superior in quality to those of the preceding age--indeed, they fall
short of the Byzantine masterpieces of the sixth century; but the
first-rate art of this second period was more abundant, or, at any rate,
has survived more successfully, than that of the first. The age that
has bequeathed us Romanesque, Lombardic, and Norman architecture gives
no sign of dissolution. We are still on the level heights of the
Christian Renaissance. Artists are still primitive. Men still feel the
significance of form sufficiently to create it copiously. Increased
wealth purchases increased leisure, and some of that leisure is devoted
to the creation of art. I do not marvel, therefore, at the common,
though I think inexact, opinion that this was the period in which
Christian Europe touched the summit of its spiritual history: its
monuments are everywhere majestic before our eyes. Not only in France,
Italy, and Spain, but in England, and as far afield as Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden, we can see the triumphs of Romanesque art. This was the last
level stage on the long journey from Santa Sophia to St. John's Wood.
With Gothic architecture the descent began. Gothic architecture is
juggling in stone and glass. It is the convoluted road that ends in a
bridecake or a cucumber frame. A Gothic cathedral is a _tour de force_;
it is also a melodrama. Enter, and you will be impressed by the
incredible skill of the constructor; perhaps you will be impressed by a
sense of dim mystery and might; you will not be moved by pure form. You
may groan "A-a-h" and collapse: you will not be strung to austere
ecstasy. Walk round it, and take your pleasure in subtleties of the
builder's craft, quaint corners, gargoyles, and flying buttresses, but
do not expect the thrill that answers the perception of sheer rightness
of form. In architecture the new spirit first came to birth; in
architecture first it dies.
We find the spirit alive at the very end of the twelfth century in
Romanesque sculpture and in stained glass: we can see it at Chartres and
at Bourges. At Bourges there is an indication of the way things are
going in the fact that in an unworthy building we find glass and some
fragments of sculpture worthy of Chartres, and not unworthy of any age
or place. Cimabue and Duccio are the last great exponents in the West of
the greater tradition--the tradition that held the essential everything
and the accidental nothing. For with Duccio, at any rate, the sense of
form was as much traditional as vital: and the great Cimabue is _fin de
siècle_. They say that Cimabue died in 1302; Duccio about fifteen years
later. With Giotto (born 1276), a greater artist than either, we turn a
corner as sharp as that which had been turned a hundred years earlier
with the invention of Gothic architecture in France. For Giotto could be
intentionally second-rate. He was capable of sacrificing form to drama
and anecdote. He never left the essential out, but he sometimes knocked
its corners off. He was always more interested in art than in St.
Francis, but he did not always remember that St. Francis has nothing
whatever to do with art. In theory that is right enough; the Byzantines
had believed that they were more interested in dogmatic theology than in
form, and almost every great artist has had some notion of the sort.
Indeed, it seems that there is nothing so dangerous for an artist as
consciously to care about nothing but art. For an artist to believe that
his art is concerned with religion or politics or morals or psychology
or scientific truth is well; it keeps him alive and passionate and
vigorous: it keeps him up out of sentimental aestheticism: it keeps to
hand a suitable artistic problem. But for an artist not to be able to
forget all about these things as easily as a man who is playing a salmon
forgets his lunch is the devil. Giotto lacked facility in forgetting.
There are frescoes in which, failing to grasp the significance of a
form, he allows it to state a fact or suggest a situation. Giotto went
higher than Cimabue but he often aimed lower. Compare his "Virgin and
Child" in the Accademia with that of Cimabue in the same gallery, and
you will see how low his humanism could bring him. The coarse heaviness
of the forms of that woman and her baby is unthinkable in Cimabue; for
Cimabue had learnt from the Byzantines that forms should be significant
and not lifelike. Doubtless in the minds of both there was something
besides a preoccupation with formal combinations; but Giotto has allowed
that "something" to dominate his design, Cimabue has forced his design
to dominate it. There is something protestant about Giotto's picture. He
is so dreadfully obsessed by the idea that the humanity of the mother
and child is the important thing about them that he has insisted on it
to the detriment of his art. Cimabue was incapable of such commonness.
Therefore make the comparison--it is salutary and instructive; and then
go to Santa Croce or the Arena Chapel and admit that if the greatest
name in European painting is not Cézanne it is Giotto.
From the peak that is Giotto the road falls slowly but steadily. Giotto
heads a movement towards imitation and scientific picture-making. A
genius such as his was bound to be the cause of a movement; it need not
have been the cause of such a movement. But the spirit of an age is
stronger than the echoes of tradition, sound they never so sweetly. And
the spirit of that age, as every extension lecturer knows, moved towards
Truth and Nature, away from supernatural ecstasies. There is a moment at
which the spirit begins to crave for Truth and Nature, for naturalism
and verisimilitude; in the history of art it is known as the early
decadence. Nevertheless, on naturalism and materialism a constant war is
waged by one or two great souls athirst for pure aesthetic rapture; and
this war, strangely enough, is invariably described by the extension
lecturer as a fight for Truth and Nature. Never doubt it, in a hundred
years or less they will be telling their pupils that in an age of
extreme artificiality arose two men, Cézanne and Gaugin, who, by
simplicity and sincerity, led back the world to the haunts of Truth and
Nature. Strangest of all, some part of what they say will be right.
The new movement broke up the great Byzantine tradition,[15] and left
the body of art a victim to the onslaught of that strange, new disease,
the Classical Renaissance. The tract that lies between Giotto and
Lionardo is the beginning of the end; but it is not the end. Painting
came to maturity late, and died hard; and the art of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries--especially the Tuscan schools--is not a mere
historical link: it is an important movement, or rather two. The great
Sienese names, Ugolino, Ambrogio Lorenzetti,[16] and Simone Martini,
belong to the old world as much as to the new; but the movement that
produced Masaccio, Masolino, Castagno, Donatello, Piero della Francesca,
and Fra Angelico is a reaction from the Giottesque tradition of the
fourteenth century, and an extremely vital movement. Often, it seems,
the stir and excitement provoked by the ultimately disastrous scientific
discoveries were a cause of good art. It was the disinterested
adoration of perspective, I believe, that enabled Uccello and the Paduan
Mantegna to apprehend form passionately. The artist must have something
to get into a passion about.
Outside Italy, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the
approaches of spiritual bankruptcy are more obvious, though here, too,
painting makes a better fight than architecture. Seven hundred years of
glorious and incessant creation seem to have exhausted the constructive
genius of Europe. Gothic architecture becomes something so nauseous[17]
that one can only rejoice when, in the sixteenth century, the sponge is
thrown up for good, and, abandoning all attempt to create, Europe
settles down quietly to imitate classical models. All true creation was
dead long before that; its epitaph had been composed by the master of
the "Haute Oeuvre" at Beauvais. Only intellectual invention dragged on
a sterile and unlucky existence. A Gothic church of the late Middle Ages
is a thing made to order. A building formula has been devised within
which the artificer, who has ousted the artist, finds endless
opportunity for displaying his address. The skill of the juggler and the
taste of the pastrycook are in great demand now that the power to feel
and the genius to create have been lost. There is brisk trade in pretty
things; buildings are stuck all over with them. Go and peer at each one
separately if you have a tooth for cheap sweet-meats.
Painting, outside Italy, was following more deliberately the road
indicated by architecture. In illuminated manuscripts it is easy to
watch the steady coarsening of line and colour. By the beginning of the
fourteenth century, Limoges enamels have fallen into that state of
damnation from which they have never attempted to rise. Of trans-Alpine
figuration after 1250 the less said the better. If in Italian painting
the slope is more gentle, that is partly because the spirit of the
Byzantine renaissance died harder there, partly because the descent was
broken by individual artists who rose superior to their circumstances.
But here, too, intellect is filling the void left by emotion; science
and culture are doing their work. By the year 1500 the stream of
inspiration had grown so alarmingly thin that there was only just
enough to turn the wheels of the men of genius. The minor artists seem
already prepared to resign themselves to the inevitable. Since we are no
longer artists who move, let us be craftsmen who astonish. 'Tis a fine
thing to tempt urchins with painted apples: that makes the people stare.
To be sure, such feats are rather beneath the descendants of Giotto; we
leave them to the Dutchmen, whom we envy a little all the same. We have
lost art; let us study the science of imitation. Here is a field for
learning and dexterity. And, as our patrons who have lost their
aesthetic perceptions have not lost all their senses, let us flatter
them with grateful objects: let our grapes and girls be as luscious as
lifelike. But the patrons are not all sensualists; some of them are
scholars. The trade in imitations of the antique is almost as good as
the trade in imitations of nature. Archaeology and connoisseurship,
those twin ticks on palsied art, are upon us. To react to form a man
needs sensibility; to know whether rules have been respected knowledge
of these rules alone is necessary. By the end of the fifteenth century
art is becoming a question of rules; appreciation a matter of
connoisseurship.
Literature is never pure art. Very little literature is a pure
expression of emotion; none, I think is an expression of pure inhuman
emotion. Most of it is concerned, to some extent, with facts and ideas:
it is intellectual. Therefore literature is a misleading guide to the
history of art. Its history is the history of literature; and it is a
good guide to the history of thought. Yet sometimes literature will
provide the historian of art with a pretty piece of collateral evidence.
For instance, the fact that Charles the Great ordained that the Frankish
songs should be collected and written down makes a neat pendant to the
renaissance art of Aachen. People who begin to collect have lost the
first fury of creation. The change that came over plastic art in France
towards the end of the twelfth century is reflected in the accomplished
triviality of Chrétien de Troyes. The eleventh century had produced the
_Chanson de Roland_, a poem as grand and simple as a Romanesque church.
Chrétien de Troyes melted down the massive conceptions of his betters
and twisted them into fine-spun conceits. He produced a poem as
pinnacled, deft, and insignificant as Rouen Cathedral. In literature, as
in the visual arts, Italy held out longest, and, when she fell, fell
like Lucifer, never to rise again. In Italy there was no literary
renaissance; there was just a stirring of the rubbish heap. If ever man
was a full-stop, that man was Boccaccio. Dante died at Ravenna in 1321.
His death is a landmark in the spiritual history of Europe. Behind him
lies that which, taken with the _Divina Commedia_, has won for Italy an
exaggerated literary reputation. In the thirteenth century there was
plenty of poetry hardly inferior to the _Lamento_ of Rinaldo; in the
fourteenth comes Petrarch with the curse of mellifluous phrase-making.
May God forget me if I forget the great Italian art of the fifteenth
century. But, a host of individual geniuses and a cloud of admirable
painters notwithstanding, the art of the fifteenth century was further
from grace than that of the Giottesque painters of the fourteenth. And
the whole output of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is
immeasurably inferior to the great Byzantine and Romanesque production
of the eleventh and twelfth. Indeed, it is inferior in quality, if not
in quantity, to the decadent Byzantine and Italian Byzantine of the
thirteenth. Therefore I will say that, already at the end of the
fourteenth century, though Castagno and Masolino and Gentile da
Fabriano and Fra Angelico were alive, and Masaccio and Piero and Bellini
had yet to be born, it looked as if the road that started from
Constantinople in the sixth century were about to end in a glissade.
From Buda-Pest to Sligo, "late Gothic" stands for something as foul
almost as "revival." Having come through the high passes, Europe, it
seemed, was going to end her journey by plunging down a precipice.
Perhaps it would have been as well; but it was not to be. The headlong
rush was to be checked. The descent was to be eased by a strange detour,
by a fantastic adventure, a revival that was no re-birth, a Medea's
cauldron rather, an extravagant disease full of lust and laughter; the
life of the old world was to be prolonged by four hundred years or so,
by the galvanising power of the Classical Renaissance.
III
THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE AND ITS DISEASES
The Classical Renaissance is nothing more than a big kink in the long
slope; but it is a very big one. It is an intellectual event.
Emotionally the consumption that was wasting Europe continued to run its
course; the Renaissance was a mere fever-flash. To literature, however,
its importance is immense: for literature can make itself independent of
spiritual health, and is as much concerned with ideas as with emotions.
Literature can subsist in dignity on ideas. Finlay's history of the
Byzantine Empire provokes no emotion worth talking about, yet I would
give Mr. Finlay a place amongst men of letters, and I would do as much
for Hobbes, Mommsen, Sainte-Beuve, Samuel Johnson, and Aristotle. Great
thinking without great feeling will make great literature. It is not for
their emotional qualities that we value many of our most valued books.
And when it is for an emotional quality, to what extent is that emotion
aesthetic? I know how little the intellectual and factual content of
great poetry has to do with its significance. The actual meaning of the
words in Shakespeare's songs, the purest poetry in English, is generally
either trivial or trite. They are nursery-rhymes or drawing-room
ditties;--
"Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid."
Could anything be more commonplace?
"Hark, hark!
Bow, wow,
The watch-dogs bark;
Bow, wow,
Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow!"
What could be more nonsensical? In the verse of our second poet,
Milton--so great that before his name the word "second" rings false as
the giggle of fatuity--the ideas are frequently shallow and the facts
generally false. In Dante, if the ideas are sometimes profound and the
emotions awful, they are also, as a rule, repugnant to our better
feelings: the facts are the hoardings of a parish scold. In great poetry
it is the formal music that makes the miracle. The poet expresses in
verbal form an emotion but distantly related to the words set down. But
it is related; it is not a purely artistic emotion. In poetry form and
its significance are not everything; the form and the content are not
one. Though some of Shakespeare's songs approach purity, there is, in
fact, an alloy. The form is burdened with an intellectual content, and
that content is a mood that mingles with and reposes on the emotions of
life. That is why poetry, though it has its raptures, does not transport
us to that remote aesthetic beatitude in which, freed from humanity, we
are up-stayed by musical and pure visual form.
The Classical Renaissance was a new reading of human life, and what it
added to the emotional capital of Europe was a new sense of the
excitingness of human affairs. If the men and women of the Renaissance
were moved by Art and Nature, that was because in Art and Nature they
saw their own reflections. The Classical Renaissance was not a re-birth
but a re-discovery; and that superb mess of thought and observation,
lust, rhetoric, and pedantry, that we call Renaissance literature, is
its best and most characteristic monument. What it rediscovered were the
ideas from the heights of which the ancients had gained a view of life.
This view the Renaissance borrowed. By doing so it took the sting out of
the spiritual death of the late Middle Ages. It showed men that they
could manage very well without a soul. It made materialism tolerable by
showing how much can be done with matter and intellect. That was its
great feat. It taught men how to make the best of a bad job; it proved
that by cultivating the senses and setting the intellect to brood over
them it is easy to whip up an emotion of sorts. When men had lost sight
of the spirit it covered the body with a garment of glamour.
That the Classical Renaissance was essentially an intellectual movement
is proved, I think, by the fact that it left the uneducated classes
untouched almost. They suffered from its consequences; it gave them
nothing. A wave of emotion floods the back-gardens; an intellectual
stream is kept within the irrigation channels. The Classical Renaissance
made absolute the divorce of the classes from the masses. The mediaeval
lord in his castle and the mediaeval hind in his hut were spiritual
equals who thought and felt alike, held the same hopes and fears, and
shared, to a surprising extent, the pains and pleasures of a simple and
rather cruel society. The Renaissance changed all that. The lord entered
the new world of ideas and refined sensuality; the peasant stayed where
he was, or, as the last vestiges of spiritual religion began to
disappear with the commons, sank lower. Popular art changed so gradually
that in the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth century we still find,
in remote corners, things that are rude but profoundly moving. Village
masons could still create in stone at the time when Jacques Coeur was
building himself the first "residence worthy of a millionaire" that had
been "erected" since the days of Honorius. But that popular art pursued
the downhill road sedately while plutocratic art went with a run is a
curious accident of which the traces are soon lost; the outstanding fact
is that with the Renaissance Europe definitely turns her back on the
spiritual view of life. With that renunciation the power of creating
significant form becomes the inexplicable gift of the occasional
genius. Here and there an individual produces a work of art, so art
comes to be regarded as something essentially sporadic and peculiar. The
artist is reckoned a freak. We are in the age of names and catalogues
and genius-worship. Now, genius-worship is the infallible sign of an
uncreative age. In great ages, though we may not all be geniuses, many
of us are artists, and where there are many artists art tends to become
anonymous.
The Classical Renaissance was something different in kind from what I
have called the Christian Renaissance. It must be placed somewhere
between 1350 and 1600. Place it where you will. For my part I always
think of it as the gorgeous and well-cut garment of the years that fall
between 1453 and 1594, between the capture of Constantinople and the
death of Tintoretto. To me, it is the age of Lionardo, of Charles VIII
and Francis I, of Cesare Borgia and Leo X, of Raffael, of Machiavelli,
and of Erasmus, who carries us on to the second stage, the period of
angry ecclesiastical politics, of Clement VII, Fontainebleau, Rabelais,
Titian, Palladio, and Vasari. But, on any computation, in the years that
lie between the spiritual exaltation of the early twelfth century and
the sturdy materialism of the late sixteenth lies the Classical
Renaissance. Whatever happened, happened between those dates. And all
that did happen was nothing more than a change from late manhood to
early senility complicated by a house-moving, bringing with it new
hobbies and occupations. The decline from the eleventh to the
seventeenth century is continuous and to be foreseen; the change from
the world of Aurelian to the world of Gregory the Great is catastrophic.
Since the Christian Renaissance, new ideas and knowledge
notwithstanding, the world has grown rotten with decency and order. It
takes more than the rediscovery of Greek texts and Graeco-Roman statues
to provoke the cataclysms and earthquakes with which it grew young.
The art of the High Renaissance was conditioned by the demands of its
patrons. There is nothing odd about that; it is a recognised stage in
the rake's progress. The patrons of the Renaissance wanted plenty of
beauty of the kind dear to the impressionable stock-jobber. Only, the
plutocrats of the sixteenth century had a delicacy and magnificence of
taste which would have made the houses and manners of modern
stock-jobbers intolerable to them. Renaissance millionaires could be
vulgar and brutal, but they were great gentlemen. They were neither
illiterate cads nor meddlesome puritans, nor even saviours of society.
Yet, if we are to understand the amazing popularity of Titian's and of
Veronese's women, we must take note of their niceness to kiss and
obvious willingness to be kissed. That beauty for which can be
substituted the word "desirableness," and that insignificant beauty
which is the beauty of gems, were in great demand. Imitation was wanted,
too; for if pictures are to please as suggestions and mementoes, the
objects that suggest and remind must be adequately portrayed. These
pictures had got to stimulate the emotions of life, first; aesthetic
emotion was a secondary matter. A Renaissance picture was meant to say
just those things that a patron would like to hear. That way lies the
end of art: however wicked it may be to try to shock the public, it is
not so wicked as trying to please it. But whatever the Italian painters
of the Renaissance had to say they said in the grand manner. Remember,
we are not Dutchmen. Therefore let all your figures suggest the
appropriate emotion by means of the appropriate gesture--the gesture
consecrated by the great tradition. Straining limbs, looks of love,
hate, envy, fear and horror, up-turned or downcast eyes, hands
outstretched or clasped in despair--by means of our marvellous
machinery, and still more marvellous skill, we can give them all they
ask without forestalling the photographers. But we are not recounters
all, for some of our patrons are poets. To them the visible Universe is
suggestive of moods or, at any rate, sympathetic with them. These value
objects for their association with the fun and folly and romance of
life. For them, too, we paint pictures, and in their pictures we lend
Nature enough humanity to make her interesting. My lord is lascivious?
Correggio will give him a background to his mood. My lord is majestic?
Michelangelo will tell him that man is, indeed, a noble animal whose
muscles wriggle heroically as watch-springs. The sixteenth century
produced a race of artists peculiar in their feeling for material
beauty, but normal, coming as they do at the foot of the hills, in their
technical proficiency and aesthetic indigence. Craft holds the candle
that betrays the bareness of the cupboard. The aesthetic significance of
form is feebly and impurely felt, the power of creating it is lost
almost; but finer descriptions have rarely been painted. They knew how
to paint in the sixteenth century: as for the primitives--God bless
them--they did their best: what more could they do when they couldn't
even round a lady's thighs?