I am tempted to think that the worst place for getting to know,
getting to _feel_, any school of painting, is the gallery, and the
best, perhaps, the fields: the fields (or in the case of the
Venetians, largely the waters), to which, with their qualities of air,
of light, their whole train of sensations and moods, the artistic
temperament, and the special artistic temperament of a local school,
can very probably be traced.
For to appreciate any kind of art means, after all, not to understand
its relations with other kinds of art, but to feel its relations with
ourselves. It is a matter of living, thanks to that art, according to
the spiritual and organic modes of which it is an expression. Now, to
go from room to room of a gallery, allowing oneself to be played upon
by very various kinds of art, is to prevent the formation of any
definite mood, and to set up what is most hostile to all mood, to all
unity of being: comparison, analysis, classification. You may know
quite exactly the difference between Giotto and Simon Martini, between
a Ferrarese and a Venetian, between Praxiteles and Scopas; and yet be
ignorant of the meaning which any of these might have in your life,
and unconscious of the changes they might work in your being. And
this, I fear, is often the case with connoisseurs and archæologists,
accounting for the latent suspicion of the ignoramus and the good
philistine, that such persons are somehow none the better for their
intercourse with art.
All art which is organic, short of which it cannot be efficient,
depends upon tradition. To say so sounds a truism, because we rarely
realise all that tradition implies: on the side of the artist, _what
to do_, and on the side of his public, _how to feel_: a habit, an
expectation which accumulates the results of individual creative
genius and individual appreciative sensibility, giving to each its
greatest efficacy. When one remembers, in individual instances--Kant,
Darwin, Michel Angelo, Mozart--how very little which is absolutely
new, how slight a variation, how inevitable a combination, marks,
after all, the greatest strokes of genius in all things, it seems
quite laughable to expect the mediocre person, mere looker-on or
listener, far from creative, to reach at once, without a similar
sequence of initiation, a corresponding state of understanding and
enjoyment. But, as a rule, this thought does not occur to us; and,
while we expatiate on the creative originality of artists and poets,
we dully take for granted the instant appreciation of their creation;
forgetting, or not understanding, in both cases, the wonderful
efficacy of tradition.
As regards us moderns, for whom the tradition of, say, Tuscan art has
so long been broken off or crossed by various other and very different
ones--as regards ourselves, I am inclined to think that we can best
recover it by sympathetic attention to those forms of art, humbler or
more public, which must originally have prepared and kept up the
interest of the people for whom the Tuscan craftsmen worked.
Pictures and statues, even in a traditional period, embody a large
amount of merely personal peculiarities of individual artists,
testifying to many activities--imitation, self-assertion,
rivalry--which have no real æsthetic value. And, during the fifteenth
century and in Tuscany especially, the flow of traditional æsthetic
feeling is grievously altered and adulterated by the merest scientific
tendencies: a painter or sculptor being often, in the first instance,
a student of anatomy, archæology or perspective. One may, therefore,
be familiar for twenty years with Tuscan Renaissance painting or
sculpture, and yet remain very faintly conscious of the special
æsthetic character, the _virtues_ (in the language of herbals) of
Tuscan art. Hence I should almost say, better let alone the pictures
and statues until you are sufficiently acquainted with the particular
quality lurking therein to recognise, extricate and assimilate it,
despite irrelevant ingredients. Learn the _quality_ of Tuscan art from
those categories of it which are most impersonal, most traditional,
and most organic and also freer from scientific interference, say
architecture and decoration; and from architecture rather in its
humble, unobtrusive work than in the great exceptional creations which
imply, like the cupola of Florence, the assertion of a personality,
the surmounting of a difficulty, and even the braving of other folks'
opinion. I believe that if one learned, not merely to know, but to
feel, to enjoy very completely and very specifically, the quality of
distinctness and reserve, slightness of means and greatness of
proportions, of the domestic architecture and decoration of the
fifteenth century, if one made one's own the mood underlying the
special straight lines and curves, the symmetry and hiatus of the
colonnades, for instance, inside Florentine houses; of the little bits
of carving on escutcheon and fireplace of Tuscan hillside farms; let
alone of the plainest sepulchral slabs in Santa Croce, one would be
in better case for really appreciating, say, Botticelli or Pier della
Francesca than after ever so much comparison of their work with that
of other painters. For, through familiarity with that humbler, more
purely impersonal and traditional art, a certain mode of being in
oneself, which is the special æsthetic mood of the Tuscan's would have
become organised and be aroused at the slightest indication of the
qualities producing it, so that their presence would never escape one.
This, I believe, is the secret of all æsthetic training: the growing
accustomed, as it were automatically, to respond to the work of art's
bidding; to march or dance to Apollo's harping with the irresistible
instinct with which the rats and the children followed the pied
piper's pipe. This is the æsthetic training which quite unconsciously
and incidentally came to the men of the past through daily habit of
artistic forms which existed and varied in the commonest objects just
as in the greatest masterpieces. And through it alone was the highest
art brought into fruitful contact with even the most everyday persons:
the tradition which already existed making inevitable the tradition
which followed.
But to return to us moderns, who have to reconstitute deliberately a
vanished æsthetic tradition, it seems to me that such familiarity with
Tuscan art once initiated, we can learn more, producing and canalising
its special moods, from a frosty afternoon like this one on the
hillside, with its particular taste of air, its particular line of
shelving rock and twisting road and accentuating reed or cypress in
the delicate light, than from hours in a room where Signorelli and
Lippi, Angelico and Pollaiolo, are all telling one different things
in different languages.