were in those times. In the big house, he probably had a pallet bed in
one of those upper dormitories where the menservants slept, and he
doubtless fed with them in the lower hall at first. They must have
laughed at his unmannerly ways, and at his surprise over every new
detail of civilized life, but he had a sharp tongue and could hold his
own in a word-fight. There were three tables in a gentleman's house in
the Middle Age,--the master's, which was served in different rooms,
according to the weather and the time of year; secondly, the 'tinello,'
or canteen, as we should call it, for the so-called gentlemen
retainers--among whom, by the bye, ranked the chief butler and the head
groom, besides the chaplain and the doctor; thirdly, the servants' hall,
where all the lower people of the house fed together. Then, as now in
old countries, the labour of a large household was indefinitely
subdivided, and no servant was expected to do more than one thing, and
every servant had an assistant upon whom he forced all the hard work. A
shepherd lad, brought in from the hills in his sheepskin coat, sheepskin
breeches, and leg swathings of rags and leather, would naturally be the
butt of such an establishment. On the other hand, the shepherd boy was a
genius and had a tongue like a razor, besides being the favourite of the
all-powerful master; and as it was neither lawful nor safe to lay hands
on him, his power of cutting speech made him feared.
So he learned Latin with the man who had taught Dante,--and Dante was
admitted to be the most learned man of his times,--and he ground the
colours and washed the brushes for Cimabue, and drew under the master's
eye everything that he saw, and became, as the chronicler Villani says
of him, 'the most sovereign master of painting to be found in his time,
and the one who most of all others took all figures and all action from
nature.' And Villani was his contemporary, and knew him when he was
growing old, and recorded his death and his splendid funeral.
One-half of all permanent success in art must always lie in the
mechanical part of it, in the understanding and use of the tools. They
were primitive in Giotto's day, and even much later, according to our
estimate. Oil painting was not dreamt of, nor anything like a lead
pencil for drawing. There was no canvas on which to paint. No one had
thought of making an artist's palette. Not one-tenth of the substances
now used for colours were known then. A modern artist might find himself
in great difficulties if he were called upon to paint a picture with
Cimabue's tools.
But to Giotto they must have seemed marvellous after his pointed stone
pencil and his bit of untrimmed slate. Everything must have surprised
and delighted him in his first days in Florence--the streets, the
houses, the churches, the people, the dresses he saw; and the boy who
had begun by copying the sheep that were before his eyes on the
hillside, instantly longed to reproduce a thousand things that pleased
him. So, when he was already old enough to understand life and its
beauty, he was suddenly transported to the midst of it, just where it
was most beautiful; and because he instantly saw that his master's art
was unreal and far removed from truth, dead, as it were, and bound hand
and foot in the graveclothes of Byzantine tradition, his first impulse
was to wake the dead in a blaze of life. And this he did.
And after him, from time to time, when art seemed to be stiffening again
in the clumsy fingers of the little scholars of the great, there came a
true artist, like Giotto, who realized the sort of deathlike trance into
which art had fallen, and roused it suddenly to things undreamed
of--from Giotto to Titian. And each did all that he meant to do. But
afterwards came Tintoretto, who said that he would draw like
Michelangelo and paint like Titian; but he could not, though he made
beautiful things: and he was the first great artist who failed to go
farther than others had gone before him; and because art must either
advance or go backward, and no one could advance any more, it began to
go backward, and the degeneration set in.
About three hundred years elapsed between Giotto's birth and Titian's
death, during which the world changed from the rough state of the Middle
Age to a very high degree of civilization; and men's eyes grew tired of
what they saw all the time, while many of the strong types which had
made the change faded away. Men grew more alike, dress grew more alike,
thoughts grew more alike. It was the beginning of that overspreading
uniformity which we have in our time, which makes it so very easy for
any one man to be eccentric, but which makes it so very hard for any one
man to be really great. One might say that in those times humanity
flowed in very small channels, which a strong man of genius could thwart
and direct. But humanity now is a stream so broad that it is almost like
an ocean, in which all have similar being, and the big fish come to the
surface, and spout and blow and puff without having any influence at all
on the tide.
There was hardly any such thing possible as eccentricity in Giotto's
time. When the dress and manners and language of every little town
differed distinctly from those of the nearest village, every man dressed
as he pleased, behaved as he had been taught, and spoke the dialect of
his native place. There was a certain uniformity among the priesthood,
whose long cassock was then the more usual dress of civilians in great
cities in times of peace and who spoke Latin among themselves and wrote
it, though often in a way that would make a scholar's blood run cold.
But there was no uniformity among other classes of men. A fine gentleman
who chose to have his cloth tights of several colours, one leg green and
one blue, or each leg in quarters of four colours, attracted no
attention whatever in the streets; and if one noble affected simple
habits and went about in an old leathern jerkin that was rusty in
patches from the joints of his armour, the next might dress himself in
rich silk and gold embroidery, and wear a sword with a fine enamelled
hilt. No one cared, except for himself, and it must have been hard
indeed to produce much effect by any eccentricity of appearance. But
there was the enormous and constantly changing variety that takes an
artist's eye at every turn,--which might make an artist then of a man
who nowadays would be nothing but a discontented observer with artistic
tastes.
I do not think that these things have ever been much noticed as factors
in the development of European art. Consider what Florence, for
instance, was to the eye at that time. And then consider that, until
that time, art had been absolutely prohibited from painting what it saw,
being altogether a traditional business in which, as Burckhardt says,
the artist had quite lost all freedom of mind, all pleasure and interest
in his work, in which he no longer invented, but had only to reproduce
by mechanical repetition what the Church had discovered for him, in
which the sacred personages he represented had shrivelled to mere
emblems, and the greater part of his attention and pride was directed to
the rich and almost imperishable materials in which alone he was allowed
to work for the honour and glory of the Church.
In the second Council of Nicea, held in the year 787, the question of
sacred pictures was discussed, and in the acts of the Council the
following statement is found:--
'It is not the invention of the painter which creates the picture, but
an inviolable law, a tradition of the Church. It is not the painters,
but the holy fathers, who have to invent and dictate. To them manifestly
belongs the composition, to the painter only the execution.'
It would be hard to find a clearer definition of the artist's place and
work before Giotto.
Consider all these things, and then think of the sensations of the first
man upon whom it flashed all at once that he might be free and might
paint everything he saw, not as monks dictated to him, but as he saw
it, to the best of his strength and talent. He must have felt like a
creature that had been starved, suddenly turned out free to roam through
a world full of the most tempting things and with a capacity to enjoy
them all. He did not realize his freedom completely at first; it was
impossible for him to throw off at once all the traditions in which he
had been brought up and taught; but he realized enough to change the
whole direction of all the art that came after him.
Two things are remarkable about the early Italian artists. With the
solitary exception of Cimabue--the first of the Renascence--none of them
was born rich, but, on the other hand, a great many of them were not
born poor either. Giotto and Mantegna were shepherd boys, it is true;
but Michelangelo was the son of a small official of ancient family in
the provinces, the mayor of the little city of Chiusi e Caprese;
Lionardo da Vinci's father was a moderately well-to-do land-holder;
Raphael's was a successful painter, and certainly not in want. Secondly,
a very great number of them made what must have been thought good
fortunes in those days, while they were still young men. Some, like
Andrea del Sarto, squandered their money and died in misery; one or two,
like Fra Angelico, refused to receive money themselves for their work
and handed over their earnings to a religious community. None, so far as
I can find out, toiled through half a lifetime with neither recognition
nor pay, as many a great artist has done in our times--like the
Frenchman Millet, for instance, whose Angelus fetched such a fabulous
price after his death. The truth is that what we mean by art had just
been discovered, and it met with immediate and universal appreciation,
and the result was a demand for it which even a greater number of
painters could not have oversatisfied. Consequently, there was plenty to
do for every man of genius, and there were people not only willing to
pay great sums for each work, but who disputed with each other for the
possession of good paintings, and quarrelled for what was equivalent to
the possession of great artists.
Another element in the lives of these men, as in the lives of all who
rose to any eminence in those days, was the great variety that
circumstances introduced into their existence. Change and variety are
favourable to creative genius as they are unfavourable to uncreative
study. The scholar and the historian are best left among their books for
twenty years at a time, to execute the labour of patient thought which
needs perpetual concentration on one subject. If Gibbon had continued to
be an amateur soldier and a man of the world, as he began, he might have
written a history, but it would not have been the most astonishing
history of modern times. In Macaulay's brilliant and often too creative
work, one sees the influence of his changing political career, to the
detriment of sober study. For the more the creative man sees and lives
in his times, the more he is impelled to create. In the midst of his
best years of painting, Lionardo da Vinci was called off to build
canals, and Caesar Borgia kept him busy for two years in planning and
constructing fortifications. Immediately before that time he had
finished his famous Last Supper, in Milan, and immediately afterwards he
painted the Battle of Anghiari--now lost--which was the picture of his
that most strongly impressed the men of his day.
Similarly, Michelangelo was interrupted in his work when, the Constable
of Bourbon having sacked Rome, the Medici were turned out of Florence,
and the artist was employed by the Republic to fortify and defend the
city. It was betrayed, and he escaped and hid himself--and the next
great thing he did was the Last Judgment, in the Sixtine Chapel. He did
stirring work in wild times, besides painting, and hewing marble, and
building Saint Peter's.
That brings one back to thinking how much those men knew. Their
universal knowledge seems utterly unattainable to us, with all our
modern machinery of education. Michelangelo grew up in a suburb of
Florence, to which his father moved when he was a child, at a notary's
desk, his father trying to teach him enough law to earn him a
livelihood. Whenever he had a chance, he escaped to draw in a corner, or
to spend forbidden hours in an artist's studio. He was taught Latin and
arithmetic by an old schoolmaster, who was probably a priest, and a
friend of his father's. At fourteen he earned money in Ghirlandajo's
studio, which means that he was already an artist. At twenty-five he was
probably the equal of any living man as sculptor, painter, architect,
engineer and mathematician. Very much the same might be said of
Lionardo. One asks in vain how such enormous knowledge was acquired, and
because there is no answer, one falls back upon wild theories about
untaught genius. But whatever may be said of painting and sculpture,
neither architecture nor engineering, and least of all the mathematics
so necessary to both, can be evolved from the inner consciousness.
Men worked harder then than now, and their teachers and their tools
helped them less, so that they learned more thoroughly what they learned
at all. And there was much less to distract a man then, when he had
discovered his own talent, while there was everything to spur him.
Amusements were few, and mostly the monopoly of rich nobles; but success
was quick and generous, and itself ennobled the men who attained to
it--that is, it instantly made him the companion, and often the friend,
of the most cultivated men and women of the day. Then, as now, success
meant an entrance into 'society' for those whose birth had placed them
outside of it. But 'society' was different then. It consisted chiefly of
men who had fought their own way to power, and had won it by a
superiority both intellectual and physical, and of women who often
realized and carried out the unsatisfied intellectual aspirations of
their husbands and fathers. For wherever men have had much to do, and
have done it successfully, what we call culture has been more or less
the property of the women. In those times, the men were mostly occupied
in fighting and plotting, but the beautiful things produced by newly
discovered art appealed to them strongly. Women, on the other hand, had
nothing to do. With the end of the Middle Age, the old-fashioned
occupations of women, such as spinning, weaving and embroidering with
their maids, went out of existence, and the mechanical work was absorbed
and better done by the guilds. Fighting was then a large part of life,
but there was something less of the petty squabbling and killing between
small barons, which kept their women constant prisoners in remote
castles, for the sake of safety; and there was war on a larger scale
between Guelph and Ghibelline, Emperor and Pope, State and State. The
women had more liberty and more time. There were many women students in
the universities, as there are now, in Italy, and almost always have
been, and there were famous women professors, whose lectures were
attended by grown men. No one was surprised at that, and there was no
loud talk about women's rights. Nobody questioned the right of women to
learn as much as they could, where-ever anything was taught. There were
great ladies, good and bad, like Vittoria Colonna and Lucrezia Borgia,
who were scholars, and even Greek scholars, and probably equal to any
students of their time. Few ladies of Michelangelo's day did not know
Latin, and all were acquainted with such literature as there was--Dante,
Macchiavelli, Aretino, Ariosto and Petrarch,--for Tasso came later,--the
Tuscan minor poets, as well as the troubadours of Provence--not to
mention the many collections of tales, of which the scenes were destined
to become the subjects of paintings in the later days of the Renascence.
Modern society is the enemy of individuality, whether in dress, taste or
criticism, and the fear of seeming different from other people is
greater than the desire to rise higher than other people by purely
personal means. In the same way, socialism is the enemy of all personal
distinction, whatever the socialists may say to the contrary, and is
therefore opposed to all artistic development and in favour of all that
is wholesale, machine-made, and labour-saving. And nobody will venture
to say that modern tendencies are not distinctly socialistic.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SANTA MARIA DEGLI ANGELI
The Baths of Diocletian remodelled by Michelangelo]
We are almost at the opposite extreme of existence from the early
Renascence. That was the age of small principalities; ours is the day of
great nations. Anyone who will carefully read the history of the Middle
Age and of the Renascence will come to the inevitable conclusion that
the greatest artists and writers of today are very far from being the
rivals of those who were great then. Shakespeare was almost the
contemporary of Titian; there has been neither a Shakespeare nor a
Titian since, nor any writer nor artist in the most distant manner
approaching them. Yet go backward from them, and you will find Dante, as
great as Shakespeare, and at least three artists, Michelangelo, Lionardo
da Vinci and Raphael, quite as great as Titian. They lived in a society
which was antisocialistic, and they were the growth of a period in which
all the ideas of civilized mankind tended in a direction diametrically
opposed to that taken by our modern theories. This is undeniable. The
greatest artists, poets and literary men are developed where all
conditions most develop individuality. The modern state, in which
individuality is crushed by the machinery of education in order that all
men may think alike, favours the growth of science alone; and scientific
men have the least individuality of all men who become great, because
science is not creative like art and literature, nor destructive like
soldiering, but inquisitive, inventive and speculative in the first
place, and secondly, in our age, financial. In old times, when a
discovery was made, men asked, 'What does it mean? To what will it
lead?' Now, the first question is, 'What will it be worth?' That does
not detract from the merit of science, but it shows the general tendency
of men's thoughts. And it explains two things, namely, why there are no
artists like Michelangelo nor literary men like Shakespeare in our
times--and why the majority of such artists and literary men as we have
are what is commonly called reactionaries, men who would prefer to go
back a century or two, and who like to live in out-of-the-way places in
old countries, as Landor lived in Florence, Browning in Venice,
Stevenson in Samoa, Liszt in Rome,--besides a host of painters and
sculptors, who have exiled themselves voluntarily for life in Italy and
France. The whole tendency of the modern world is scientific and
financial, and the world is ruled by financiers and led by a financial
society which honours neither art nor literature, but looks upon both as
amusements which it can afford to buy, and which it is fashionable to
cultivate, but which must never for a moment be considered as equal in
importance to the pursuit of money for its own sake.
It was the great scope for individuality, the great prizes to be won by
individuality, the honour paid to individuality, that helped the early
painters to their high success. It was the abundance of material,
hitherto never used in art, the variety of that material, in an age when
variety was the rule and not the exception, it was the richness of that
material, not in quantity and variety only, but in individual quality,
that made early paintings what we see. It was their genuine and true
love of beauty, and of nature and of the eternal relations between
nature and beauty, that made those men great artists. It was the
hampering of individuality, the exhaustion and disappearance of material
and the degeneration of a love of beauty to a love of effect, that put
an end to the great artistic cycle in Italy, and soon afterwards in the
rest of the world, with Rembrandt and Van Dyck, the last of the really
great artists.
Progress is not civilization, though we generally couple the two words
together, and often confound their values. Progress has to do with what
we call the industrial arts, their development, and the consequent
increase of wealth and comfort. Civilization means, on the other hand,
among many things, the growth and perfecting of art, in the singular;
the increase of a general appreciation of art; the refinement of manners
which follows upon a widespread improvement of taste; the general
elevation of a people's thoughts above the hard conditions in which a
great people's struggles for existence, preeminence and wealth take
place.
Progress, in its right acceptation, ought also to mean some sort of
moral progress--such, for instance, as has transformed our own
English-speaking race in a thousand years or more from a stock of very
dangerous pirates to a law-abiding people--if we may fairly say as much
as that of ourselves.
Civilization has nothing to do with morality. That is rather a shocking
statement, perhaps, but it is a true one. It may be balanced by saying
that civilization has nothing to do with immorality either. The early
Christians were looked upon as very uncivilized people by the Romans of
their time, and the meanest descendants of the Greeks secretly called
the Romans themselves barbarians. In point of civilization and what we
call cultivation, Alcibiades was immeasurably superior to Saint Paul,
Peter the Hermit or Abraham Lincoln, though Alcibiades had no morality
to speak of and not much conscience. Moreover, it is a fact that great
reformers of morals have often been great enemies of art and destroyers
of the beautiful. Fra Bartolommeo, who is thought by many to have
equalled Raphael in the latter's early days, became a follower of
Savonarola, burned all his wonderful drawings and studies, and shut
himself up in a monastery to lead a religious life; and though he
yielded after several years to the command of his superiors, and began
painting again, he confined himself altogether to devotional subjects as
long as he lived, and fell far behind Raphael, who was certainly not an
exemplary character, even in those days.
In Europe, and in the Latin languages, there is a distinction, and a
universally accepted one, between education and instruction. It is
something like that which I am trying to make clear between Civilization
and Progress. An 'instructed man' means a man who has learned much but
who may have no manners at all, may eat with his knife, forget to wash
his hands, wear outlandish clothes, and be ignorant even of the ordinary
forms of politeness. An 'educated person,' on the contrary, may know
very little Latin, and no Greek, and may be shaky in the multiplication
table; but he must have perfect manners to deserve the designation, and
tact, with a thorough knowledge of all those customs and outward forms
which distinguish what calls itself civilized society from the rest of
the world. Anyone can see that such instruction, on the one hand, and
such education, on the other, are derived from wholly different
sources, and must lead to wholly different results; and it is as common
nowadays to find men who have the one without the other, as it ever was
in ancient Greece or Rome. I should like to assert that it is more
common, since Progress is so often mistaken for Civilization and tacitly
supposed to be able to do without it, and that Diogenes would not be
such a startling exception now as he was in the days of Alexander the
Great. But no one would dare to say that Progress cannot go on in a high
state of Civilization. All that can be stated with absolute certainty is
that they are independent of each other, since Progress means 'going on'
and therefore 'change'; whereas Civilization may remain at the same high
level for a very long period, without any change at all. Compare our own
country with China, for instance. In the arts--the plural 'arts'--in
applied science, we are centuries ahead of Asia; but our manners are
rough and even brutal compared with the elaborate politeness of the
Chinese, and we should labour in vain to imitate the marvellous
productions of their art. We may prefer our art to that of the far East,
though there are many critics who place the Japanese artists much higher
than our own; but no one can deny the superior skill of the Asiatics in
the making of everything artistic.
Nor must we undervalue in art the importance of the minor and special
sort of progress which means a real and useful improvement in methods
and materials. That is doubtless a part, a first step, in the general
progress which tends ultimately to the invention of machinery, but
which, in its development, passes through the highest perfection of
manual work.