particular material in a quite different material, simply because we
are used to the sight of them. The far-famed Greek temple architecture
is largely a result of this thoughtlessness: it slavishly imitates in
stone the wooden architecture, the place of which it has taken; it
retains the beams with projecting beam-heads and cross-braces that
have neither object nor meaning in stone. To the same category belong
the tablets, with manifold curled up and twisted edges, which the
Renaissance and the Rococo executed in stone and wood, although they
have no sense or justification except in sheet metal: the contemporary
Moscow silver-work, which imitate painfully enough damask linen with
Russo-Byzantine coloured embroidery, or cakes and black-bread in
precious metals or enamel: the marble veils, lace garments, and knitted
stockings of the North-Italian sculptors of the decadence, etc.
It is mental inertia when we mechanically persist in repeating forms
which either are unfitted for a given object, or have lost all meaning.
For two thousand years artists of all sorts have made a decorative
use of acanthus leaves in countries where no human eye has ever had
an acanthus leaf before it. The Middle Ages decorated with a whole
menagerie of beasts from Asia and Africa, which they knew only from
fables, foreign textures, and pictures. From imitation to imitation
the outlines, which no comparison with the actual model corrected and
restored to accuracy, became more inexact and grotesque. Thus arose
acanthus capitals which are more like rough logs than the elegantly
curled plant, and heraldic lions and leopards, in which no feature any
longer reminds us of the great cats. This is then called improving
upon the natural form, and people even discover a particular beauty
in it: a striking proof of the ability of mankind to make a virtue
out of necessity. For the so-called stylisation is conscious and
intentional only in late conservative imitation. It arises, however,
quite involuntarily through unintelligent imitation of a pattern that
is incorrectly felt and grasped, because one has never known its living
model. So, too, the whole mythology of the Greeks still haunts our
present-day decoration, which mythology was to the Greek artists a part
of their living feeling and religious conviction, whilst to-day it has
lost all thought and feeling. What can Neptune’s trident, Orpheus’
lyre, the Sirens and the Centaur, the Sphynx and the Gorgon, signify
to a son of this century? But whilst these bits of inherited form
wander from one imitator to another, until they become hopelessly
unrecognisable, they gain a beauty of another sort which they did not
originally possess: the venerable spell of antiquity surrounds them,
and this charm, in its turn, touches certain susceptibilities of the
soul, the inclination to mystic, twilight conceptions of what is remote
in time and place, the pleasurable feeling of comfortable persistance
in that to which we are accustomed, the connection of the familiar
and always known with the remembrance of all strong impressions, both
happy and unhappy, of childhood and youth. This mystico-archaic and
subjectively sentimental element, which occurs in every style handed
down traditionally, furnishes it with fanatical devotees whom its
original decorative value could never win. That is, if I may say so,
the religious side of the feeling for, and appreciation of, style.
From the oppressive mass of material, which I must, for the most
part, leave untouched, I am afraid I must deal with only one more
question:—Is there a new style? Is the so-called “Secessionism” a style
which characterises our time, or, perhaps, a fugitive moment of our
time? He who has attentively observed the later exhibitions on this
point will be bound to say “No” decisively. Household furniture and
room decoration of the “secessionist” order are tortured into appearing
new and original; but they are neither the one nor the other, but a
patient, methodical eclecticism which aims at the influence of what
is foreign and peculiar. We distinguish accurately that rooms built
and painted in the secession style are patched together of Chinese
motives, with an addition of Loie Fuller’s serpentine twistings, and
that secessionist furniture imitates, in good wood and metal, the
slenderness, knottiness, and pliancy of bamboos. The secession contains
a very minute percentage of independent invention and a great many
reminiscences of Eastern Asia. The West European style, which should
ostensibly be the expression of the latest high European tendencies,
is, in reality, Chinese and Japanese style, exaggerated by absurdity of
form and assumed or real delirium.
IV
THE OLD FRENCH MASTERS
We must once more change our method of study. That is the immediate
result of the Exhibition of Old French artists—painters, draughtsmen,
enamellers, sculptors—which, in 1904, in the Pavilion de Marsan at
the Louvre, brought together several hundred fascinating, and perhaps
half a dozen overpowering works. With the proofs furnished by these
masterpieces full of earnestness and beauty, a chapter in the history
of French and European art will have to be rewritten—not, to be sure,
altogether in the sense intended and proclaimed by those who prepared
this exceedingly important arrangement.
Comparatively few mediæval French works of art have been preserved to
us. The Hundred Years’ War, the devastations of the League, and the
Great Revolution made a clean sweep of them with fiendish thoroughness.
With the châteaux, abbeys, and monasteries, their contents so far as
works of art were concerned also perished. What survived has up to
now appeared to a pre-conceived idea scarcely native. One historian of
art wrote after another, that, up to the period of the Renaissance,
the plastic artists who worked in France came partly from the Low
Countries, partly from Italy, but were only quite exceptionally, if at
all, Frenchmen. From a geographical standpoint, we might speak of a
French mediæval art; but from the nature and form of the work, on the
other hand, we should admit only a Flemish or Italian, but no French
art.
This view is no longer defensible. France, too, had, in the Middle
Ages, her own artists and schools of art, and if she also offered
hospitality to foreign talent, she was not dependent on it. The strong,
creative genius that developed in Northern France from the prosaic
semi-circular arch of the Byzantine style the pointed-arch poetry of
the Gothic, knew also how to make use of the chisel and paint-brush
as means of expression, and to satisfy by painting and carving its
impulse for depicting form. The mediæval art of France is not inferior
to any other. It must no longer be treated as a mere appendage of art
development in the Low Countries and Lombardy.
To be sure, if the learned compilers of the Exhibition Catalogue—George
Lafenestre, Henri Bouchot, Leopold Delisle and other academicians
or directors of museums and libraries—claim to have discovered, in
the pictures and statues, a particular French national feature
which distinguishes them clearly from other contemporary works, they
are led astray by patriotic prejudice. The works bear the stamp of
a period, not of a people. Nothing is more like a fourteenth- or
fifteenth-century French work of art than a Flemish or Italian, and
_vice versâ_. It is noticeable that people have taken Bourdichon’s
masterpiece, one of the gems of the collection—the portrait of the
little Dauphin Charles Roland, to be a work of Memling; and of the most
beautiful paintings of one and the same painter—des Moulins—have long
ascribed one to Van der Goes, the other to Ghirlandajo.
No; the temperaments of the artists at this period were not
differentiated nationally. They are, moreover, not so at the present
day either, and if analogies are established between artists of the
same origin, they may, in all cases, be naturally explained otherwise
than by a common descent. The influence of strong personalities, who
influence as prototypes, external successes, which form a current of
fashion and incite to imitation, or simply a tenaciously held tradition
of a school, in which in a long series of artist generations has grown
up, suffice to impress on the art of a country through extensive
epochs, a certain family physiognomy, which only a mystically inclined
mind will be tempted to refer to race and blood.
Topographical and national classifications have in fact no inward
spiritual justification in art, but at most a value of convenience,
in so far as they render possible external groupings, which facilitate
a survey. The whole art of Europe is one. It has developed from
the Greek, the tradition of which has remained living through all
the centuries, and has crept, from country to country, connecting
inseparably all separate national developments with their common
origin. The Greeks were the teachers of the Romans, and their
inspirations and rules were carried down into the Christian catacombs,
and from them blossomed the art of the Middle Ages.
Byzantine artists from the Roman empire of the East itself or from
Italy, initiated, at the Court of Charlemagne, the barbarians of the
Frankish kingdom in the mysteries of their craft, and carried the
Promethean spark, however weakly it glimmered, from Attica to the banks
of the Seine and Scheldt, where it did not expire, but, later on, was
fanned again to bright flame by the fresh breeze of the Renaissance.
The Eastern branch of Greek art withered into actual Byzantism,
whose last off-shoots are the Russian icons of to-day. The Church
in the East, to suit the fetish-loving views of her superstitious
semi-barbarians, attributes to the picture the meaning and value of an
idol, and opposes mistrustfully every deviation from the canon which,
according to her conception, might weaken the power of the idol. In
the West less credence was given to the picture’s magical virtue, its
form obtained no dogmatic consecration, the Church allowed the artist
freer movement, and thus development was possible, which broke through
the stiff, lifeless rule of the school, and found its way back to the
inexhaustible primitive source of Greek art itself, namely, nature.
The emancipation from the Byzantine system is not the work of Cimabue
and Giotto, or of an individual at all, but an effort of almost all
the artists of Western Europe at the close of the thirteenth and the
beginning of the fourteenth century. The portrait of John II. (1310-64)
in the Exhibition, which was painted about 1359, of course _in tempera_
on a gold ground, by Girard of Orleans, is of a marvellous realism,
unchecked by the slightest restraint of any studied rule. The head in
profile, turned towards the left, of the melancholy-looking man in the
’fifties with the long, well-formed nose, the scanty moustache and
beard, and the long hair, gleams with warm life. Girard copied his
model modestly and truly, without troubling himself about a golden
profit, and he could put soul into the portrait of his king in the
measure in which he himself felt the latter’s inward life.
The awakening of a feeling for nature in art is generally ascribed
to the Flemings, particularly to the brothers Van Eyck. That, too,
is arbitrary, as a glance at the works of the old Frenchmen, who
flourished contemporaneously with the Van Eycks, or even before them,
teaches us. The feeling for nature was always active in the few with
bright eyes and joyous consciousness of life, who dedicated themselves
to art from inner impulse. The themes to which the plastic arts had for
many centuries to restrict themselves were certainly as unfavourable
as possible to a healthy naturalism. The only subjects the painter
dared to treat were illustrations of the Old and New Testament, legends
of the saints, and the symbols of faith. Scenes of heaven and hell,
Biblical miracles, and personification of the dogmas of the Church
could assuredly no more be painted from the model than the Holy Ghost,
or transubstantiation. And yet nature herself came to her rights in
this fundamental representation of the supernatural and what lay
outside of nature, for she does not allow herself now to be driven out,
even by the violent methods of the pitch-fork spoken of by Horace in
a famous verse. Without taking particular thought about it, or with a
cunning conscious of its purpose, the artists fashioned their works
most foreign to actual life out of elements of reality, and achieved
them by nature, truth, and life. For this reason even the earliest
miniatures of the manuscripts become a trustworthy source for the
history of manners. Because the art-workers of limited capacity, who
wrought servilely according to the tradition of their gild, reproduced
accurately all the accessories—clothes, weapons, furniture, buildings,
and scenery—as they actually saw them.
The little picture, “The Virgin and Child,” which is ascribed to Jean
Malouel, and was painted about 1395, and can therefore have owed
nothing to the Van Eycks, then in Dijon, and perhaps, too, elsewhere,
certainly still quite obscure young people, is of such charming realism
that one might rather class it as a _genre_ picture than as a sacred
picture. The Virgin is making the Child a frock, and is just drawing
the thread tight, with the needle turned in a correct horizontal
direction, and the child Jesus is amusing Himself by putting His rosy
little foot in His Mother’s red leather slipper, of enormous size
to Him, which she has taken off and placed before her. There is no
reason why we should not assume that Malouel—if it was he—gave his
patron—perhaps the Duke of Burgundy—his (the artist’s) own dear wife
and little son as a Holy Family.
In “The Death of the Virgin,” of the same school of Burgundy, but about
a century later, the apostle, kneeling at the foot of the death-bed
and reading his prayer-book devoutly, with a big pair of spectacles
on his nose, is, in spite of the pathos of the moment, so natural as
to be almost comic. “The Miracle of the Saint,” with his head in his
hands, who is walking barefoot, by a pupil of Nicolas Froment—perhaps
by the master himself—painted, about 1480, at Aix in Provence, attests
the painter’s most naïve indifference to probability. In the middle of
the street where the decapitated saint is walking, and the executioner,
leaning on his sword, stands dumbfounded, kneel, in measured symmetry,
to the right and left of the saint, the founder and his consort; he
with four little sons, she with four little daughters in a row, like so
many organ-pipes, behind them. The picture of the city is, however, so
realistic that even to-day an old corner of Aix is recognisable in it,
and the gazers running up or standing in knots and laying their heads
together, or hurrying to the windows, are of everlasting human verity.
Exactly the same holds good of the altar decoration, ascribed to John
of Orleans (circ. 1374), a wonderful sepia painting on white silk. The
sections which depict the Scourging of Christ by two brutal fellows
with hang-dog faces, the Carrying of the Cross, with the Mocking of
Jesus by the rabble of Jerusalem, and the Entombment, with the Blessed
Virgin kissing the corpse, show that striving after truth, which
has hitherto been pronounced to be a peculiarity of the Dutch. In
the “Martyrdom of a Holy Bishop”—most likely by Jean Malouel (circ.
1400)—the martyr, in mitre and pallium, gazes from a strongly barred
prison window, near which an angel kneels, and through the bars of
which the Saviour in person administers to him the viaticum. But the
castle in the Lombard style—stone rafters and corbels with red tiled
spaces—on to the ground-floor of which the oval window opens, may be
regarded as an architectural design.
Nicolas Froment’s famous “Burning Thornbush” from Aix Cathedral
(1475-6) is entirely fabulous in the middle. A soft, cloud-like, lumpy
hill of rock supports a dense group of thick-stemmed trees, the tops of
which unite in a kind of gigantic bird’s nest, wherein the Virgin and
Child sit enthroned. But this miracle, with no measure of reality to
gauge it, is framed in a deep landscape with great distances; in which
white towns lie by mirroring waters, and thickly-leaved trees rise up
from green hills to the bright sky, and in the foreground, beside an
angel of Annunciation, sits, surrounded by his drove of wethers and his
quaintly posed dog, the white-bearded shepherd with his legs crossed in
the most natural posture you could conceive.
In the case of almost all the paintings in the Exhibition, and chiefly
of the best of them, this proposition can be repeated. The painter
loyally carries out the subject commissioned, treating it faithfully
according to the traditional formula; but what is not covered by the
formula he shapes with sovereign freedom and an honest joyous realism
which is by no means the prerogative of the Dutch and Germans, as has
been so long believed, but is to be met with, according to the evidence
of this Exhibition, in the same measure in the French.
Sculpture might become crude in the earlier Middle Ages, but it did not
cease to be fostered. Sculpture in stone or wood was the complement of
building, that strongest expression of mediæval energy, ivory-carving,
or the jewel of precious metal, the adornment of the altar or the
state-rooms in the palace. Painting, on the other hand, after the
collapse of the old world, went back to the adornment of books, and
from this the great art of wall- and easel-painting was again developed
only after the age of the Crusades. This, in many details, betrays its
origin from miniature. For a long time it was nothing but an enlarged
miniature. The works in the Exhibition show, at any rate up to the
last third of the fifteenth century, all the features that distinguish
the pictorial ornamentation of the manuscripts: the gold ground, the
neat, nay, painful perfection, the gay, unqualified, almost glaring,
colours, the equal clearness of objects in the furthest background and
in the foreground, the puerile joy in innumerably repeated complicated
decorations of the surface, the framing, with richly figured wreaths,
ornamental borders, or picture margins. Even the standing formulæ of
manuscript miniatures are repeated for centuries in the paintings,
viz., the movements of all the personages at the Annunciation,
Crucifixion, Entombment, and Ascension. Only towards the end of the
fifteenth century does painting fully escape from the still clinging
egg-shell of the miniature, and grow accustomed to a large, bold line,
and a freedom of composition which finally reckons with considerations
of distance, and prevails upon itself to neglect comparatively the
subsidiary in favour of the essential. The glorious Master of Moulins
has, it is clear, no longer the old inherited habit of feeling himself
banished to a page in a book. He no longer shows the same somewhat
mechanical respect to all work, principal and accessory. In the “Virgin
and Child between the Founders,” and particularly in the “Nativity”
with the twilight landscape in the background, and the fat poodle in
front sitting on the kneeling cardinal’s mantle, the precedence of
values is observed, and the painter reserves his piety and devotion for
the noble parts.
The author of these pictures—one of the greatest painters that ever
lived—is only known as the Master of Moulins, or the Painter of the
Bourbons. His name was probably Jean Perréal, but there is no certainty
about it. Only a few definite names have come down to us from the
beginnings of modern art. We must search for them in the inventories
and account books of princely households or cathedral chapters. The
artists did not yet sign their works; they indulged in no dreams of
immortality. They did not yet feel they were the supermen, that the
Renaissance, later on, made of them, and that, in the estimation of
the upper class, especially of its feminine and effeminate portion,
they have remained till the present day. They were honest and genuine
artisans, just like other respectable artisans; and in France they,
for the most part, enrolled themselves in the Saddlers’ Guild, perhaps
because they, like the latter, had originally, as miniature painters,
to do with parchment, _i.e._, a species of leather. They regarded it as
a special distinction to be appointed servant,—_valet_ or _varlet_—of
a prince, on whose commissions for church and palace they lived. Jean
Malouel and his pupils, Jacques Cone and Jean Mignot, Jehan Fouquet,
his sons Jean and François, and his great pupil Jean Bourdichon,
Enguerrand Charonton and Nicolas Froment, perhaps also Perréal and
King René the Good (1409-80), are perhaps the only painters whose
personality stands out clearly outlined in the dawn of art history
before Clouet, and his contemporary Corneille of Lyons. Perhaps
a number of forgotten names may yet be dug up from archives. The
obscurity of the few who have either been handed down to us, or been
rescued from oblivion by industrious investigators in recent years is
a heavy injustice. They deserve to shine with the same glory as the
most illustrious that Vasari has preserved for us in a work of amusing
studio gossip.
Jehan Fouquet stands in a line with the greatest portrait painters of
all times. He may be named in the same breath with Holbein—nay, with
Velasquez. His portrait of a man in the Liechtenstein Gallery at
Vienna, which shone as one of the gems of the exhibition, is perhaps
the most powerful work that the great master created, and the “Man with
the Wine-glass,” in the Vienna collection of Count Wilczek, is hardly
inferior to it in significance.
Of the numerous suggestions of an artistic, moral, and psychological
nature that were the outcome of this unique exhibition, the deepest
and most abiding—at least for me—was that one felt the spiritual
condition of the artists who created these works on commission and,
for the most part, according to precise instructions from princes
and prelates, lords and governments of cities. In nearly every one
of them is played the great drama of the struggle of souls thirsting
for freedom with the fearful oppression of intellect of the darkest
Middle Ages. Secret corners and angles, easily overlooked backgrounds
of the pictures, suggest already the future art, untrammelled by the
world, which will overcome this art of the guilds, with its fixed,
dogmatic formulæ. A Fouquet, a Bourdichon, a Clouet who, in kings and
princes sees, and paints with horrible realism, poor, sick, ugly, dull
fools, stands no longer under the control of royalty. He is inwardly a
disrespectful rebel, and is, in his way, a prelude to the procession
of the market-women to Versailles, which, two or three centuries
later, was destined to overthrow the kingdom. A master of the “Mount
Calvary” (1460), who makes the holy women and disciples stare with
such unmoved, wooden countenances at the Body of Christ, not because
he is incapable of painting sorrow-stricken faces—all the details of
the painting witness to his artistic power—but because he contemplates
the incident with coldness of heart, and expresses his unbelief to the
initiate as plainly as the rack and stake of the period allowed. In
these early works there is a very soft and very weak rumble of thunder
of a very far-off storm. They are a first indistinct announcement of
the Revolutions that are slowly preparing.
V
A CENTURY OF FRENCH ART
Sincerity did not rule in all parts of the Paris Universal Exhibition
of 1900, but a quickening air of freedom was breathed in the great
palace of art. The temporary proprietors of this colossal building,
the French artists, did not pretend to any motive that they did not
possess. “Make room! Out of the way! Out!” we fancied we heard from all
the dusky corners of the vast halls in a voice of thunder. “Foreigners
from both worlds? To the south wing with them! In the corner! Under
the staircase! That’s quite too good for them. The dead? The famous of
yesterday? What do the disturbers want? Haven’t they had their share
of ribbons, titles, commissions from the State, and other forms of the
artist’s ideals? Back with you! To the furthermost building in the
rear! If any one wants to make journeys of discovery, he can steer
away. The chief buildings, the foregrounds, the splendid halls for us,
the _chers maîtres_ of to-day. We are the strongest, therefore we need
do no violence to our feelings. We are alive, therefore we are right.”