morning, when men create art because they must, and that darkest hour
when men confound imitation with art. These slopes can be subdivided
into movements. The downward course of a slope is not smooth and even,
but broken and full of accidents. Indeed the procession of art does not
so much resemble a river as a road from the mountains to the plain. That
road is a sequence of ups and downs. An up and a down together form a
movement. Sometimes the apex of one movement seems to reach as high as
the apex of the movement that preceded it, but always its base carries
us farther down the slope. Also, in the history of art the summit of one
movement seems always to spring erect from the trough of its
predecessor. The upward stroke is vertical, the downward an inclined
plane. For instance, from Duccio to Giotto is a step up, sharp and
shallow. From Giotto to Lionardo is a long and, at times, almost
imperceptible fall. Duccio is a fine decadent of that Basilian movement
which half survived the Latin conquest and came to an exquisite end
under the earlier Palaeologi. The peak of that movement rises high above
Giotto, though Duccio near its base is below him. Giotto's art is
definitely inferior to the very finest Byzantine of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, and Giotto is the crest of a new movement destined
and doomed inevitably to sink to depths undreamed of by Duccio.
All that was spiritual in Greek civilisation was sick before the sack of
Corinth, and all that was alive in Greek art had died many years
earlier. That it had died before the death of Alexander let his tomb at
Constantinople be my witness. Before they set the last stone of the
Parthenon it was ailing: the big marbles in the British Museum are the
last significant examples of Greek art; the frieze, of course, proves
nothing, being mere artisan work. But the man who made what one may as
well call "The Theseus" and "The Ilissus," the man whom one may as well
call Phidias, crowns the last vital movement in the Hellenic slope. He
is a genius, but he is no oddity: he falls quite naturally into his
place as the master of the early decadence; he is the man in whom runs
rich and fast but a little coarsened the stream of inspiration that gave
life to archaic Greek sculpture. He is the Giotto--but an inferior
Giotto--of the slope that starts from the eighth century B.C.--so
inferior to the sixth century A.D.--to peter out in the bogs of
Hellenistic and Roman rubbish. Whence sprang that Hellenic impulse? As
yet we cannot tell. Probably, from the ruins of some venerable
Mediterranean civility, against the complex materialism of which it was,
in its beginnings, I dare say, a reaction. The story of its prime can be
read in fragments of archaic sculpture scattered throughout Europe, and
studied in the National Museum at Athens, where certain statues of
athletes, dating from about 600, reveal the excellences and defects of
Greek art at its best. Of its early decline in the fifth century Phidias
is the second-rate Giotto; the copies of his famous contemporaries and
immediate predecessors are too loathsome to be at all just; Praxiteles,
in the fourth century, the age of accomplished prettiness, is the
Correggio, or whatever delightful trifler your feeling for art and
chronology may suggest. Fifth and fourth century architecture forbid us
to forget the greatness of the Greeks in the golden age of their
intellectual and political history. The descent from sensitive, though
always rather finikin, drawing through the tasteful and accomplished to
the feebly forcible may be followed in the pots and vases of the sixth,
fifth, fourth, and third centuries. In the long sands and flats of Roman
realism the stream of Greek inspiration is lost for ever.
Before the death of Marcus Aurelius, Europe was as weary of materialism
as England before the death of Victoria. But what power was to destroy a
machine that had enslaved men so completely that they dared not conceive
an alternative? The machine was grown so huge that man could no longer
peer over its side; man could see nothing but its cranks and levers,
could hear nothing but its humming, could mark the spinning fly-wheel
and fancy himself in contemplation of the revolving spheres.
Annihilation was the only escape for the Roman citizen from the Roman
Empire. Yet, while in the West Hadrian was raising the Imperial talent
for brutalisation to a system and a science, somewhere in the East, in
Egypt, or in Asia Minor, or, more probably in Syria, in Mesopotamia, or
even Persia, the new leaven was at work. That power which was to free
the world was in ferment. The religious spirit was again coming to
birth. Here and there, in face of the flat contradiction of
circumstances, one would arise and assert that man does not live by
bread alone. Orphism, Mythraism, Christianity, many forms of one spirit,
were beginning to mean something more than curious ritual and discreet
debauch. Very slowly a change was coming over the face of Europe.
There was change before the signs of it became apparent. The earliest
Christian paintings in the catacombs are purely classical. If the early
Christians felt anything new they could not express it. But before the
second century was out Coptic craftsmen had begun to weave into dead
Roman designs something vital. The academic patterns are queerly
distorted and flattened out into forms of a certain significance, as we
can feel for ourselves if we go to the textile room at South Kensington.
Certainly, these second century Coptic textiles are more like works of
art than anything that had been produced in the Roman Empire for more
than four hundred years. Egyptian paintings of the third century bear
less positive witness to the fumblings of a new spirit. But at the
beginning of the fourth century Diocletian built his palace at Spalato,
where we have all learned to see classicism and the new spirit from the
East fighting it out side by side; and, if we may trust Strzygowski,
from the end of that century dates the beautiful church of Kodja-Kalessi
in Isauria. The century in which the East finally dominated the West
(350-450) is a period of incubation. It is a time of disconcerting
activity that precedes the unmistakable launch of art upon the Christian
slope. I would confidently assert that every artistic birth is preceded
by a period of uneasy gestation in which the unborn child acquires the
organs and energy that are to carry it forward on its long journey, if
only I possessed the data that would give a tottering support to so
comforting a generalisation. Alas! the births of the great slopes of
antiquity are shrouded in a night scarcely ruffled by the minute
researches of patient archaeologists and impervious to the startling
discoveries by experts of more or less palpable forgeries. Of these
critical periods we dare not speak confidently; nevertheless we can
compare the fifth century with the nineteenth and draw our own
conclusions.
In 450 they built the lovely Galla Placidia at Ravenna. It is a building
essentially un-Roman; that is to say, the Romanism that clings to it is
accidental and adds nothing to its significance. The mosaics within,
however, are still coarsely classical. There is a nasty, woolly realism
about the sheep, and about the good shepherd more than a suspicion of
the stodgy, Graeco-Roman, Apollo. Imitation still fights, though it
fights a losing battle, with significant form. When S. Vitale was begun
in 526 the battle was won. Sta. Sophia at Constantinople was building
between 532 and 537; the finest mosaics in S. Vitale, S.
Apollinare-Nuovo and S. Apollinare-in-Classe belong to the sixth
century; so do SS. Sergius and Bacchus at Constantinople and the Duomo
at Parenzo. In fact, to the sixth century belong the most majestic
monuments of Byzantine art. It is the primitive and supreme summit of
the Christian slope. The upward spring from the levels of
Graeco-Romanism is immeasurable. The terms in which it could be stated
have yet to be discovered. It is the whole length of the slope from Sta.
Sophia to the Victoria Memorial pushed upright to stand on a base of a
hundred years. We are on heights from which the mud-flats are invisible;
resting here, one can hardly believe that the flats ever were, or, at
any rate, that they will ever be again. Go to Ravenna, and you will see
the masterpieces of Christian art, the primitives of the slope: go to
the Tate Gallery or the Luxembourg, and you will see the end of that
slope--Christian art at its last gasp. These _memento mori_ are salutary
in an age of assurance when, looking at the pictures of Cézanne, we
feel, not inexcusably, that we are high above the mud and malaria.
Between Cézanne and another Tate Gallery, what lies in store for the
human spirit? Are we in the period of a new incubation? Or is the new
age born? Is it a new slope that we are on, or are we merely part of a
surprisingly vigorous premonitory flutter? These are queries to ponder.
Is Cézanne the beginning of a slope, a portent, or merely the crest of a
movement? The oracles are dumb. This alone seems to me sure: since the
Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe
has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cézanne.
With Sta. Sophia at Constantinople, and the sixth century churches and
mosaics at Ravenna, the Christian slope establishes itself in
Europe.[10] In the same century it took a downward twist at
Constantinople; but in one part of Europe or another the new inspiration
continued to manifest itself supremely for more than six hundred years.
There were ups and downs, of course, movements and reactions; in some
places art was almost always good, in others it was never first-rate;
but there was no universal, irreparable depreciation till Norman and
Romanesque architecture gave way to Gothic, till twelfth-century
sculpture became thirteenth-century figuration.
Christian art preserved its primitive significance for more than half a
millennium. Therein I see no marvel. Even ideas and emotions travelled
slowly in those days. In one respect, at any rate, trains and
steam-boats have fulfilled the predictions of their exploiters--they
have made everything move faster: the mistake lies in being quite so
positive that this is a blessing. In those dark ages things moved
slowly; that is one reason why the new force had not spent itself in six
hundred years. Another is that the revelation came to an age that was
constantly breaking fresh ground. Always there was a virgin tract at
hand to take the seed and raise a lusty crop. Between 500 and 1000
A.D. the population of Europe was fluid. Some new race was
always catching the inspiration and feeling and expressing it with
primitive sensibility and passion. The last to be infected was one of
the finest; and in the eleventh century Norman power and French
intelligence produced in the west of Europe a manifestation of the
Christian ferment only a little inferior to that which five hundred
years earlier had made glorious the East.
Let me insist once again that, when I speak of the Christian ferment or
the Christian slope, I am not thinking of dogmatic religion. I am
thinking of that religious spirit of which Christianity, with its dogmas
and rituals, is one manifestation, Buddhism another. And when I speak of
art as a manifestation of the religious spirit I do not mean that art
expresses particular religious emotions, much less that it expresses
anything theological. I have said that if art expresses anything, it
expresses an emotion felt for pure form and that which gives pure form
its extraordinary significance. So, when I speak of Christian art, I
mean that this art was one product of that state of enthusiasm of which
the Christian Church is another. So far was the new spirit from being a
mere ebullition of Christian faith that we find manifestations of it in
Mohammedan art; everyone who has seen a photograph of the Mosque of Omar
at Jerusalem knows that. The emotional renaissance in Europe was not the
wide-spreading of Christian doctrines, but it was through Christian
doctrine that Europe came to know of the rediscovery of the emotional
significance of the Universe. Christian art is not an expression of
specific Christian emotions; but it was only when men had been roused by
Christianity that they began to feel the emotions that express
themselves in form. It was Christianity that put Europe into that state
of emotional turmoil from which sprang Christian art.
For a moment, in the sixth century, the flood of enthusiasm seems to
have carried the Eastern world, even the official world, off its feet.
But Byzantine officials were no fonder of swimming than others. The men
who worked the imperial machine, studied the Alexandrine poets, and
dabbled in classical archaeology were not the men to look forward. Only
the people, led by the monks, were vaguely, and doubtless stupidly, on
the side of emotion and the future. Soon after Justinian's death the
Empire began to divide itself into two camps. Appropriately, religious
art was the standard of the popular party, and around that standard the
battle raged. "No man," said Lord Melbourne, "has more respect for the
Christian religion than I; but when it comes to dragging it into private
life...." At Constantinople they began dragging religion, and art too,
into the sanctity of private capital. Now, no official worth his salt
can watch the shadow being recklessly sacrificed to the substance
without itching to set the police on somebody; and the vigilance and
sagacity of Byzantine civilians has become proverbial. We learn from a
letter written by Pope Gregory II to the Emperor Leo, the iconoclast,
that men were willing to give their estates for a picture. This, to
Pope, Emperor, and Mr. Finlay the historian, was proof enough of
appalling demoralisation. For a parallel, I suppose, they recalled the
shameful imprudence of the Magdalene. There were people at
Constantinople who took art seriously, though in a rather too literary
spirit--"dicunt enim artem pictoriam piam esse." This sort of thing had
to be stopped. Early in the eighth century began the iconoclast
onslaught. The history of that hundred years' war, in which the popular
party carried on a spirited and finally successful resistance, does not
concern us. One detail, however, is worth noticing. During the
iconoclast persecution a new popular art makes its appearance in and
about those remote monasteries that were the strongholds of the mystics.
Of this art the Chloudof Psalter is the most famous example. Certainly
the art of the Chloudof Psalter is not great. A desire to be
illustrative generally mars both the drawing and the design. It mars,
but does not utterly ruin; in many of the drawings something significant
persists. There is, however, always too much realism and too much
literature. But neither the realism nor the literature is derived from
classical models. The work is essentially original. It is also
essentially popular. Indeed, it is something of a party pamphlet; and in
one place we see the Emperor and his cabinet doing duty as a conclave of
the damned. It would be easy to overrate the artistic value of the
Chloudof Psalter, but as a document it is of the highest importance,
because it brings out clearly the opposition between the official art of
the iconoclasts that leaned on the Hellenistic tradition and borrowed
bluntly from Bagdad, and the vital art that drew its inspiration from
the Christian movement and transmuted all its borrowing into something
new. Side by side with this live art of the Christian movement we shall
see a continuous output of work based on the imitation of classical
models. Those coarse and dreary objects that crop up more or less
frequently in early Byzantine, Merovingian, Carolingian, Ottonian,
Romanesque, and early Italian art, are not, however, an inheritance from
the iconoclastic period; they are the long shadow thrown across history
by the gigantic finger of imperial Rome. The mischief done by the
iconoclasts was not irreparable, but it was grave. True to their class,
Byzantine officials indulged a taste for furniture, giving thereby an
unintentional sting to their attack. Like the grandees of the Classical
Renaissance, they degraded art, which is a religion, to upholstery, a
menial trade. They patronised craftsmen who looked not into their
hearts, but into the past--who from the court of the Kalif brought
pretty patterns, and from classical antiquity elegant illusions, to do
duty for significant design. They looked to Greece and Rome as did the
men of the Renaissance, and, like them, lost in the science of
representation the art of creation. In the age of the iconoclasts,
modelling--the coarse Roman modelling--begins to bulge and curl
luxuriously at Constantinople. The eighth century in the East is a
portent of the sixteenth in the West. It is the restoration of
materialism with its paramour, obsequious art. The art of the
iconoclasts tells us the story of their days; it is descriptive,
official, eclectic, historical, plutocratic, palatial, and vulgar.
Fortunately, its triumph was partial and ephemeral.
For art was still too vigorous to be strangled by a pack of cultivated
mandarins. In the end the mystics triumphed. Under the Regent Theodora
(842) the images were finally restored; under the Basilian dynasty
(867-1057) and under the Comneni Byzantine art enjoyed a second golden
age. And though I cannot rate the best Byzantine art of the ninth,
tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries quite so high as I rate that of
the sixth, I am inclined to hold it superior, not only to anything that
was to come, but also to the very finest achievement of the greatest
ages of Egypt, Crete, and Greece.
II
GREATNESS AND DECLINE
Having glanced at the beginnings of Christian art, we must not linger
over the history of Byzantine. Eastern traders and artisans, pushing
into Western Europe from the Adriatic and along the valley of the Rhone,
carried with them the ferment. Monks driven out of the East by the
iconoclast persecutions found Western Europe Christian and left it
religious. The strength of the movement in Europe between 500 and 900 is
commonly under-rated. That is partly because its extant monuments are
not obvious. Buildings are the things to catch the eye, and, outside
Ravenna, there is comparatively little Christian architecture of this
period. Also the cultivated, spoon-fed art of the renaissance court of
Charlemagne is too often allowed to misrepresent one age and disgust
another. Of course the bulk of those opulent knick-knacks manufactured
for the Carolingian and Ottonian Emperors, and now to be seen at Aachen,
are as beastly as anything else that is made simply to be precious. They
reflect German taste at its worst; and, in tracing the line, or
estimating the value, of the Christian slope it is prudent to overlook
even the best of Teutonic effort.[11] For the bulk of it is not
primitive or mediaeval or renaissance art, but German art. At any rate
it is a manifestation of national character rather than of aesthetic
inspiration. Most aesthetic creation bears the mark of nationality; very
few manifestations of German nationality bear a trace of aesthetic
creation. The differences between the treasures of Aachen, early German
architecture, fifteenth-century German sculpture, and the work produced
to-day at Munich are superficial. Almost all is profoundly German, and
nothing else. That is to say, it is conscientious, rightly intentioned,
excessively able, and lacking in just that which distinguishes a work of
art from everything else in the world. The inspiration and sensibility
of the dark ages can be felt most surely and most easily in the works of
minor art produced in France and Italy.[12] In Italy, however, there is
enough architecture to prove up to the hilt, were further proof
required, that the spirit was vigorous. It is the age of what Sig.
Rivoira calls Pre-Lombardic Architecture--Italian Byzantine: it is the
age of the Byzantine school of painting at Rome.[13]
What the "Barbarians" did, indirectly, for art cannot be over-estimated.
They almost extinguished the tradition of culture, they began to destroy
the bogey of imperialism, they cleaned the slate. They were able to
provide new bottles for the new wine. Artists can scarcely repress their
envy when they hear that academic painters and masters were sold into
slavery by the score. The Barbarians handed on the torch and wrought
marvels in its light. But in those days men were too busy fighting and
ploughing and praying to have much time for anything else. Material
needs absorbed their energies without fattening them; their spiritual
appetite was ferocious, but they had a live religion as well as a live
art to satisfy it. It is supposed that in the dark ages insecurity and
want reduced humanity to something little better than bestiality. To
this their art alone gives the lie, and there is other evidence. If
turbulence and insecurity could reduce people to bestiality, surely the
Italians of the ninth century were the men to roar and bleat. Constantly
harassed by Saracens, Hungarians, Greeks, French, and every sort of
German, they had none of those encouragements to labour and create which
in the vast security of the _pax Romana_ and the _pax Britannica_ have
borne such glorious fruits of private virtue and public magnificence.
Yet in 898 Hungarian scouts report that northern Italy is thickly
populated and full of fortified towns.[14] At the sack of Parma (924)
forty-four churches were burnt, and these churches were certainly more
like Santa Maria di Pomposa or San Pietro at Toscanella than the
Colosseum or the Royal Courts of Justice. That the artistic output of
the dark ages was to some extent limited by its poverty is not to be
doubted; nevertheless, more first-rate art was produced in Europe
between the years 500 and 900 than was produced in the same countries
between 1450 and 1850.
For in estimating the artistic value of a period one tends first to
consider the splendour of its capital achievements. After that one
reckons the quantity of first-rate work produced. Lastly, one computes
the proportion of undeniable works of art to the total output. In the
dark ages the proportion seems to have been high. This is a
characteristic of primitive periods. The market is too small to tempt a
crowd of capable manufacturers, and the conditions of life are too
severe to support the ordinary academy or salon exhibitor who lives on
his private means and takes to art because he is unfit for anything
else. This sort of producer, whose existence tells us less about the
state of art than about the state of society, who would be the worst
navvy in his gang or the worst trooper in his squadron, and is the
staple product of official art schools, is unheard of in primitive ages.
In drawing inferences, therefore, we must not overlook the advantage
enjoyed by barbarous periods in the fact that of those who come forward
as artists the vast majority have some real gift. I would hazard a guess
that of the works that survive from the dark age as high a proportion as
one in twelve has real artistic value. Were a proportion of the work
produced between 1450 and 1850 identical with that of the work produced
between 500 and 900 to survive, it might very well happen that it would
not contain a single work of art. In fact, we tend to see only the more
important things of this period and to leave unvisited the notorious
trash. Yet judging from the picked works brought to our notice in
galleries, exhibitions, and private collections, I cannot believe that
more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850
can be properly described as a work of art.