drawing of himself at the age of twelve shows how early he had mastered
that simple and abrupt sincerity of Gothic draughtsmanship. One is
inclined to say that in none of his subsequent work did he ever surpass
this in all that really matters, in all that concerns the essential
vision and its adequate presentment. He increased his skill until it
became the wonder of the world and entangled him in its seductions; his
intellectual apprehension was indefinitely heightened, and his knowledge
of natural appearances became encyclopædic.
What, then, lies at the root of Dürer’s art is this Gothic sense of the
characteristic, already menaced by the professional bravura of the late
Gothic craftsman. The superstructure is what Dürer’s industry and
intellectual acquisitiveness, acting in the peculiar conditions of his
day, brought forth. It is in short what distinguishes him as the pioneer
of the Renaissance in Germany. This new endeavour was in two directions,
one due mainly to the trend of native ideas, the other to Italian
influence. The former was concerned mainly with a new kind of realism.
In place of the older Gothic realism with its naïve and self-confident
statement of the salient characteristic of things seen, this new realism
strove at complete representation of appearance by means of perspective,
at a more searching and complete investigation of form, and a fuller
relief in light and shade.
To some extent these aims were followed also by the Italians, and with
even greater scientific ardour: all the artists of Europe were indeed
striving to master the complete power of representation. But in Italy
this aim was never followed exclusively; it was constantly modified and
controlled by the idea of design, that is to say, of expression by means
of the pure disposition of contours and masses, and by the perfection
and ordering of linear rhythm. This notion of design as something other
than representation was indeed the common inheritance of European art
from the mediæval world, but
[Illustration:
Rembrandt. Calumny of Apelles, after Mantegna British Museum]
[Illustration:
Mantegna. Calumny of Apelles British Museum]
[Illustration:
Dürer. Calumny of Apelles British Museum
Plate XI.]
in Italy the principles of design were more profoundly embedded in
tradition, its demands were more clearly felt, and each succeeding
generation was quite as deeply concerned with the perfection of design
as with the mastery of representation. In the full Renaissance, indeed,
this idea of design became the object of fully conscious and deliberate
study, and the decadence of Italian art came about, not through
indifference to the claims of artistic expression, but through a too
purely intellectual and conscious study of them. The northern and
especially the Teutonic artists, who had not inherited so strongly this
architectonic sense, made indeed heroic efforts to acquire it, sometimes
by the futile method of direct imitation of a particular style,
sometimes--and this is the case with Dürer--by a serious effort of
æsthetic intelligence. But on the whole the attempt must be judged to
have failed, and northern art has drifted gradually towards the merely
photographic vision.
Dürer strove strenuously in both these directions. He unquestionably
added immensely to the knowledge of actual form and to the power of
representation, but his eagerness led him to regard quantity of form
rather than its quality. With him drawing became a means of making
manifest the greatest possible amount of form, the utmost roundness of
relief, and his studies in pure design failed to keep pace with this. In
the end he could not use to significant purpose the increased material
at his disposal, and from the point of view of pure design his work
actually falls short of that of his predecessor, Martin Schongauer, who
indeed was benefited by lacking Dürer’s power of representation.
From this point of view it may be worth while to examine in some detail
Dürer’s relations to Italian art. The earliest definite example of his
study of Italian art is in 1494, when he was probably in Venice for the
first time. It is a copy in pen and ink of an engraving of the “Death of
Orpheus” by some follower of Mantegna. The engraving is not the work of
a great artist, and Dürer’s copy shows his superior skill in the
rendering of form; but even here he has failed to realise the beauty of
spatial arrangement in the original, and his desire to enrich the design
with many skilfully drawn and convincing details results in a distinct
weakening of the dramatic effect. Again, in the same year we have two
drawings from engravings, this time by Mantegna himself. It is easy to
understand that of all Italians, Mantegna should have been the most
sympathetic to Dürer, and that he should have regretted more than any
other ill-fortune of his life,--more even than the similar fate that
prevented his meeting Schongauer,--Mantegna’s death just when he was
setting out to Mantua to learn from the great master. What Dürer saw in
Mantegna was his clear decision of line and his richly patterned effect.
In his pen-and-ink copies he tries to surpass the original in both these
ways, and indeed the effect is of greater complexity, with more fullness
and roundness of form. Where Mantegna is content with a firm statement
of the generalised contour of a limb, Dürer will give a curve for each
muscle. There is in Dürer’s copies a mass of brilliant detail; each part
is in a sense more convincingly real; but in doing this something of the
unity of rhythm and the easy relations of planes has been lost, and on
the whole the balance is against the copyist. It is curious that when in
time Rembrandt came to copy Mantegna he took the other way, and actually
heightened the dramatic effect by minute readjustments of planning, and
by a wilful simplification of the line.[40]
Dürer evidently felt a profound reverence for Mantegna’s designs, for he
has altered them but little, and one might well imagine that even Dürer
could scarcely improve upon such originals. But it is even more
instructive to study his work upon the so-called Tarocchi engravings.
Here the originals were not executed by an artist of first-rate ability,
though the designs have much of Cossa’s splendid style. Dürer seems,
therefore, to have felt no particular constraint about altering them.
His alterations (see Plate) show us clearly what it was that he saw in
the originals and what he missed. In all these figures Dürer gives
increased verisimilitude: his feet are like actual feet, not the
schematic abstract of a foot that contents the Italian engraver; his
poses are more casual, less formal and symmetrical; and his draperies
are more ingeniously disposed; but none the less, from the point of view
of the expression of imaginative truth, there is not one of Dürer’s
figures which equals the original, not one in which some essential part
of the idea is not missed or at least less clearly stated. In general
the continuity of the contour is lost sight of and the rhythm frittered
away. In the Pope, for instance, Dürer loses all the grave sedateness of
the original by breaking the symmetry of the pose, its
[Illustration:
Tarocchi print. Celestial sphere]
[Illustration:
Dürer: after same
Plate XII.]
squareness and immovable aplomb. And with this goes, in spite of the
increased verisimilitude, the sense of reality. In the “Knight and Page”
not only is the movement of the knight missed by correcting a distortion
in the original, but the balance of the composition is lost by
displacing the page. In the “Primum Mobile” (see Plate) the ecstatic
rush of the figure is lost by slight corrections of the pose and by
giving to the floating drapery too complicated a design. It would be
tedious to go through these copies in detail, but enough has been said
to show how hard it was for Dürer, absorbed by his new curiosity in
representation, to grasp those primary and elemental principles of
design which were inherent in the Italian tradition.
About the same time we find Dürer studying both Pollajuolo and Lorenzo
di Credi. The copy of Pollajuolo is not a good example of Dürer’s art;
it certainly misses the tension and inner life of Pollajuolo’s nudes.
The Lorenzo di Credi, as might be expected, is in many ways more than
adequate to the original, though as compared even with Credi, Dürer has
not a clear sense of the correlation of linear elements in the design.
The next stage in Dürer’s connection with Italian art is his intimacy
with Jacopo de’ Barbari, who was settled in Nuremberg. From 1500 to 1505
this influence manifests itself clearly in Dürer’s work. Unfortunately
Barbari was too second-rate an artist to help him much in the principles
of design, though he doubtless stimulated him to pursue those scientific
investigations into the theory of human proportions which held out the
delusive hope of reducing art to a branch of mathematics.
It was not, however, until his second visit to Venice that Dürer
realised the inferiority, at all events, of Barbari, and it was then
that, through his amiable relations with Giovanni Bellini, he came
nearer than at any other moment of his life to penetrating the mysteries
of Italian design. It is in the letters from Venice, written at this
time, that his connection with the Venetian artists is made clear, and a
study of those writings will be found to illuminate in a most
interesting way Dürer’s artistic consciousness, and help to answer the
question of how he regarded his own work when seen in comparison with
the Venetians, and in what manner the Venetians regarded this wonder
worker from the north.
EL GRECO[41]
Mr. Holmes has risked a good deal in acquiring for the nation the new El
Greco. The foresight and understanding necessary to bring off such a
_coup_ are not the qualities that we look for from a Director of the
National Gallery. Patriotic people may even be inclined to think that
the whole proceeding smacks too much of the manner in which Dr. Bode in
past ages built up the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, largely at the expense
of English collections. Even before the acquisition of the El Greco
there were signs that Mr. Holmes did not fully understand the importance
of “muddling through.” And now with the El Greco he has given the
British public an electric shock. People gather in crowds in front of
it, they argue and discuss and lose their tempers. This might be
intelligible enough if the price were known to be fabulous, but, so far
as I am aware, the price has not been made known, so that it is really
about the picture that people get excited. And what is more, they talk
about it as they might talk about some contemporary picture, a thing
with which they have a right to feel delighted or infuriated as the case
may be--it is not like most old pictures, a thing classified and
museumified, set altogether apart from life, an object for vague and
listless reverence, but an actual living thing, expressing something
with which one has got either to agree or disagree. Even if it should
not be the superb masterpiece which most of us think it is, almost any
sum would have been well spent on a picture capable of provoking such
fierce æsthetic interest in the crowd.
That the artists are excited--never more so--is no wonder, for here is
an old master who is not merely modern, but actually appears a good many
steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way. Immortality if you
like! But the public--what is it that makes them “sit up” so
surprisingly, one wonders. What makes this El Greco “count” with them as
surely no Old Master ever did within memory? First, I suspect, the
extraordinary completeness of its realisation. Even the most casual
spectator, passing among pictures which retire discreetly behind their
canvases, must be struck by the violent attack of these forms, by a
relief so outstanding that by comparison the actual scene, the gallery
and one’s neighbours are reduced to the key of a Whistlerian Nocturne.
Partly, for we must face the fact, the melodramatic apparatus; the
“horrid” rocks, the veiled moon, the ecstatic gestures. Not even the
cinema star can push expression further than this. Partly, no doubt, the
clarity and the balanced rhythm of the design, the assurance and grace
of the handling; for, however little people may be conscious of it,
formal qualities do affect their reaction to a picture, though they may
pass from them almost immediately to its other implications. And
certainly here, if anywhere, formal considerations must obtrude
themselves even on the most unobservant. The extraordinary emphasis and
amplitude of the rhythm, which thus gathers up into a few sweeping
diagonals the whole complex of the vision, is directly exciting and
stimulating. It affects one like an irresistible melody, and makes that
organisation of all the parts into a single whole, which is generally so
difficult for the uninitiated, an easy matter for once. El Greco,
indeed, puts the problem of form and content in a curious way. The
artist, whose concern is ultimately and, I believe, exclusively with
form, will no doubt be so carried away by the intensity and completeness
of the design, that he will never even notice the melodramatic and
sentimental content which shocks or delights the ordinary man. It is
none the less an interesting question, though it is rather one of
artists’ psychology than of æsthetics, to inquire in what way these two
things, the melodramatic expression of a high-pitched religiosity and a
peculiarly intense feeling for plastic unity and rhythmic amplitude,
were combined in El Greco’s work; even to ask whether there can have
been any causal connection between them in the workings of El Greco’s
spirit.
Strange and extravagantly individual as El Greco seems, he was not
really an isolated figure, a miraculous and monstrous apparition thrust
into the even current of artistic movement. He really takes his place
alongside of Bernini as the greatest exponent of the Baroque idea in
figurative art. And the Baroque idea goes back to Michelangelo.
Formally, its essence both in art and architecture was the utmost
possible enlargement of the unit of design. One can see this most easily
in architecture. To Bramante the façade of a palace was made up of a
series of storeys, each with its pilasters and windows related
proportionally to one another, but each a co-ordinate unit of design. To
the Baroque architect a façade was a single storey with pilasters going
the whole height, and only divided, as it were, by an afterthought into
subordinate groups corresponding to the separate storeys. When it came
to sculpture and painting the same tendency expressed itself by the
discovery of such movements as would make the parts of the body, the
head, trunk, limbs, merely so many subordinate divisions of a single
unit. Now to do this implied extremely emphatic and marked poses, though
not necessarily violent in the sense of displaying great muscular
strain. Such poses correspond as expression to marked and excessive
mental states, to conditions of ecstacy, or agony or intense
contemplation. But even more than to any actual poses resulting from
such states, they correspond to a certain accepted and partly
conventional language of gesture. They are what we may call rhetorical
poses, in that they are not so much the result of the emotions as of the
desire to express these emotions to the onlooker.
When the figure is draped the Baroque idea becomes particularly evident.
The artists seek voluminous and massive garments which under the stress
of an emphatic pose take heavy folds passing in a single diagonal sweep
from top to bottom of the whole figure. In the figure of Christ in the
National Gallery picture El Greco has established such a diagonal, and
has so arranged the light and shade that he gets a statement of the same
general direction twice over, in the sleeve and in the drapery of the
thigh.
Bernini was a consummate master of this method of amplifying the unit,
but having once set up the great wave of rhythm which held the figure in
a single sweep, he gratified his florid taste by allowing elaborate
embroidery in the subordinate divisions, feeling perfectly secure that
no amount of exuberance would destroy the firmly established scaffolding
of his design.
Though the psychology of both these great rhetoricians is infinitely
remote from us, we tolerate more easily the gloomy and
[Illustration:
El Greco. Allegory Collection Zuloaga
Plate XIII.]
terrible extravagance of El Greco’s melodrama than the radiant
effusiveness and amiability of Bernini’s operas.
But there is another cause which accounts for our profound difference of
feeling towards these two artists. Bernini undoubtedly had a great sense
of design, but he was also a prodigious artistic acrobat, capable of
feats of dizzying audacity, and unfortunately he loved popularity and
the success which came to him so inevitably. He was not fine enough in
grain to distinguish between his great imaginative gifts and the
superficial virtuosity which made the crowd, including his Popes, gape
with astonishment. Consequently he expressed great inventions in a
horribly impure technical language. El Greco, on the other hand, had the
good fortune to be almost entirely out of touch with the public--one
picture painted for the king was sufficient to put him out of court for
the rest of his life. And in any case he was a singularly pure artist,
he expressed his idea with perfect sincerity, with complete indifference
to what effect the right expression might have on the public. At no
point is there the slightest compromise with the world; the only issue
for him is between him and his idea. Nowhere is a violent form softened,
nowhere is the expressive quality of brushwork blurred in order to give
verisimilitude of texture; no harshness of accent is shirked, no crudity
of colour opposition avoided, wherever El Greco felt such things to be
necessary to the realisation of his idea. It is this magnificent courage
and purity, this total indifference to the expectations of the public,
that bring him so near to us to-day, when more than ever the artist
regards himself as working for ends unguessed at by the mass of his
contemporaries. It is this also which accounts for the fact that while
nearly every one shudders involuntarily at Bernini’s sentimental
sugariness, very few artists of to-day have ever realised for a moment
how unsympathetic to them is the literary content of an El Greco. They
simply fail to notice what his pictures are about in the illustrative
sense.
But to return to the nature of Baroque art. The old question here turns
up. Did the dog wag his tail because he was pleased, or was he pleased
because his tail wagged? Did the Baroque artists choose ecstatic
subjects because they were excited about a certain kind of rhythm, or
did they elaborate the rhythm to express a feeling for extreme emotional
states? There is yet another fact which complicates the matter. Baroque
art corresponds well enough in time with the Catholic reaction and the
rise of Jesuitism, with a religious movement which tended to dwell
particularly on these extreme emotional states, and, in fact, the
Baroque artists worked in entire harmony with the religious leaders.
This would look as though religion had inspired the artists with a
passion for certain themes, and the need to express these had created
Baroque art.
I doubt if it was as simple as that. Some action and reaction between
the religious ideas of the time and the artists’ conception there may
have been, but I think the artists would have elaborated the Baroque
idea without this external pressure. For one thing, the idea goes back
behind Michelangelo to Signorelli, and in his case, at least, one can
see no trace of any preoccupation with those psychological states, but
rather a pure passion for a particular kind of rhythmic design.
Moreover, the general principle of the continued enlargement of the unit
of design was bound to occur the moment artists recovered from the
debauch of naturalism of the fifteenth century and became conscious
again of the demands of abstract design.
In trying thus to place El Greco’s art in perspective, I do not in the
least disparage his astonishing individual force. That El Greco had to
an extreme degree the quality we call genius is obvious, but he was
neither so miraculous nor so isolated as we are often tempted to
suppose.
The exuberance and abandonment of Baroque art were natural expressions
both of the Italian and Spanish natures, but they were foreign to the
intellectual severity of the French genius, and it was from France, and
in the person of Poussin, that the counterblast came. He, indeed, could
tolerate no such rapid simplification of design. He imposed on himself
endless scruples and compunctions, making artistic unity the reward of a
long process of selection and discovery. His art became difficult and
esoteric. People wonder sometimes at the diversity of modern art, but it
is impossible to conceive a sharper opposition than that between Poussin
and the Baroque. It is curious, therefore, that modern artists should be
able to look back with almost equal reverence to Poussin and to El
Greco. In part, this is due to Cézanne’s influence, for, from one point
of view, his art may be regarded as a synthesis of these two apparently
adverse conceptions of design. For Cézanne consciously studied both,
taking from Poussin his discretion and the subtlety of his rhythm, and
from El Greco his great discovery of the permeation of every part of the
design with a uniform and continuous plastic theme. The likeness is
indeed sometimes startling. One of the greatest critics of our time, von
Tschudi--of Swiss origin, I hasten to add, and an enemy of the
Kaiser--was showing me El Greco’s “Laocoon,” which he had just bought
for Munich, when he whispered to me, as being too dangerous a doctrine
to be spoken aloud even in his private room, “Do you know why we admire
El Greco’s handling so much? Because it reminds us of Cézanne.”
No wonder, then, that for the artist of to-day the new El Greco is of
capital importance. For it shows us the master at the height of his
powers, at last perfectly aware of his personal conception and daring to
give it the completest, most uncompromising expression. That the picture
is in a marvellous state of preservation and has been admirably cleaned
adds greatly to its value. Dirty yellow varnish no longer interposes
here its hallowing influence between the spectator and the artist’s
original creation. Since the eye can follow every stroke of the brush,
the mind can recover the artist’s gesture and almost the movements of
his mind. For never was work more perfectly transparent to the idea,
never was an artist’s intention more deliberately and precisely
recorded.
THREE PICTURES IN TEMPERA BY WILLIAM BLAKE[42]
Blake’s finished pictures have never received the same attention nor
aroused the same admiration as his wash-drawings, his wood-cuts, or his
engravings. It is difficult to account for this comparative neglect,
since they not only show command of a technique which admits of the
completest realisation of the idea, but they seem actually to express
what was personal to Blake in a purer form than many of his other works,
with less admixture of those unfortunate caprices which the false
romantic taste of his day imposed too often even on so original and
independent a genius. The explanation may perhaps lie in the fact that
to most people Blake, for all his inimitable gifts, appears as a
divinely inspired amateur rather than as a finished master of his art,
and they are willing to tolerate what they regard as his imperfect
control of form in media which admit only of hints and suggestions of
the artist’s vision.