It is curious to reflect, that mistaken views of religion have in all
times been the prime cause of the ruin of art. It was not Alaric or
Theodoric, but an edict from Honorius, that ordered the early Christians
to destroy such images, if any remained.
Flaxman says: “The commands for destroying sacred paintings and
sculpture prevented the artist from suffering his mind to rise to the
contemplation or execution of any sublime effort, as he dreaded a prison
or a stake, and reduced him to the lowest drudgery in his profession.
This extraordinary check to our national art occurred at a time which
offered the most essential and extraordinary assistance to its
progress.” Flaxman proceeds to remark, that “the civil wars completed
what fanaticism had begun; and English art was so completely
extinguished that foreign artists were always employed for public or
private undertakings.”
In the reign of Elizabeth it became a fashionable taste to sally forth
and knock pictures to pieces; and in the “State Trials” is a curious
trial of Henry Sherfield, Esq., Recorder of Salisbury, who concealed
himself in the church, and with a long pike knocked a window to pieces:
as he was doing this, he was watched through the door, and seen to slip
down, headlong, where he lay groaning for a long time, and a horse was
sent for to carry him home: he was fined 500_l._, and imprisoned in the
Fleet; and the Attorney-general for the Crown, 1632, said there were
people, he verily believed, who would have knocked off the cherubim from
the ark. By the witnesses examined, it was evidently a matter of
religious conscience in Sherfield, who complained that his pew was
opposite the window, and that the representation of God by a human
figure disturbed him at prayer.
Queen Elizabeth was the bitterest persecutor: she ordered all walls to
be whitewashed, and all candlesticks and pictures to be utterly
destroyed, so that no memorial remain of the same.
In Charles the First’s time, on the Journals of the House is found,
1645, July 23: “Ordered, that all pictures having the second person in
the Trinity shall be burnt.” Walpole relates, that one Blessie was hired
at half-a-crown a day to break the painted glass window at Croydon
Church. There is extant the journal of a parliamentary visitor,
appropriately enough named _Dowsing_, appointed for demolishing
superstitious pictures and ornaments of churches, &c.; and by
calculation, he and his agents are found to have destroyed about 4660
pictures, from June 9, 1643, to October 4, 1644, evidently not all
glass, because when they were glass he specifies them.
The result of this continued persecution, says Hayden, was the ruin of
“high art;” for the people had not taste enough to feel any sympathy for
it independently of religion, and every man who has pursued it since,
who had no private fortune, and was not supported by a pension like
West, became infallibly ruined.
Historical painters left without employment began to complain. In the
time of Edward VI. and Elizabeth we find them petitioning for bread!
They revived a little with Charles I. and II. Thornhill got employed in
the early part of the last century; then came the Society in St.
Martin’s Lane, 1760; and in 1768 was established the Royal Academy, _to
help high art_; but there being still no employment for it, the power in
art fell into the hands of portrait-painters, who too long continued to
wield it, with individual exceptions, to the further decay and
destruction of this eminent style.