified by his special individuality. A study of the artist's character
as revealed in his biography leads to a fuller understanding of the
intention and scope of his work. The events of his life become
significant as they are seen to be the causes or the results of his total
personality, that which he was in mind and temperament. What were
the circumstances that moulded his character and decided his course?
What events did he shape to his own purpose by the active force of
his genius? What was the special angle of vision from which he
looked upon the world? The answers to these questions are the clue
to the full drift of his work. As style is the expression of the man, so
conversely a knowledge of the man is an entrance into the wider and
subtler implications of his style. We explore the personality of the
man in order more amply to interpret his art, and we turn to his art
as the revelation of his personality. In studying an artist we must
look for his _tendency_ and seek the unifying principle which binds
his separate works into a whole. An artist has his successive periods
or "manners." There is the period of apprenticeship, when the young
man is influenced by his predecessors and his masters. Then he
comes into his own, and he registers nature and life as he sees it
freshly for himself. Finally, as he has mastered his art and won some
of the secrets of nature, and as his own character develops, he tends
more and more to impose his subjective vision upon the world, and
he subordinates nature to the expression of his distinctive
individuality. A single work, therefore, is to be considered in
relation to its place in the artist's development; it is but a part, and it
is to be interpreted by reference to the whole.
In the study of biography, however, the man must not be mistaken
for the artist; his acts are not to be confounded with his message. "A
man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, but what he
became." We must summon forth the spirit of the man from within
the wrappages of material and accident. In our preoccupation with
the external details of a man's familiar and daily life it is easy to lose
sight of his spiritual experience, which only is of significance.
Whistler, vain, aggressive, quarrelsome, and yet so exquisite and so
subtle in extreme refinement, is a notable example of a great spirit
and a little man. Wagner wrote to Liszt: "As I have never felt the
real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of
my dreams, in which from beginning to end that love shall be
thoroughly satiated." Not the Wagner of fact, but the Wagner of
dreams. Life lived in the spirit and imagination may be different
from the life of daily act. So we should transcend the material,
trying through that to penetrate to the spiritual. It is not a visit to the
artist's birthplace that signifies, it is not to do reverence before his
likeness or cherish a bit of his handwriting. All this may have a
value to the disciple as a matter of loyalty and fine piety. But in the
end we must go beyond these externals that we may enter
intelligently and sympathetically into the temper of his mind and
mood and there find disclosed what he thought and felt and was able
only in part to express. It is not the man his neighbors knew that is
important. His work is the essential thing, what that work has to tell
us about life in terms of emotional experience.
Studies in the history of art and in biography are avenues of
approach to the understanding of a work of art; they do not in
themselves constitute appreciation. Historical importance must not
be mistaken for artistic significance. In reading about pictures we
may forget to look at them. The historical study of art in its various
divisions reduces itself to an exercise in analysis, resolving a given
work into its elements. But art is a synthesis. In order to appreciate a
work the elements must be gathered together and fused into a whole.
A statue or a picture is meant not to be read about, but to be looked
at; and its final message must be received through vision. Our
knowledge will serve us little if we are not sensitive to the appeal of
color and form. There is danger that preoccupation with the history
of art may betray us if we are not careful to keep it in its place. The
study of art should follow and not lead appreciation. We are apt to
see what we are looking for. So we ought to come to each work
freshly without prejudice or bias; it is only afterwards that we should
bring to bear on it our knowledge about the facts of its production.
Connoisseurship is a science and may hold within itself no element
of aesthetic enjoyment. Appreciation is an art, and the quality of it
depends upon the appreciator himself. The end of historical study is
not a knowledge of facts for their own sake, but through those facts
a deeper penetration and fuller true enjoyment. By the aid of such
knowledge we are enabled to recognize in any work more certainly
and abundantly the expression of an emotional experience which
relates itself to our own life.
The final meaning of art to the appreciator lies in just this sense of
its relation to his own experience. The greatest works are those
which express reality and life, not limited and temporary conditions,
but life universal and for all time. Without commentary these carry
their message, appealing to the wisest and the humblest. Gather into
a single room a fragment of the Parthenon frieze, Michelangelo's
"Day and Night," Botticelli's "Spring," the sprites and children of
Donatello and Delia Robbia, Velasquez's "Pope Innocent,"
Rembrandt's "Cloth-weavers," Frans Hals' "Musician," Millet's
"Sower," Whistler's "Carlyle." There is here no thought of period or
of school. These living, present, eternal verities are all one company.