BOOKS BY PROF. JOHN C. VAN DYKE
=Art for Art’s $1.50
Sake.= University
Lectures on the
Technical Beauties
of Painting. With
24 Illustrations.
12mo
=The Meaning of _net_
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Lectures at the
Metropolitan
Museum, New York.
With 31
Illustrations.
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the Famous
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=What is Art?= _net_
Studies in the $1.00
Technique and
Criticism of
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=Text Book of the $1.50
History of
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110
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=Old Dutch and $7.50
Flemish Masters.=
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Wood-Engravings.
Superroyal 8vo
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Superroyal 8vo
=Modern French $10.00
Masters.= Written
by American
Artists and Edited
by Prof. Van Dyke.
With 66 Full-page
Illustrations.
Superroyal 8vo
=Nature for Its Own $1.50
Sake.= First
Studies in Natural
Appearances. With
Portrait. 12mo
=The Desert.= _net_
Further Studies in $1.25
Natural
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Frontispiece. 12mo
=The Opal Sea.= _net_
Continued Studies $1.25
in Impressions
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A Commentary on $4.00
the Place and the
People. With 125
Illustrations by
Joseph Pennell
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
PALMA VECCHIO, Santa Barbara (detail) S. M. Formosa, Venice.
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MEANING OF PICTURES
_SIX LECTURES GIVEN FOR COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
AT THE METROPOLITAN
MUSEUM OF ART_
BY
JOHN C. VAN DYKE
AUTHOR OF “ART FOR ART’S SAKE,” “NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE,” ETC.
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1911
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
───
Published, February, 1908
[Illustration]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
~To~
WILLIAM CRARY BROWNELL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
JUST how we should look at pictures, just how we should judge of them,
is not for any one person to say. We all have our different ways of
estimating art; and art is capable of being estimated in different ways.
In these lectures I have endeavored to set forth the various points of
view. The painter’s conception has received perhaps the primary
attention, but I have given the public’s conception of the picture also.
Nor do I mean to apologize for arguing both sides of the case. Art might
be better understood, if there were less special pleading and theorizing
about it. It is so largely dependent upon the individual make-up of the
artist, that any precise theory about it must fall short of the mark.
Instead of quarrelling over terms and trying to put the opposition in
the wrong, it would be better frankly to examine the product in the
light of the producer’s intention and draw our conclusions from that. We
should not always agree, but that is all the more reason for tolerance
and liberality.
J. C. V. D.
RUTGERS COLLEGE,
November, 1902
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. _Truth in Painting._—Theory of 1
realism—The old masters as realists—And the
Dutch painters—Absolute realism impossible—The
real and truth defined—Art a series of
signs—Recognizing the convention—In poetry,
music, and painting—Grasping the artist’s
intention—Realism merely the elaboration of the
sign—Millet _vs._ Meissonier—Attitude of the
realists—Kinds of truth—The camera _vs._ the
human eye—Individual truths—National
truths—Universal truths—Great art universal in
scope—Greatness as shown in Rembrandt, Titian,
and Velasquez—Art truths both great and
small—Millet _vs._ Gérôme—Truth by
suggestion—Michael Angelo and Shakespeare—The
truth of history—And of archæology—The truth of
art—The law of sacrifice, Velasquez _vs._
Bonnat—Realism not the sum-total of art—But its
value not to be denied
CHAPTER II. _Individuality or the Personal 31
Element._—The personal equation—Variations in
handwritings—Different points of view—Different
views of landscape—Sketches of the model in the
class-room—Variations in portraiture—Difference
between the camera and our eyes—Individual
styles in literature—And in art—Personal
qualities of the painter in his work—Carpaccio
and Bellini—Michael Angelo in the
Sistine—Rembrandt in his pictures—Giorgione,
Correggio, Corot, Raphael, Titian—Dürer’s
“Christ on the Cross”—The disagreeable
personality in art—Vulgarity, brutality, and
insipidity—Conceit in painting—The insistent
personality—Eccentricity _vs._ individuality—The
lost individuality—The copyist and the
realist—The academic pattern—Impersonal
art—Great art above laws and formulas—Something
more to painting than individuality and realism
CHAPTER III. _Imagination of the Artist._—The act 60
of seeing—Perception—Unconscious seeing—Colors
as seen by the ancients—Seeing the
model—Necessity of imaginative seeing—The
imagination as ordinarily employed—As employed
in portrait painting—The distorted view—The
camera _vs._ the eye of the artist—Michael
Angelo in the Sistine again—Tintoretto’s
distortions—Claude Monet’s lights—Impossibility
of creating anew—The imagination separating a
part from the whole—In poetry and painting—In
coins, marble, and bronzes—The combining
imagination—Inspiration _vs._ composition—All
the great masterpieces have been composed and
labored over—Goethe’s “Faust”—“The Ancient
Mariner”—Turner’s marines and Venetian scenes as
flights of imagination—Imagination of Paolo
Veronese—Tintoretto’s “Ariadne and Bacchus”—His
Scuola San Rocco pictures—Ruskin’s explanation
of them—Fancy—The serious _vs._ the clever in
painting—The fantastic—The bizarre—Caricature
and the grotesque—The bombastic and baroque
CHAPTER IV. _Pictorial Poetry._—The argument for 87
poetry in art—Ideas suitable for different
arts—Confusion of mediums of
expression—Pictorial poetry not literary
poetry—Painting deals with forms and colors, not
sound—Millet’s “Angelus”—The division of the
arts—The time limit in painting—The picture
cannot disclose time—What is pictorial
poetry—Literary and pictorial themes—Writers who
paint with words—Spenser, Shakespeare, Scott,
Matthew Arnold—Limits of pictorial
expression—“Feeling” in art—Sentiment and
emotion, how suggested—Feeling in literary
poetry and in music—Also in painting—Religious
feeling of early Italians—Fra Angelico,
(Benozzo) Gozzoli, Botticelli—Sincerity of
Carpaccio and Bellini—Feeling for life, light,
and color with Giorgione and Correggio—The
pathos of Rembrandt—And of Millet—The peasants
of France and Holland—Their beauty of
character—The poetry of landscapes, of sea
views, of interiors—Indefiniteness of the
pictorial thought—The picture not a good vehicle
for abstract ideas—But well fitted for emotional
expression—Poetry in the means of expression
CHAPTER V. _The Decorative Quality._—Disagreement 114
between the painter and the public—The “average
person” in the gallery—The painter in the
gallery—Art as representation _vs._ art as
decoration—The artist devoted to the
decorative—Art has always been decorative—Origin
of painting—In the Stone Age—Primitive man as
artist—The artist in Egypt—In Assyria and
Greece—Filling of space on Greek coins—The
Gothic Age and decoration—Giotto,
Masaccio—Line-composition with Raphael and
Michael Angelo—Light-and-shade composition with
Leonardo, Correggio, Giorgione—Color-composition
with Titian and Paolo Veronese—Art history
explained on purely technical grounds—Titian and
his ideas in art—The Decadence and why it
came—Lack of technical skill—Why art flourished
in the Seventeenth Century with Rembrandt,
Rubens, and Velasquez—The decorative in modern
art—Revision of technical methods by Millet,
Manet, and Monet—Advance of painting with new
discoveries—The spontaneity of art—Materials and
the craftsman in literary art—Absence of the
decorative in Walt Whitman and Holman Hunt—The
lasting value of the decorative—The “Venus of
Milo” and Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love”—And
Shakespeare again
CHAPTER VI. _Subject in Painting._—Art for the 139
artist—The voice of the public in the work of
art—The old masters working for the
Church—Various views of art held by
artists—Partisan views and their
advocates—Extravagant views in literature—Mr.
Whistler on painting—Advocates of the decorative
only—The meaning of pictures again—The subject
cannot be omitted—Mr. Whistler’s
marines—“Patriotism” in painting—Velasquez,
Rembrandt, Frans Hals all show it—All painting
must illustrate something—Historical
painting—Whistler and Monet illustrating the
social history of their time—The illustrative
quality of Italian art—Whistler’s “White Girl”
_vs._ Palma Vecchio’s “Santa Barbara”—The Dutch
as subject painters—The historical landscapes of
Claude and Turner—The story in painting—Titian’s
“Sacred and Profane Love” once more—The silly
incident and the degradation of painting—How the
old masters worked upon given subjects—The
subject in the “Sistine Madonna”—The subject in
painting to be treated
illustratively—Catholicity of
taste—Education—Many elements united in “great
art”—Conclusion
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PALMA VECCHIO, ST. BARBARA _Frontispiece_
(DETAIL).
PAGE
I. HOLBEIN, PORTRAIT OF A MAN, 8
II. BENOZZO GOZZOLI, ADORATION OF KINGS 12
(DETAIL),
III. VAN DYCK, CORNELIUS VAN DER GEEST, 16
IV. MILLET, THE GLEANERS, 20
V. PAOLO VERONESE, MARRIAGE IN CANA, 24
VI. CARPACCIO, ST. URSULA AND PRINCE OF 28
ENGLAND (DETAIL),
VII. BELLINI, MADONNA AND SAINTS, 36
VIII. CORREGGIO, MYSTIC MARRIAGE OF ST. 40
CATHERINE,
IX. COROT, LANDSCAPE, 48
X. DÜRER, CHRIST ON THE CROSS, 56
XI. TURNER, THE FIGHTING TÉMÉRAIRE, 64
XII. ANTONELLO DA MESSINA, PORTRAIT OF A 70
MAN,
XIII. VELASQUEZ, INNOCENT X., 74
XIV. PAOLO VERONESE, VENICE ENTHRONED, 80
XV. TINTORETTO, MIRACLE OF THE SLAVE, 84
XVI. DAUBIGNY, SPRING, 88
XVII. BENOZZO GOZZOLI, ADORATION OF KINGS 92
(DETAIL),
XVIII. VAN DYCK, JEAN GRUSSET RICHARDOT, 96
XIX. GAINSBOROUGH, MRS. SIDDONS, 100
XX. GÉRÔME, NAPOLEON BEFORE THE SPHINX, 104
XXI. MICHAEL ANGELO, DELPHIC SIBYL, 108
XXII. HALS, THE JOLLY MAN, 116
XXIII. BONIFAZIO VERONESE, MOSES SAVED 120
FROM THE NILE,
XXIV. GIORGIONE, MADONNA AND SAINTS, 128
XXV. REYNOLDS, LADY COCKBURN AND FAMILY, 132
XXVI. CLAUDE LORRAINE, FLIGHT INTO EGYPT, 136
XXVII. TINTORETTO, MARRIAGE IN CANA, 140
XXVIII. RAPHAEL, SISTINE MADONNA, 148
XXIX. BOTTICELLI, ALLEGORY OF SPRING, 152
XXX. POUSSIN, SHEPHERDS IN ARCADIA, 156
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MEANING OF PICTURES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MEANING OF PICTURES
CHAPTER I
TRUTH IN PAINTING
THOSE people who go out into the highways of art crying, Haro! Haro! in
the name of realism, would certainly gain their cause could numbers give
them a verdict. They have always been in evidence; they have always made
themselves heard. There never was a time when the mob was not hungry for
realities, when artists were not harping upon “truth to nature,” when
critics were not concerned about “the realistic tendencies of the age.”
The interest in things as things and the art that hinges upon facts as
facts were from the beginning. For did not Apelles paint horses so
realistically that other horses neighed at the sight of the picture? And
did not Zeuxis deceive the birds with his painted grapes, and was not he
himself deceived in turn by the painted curtain of Parrhasios? Admitting
the stories to be greatly exaggerated, does not their very existence
prove the liking for the realistic motive?
Indeed, the Greeks were accounted very good realists in the days of
their late power. The Pergamon frieze, the “Samothracian Victory,” the
“Dying Gaul” give the proof. And in earlier times they modelled and
chiselled the Parthenon marbles so true to life that William Hazlitt
based a theory of art upon them, maintaining that the aim of art was the
imitation of nature and the finest art was simply the imitation of the
finest nature. It was the realistic Roman marbles, founded upon those of
Greece, that gave the first breath of inspiration to the painters of
Italy. The Renaissance nature-study that went hand in hand with the
study of the Greek was largely to enable the painters to reveal the
model more completely, to draw a leg or arm or face more exactly, to
place figures in an atmospheric envelope, to reproduce a likeness of the
landscape background. If we examine the works of Fra Filippo,
Botticelli, or Mantegna, we shall find that there was more of the
earthly in their painting than the mystic face of the Madonna or the
religious pathos of saints would disclose. They were intent upon the
reality before them and evidently for the reality’s sake. They delighted
in drawing a foot and placing it firmly upon the ground, in giving bulk,
body, and weight to the figure, in painting flowers, leaves, and fruits
with precision, in adjusting the exact relations of light-and-shade, in
catching the right tone of color. It was all a close following of the
model—a representation of nature itself or as near to it as they could
attain.
But the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were far more rigid
sticklers for the fact than the Italians. Their work was essentially a
portrait of Holland and its people, as Fromentin has said, wherein
faithfulness to the model was a primary consideration. From Hals and
Rembrandt down to Van Mieris and Schalken every Dutchman considered an
object as a plastic fact—a something not to be juggled with, but to be
rendered as truthfully as possible. Indeed, it was the Dutchmen who set
the pace for all the moderns in what is called realism. It was the five
days upon a lady’s hand—a day to each finger—of Gerard Dou that
suggested the ten days to a shoe-buckle of Meissonier. All the modern
contingent of _genre_ painters and students of still-life who paint
things that “stand out” are but a growth from the Dutch. The tradition
has been handed down unimpaired, losing none of its ancient
positiveness, but rather gaining some latter-day exactness in the
process of transmission.
For just now realism in art seems more of a _desideratum_ than ever. And
from the way the word “truth” is bandied about studio and gallery, one
might think it the only thing worth having in artistic equipment. But we
need not necessarily become either brow-beaten or bewildered by all this
volume of talk about the real. For, bluntly stated, there is no such
thing as absolute realism in art. The “real” is nature itself, and
“truth” is merely the report of nature made by man. Some cattle and
horses standing under a tree in a meadow are a reality, and your
description or report of the scene, either in words, lines, or colors,
would be the truth of the scene—that is, provided your description was
accurate. Under no circumstances is the report made by producing the
real things in evidence. It is practically impossible to do that in art.
Any close attempt at doing it, or misleading one into thinking he sees
reality, generally results in absurdity or repulsiveness. What, for
instance, could be more hideous than the wax figure in the museum? Or
what more dull than the modern battle-panorama where dummy-figures and
painted figures mingle to make up the scene?
Art is far removed from such attempts. Instead of producing the real it
merely implies or suggests the real by certain signs and symbols which
we have agreed among ourselves to recognize as its equivalent. If, for
instance, we attempt to bring to the mind of another the thought of
water we do not get a glassful of it and place it upon the table to show
what we mean. We simply say or write “water”—a word of five letters
which bears no likeness or resemblance whatever to the original, yet
brings the original to mind at once. This is the linguistic sign for
water. The chemical sign for it, H_{2}O, is quite as arbitrary, but to
the chemist it means water again. And only a little less arbitrary are
the artistic signs for it. The old Egyptian conveyed his meaning by
drawing a zigzag up or down the wall; Turner in England often made the
few horizontal scratches of a lead pencil do duty for it; and in modern
painting we have some blue paint touched with high lights to represent
the same thing. None of these signs attempts to produce the original or
has any other meaning than to suggest the original. They are signs which
have meanings for us only because we agree to understand their meanings
beforehand.
Now this agreement to understand the sign is what might be called the
recognition of the convention. All art is in a measure conventional,
arbitrary—unreal if you please. Everyone knows that Hamlet in real life
would not talk blank verse with his latest breath. The drama (and all
poetry for that matter) is an absurdity if you insist upon asking: Is it
natural? It is not natural; it is very artificial. And unless you accept
the artificial as symbolizing the natural, unless you recognize the
convention of metre and rhyme, you are not in a position to appreciate
verse. The name of those who “do not care for poetry” is legion, because
they have not the proper angle of vision, because they are out of focus.
And this is equally true of music. Tristan and Isolde singing their
loves at each other is sheer insanity from a realistic standpoint.
Everyone knows that love in real life may do a good deal of sighing and
sobbing, but it does not burst forth into song. The opera is a most
palpable convention, and the flow of music, which so beautifully
suggests the depths of passion and the heights of romance, is but an
arbitrary symbol of reality. Recognize this and you have taken the first
step toward the understanding of art; fail to recognize it and art must
always be a closed book to you. You will not perceive the artist’s
intention.
As a matter of fact we all do accept the convention in one form or
another. If a child standing at the blackboard should draw a horse with
four chalk-lined legs and a chalk-lined body and head we should have no
trouble in making it out as a horse. And should we know it as a horse
because of its truth to nature? Is a horse flat, hairless, colorless,
shadowless? And has he a chalk line about him? Not at all. The
representation is but a sign or symbol which we have agreed to recognize
as a horse. It is a child’s representation, and it differs from a
painter’s representation of the same animal largely in the matter of
trained skill and imaginative conception. The fine portraits of
Holbein—than which there is nothing finer in painting—have that same rim
about them (Plate 1). We call it Holbein’s “clear outline,” but it is
substantially the same thing. And the etched landscapes of
Rembrandt—what could you have more arbitrary? Merely a few lines drawn
with a swift hand, a few scratches in a copper plate to represent
sunlight, and some cross-hatchings to represent shadow; but how quickly
we recognize their meanings! If you will look closely at the wood
engravings of Timothy Cole you will see the modelling of the faces
brought out sometimes by long, waving, diagonal lines, sometimes by dots
and sometimes by checks and squares. Again could anything be more
conventional? But we have no trouble in making out the artist’s
intention. We accept the convention from the start.
So it is that we do not necessarily grasp the intention by the fulness
or elaborateness of the sign. The painter, from long experience, from
being more expert of hand, is perhaps better able to exploit the sign
than is the child; but we do not fail in understanding the meaning of
the childish outline. There is a difference in sign making, to be sure,
and that may make a great difference in art; but there is little or no
difference in the intention—the meaning of the sign. The flat figures
upon the Greek vases are not quite like the outlined figures of Raphael
and Ingres, and still less like the figures of Manet; but they are all
signs nevertheless. Manet used the patch of color instead of the rim or
outline, which is supposed to be a very fetching piece of realism; but
none of the representations is to be mistaken for reality. The real is
one thing; the sign or symbol for it, quite another thing.
What then is realism in art—this drawing of eyes that follow you about
the room, lips that seem parted as if to speak, and hands that you could
shake? What is this painting of pots and pans to be picked up, and cows
that walk out of the canvas? Can we not define it as merely the
adding-to, the rounding, the perfecting of the sign? Is it anything more
than the telling of all the truths, both great and small, so that the
veriest dunce in conventions shall not fail to recognize them?
[Illustration:
I.—HOLBEIN, Portrait of a Man. Belvedere, Vienna.
]
To revert to our former illustrations, perhaps Ingres’s rigid outline
contains less truth—less important truths—than Manet’s color patch. Why?
Because the figure in full light really has no rim about it. It looks
more like a patch of color relieved against other colors. The rim or
outline is childish, primitive, and originally came, not from a direct
study of the model but from studying the model’s shadow or silhouette.
People of childish intelligence, like the Egyptian fellaheen, for
instance, understand it very readily because of its simplicity and its
arbitrary utterance; but the more complex sign that deals with sunshine
rather than the flattened shadow contains the greater truth. Therefore
as regards the whole truth there is more of it in Manet’s figure than in
Ingres’s. Additions to the sign, such as effects of light-and-shade, of
color, of surface texture, of contour, may tell us more about the object
and add to the sum of truth and the perfection of the sign; and yet
these may not change in any way the significance of the sign. The most
elaborate human being that a Meissonier could paint would still be only
the individual symbol of a man, and in that respect would not be
different from the incised outline of Rameses the Great upon a Theban
wall.
You will understand, of course, that there are painters who use the sign
to convey a meaning—use it as one might words and sentences. Millet, in
writing to a friend, said: “All art is a language and language is made
to express thoughts.” Of that I shall have something to say later; but
just now I wish to call your attention to the fact that the realist does
not agree with Millet, that he is not concerned with ulterior meanings,
that in fact he rather despises them. For realism, broadly speaking,
means a pot for a pot’s sake, or a cow for a cow’s sake, which is to say
a sign for a sign’s sake. The Gerard Dous and the Meissoniers rather
plume themselves upon being expert sign-makers. Their art usually goes
no farther than excellent craftsmanship. They draw and paint skilfully,
decoratively, telling everything about the model before them, from an
eyelash to a boot-strap; and there they stop. They give forth an
official report which may be true enough from their point of view and
yet contain not an idea worth the contemplating, not a thought worth the
thinking. But that does not in any way disturb the poise of the realist.
He is ready to answer you that “beauty is truth and truth beauty”—an
aphorism that sounds like argument and yet is only assumption. But let
us look into the matter a little farther and ask: What is the truth
which they claim to have? Is it the vital truth or the only truth, and
are there not varieties, grades, and degrees of truth in painting as in
the other departments of art and life? I have no wish to deny that
realism, so-called, makes up one kind of art; but let us push our
inquiry farther afield and find out if possible what is the basis of the
realistic picture.
“Truth,” we have already affirmed, “is the report of nature made by
man.” We may cast out the child’s report about the horse because it is
incomplete, immature. It is made up of all the errors of the untrained
hand and eye, and though it has a certain personality about it, and
gives us a child’s idea of a horse, yet it cannot be considered as an
entirely truthful record. The report of the camera, if it be true or
false we do not know. Light flashes and the horse’s silhouette is
instantly caught and fixed upon the plate; but I need not tell you that
light does not flash into the human eye, and the silhouette is not
instantly fixed upon the human retina in the same way. Nor need I tell
you that eyes vary more widely in the way they see than do cameras.
Which then tells the truth? That the camera always records the same does
not prove that it always records truly. It may always record falsely. At
least the human eye sees differently from the camera, and the ultimate
decision as to truth must be referred back to the eye. It may not be an
infallible register, but it is the best we have. For all human knowledge
must base itself upon human sensation.
The horse of the child being incomplete and that of the camera
misleading, we return to the work of the painter and ask: What of the
horse of Apelles? Can that stand as the final truth? The story of its
deceiving other horses we may put aside as pure romance, but undoubtedly
the picture was emphasized in its modelling—pushed hard in its high
lights—to make the horse “stand out.” Granted a truth of relief and
perhaps a truth of surface, are these the only truths about the horse?
And do they make the standard to which art and artists must bow? Not
necessarily. We have had hundreds of painters since Apelles’s time who
have painted hundreds of horses, perhaps quite as true to nature as his,
but never a one of them saw or painted a horse in just the way Apelles
did.
And now we are confronted with the fact that if there are many men of
many minds in this world of ours there are also many men with many eyes.
No two pairs of eyes see alike. Are we to infer then that any one pair
of eyes or any one race or its school of painters sees truth and all the
others see only error? Is truth on one side of the Alps and falsehood on
the other? Titian in Italy made a different report of nature from
Rembrandt in Holland—which told the truth? Does truth abide exclusively
in the Orient or the Occident? A landscape in Japan by Hokousai, how
very different from a Seine landscape by Daubigny! But is either of them
false? And after all does not something of truth—I do not say the whole
of it—consist in the fidelity with which the point of view is
maintained? We must cultivate liberality in this matter. For Creation
ordained that there should be a Babel of eyes, all seeing differently,
and consequently there must be a standard of truth peculiar to each
individual.
[Illustration:
II.—BENOZZO GOZZOLI, Adoration of Kings (detail). Riccardi Palace,
Florence.
]
Does “truth to nature” then mean to each man what his eyes tell him and
to each painter what the sincerity of his make-up enables him to record?
Yes, certainly; but, mind you, it may be a very limited truth, not
necessarily an absolute truth, not a world-embracing truth applicable to
all classes and conditions of men. The child with his chalk-lined horse
may be maintaining his childish point of view with the utmost fidelity,
but it is apparent from his drawing that he does not fully comprehend
his subject, does not see the object in its entirety. The horses by
Spinello Aretino, shown in his Campo Santo pictures at Pisa, are not
very different from the child’s conception. They contain more truths
without by any means being exhaustive. They are still crude, but true
enough as regards the maintenance of the point of view. The fine horses
of Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Riccardi palace fresco (Plate 2), are an
improvement upon those of Spinello without being complete, and the
Gattamelata horse of Donatello, the Colleoni of Verrocchio, may make us
enthusiastic about the special truth of their pushing power, and again
not make a full report of the horse. Perhaps when we reach the height of
realism and come to a horse as seen by Gérôme or Rosa Bonheur we are not
so pleased with it as with Benozzo’s square-framed beast; but that may
be for a cause which we shall discuss hereafter. The completeness of the
truth, the fulness of the report, may not be denied, however wearisome
it may be as art.
Now we must add to this individuality, which everyone possesses in
measure and which must warp the vision somewhat, a further influence or
bias which the individual takes from his race and his country. I have
already asked Pascal’s question about truth being on one side of the
Alps and error on the other side. Applied to the arts it is pertinent to
inquire: Is a Siena landscape by Pintoricchio false because it does not
look like a Vosges landscape by Courbet? Not at all. They are both
true—that is, not only true to locality but true to that native flavor
which makes a pine-tree in Japanese art look “Japanesey” and a pine-tree
in Norwegian art look Norwegian.[1] Moreover, each landscape is true in
exhibiting its time, its country, and its race. The Pintoricchio shows
the attenuated purist landscape of the Tuscan country—the landscape
admirably suited to serve as a background for the sensitive, sentimental
saints he depicted. It speaks truly enough for a portion of Italy during
the Early Renaissance, that portion which lies in the Tuscan country;
but it goes no farther. Giovanni Bellini at Venice was Italian, too; but
he was at this very time producing quite a different landscape—one that
spoke for the mountainous country lying to the north of Venice, but not
for Tuscany. The landscape by Courbet is not so limited. It is
nineteenth-century work and has the advantage of the great advance made
in landscape work since the Renaissance; and yet no one could fail to
see that it was French, that it depicted a French country in a French
way. With all its large truth of appearance it shows its localized
Parisian point of view. To be sure Paris in Courbet’s day was very
cosmopolitan. His vision was broader, his grasp of truths greater than
the sculptor who carved, in bas-relief, Sargon feasting with his wives;
but nevertheless the local truths of France and of Assyria are each
apparent in each.
Footnote 1:
“If we will take the trouble to look at the wood-cuts illustrative of
some given celebrity as they appear in the illustrated newspapers of
various nations, we shall see that, though copied very mechanically
from the same photograph, Mr. Gladstone becomes a Frenchman in France,
a Spaniard in Spain, and, though less visible to us, in the same way
the Continental, the Spaniard, or the Frenchman becomes English in the
engraving of an English magazine. Even in the handling of the tool
called the graver which cuts the wood there is, then, a
nationality.”—JOHN LA FARGE, in _International Monthly, Nov., 1900_.
Is every artist then biassed in his conception of truth by his race and
age; and is every art significant of its environment? Certainly. Thus
far in the world’s history all art has been provincial—expressive at
least of a nationality if not of a locality. The art of Holland in the
sixteenth century never travelled beyond the dikes and dunes except in
the case of a genius like Rembrandt. As a truth for universal
application a roystering party by Jan Steen would go no farther to-day
than a garden party under the cherry blossoms by Hiroshighe. Both are
peculiarly provincial and belong in their own lands with their own
peoples. Outside of their own countries they meet with appreciative
understanding only from the artistic few. A century ago no one in the
Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic world cared very much for Dutch art, and not
fifty years ago Japanese art was regarded as little more than an
interesting absurdity because of its unfamiliar perspective. Neither of
them at this day has any world-wide reach. They have not travelled to
us, but the cosmopolitan art-lover has gone out and discovered them.
Transportation may eventually make us all cosmopolitan—make all art kin;
but it has not done so as yet.
Of course all painting is not so strictly local as the pictures of Jan
Steen and Hiroshighe would suggest. A work of art, in subject and in
method, appeals more strongly perhaps to its own people than to any
other—an Osiris to an Egyptian, a Zeus to a Greek, and a Madonna to a
Christian. But the carved Buddha, seated with crossed legs, open palms,
and a vacant stare into space appeals only to a Buddhist. It will not
travel elsewhere except as a curio. Nor will the Osiris or the Madonna
go very far. But what of a Zeus! what of a Hermes by Praxiteles! what of
the Greek ideal! Have they not a universal quality about them—a grasp of
universal truths—that carry them beyond the frontier lines of Hellas?
Think for a moment of the “Venus of Milo.” Has it not something
supremely true about it that a person of any nationality cannot choose
but see? And think for a moment of the “Ariadne” of Tintoretto. Again is
there not something here that compels the admiration of the Asiatic as
well as the European and the American? There is individual and local and
racial truth in all these works, but there is also universal truth—truth
applicable to all humanity.
[Illustration:
III.—VAN DYCK, Cornelius van der Geest. National Gallery, London.
]
And now, if we stop to consider the great men in the arts, we shall
invariably find that each one of them is marked by some quality of
universal significance. There is something about them all that overleaps
the provincial, the accidental, the small, and the trifling. They
disregard in a measure the local truths and aim at the general truths—at
things essentially true for all humanity. Our Shakespeares and Platos
and St. Pauls survey the world from mountain tops. From these vantage
points their perspective is far-reaching, their view of the world
expansive. They see and grasp the essentials, the basic elements, the
foundations of things. It is this, for one thing, that makes the art of
Titian so superlatively great. What wonderful men and women people his
pantheon! What types they are of manhood and womanhood! What embodiments
of loftiness, dignity, and nobility! And are they not universally
admired? No matter what a man’s nationality, he cannot choose but be
interested in “The Man with a Glove” or the “Charles V.” at Madrid.
There is something in them of that truth seen from mountain heights
which every one will recognize as the nobler part of his little
valley-world.
Just so with the art of Rembrandt. His type is essentially of the Low
Countries; his costumes, landscapes, light-and-shade, and methods are
all localized in Holland. But a sadder painter you cannot find in all
the reach of painting. His emotional nature had been wrung by trial and
suffering and his sympathies were with the down-trodden and the
grief-stricken. There never was a painter who painted so much of sorrow
in the faces of his people as Rembrandt. The “Christ at Emmaus” is, in
form and figure, only a poor emaciated Amsterdam Jew; but in emotional
truth it is the one Christ of all painting. That face appeals to
Christian, Mahometan, Jew, and infidel alike, not because of its
divinity but because of its intense humanity. Should we bring up the
names of the other great masters of painting we should find that each
one of them is remarkable for some quality of universal
significance—Michael Angelo for his great command of form, Rubens for
his great splendor of effect, Velasquez for his sense of vitality in the
physical presence (Plate 13), Raphael for his unity and his harmony.
The great men are remarkable for their breadth—the wide angle of their
vision. They see, not differently from others, but they see more. Yet it
is only a point of view, a limited outlook, and not by any means the
total sum of truth. The report of nature made by man, which we have
defined as “truth,” is always a report of some sort whoever makes it.
The difference between the great minds and the small ones consists in
what is seen and reported. A Rousseau who sees and tells of the solidity
of the earth, the volume of the forest, the great luminous expanse of
the sky, does not think to tell everything that may be in the landscape.
He sees the great truths, those truths that are of universal permanence
in all landscape, and emphasizes them at the expense of the smaller
details. A man of narrower vision would perhaps overlook the sky and
earth, and fail to see the forest for the trees. He might centre all his
interest in blades of grass, in dew-drops and spider-webs and opening
buttercups—the infinitely little things in the landscape.
In portraiture men like Gerard Dou and Denner emphasize the small
skin-facts of a man’s face with such minute workmanship that you may
study them with a magnifying-glass. You will never see anything like
this in the portraits by Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Van Dyck (Plates
3, 13, 18). They waste no time on small truths. They are intent upon
giving the large physical presence, not the petty deformities of the
epidermis.
Again in drawing a hand and arm you will observe that men like Gérôme
give every curve and break of light along the arm, every accidental
contortion of muscle, every wrinkle and twist of flesh; but somehow,
when all these features are put down, the arm fails to live, fails to
move. It is a petrified arm. For an opposite statement of truth look at
the arm of Millet’s “Sower.” There is nothing absolute or minute about
the drawing. The arm is generalized, summarized, synthetized as it were.
The wrinkles in it are not apparent, the covering of it is vague, the
hand is not articulated in the muscles or even definite in the drawing
of the fingers. In short the whole arm and hand are cut down to a few
elementary lines, so that they appear to the uninitiated somewhat
sketchy and peremptory. But looked at for those qualities which Millet
thought more important than surface texture, looked at for bulk, mass,
weight, motion—particularly motion—and there is a larger view apparent.
The arm and hand certainly have motion and life. And these are precisely
what Gérôme’s arm and hand have not. Can it not be claimed then that the
truth of life and motion is a greater truth than the truth of momentary
rigidity? Is it not a fact that Millet has seized upon a general and
universal truth characteristic of all arms and hands—that is, the truth
of life and movement—whereas Gérôme has seized upon an accidental truth
of light-and-shade which may be something local and peculiar to that one
hand and arm?
[Illustration:
IV.—MILLET, The Gleaners. Louvre, Paris.
]
If one shows us a snap-photograph of breaking waves, what do we see if
not the highest and most brittle wave the camera man could catch? Does
this give us a general or a particular truth of the sea? Do waves stand
rigidly in air, petrified from base to crest, as we see in the
photograph, or do they roll and keep on rolling indefinitely and
ceaselessly? Does not the very essence of truth about a wave lie in its
restless heave and toss, its breaking and reforming, its eternal
indefiniteness of form? How many sea pictures have we seen with every
wave in place—pounded into place like hammered steel—with every facet
shining like a mirror, and not a possibility of motion in anything?
Perhaps we have rather enjoyed them and fancied, in crossing the ocean,
that the waves looked like that. Perhaps they did; perhaps we were
content to see only the small truths of the ocean; but a study of the
marines by Courbet, Manet, and Monet may convince us that there are
larger truths of the ocean than those relating to its mirror-like
sparkles—larger truths in the ocean’s depth, power, and its restless,
ceaseless motion. These painters have discarded small things on the
surface of the water, as Frans Hals the small spots on a man’s face, in
order to give the sense of form back of it (Plate 22).
In the same way you will often find painters discarding the exact
drawing of objects such as wood or cloth or stone or metal in order that
they may give the weight, the elasticity, or the density of these
objects. A feather or a leaf may be an epitome of floating, dancing
lightness, but if you draw its complete anatomy and paint all its
surface texture you will have something that is as heavy as wrought
iron. It does not follow either, because Desgoffes gives us the sheen
and flash of brasses, china, and satins, that he has told all or the
most vital truths about those articles. Vollon may paint the same things
in a fuller manner, showing us something of structural character which
is just as important and just as true as surface appearance. Moreover,
the broader method leaves something to implication and suggestion, where
the other method buries under an accumulation of fact.
Please note the word “suggestion,” for it is by suggestion that the
greatest truths of art are brought home to us. The realist, whom we have
been hastily considering, does not care for this method of approach. He
is bent upon realization. He is analytical in his statement of each and
every fact and makes a full report. All painters do this in some degree
during the early stages of their career, but as they advance in years
and experience there is a tendency to a broader treatment, a return to
the simple line of the child, to the synthesis of a Millet, as shown in
the arms, hands, and backs of the women in “The Gleaners” (Plate 4), to
the implication and suggestion of a Corot, as shown in the sky of the
“Biblis.” Facts are summarized. A mere charcoal outline drawn by Degas
gives us the reliefs, proportions, weight, and bulk of a human figure; a
shadow with Giorgione or Rembrandt sums up the series of facts beneath
it, and becomes suggestive by its very mystery and uncertainty; a
blended blur of color by Whistler may bring to mind a heaving wave in
mid-ocean better than all the drawn and tinted and “realized” waves of
all the realists.
It is not the heaping of fact upon fact that flashes the truth upon
us—at least not in art, though it may in logic or in law. Indeed, the
accumulation of evidence often confuses. It is common studio experience
that a sketch of a picture is frequently better than the picture itself.
The attempt to “finish” (that is, to put in all the details and minutiæ)
makes it dull and unsuggestive. The unfinished marbles of Michael
Angelo, do they really suffer much by being unfinished? I have sometimes
thought that the figure of “Day” in the Medici Chapel gained by its
incompleteness—that it was better than the “Night” upon the opposite
side of the tomb because the sculptor’s intention is perfectly obvious
and yet the spectator’s imagination is not stifled. There, like a fallen
god, he lies, half embedded in his matrix of stone with a suggestion of
mighty power, never so strongly felt in any other marble in this world.
The lack of finish, the mystery, the uncertainty, help on the
imagination. One may fancy, as many have done, that the figure
symbolizes the loss of Florentine freedom, and that the grand captive,
with his massive brow and sunken eyes, half-rises wearily to view the
morning light shining for him in vain. And again one may imagine he is a
new Prometheus bound to the rock; one of the Gigantes; or perhaps a
conquered Titan lying along the hills of Tartarus in the drear twilight,
brooding in melancholy silence over the loss of Olympus. To whatever the
mind may conjure up regarding the figure, the element of reserved
strength will lend assistance. Cut the captive from his bed of stone and
the strength falls short, lacking the foil of resistance; finish the
marble and an existent fact precludes the possibility of wide
imagination.
The great English master of art, how well he knew what to leave out! The
lovers Lorenzo and Jessica are in the still, evening air, and with what
consummate skill Shakespeare paints the landscape with that one
suggestive line:
“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.”
Not a word about the trees or grasses or ponds or meadows; not a word
about the stillness of the night, the hushed winds, and the shining
stars; but do you not see them all? Do they not rise up before your eyes
as by magic? Your realist would have put us to sleep with dreary
descriptions of grass and groves and glittering dew-drops instead of the
moonlight. And Shakespeare himself might have written a volume of
description and still not roused us to his meaning so quickly as with
that one suggestive line. The value of the sign in art, whether it be
pictorial, sculptural, or literary, lies in its suggestive quality; and
the “Sower” of Millet, the “Day” of Michael Angelo, and the moonlight of
Shakespeare are merely so many suggestive signs.
[Illustration:
V.—PAOLO VERONESE, Marriage in Cana. Louvre, Paris.
]
Thus far our inquiry has extended no farther than the truth of
nature—the truth of appearance as shown in realistic art. But there are
other truths with which the picture has to do that perhaps call for a
moment’s consideration. The truth of history for which the public
contends so valiantly need not detain us long. That Paolo Veronese and
his contemporaries chose to garb the sacred characters of the “Marriage
in Cana” (Plate 5) or “Moses saved from the Nile” (Plate 23), in
Venetian costume, is matter of small importance. And it is of still less
importance whether Christ and the Apostles show the Semitic cast of
countenance or not. The intense reverence for local and ethnographical
truth possessed by the Holman Hunts and Alma-Tademas of the art world
would seem somewhat misplaced. No matter what care is bestowed upon the
archæology, there is always something not quite true to the fact. And
moreover, all art in all times has pictured its own race, costume, and
country. It would not be worth much unless it did. The marble gods of
Greece are all Greek, the painted Madonnas of Italy are all Italian. How
otherwise would you have it? Marlowe’s Mephistopheles talks English, and
Goethe’s Mephistopheles talks German. What language should they talk?
When art deals with the past it translates it into the present. It could
not possibly do otherwise. No Anglo-Saxon could feel, think, or work
like a Greek, simply because he is an Anglo-Saxon.
There is another truth of far more consequence than historical accuracy,
and that is the truth of art. This comes in here opportunely enough, for
art-truth is produced by the suggestive method of dealing with facts
which I have just been illustrating. The method is absolutely essential
to all strong work in all departments. It is usually known in painting
as the “law of sacrifice”; and you will find it in literature under the
name of “dramatic force.” We should never have had such characters as
Faust and Macbeth had all the other characters in the plays been treated
with an importance equal to that of the heroes. Hamlet is an elevated
Hamlet simply because the other characters are subordinate characters,
just as Corot’s light is light, because everything else in the picture
is sacrificed to it. There is no quarrel with truth to nature in this
truth to art. Great art seldom falsifies, but it always selects,
emphasizing some features and subordinating other features. It usually
gives the large truths and merely implies the small ones. Millet in his
“Sower” has no notion of telling you more than a few prominent facts
about the man and his work. He shows a peasant, working under the shadow
of a hill, working late in the evening, swinging and sowing with
rhythmic motion of foot, hand, arm and body. It is matter of no
importance whether he wears linen or woollen or cotton, whether his
blouse has buttons upon it or not, whether his face is clean or not. The
all-pervading truth of the picture lies in the swinging form of the
sower, and to keep your attention upon that he omits everything else.
The figure is but a suggestion, a something that stands as an equivalent
for that man whom Millet thought should be recognized for his patience
and fortitude of spirit, his nobility and dignity in the hard labor of
life, his fine pictorial qualities as seen against the background of his
native heath. That is the ulterior meaning which he would show us. The
sign is true to the great truth of a sower, the meaning is true within
the limits of pictorial creation, and finally the recording of it is
true to the truth of art.
This method of procedure, wherein suggestion becomes such an important
factor, implies two people in the work of art rather than one. The
spectator must do his part as well as the artist. The latter suggests,
the former takes up the suggestion and builds upon it. When Velasquez
painted Christ on the cross, hanging there alone in the night, the head
bowed forward on the breast, and the long dark hair tailing over the
face and half covering it, he did not think to obliterate the face—to
take it out of the picture completely. He knew very well that the
imagination of the spectator would go behind the veil and picture that
face more vividly than he could paint it. What painter ever yet produced
a wholly satisfactory face of Christ? Velasquez was wise in leaving it
to the imagination of the spectator. How wise he was you can perhaps
gather by contrasting his “Christ on the Cross” with the same subject by
Léon Bonnat—one of the noblest of the latter-day realists. Bonnat simply
took a dead body from the morgue and hung it upon a cross in the
court-yard of the _École de Médecine_, and painted it exactly as he saw
it. But it is not Christ; it is the dead body he took from the morgue.
There is strain of arm and leg and torso, the anatomy is wrenched, the
muscles are contorted, the veins are swollen. But there is no suggestion
of anything that had been noble or exalted in the living. In fact there
is not a suggestion of any kind. Everything is told and the spectator’s
imagination is not called upon. Realism has been pushed into the last
ditch, and yet has produced only a sign standing for Christ on the
cross, and not the real thing—a sign which, in gaining an elaborate
truth to fact, has lost its truth to art and its power of suggestion.
[Illustration:
VI.—CARPACCIO, St. Ursula and Prince of England (detail). Academy,
Venice.
]
We may as well conclude then, without further illustration, that the
exact portrayal of nature known as realism falls somewhat short of its
mark. It may report and report, but it cannot realize. Light, air,
hills, mountains, human beings and their habitations cannot be
reproduced, but they may be translated through the medium of pigment and
thus rendered intelligible to us. You may translate them “realistically”
or you may translate them suggestively, but in either case it is the
translation that you will have, and not the original. Each art—music,
poetry, painting—has its peculiar method of translation, and we have
called the result in each case a sign—a convention which we have agreed
to recognize as meaning thus and so; but of course the signs in painting
are not quite so arbitrary as in language or chemistry. The painting of
a wave certainly looks more like a wave than the word “water,” or the
symbol H_{2}O. The sign has a certain resemblance to the original which
gives a reason for the existence of realism and also adds to the
confusion of those who would spin a theory of art; but the resemblance
should not mislead us. The sign is still a sign, though in the one case
it is representative and in the other case symbolic. Its meaning has not
changed in any way. The all-seeing eye of Osiris is not like those
speaking eyes in Van Dyck’s portrait of “Cornelius Van der Geest” (Plate
3). One is more conventional than the other, but both are conventions.
It is not necessary that we should deny value to this realistic art,
even though we do not wholly accept it. The very endeavor to make the
work faithful to the original in every detail, though it may hurt its
deeper sentiment, cannot but result in good workmanship; and that in
itself is always acceptable and pleasurable. Indeed, bald realism, with
nothing else back of it, is seldom seen in art. The man, the material,
and the method are inextricably mixed together, so that the product
always has more or less individuality about it, or is decorative in form
or color, or expresses some thought or feeling of the painter, or stands
for something in subject. In any event the well-made sign—even as a
sign—is not to be scorned. We shall see hereafter how it is distorted by
the personal element, how it is twisted by the imagination, how it is
warped by the decorative instinct; but we are not to forget at any time
that it is but a symbol, merely a means of suggesting reality, and not
reality itself.
------------------------------------------------------------------------