THE CHIEF FUNCTION OF PAINTING.
"All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us
cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children--in our
gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty
too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret
of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel if you can, with a
floating violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light;
paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward
and opening her arms to receive the divine glory; but do not
impose upon us any æsthetic rules which shall banish from the
region of art, those old women scraping carrots with their
work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy
pot house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces
that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the
world."--GEORGE ELIOT.
Before I speak in detail of Giotto's pictures, it will be well to
consider very shortly what are the chief characteristics of good
painting, and in what proportion the beauty of form, of colour,
sentiment and thought, should be combined, in order to give us work of
the highest order. And such a preliminary inquiry is the more needful,
since the whole history of art is the history of the development of
one or more of these characteristics, rather than the development of
their just combination. If we look back at the greatest schools of the
fifteenth century, we find that each of them had one main object in
their art, which they pursued to the detriment of the others. However
much, for instance, we may admire the feeling of Raphael, we perceive
the lack of the qualities which we find in Titian--however much we
delight in Titian or Tintoretto, we feel that there is something
lacking which we had in Raphael. And so on with every school, till at
last we discover that the deficiency is not one in the individual
painter, but is rather owing to the end which he and those of his
school proposed to themselves; and whether it be the Florentine
striving after expression of emotion, or the Venetian after expression
of the truths of shade and colour, each is alike defective. In later
times this becomes still more evident in the works of the Dutch
painters, and it may be seen at its utmost height in the works of the
majority of modern artists, whose aim is commonly restricted not only
to one phase of feeling, but to one special manifestation of such
phase; not to the seeking of colour, say, as the main object, but to
the seeking of one particular colour.
If then every art school which the world has hitherto known, has been
in some way partial in its choice of subject and the aims it has
proposed to itself, let us think which partiality is the least
blameable, and, in fact, what is the best thing that a painter can
give us. Is it perfection of form, or of colour, intensity of feeling,
or depth of meaning? If we can't have all, what should we choose first
and cling to most securely?
Now, at the present day, there is amongst those who care for art, a
rapidly-increasing class who give a most decided answer to this
question; one, which if we can at all accept its reasoning, will
settle the matter for ever. "Art," they say, "has but one real
province, that of the simply sensuous; in whatever degree you admit
other elements you so far weaken the art." To use the expression of a
member of this school, what is wanted is "a solid sensuousness."
Now whatever else is true, this is false--"falser than all fancy
painted;" and, should it once come to be believed, will reduce art to
a worse slavery than the one from which Giotto rescued it. It would
really be hard to conceive that such a notion was really abroad did we
not read it in book, essay, and article, and see the consequences of
its prevalence in the works of our painters. Just think: here we have
an influence notoriously one of the most powerful in the world, one
that appeals equally to both sexes, to all classes, ages, and nations
of men; and we are asked, or rather told, with the true _sic volo, sic
jubeo_ accent, that we must use it for but one thing, and that is the
encouragement of sensuous pleasure. It is so utterly contrary to
truth, and productive of such evil results, that I really lack the
patience to speak of it and its exponents with common courtesy. But
leaving on one side the injurious effects of such a doctrine, it is
worth while to observe that it is really destructive of art itself.
The one vital principle of all art is its freedom; its concern with
every fact of nature or humanity, whether it be the form of a cabbage
or the sufferings of a Christ. Take your solid sensuous feeling and
welcome, but don't forget that that's but one, and a comparatively
unimportant, fragment of men's nature; and give us also their power of
endurance, their moments of rapture, their deeds of heroism, their
every-day sufferings, and their rarer joys. I put that quotation from
George Eliot at the top of the chapter, because it expresses far more
clearly and beautifully than any words that lie in my power, this
essential fact, that art is concerned with no one phase of human
feeling or external nature, but finds adequate material in whatever is
connected with men's lives.
Well, then, leaving on one side this pestilential heresy of art for
art's sake, this talk about gracious curves, and sensuous images,
secrets, twilights, silences, and all the rest of the jargon; we find
on thinking over the subject carefully, that there is one truth, which
art from its very nature is more fitted to express than any other, and
indeed that it is a truth which can and should enter into every work
of art, and that is the truth of beauty. The more we see of the world
and its varying actions and interests, the more certainly do we
discover one fact, that there is a kernel of beauty beneath almost the
roughest husks and rinds of human nature, and that in the natural
world there is also a beauty far superior to that which lies on the
surface, a subtle essence of loveliness only to be perceived by
earnest students, after long and patient study. All the subtler and
rarer manifestations of this beauty, are necessarily disregarded by
the mass of men engaged in the hard struggle of life, and it is these
which form the great province of the artist. His work is to say to us
in his picture "Look at this subject! It is beautiful, not only as you
would have thought, for its arrangement of line and colour and the
interest of its composition, but because I have penetrated into the
depth of the meaning involved; I have seen something which you would
not have seen, but yet something which was there, and if you think,
you will see that it must have been so." Every picture worthy of the
name of great, is thus a record of penetrative insight as well as mere
skill of painting; and the greater it is, the nearer it approaches in
the complexity of its meaning to the personality of a human being, and
receives a different interpretation from every one who sees it.
Again, of landscape painting, why is it that a picture of any natural
scene will move hundreds of people who would have derived little or no
enjoyment from the scene itself? Why, for instance, could Fred Walker
paint a street at Cookham or a country lane in a shower, so as to give
an amount of pleasure quite incommensurate with the importance or
loveliness of his subject? It is because he saw in it a beauty which
cannot be seen, except through him; for it is a beauty made up of the
scene itself and his actual feelings about it. Could you photograph
instantaneously lane and figures, and rain clouds, in the very colours
of nature, you would not gain a picture which would affect you in as
powerful a way. Who ever derived real pleasure from a photograph of a
landscape? Nature is beautiful always, but representations of nature
made by machinery have little beauty, and no interest. I cannot dwell
upon this theme--it would lead me too far from my subject--suffice it
to say, that in landscape, no less than in figure painting, it is the
spiritual insight of the painter which gives the highest value to his
work.[49]
To sum up shortly--truth of form, and colour, and expression, will
make a fine, perhaps even an impressive picture, but hardly a great
one; in order to do that the artist must be possessed of the power of
seizing the essence of the scene, of penetrating beneath the first
commonplace view of the subject, and finding every element of true
meaning and beauty which lies in his subject. If he once does this, he
is a true artist, and his errors of detail will become fewer and fewer
with time; if he fails in this first requisite, if he has no story to
tell except one that every one of his spectators could tell equally
well, then, no matter what may be his technical perfection, he will
never be a great artist to the end of time. To close this somewhat
long, but, I think, necessary digression, just remember what art was
when Giotto's work began. It was in a condition of double bondage,
first to the service of the Catholic Church, and second to itself, in
the perpetuation of traditional methods of work.
Always representing the same thing in the same way, its records had
become little more than variations in the arrangement of coloured
draperies. Every detail of the composition was executed upon a given
plan; the very position of the Virgin's head and the Saviour's hands
were absolutely conventional. The study of animals was almost unknown;
that of landscape nature absolutely so; all attempt at expression of
any feeling but resignation, devotion, or divine peacefulness was
perfectly discontinued; laughter, curiosity, or scorn, might have had
no existence, for any trace of them which can be found in the pictures
of the time. A picture was then nothing but a composition of
traditionally graceful lines and pleasant colours, set against a gold
background, and offered generally to the service of the Church, in
much the same spirit as the coloured German prints of the Madonna are
hung up at the little road-side shrines in Italy to this day.
In fact, art was very much in the way to which some good people of the
present day would reduce it, and represented nothing save in a partial
and symbolical manner. It was wholly unconnected with all the varying
incidents and emotions of real life, and existed only to give form to
certain traditions, and fulfil certain prescriptive offices. Its aim
was not to become of real use to man, to enter into his joys and
griefs, to console, and to enlighten him, but only to serve as a
faithful servant to the Church. Painting had gazed so long at things
heavenly, as to have almost forgotten there was an earth at all, and
so to the very ordinary-minded people who fortunately compose
nine-tenths of the world's population, its influence was too remote to
have much significance. It might represent saints, martyrs, and angels
faithfully, but what was wanted were true representations of men and
women.
Bearing this well in mind, let us examine Giotto's works, and see what
change, if any, he effected in the popular practice, and what is the
peculiar merit of his works at this day, when we are six hundred years
further on the march of progress.
FOOTNOTE:
[49] Those who are interested in this subject will find an article
discussing it in the _Spectator_ of November 10th, 1877, entitled "The
Human Element in Landscape Painting."