In Leonardo's "Treatise on Painting," only one contemporary is
named--Sandro Botticelli.... The Pagan and Christian world mingle in
the work of Botticelli; but the man himself belonged to an age that
is past and gone--an age that flourished long before men recorded
history. His best efforts seem to spring out of a heart that forgot
all precedent, and arose, Venus-like, perfect and complete, from the
unfathomable Sea of Existence.
--_Walter Pater_
[Illustration: Botticelli]
One Professor Max Lautner has recently placed a small petard under
the European world of Art, and given it a hoist to starboard, by
asserting that Rembrandt did not paint Rembrandt's best pictures.
The Professor makes his point luminous by a cryptogram he has
invented and for which he has filed a caveat. It is a very useful
cryptogram; no well-regulated family should be without it--for by it
you can prove any proposition you may make, even to establishing
that Hopkinson Smith is America's only stylist. My opinion is that
this cryptogram is an infringement on that of our lamented
countryman, Ignatius Donnelly.
But letting that pass, the statement that Rembrandt could not have
painted the pictures that are ascribed to him, "because the man was
low, vulgar and untaught," commands respect on account of the
extreme crudity of the thought involved. Lautner is so dull that he
is entertaining.
"I have the capacity in me for every crime," wrote that gentlest of
gentle men, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Of course he hadn't, and in making
this assertion Emerson pulled toward him a little more credit than
was his due. That is, he overstated a great classic truth.
"If Rembrandt painted the 'Christ at Emmaus' and the 'Sortie of the
Civic Guard,' then Rembrandt had two souls," exclaims Professor
Lautner.