most mysterious personalities in art, and typically Florentine. His
mystery lies partly in our ignorance about him, partly in the difficulty
of grasping the rapidity of action, the precocity, of genius such as
his. Coming at the very beginning of the naturalistic movement he seized
with a strange complacency and ease upon the new material it offered,
but (and this is what astounds one) he instantly discovered how to
assimilate it perfectly to the formal requirements of design. So that
not only the discovery of the new material, but its digestion was with
him a simultaneous and almost instantaneous process. He was helped
perhaps by the fact that the new naturalism was as yet only a general
perception of new aspects of natural form. It was left for his younger
contemporaries to map out the new country methodically--to the group of
adventurous spirits--Brunelleschi, Donatello, Castagno, and Uccello--who
founded modern science, and gave to the understanding of classic art a
methodical basis. It is in this group that the fierce intellectual
passion of the Florentine genius manifests itself most clearly.
Perspective and anatomy were the two studies which promised to reveal to
them the secrets of natural form. The study of anatomy exemplifies
mainly the aspect of curiosity, though even in this the desire to find
the underlying principles of appearance is evident--on the other hand
perspective, to its first discoverers, appeared to promise far more than
an aid to verisimilitude, it may have seemed a visual revelation of the
structure of space and through that a key to the construction of
pictorial space.
To our more penetrating study of æsthetic (for of all sciences, æsthetic
has been the greatest laggard) it is evident that neither perspective
nor anatomy have any very immediate bearing upon art--both of them are
means of ascertaining facts, and the question of art begins where the
question of fact ends. But artists have always had to excite themselves
with some kind of subsidiary intoxicant, and perspective and anatomy,
while they were still in their infancy, acted admirably as stimulants.
That they have by now become, for most artists, the dreariest of
sedatives may make it difficult to conceive this. But at all events in
that first generation they excited their devotees to an ardent search
for abstract unity of design. And this excitement went on to the next
generation as exemplified by the works of the Umbro-Florentines--Piero
della Francesca and Signorelli--and in Florence itself of Pollajuolo.
But the scientific spirit once aroused was destined not to remain for
long so stimulating and helpful an assistant to the creation of design.
It was bound in the end to start trains of thought too complex and too
absorbing to occupy a subordinate place. Already in the rank and file of
Florentine artists, the Ghirlandajos, Filippino Lippis, and their
kindred, mere curiosity--naïve literalism--had undermined the tradition,
so that towards the last quarter of the century hardly any artist knew
how to design intelligibly on the scale of a fresco, whereas the merest
duffer of the fourteenth century could be certain of the volumes and
quantities of his divisions.
But it is with Leonardo da Vinci that the higher aspects of the
scientific spirit first came into conflict with art. Doubtless this
conflict is not fundamental nor final, but only an apparent result of
human limitations; but to one who, like Leonardo, first had a Pisgah
prospect of that immense territory, to the exploration of which four
centuries of the intensest human effort have been devoted without yet
getting in sight of its boundaries--to such a man it was almost
inevitable that the scientific content of art should assume an undue
significance. Up till Leonardo one can say that the process of digesting
the new found material into æsthetic form had kept pace with
observation, though already in Verrocchio there is a sign of yielding to
the crude phenomenon. But with Leonardo himself the organising faculty
begins to break down under the stress of new matter. Leonardo himself
shared to the full the Florentine passion for abstraction, but it was
inevitable that he should be dazzled and fascinated by the vast
prospects that opened before his intellectual gaze. It was inevitable
that where such vast masses of new particulars revealed themselves to
his curiosity their claim for investigation should be the most
insistent. Not but what Leonardo did recognise the necessity for his art
of some restriction and choice. His keen observation had revealed to him
the whole gamut of atmospheric colour which first became a material for
design under Monet and his followers. But having described a picture
which would exactly correspond to a French painting of 1870, he rejects
the whole of this new material as unsuitable for art. But even his
rejection was not really a recognition of the claims of form, but only,
alas! of another scientific trend with which his mind had become
possessed. It was his almost prophetic vision of the possibilities of
psychology which determined more than anything else the lines of his
work. In the end almost everything was subordinated to the idea of a
kind of psychological illustration of dramatic themes--an illustration
which was not to be arrived at by an instinctive reconstruction from
within, but by deliberate analytic observation. Now in so far as the
movements of the soul could be interpreted by movements of the body as a
whole, the new material might lend itself readily to plastic
construction, but the minuter and even more psychologically significant
movements of facial expression demanded a treatment which hardly worked
for æsthetic unity. It involved a new use of light and shade, which in
itself tended to break down the fundamental divisions of design, though
later on Caravaggio and Rembrandt managed, not very successfully, to
pull it round so as to become the material for the basic rhythm. And in
any case the analytic trend of Leonardo’s mind became too much
accentuated to allow of a successful synthesis. Michelangelo, to some
extent, and Raphael still more, did, of course, do much to re-establish
a system of design on an enlarged basis which would admit of some of
Leonardo’s new content, but one might hazard the speculation that
European art has hardly yet recovered from the shock which Leonardo’s
passion for psychological illustration delivered. Certainly literalism
and illustration have through all these centuries been pressing dangers
to art--dangers which it has been the harder to resist in that they
allow of an appeal to that vast public to whom the language of form is
meaningless.
In Florentine art, then, one may see at happy moments of equilibrium the
supreme advantages of intellectual art and at other and less fortunate
moments the dangers which beset so difficult an endeavour. It was after
all a Florentine who made the best prophecy of the results of modern
æsthetic when he said: “Finally good painting is a music and a melody
which intellect only can appreciate and that with difficulty.”
[Illustration:
Paolo Ucello. St. George and the Dragon Collection Jacquemart-André
Plate VIII.]
THE JACQUEMART-ANDRÉ COLLECTION[38]
The Jacquemart-André collection is not merely one of those accumulations
of the art of the past by which it has become the fashion for rich
people to impose themselves on the wonder of an ignorant public. It
shows that the lady who created it did so partly, at all events, because
of a quite personal and intimate love of beautiful things, a love which
did not have to seek for its justification and support in the opinion of
the world.
The three pictures reproduced here are proof of the sincerity and
courage of Mdme. André’s artistic convictions. They offer scarcely any
foothold for the sentimental and associative understanding of pictures.
The “S. George” of Paolo Uccello (see Plate) might, it is true, be taken
as a “naïve,” “quaint,” or “primitive” rendering of an “old world”
legend--indeed, whilst I was admiring it I gathered from the comments of
those who lingered before it for a few seconds that this was the general
attitude--but to do so would be to misunderstand the picture completely.
Uccello, in fact, lends himself to misunderstanding, and Vasari, with
his eye to literary picturesqueness, has done his best to put us off the
scent. He made him an “original,” a harmless, ingenious, slightly
ridiculous crank, gifted, no doubt, but one whose gifts were wasted by
reason of his crankiness. And the legend created by Vasari has stuck.
Uccello has always seemed to be a little aside from the main road of
art, an agreeable, amusing diversion, one that we can enjoy with a
certain humorous and patronising detachment, as we enjoy the innocence
of some mediæval chronicler. Uccello, I admit, has lent himself to this
misunderstanding because from every other point of view but that of pure
design he comes up to the character Vasari has made current. No artist
was ever so helpless as he at the dramatic presentment of his theme.
Nothing can well be imagined less like a battle than his battle pieces,
nor if we think of the Deluge would our wildest fancies have ever
conceived anything remotely resembling the scene which he painted with
such literal precision, with such a mass of inconclusive and improbable
invention, in the Chiostro Verde of Sta. Maria Novella.
The idea of verisimilitude is entirely foreign to him. And here comes in
the oddity and irony of his situation. He was the first or almost the
first great master of linear perspective. The study of perspective
became so engrossing to him that according to Vasari it wasted his
talent as an artist.
Now perspective is the scientific statement of the nature of visual
appearance. To the modern artist it becomes an occasional assistance in
giving to his images an air of verisimilitude. Wherever a strict
adherence to the laws of perspective would give to his objects a strange
or unlikely look he frankly neglects it. But to Uccello perspective
seemed, perhaps wrongly, to have an altogether different value. To him
it appears to have been a method of recreating a visual world. That is
to say, he took certain data of appearance from observation, and by
handling them according to the laws of perspective he created a world,
which, owing to the simplicity of his data and the rigid application of
his laws, has far less resemblance to what we see than his
contemporaries and predecessors had contrived by rule of thumb. Had he
taken the whole of the data of observed form the application of the laws
of perspective would have become impossible, and he would have been
thrown back upon imitative realism and the literal acceptance of
appearance. Such was indeed what happened to the painters of Flanders
and the north, and such has become the usual method of modern realistic
art. But nothing was more abhorrent to the spirit of fifteenth-century
Florence than such an acceptance of the merely casual, and nothing is
more fundamentally opposed to the empirical realism of a Van Eyck or a
Frith than the scientific and abstract realism of Paolo Uccello.
This passion, then, for an abstract and theoretical completeness of
rendering led Uccello to simplify the data of observed form to an
extraordinary extent, and his simplification anticipates in a curious
way that of the modern cubists, as one may see from the treatment of his
horses in the National Gallery battle-piece.
It is one of the curiosities of the psychology of the artist that he is
generally trying very hard to do something which has nothing to
[Illustration:
Baldovinetti. Virgin and Child Collection Jacquemart-André
Plate IX.]
do with what he actually accomplishes; that the fundamental quality of
his work seems to come out unconsciously as a by-product of his
conscious activity. And so it was in Uccello’s case. If one had asked
him what his perspective was for, he would probably have said that when
once it was completely mastered it would enable the artist to create at
will any kind of visual whole, and that this would have the same
completeness, the same authenticity as an actual scene. As a matter of
fact such a conception is unrealisable; the problem is too complex for
solution in this way, and what happened to Uccello was that the
simplifications and abstractions imposed upon his observation of nature
by the desire to construct his whole scene perspectively, really set
free in him his power of a purely æsthetic organisation of form. And it
is this, in fact, that makes his pictures so remarkable. In the
Jacquemart-André picture, for instance, we see how the complex whole
which such a scene as the legend of S. George suggests is reduced to
terms of astounding simplicity; saint, horse, dragon, princess are all
seen in profile because the problems of representation had to be
approached from their simplest aspect. The landscape is reduced to a
system of rectilinear forms seen at right angles to the picture plane
for the same reason.
And out of the play of these almost abstract forms mainly rectangular,
with a few elementary curves repeated again and again, Uccello has
constructed the most perfect, the most amazingly subtle harmony. In
Uccello’s hands painting becomes almost as abstract, almost as pure an
art as architecture. And as his feeling for the interplay of forms, the
rhythmic disposition of planes, was of the rarest and finest, the most
removed from anything trivial or merely decorative (in the vulgar
sense), he passes by means of this power of formal organisation into a
region of feeling entirely remote from that which is suggested if we
regard his work as mere illustration. Judged as illustration the “S.
George” is quaint, innocent and slightly childish; as design it must
rank among the great masterpieces.
Two other pictures in the Jacquemart-André collection illustrate the
same spirit of uncompromising æsthetic adventure which distinguishes one
branch of the Florentine school of the fifteenth century, and lifts it
above almost all that was being attempted elsewhere in Italy even at
this period of creative exuberance.
Baldovinetti was at one time in close contact with Uccello, and of all
his works the “Madonna and Child” in the Jacquemart-André collection is
the most heroically uncompromising (Plate IX). No doubt he accepted more
material directly from nature than Uccello did. He was beginning to
explore the principles of atmospheric perspective which were destined
ultimately to break up the unity of pictorial design, but everything
that he takes is used with the same spirit of obedience to the laws of
architectonic harmony. The spacing of this design, the relations of
volume of the upright mass of the Virgin’s figure to the spaces of sky
and landscape have the unmistakable interdependence of great design.
Only a great creative artist could have discovered so definite a
relationship. The great mass of the rocky hill in the landscape and the
horizontal lines of the Child’s figure play into the central idea with
splendid effect. Only in the somewhat rounded and insensitive modelling
of the Virgin’s face does the weakness of Baldovinetti’s genius betray
itself. The contours are everywhere magnificently plastic; only when he
tries to create the illusion of plastic relief by modelling,
Baldovinetti becomes literal and uninspired. In his profile portrait in
the National Gallery he relies fortunately almost entirely on the
plasticity of the contour--in his late “Trinità” at the Accademia in
Florence the increasing desire for imitative realism has already gone
far to destroy this quality.
The third picture (see Plate) which I have taken as illustrating my
theme is not, it is true, Florentine, but its author, Signorelli, kept
so constantly in touch with the scientific realists of Florence that he
may be counted almost as one of them, nor indeed did any of them surpass
him in uncompromising fidelity to the necessities of pure design.
Certainly there is nothing of the flattering or seductive qualities of
the common run of Umbrian art in this robust and audacious composition,
in which everything is arranged as it were concentrically around the
imposing mass of the Virgin’s figure. The gestures interpreted
psychologically are not on the same imaginative plane as the design
itself. Signorelli was ill at ease in interpreting any states but those
of great tension, and here the gestures are meant to be playful and
intimate. As in the Uccello, the illustrative pretext is at variance
with the design which it serves; and as in the Uccello, the design
itself, the scaffolding of the architectonic structure, is really what
counts.
[Illustration:
Signorelli. Holy Family Collection Jacquemart-André
Plate X.]
DÜRER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES[39]
It is a habit of the human mind to make to itself symbols in order to
abbreviate its admiration for a class. So Dürer has come to stand for
German art somewhat as Raphael once stood for Italian. Such symbols
attract to themselves much of the adoration which more careful
worshippers would distribute over the Pantheon, and it becomes difficult
to appreciate them justly without incurring the charge of iconoclasm.
But this, in Dürer’s case, is the more difficult because, whatever one’s
final estimate of his art, his personality is at once so imposing and so
attractive, and has been so endeared to us by familiarity, that
something of this personal attachment has transferred itself to our
æsthetic judgment.
The letters from Venice and the Diary of his journey in the Netherlands,
which form the matter of this volume, are indeed the singularly
fortunate means for this pleasant discourse with the man himself. They
reveal Dürer as one of the distinctively modern men of the Renaissance:
intensely, but not arrogantly, conscious of his own personality;
accepting with a pleasant ease the universal admiration of his genius--a
personal admiration, too, of an altogether modern kind; careful of his
fame as one who foresaw its immortality. They show him as having, though
in a far less degree, something of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific
interest, certainly as having a quick, though naïve curiosity about the
world and a quite modern freedom from superstition. It is clear that his
dominating and yet kindly personality, no less than his physical beauty
and distinction, made him the centre of interest wherever he went. His
easy and humorous good-fellowship, of which the letters to Pirkheimer
are eloquent, won for him the admiring friendship of the best men of his
time. To all these characteristics we must add a deep and sincere
religious feeling, which led him to side with the leaders of the
Reformation, a feeling that comes out in his passionate sense of loss
when he thinks that Luther is about to be put to death, and that
prompted him to write a stirring letter to Erasmus, in which he urged
him to continue the work of reform. For all that, there is no trace in
him of either Protestantism or Puritanism. He was perhaps
fortunate--certainly as an artist he was fortunate--in living at a time
when the line of cleavage between the Reformers and the Church was not
yet so marked as to compel a decisive choice. The symbolism of the
Church still had for him its old significance, as yet quickened and not
discredited by the reformer’s energy. But intense as Dürer’s devotion
was, his religious feeling found its way to effective artistic
expression only upon one side, namely, the brooding sense which
accompanied it, of the imminence and terror of death. How much more
definite is the inspiration in the drawing of “Death on a Horse” (in the
British Museum), in the “Knight, Death and the Devil,” and in the allied
“Melancholia,” than it is in his renderings of the Virgin or indeed of
any of the scenes of Christian legend! It is this feeling, too, which
gives to his description of his mother’s death its almost terrible
literary beauty and power. Nor in the estimate of Dürer’s character must
one leave out the touching affection and piety which the family history
written by him in 1524 reveals.
So much that is attractive and endearing in the man cannot but react
upon our attitude to his work--has done so, perhaps, ever since his own
day; and it is difficult to get far enough away from Dürer the man to be
perfectly just to Dürer the artist. But if we make the attempt, it
becomes clear, I think, that Dürer cannot take rank in the highest class
of creative geniuses. His position is none the less of great importance
and interest for his relation on the one hand to the Gothic tradition of
his country, and on the other to the newly perceived splendours of the
Italian Renaissance.
Much must depend on our estimate of his last work, the “Four Apostles,”
at Munich. In that he summed up all that the patient and enthusiastic
labour of a lifetime had taught him. If we regard that as a work of the
highest beauty, if we can conscientiously put it beside the figures of
the Sistine Chapel, beside the Saints of Mantegna, or Signorelli, or
Piero della Francesca, then indeed Dürer’s labour was crowned with
success; but if we find in it rather a careful exposition of certain
theoretical principles, if we find that the matter is not entirely
transfused with the style, if we find a conflict between a certain naïve
crudity of vision and a straining after the grand manner, then we have
to say that Dürer’s art was the outcome of a magnificent and heroic but
miscalculated endeavour.
It is one of the ironies of history that the Romans, the only Philistine
people among Mediterranean races, should have been the great means of
transmitting to the modern world that culture which they themselves
despised, and that the Germans should have laboured so long and hard to
atone for the heroism of their ancestors in resisting that beneficent
loss of liberty. Nuremberg of the fifteenth century was certainly given
over to the practice of fine art with a pathetic enthusiasm, and it
remains as a sad but instructive proof of how little good-will and
industry avail by themselves in such matters. The worship of mere
professional skill and undirected craftsmanship is there seen pushed to
its last conclusions, and the tourist’s wonder is prompted by the sight
of stone carved into the shapes of twisted metal, and wood simulating
the intricacies of confectionery, his admiration is canvassed by every
possible perversion of technical dexterity. Not “What a thing is done!”
but, “How difficult it must have been to do it!” is the exclamation
demanded.
Of all that perverted technical ingenuity which flaunts itself in the
wavering stonework of a Kraft or the crackling woodwork of a Storr,
Dürer was inevitably the heir. He grew up in an atmosphere where the
acrobatic feats of technique were looked on with admiration rather than
contempt. Something of this clung to him through life, and he is always
recognised as the prince of craftsmen, the consummate technician. In all
this side of Dürer’s art we recognise the last over-blown efflorescence
of the mediæval craftsmanship of Germany, of the apprentice system and
the “master” piece; but that Gothic tradition had still left in it much
that was sound and sincere. Drawing still retained something of the
blunt, almost brutal frankness of statement, together with the sense of
the characteristic which marked its earlier period. And it is perhaps
this inheritance of Gothic directness of statement, this Gothic realism,
that accounts for what is ultimately of most value in Dürer’s work.
There exists in the Kunsthistorisches Akademie at Vienna a painting of a
man, dated 1394, which shows how much of Dürer’s portraiture was
already implicit in the Nuremberg school. In this remarkable work,
executed, if we may trust the date, nearly a century before Dürer, there
is almost everything that interests us in Dürer’s portraits. Indeed, it
has to an even greater extent that half-humorous statement of the
characteristic, that outrageous realism that makes the vivid appeal of
the Oswold Krell, and the absence of which in Dürer’s last years makes
the Holtschuer such a tiresome piece of brilliant delineation.