quite different, for the colour had to be applied swiftly and once for
all to the wet plaster. Here the technique was direct and instantaneous,
quite unlike that of panel painting, and though it was no more adaptable
to the vagaries of temperamental expression, it opened up new
possibilities of which painters were always trying to take advantage.
Giotto himself, being the greatest master of this particular mode, was
always working along these lines, and later Velasquez combined them with
the possibilities inherent in the development of underpainting as a
thing final in itself, without the laborious and studied glazing of
successive coats of pure colour.
The art of painting was never a rigid and immobile system; every painter
was striving for new methods and new developments, and frequently
finding them; in the end, as the old artistic sense died away,
virtuosity took its place, and this found its opportunity through the
elimination of all the old elements of craftsmanship and a development
of the qualities of breadth and swiftness inherent in fresco-painting,
together with the dash and bravura that offered themselves through the
clever manipulation of the thick and solid and suave material of the old
underpainting. In a word, the tendency was toward combining drawing,
modelling, and colour in one process, obtaining final effects in one
operation; and while this meant a possible slouching of drawing, a
substitution of surprise and bravado for consistent modelling, a loss of
all depth and resonance of colour, and the putting of a premium on such
quite unimportant (and sometimes vicious) matters as dashing brush work,
it must be admitted it did permit “temperament” to express itself with a
swiftness and mobility impossible before, granting always that this is
desirable.
Now in the working of this revolution the Van Eycks had no part
whatever. They did not invent “oil painting” or anything like it. They
were the greatest painter-craftsmen ever known, and they and the
generations that followed them in Flanders and Italy held faithfully to
the old threefold mode of operation until Tintoretto, Velasquez, and
Rubens began to merge the three in one and to lay the foundations for
the present lamentable subterfuges of the Salon and the Royal Academy.
What they did do was this: until Hubert’s time every painter had been
searching for some medium which would not mitigate the perfect
transparency of their hand-ground colours and would dry quickly. All
kinds of viscous things had been employed--white of egg, fig juice, and
other less seemly media--but none was wholly satisfactory. Oil was the
natural thing, but oil was an unconscionable time in drying. Hubert Van
Eyck found some oil medium (or varnish) that dried quickly and this at
once became the universal medium. It was a great discovery and a great
boon, but it had nothing whatever to do with “oil painting,” which did
not actually come into existence until the dark days of the late
eighteenth or early nineteenth century, therefore the skirts of the Van
Eycks are clear and we can absolve them of all responsibility.
There never was a school of such consummate craftsmanship as this of
Flanders. The Van Eycks, Memling, Van der Weyden were the most perfectly
trained, the most comprehensively competent, and the most
conscientiously laborious artists ever known; also they understood
drawing, composition, and lighting as no others ever did, while their
sense of beauty of colour, either in itself or in subtle and splendid
combinations, was unique. They were not portents, sudden meteors
shooting across a dark sky, they simply continued and developed a long
and glorious tradition. Long before them the monasteries had been
producing great art of every kind--frescos, illuminations, stained
glass, embroidery, painted sculpture--and it was all art of the
greatest. When Hubert painted the “Adoration of the Lamb,” he merely
gathered together all these arts and manifested his enormous and
astounding synthesis in concentrated form, and better than any one had
ever done before. All the intricate delicacy of jewel work, all the
vivacity of clean-cut sculpture, all the suavity of silken needlework,
all the flaming splendour of stained glass are brought together here in
one astonishing combination, and to this era-making synthesis is added
the living light
[Illustration:
OUR LADY, FROM THE TRYPTICH AT GHENT
HUBERT VAN EYCK
]
and the human appeal of the poignant beauty of the world, and the
transcendent magic of the supernatural, sacramentally and visibly set
forth.
This, which very well may be the greatest picture in the world (it does
not matter), was ordered from Hubert Van Eyck when he was nearly fifty
years old, he having been born about 1366 in the province of Limbourg
and coming of a long line of painters. It was ordered by Jodocus Vydts,
a worthy burgher of Ghent, as an altar-piece for a chapel he had built
and endowed (according to the pious and admirable practice of those good
Catholic times) in the Cathedral of St. Bavon. For ten years he worked
at his masterpiece, and then death overtook him in the year 1426, when
his work was only partly finished, when his brother, Jan, took it up and
brought it to a triumphant conclusion in 1432. It is a great triptych of
twenty-two painted panels and its preservation has been nothing short of
miraculous. Philip II tried to carry it off in 1558, the Protestants to
destroy it in 1566, and the Calvinists to give it away to Queen
Elizabeth in 1578. It was nearly destroyed by fire in 1641, dismembered
and packed away in 1781, carried off (parts of it) to Paris in 1794. In
1816 most of the wings were sold to a shrewd dealer for $20,000 and by
him to the Berlin Museum for $80,000; finally the Adam and Eve panels
were taken to the Brussels Museum, and a set of copies attached to the
mutilated remainder in the Cathedral of St. Bavon.
The work is one vast, comprehensive, and sacramental manifestation of
the central Catholic sacrament of the mass, searching and final in its
symbolism, consummate in its mastery of all the elements that enter into
the make-up of a great work of pictorial and decorative art,
unapproached and unapproachable in its splendour of living and radiant
colour. In its philosophical grasp, its technical perfection, its
unearthly beauty, its communication of the very essence of a fundamental
mystery, and in its evocative power it staggers the imagination and
takes its place amongst the few great works of man, in any category,
which are so far beyond what seems possible of achievement that they
rank as definitely superhuman. So far as its spiritual content is
concerned, it can no more be estimated than can the mass itself, or
paraphrased in words than Chartres Cathedral or a Brahms symphony or the
Venus of Melos. If the Van Eycks are responsible for this, they rank
with St. Thomas Aquinas and Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci as the
greatest creative forces amongst men. Of course they were not, nor the
others, named. Somehow each was used by something greater than he: the
concentrated consciousness of his fellows, the underlying and informing
time-spirit of an era--or why not God Himself?--as a channel through
which and by which absolute truth was communicated to man who, of his
own motion, can do much, but not so much as this.
For the consummate artistry, for the perfect sense of decoration and
composition, the keen and exquisite line, the perception and recording
of diversified character, the poignant love of all natural beauty and
corresponding rejection of all ugliness, for the technique which is that
of a master in the fashioning of precious metals and the cutting of
priceless gems, for the colour that is now resonant with all the deep
splendour of great music, now thin and aerial with all the delicacy of
far horizons and misty forests at some pale dawn in a land of
dreams--for all these things we may remember Hubert Van Eyck and his
brother Jan, for this is their work, but beyond this we go elsewhere, at
least as far as the mass itself, for the inspiration that has made this
Flemish triptych one of the great, revealing creations of the world.
The infinite variety of conception and rendition simply transcend
experience. The three great, dominating figures--God the Father, Our
Lady, and St. John Baptist--are of a Byzantine majesty transfused by a
passionate humanism that is almost unique in any form. From them you
pass to the central panel of the “Worship of the Lamb That Was Slain,”
which is as tender and personal and human as the best of Fra Angelico,
and, like his clear visions, irradiated by a kind of paradisal glory
that sets it in a heaven of its own; from this you go to the panels of
singing angels and splendid attendant knights and marching pilgrims that
are pages out of the daily record of life in proud and beautiful Bruges,
and finally you come to the Adam and Eve who are sheer, unadulterated
realism unapproachable in its minute veracity. Surely, these two men
were a type of the universal genius. They balked at nothing and found
nothing too difficult of accomplishment, simply because they were
perfectly trained and broadly accomplished craftsmen who knew that
theirs was an exacting and a jealous craft for which
“temperament”--artistic or otherwise--was not, and could not be made, a
substitute.
It is with a feeling almost of relief that we come down nearer the earth
and confront the masterpieces of Jan Van Eyck. With Hubert we are taken
into a kind of seventh heaven of mystical revelation; with his brother
and those that follow we come back to what is more human, more in scale
with experience. Great art still, as great as one can find elsewhere,
and with all the mastery of methods, all the confident certainty, all
the triumphant colour and the exquisite design and the faultless
craftsmanship of the painted “Beatific Vision” itself. There once were
many other pictures by Hubert Van Eyck, but all now are gone, destroyed
by the savage hands of Calvinists and Revolutionaries, and the
“Adoration of the Lamb” remains alone as an isolated miracle.
Jan was of another sort; equally great as a craftsman, he was a fine
gentleman, a courtier, the friend of princes, and a diplomat. In those
barbarous days before the culmination of the era of enlightenment, art
was not a cult, isolated from life, nor were artists a sort of creature
apart, made so by the possession of a then undiscovered and quite
pathological affliction called the “artistic temperament.” They were
good citizens and an integral part of a like-minded community, serving
their kind after many fashions, amongst them being the honourable and
admirable craft of art. Of this craft Jan was past master; he painted
statues and illuminated missals and fashioned stained glass; he created
great altar-pieces and produced living portraits of old ecclesiastics
and worthy burghers and their wives; for all I know he was an architect
as well--at all events he might have been, as is proved by the wonderful
drawing of St. Barbara with its background of a great Gothic tower under
construction. A thoroughly typical example of his painting is the St.
Donatian altar-piece, a votive picture ordered by the excellent old
Canon Van der Paele, who is shown in adoration before Our Lady and the
Holy Child and attended by St. Donatian himself and St. George. Mr.
Berenson could find no finer example than this of that “space
composition” on which he rightly lays such stress; Holbein could paint
no more exact and characteristic portraits; all the goldsmiths of
Byzantium could not rival the jewel work of armour and orphreys,
brocades and embroideries, and sculptures and inlays, while the colour,
both in its individual parts and its composition, comes nearer the
living light of the
[Illustration: A DRAWING OF ST. BARBARA, JAN VAN EYCK]
windows of Chartres than any other painted colour in the world. One
would like to hang this particular picture (for a time only, then
replacing it over an altar where alone it belongs) in the midst of a
“Rubens Gallery,” or a room in the Luxembourg or the Royal Academy, and
call all the world to see.
There is little enough left of Jan’s work, and for the same humiliating
reason that holds in the case of his brother. Of Hans Memling, another
wonder child, there is fortunately much. When one catalogues the list of
this earliest and greatest work in Flanders and recalls the wrecking
with axe and torch of cathedrals, abbeys, convents, hospitals, châteaux
by Calvinists and sans-culottes; the pyres of smouldering pictures, the
ditches filled up with pulverised glass, shattered statues, illuminated
missals and graduales and books of hours; the sacred vessels and
gorgeous vestments, such as Hubert and Jan, Hans and Gerard showed in
their pictures, despoiled of their splendid jewels (transferred for a
consideration to Hebrew brokers) and melted down or used for chair
covers, as the case may be; and when in this lurid light one weighs the
thick hides and the muddled brains and the shrivelled souls of the
wreckers against even the mere artistic value of their spoils, one
marvels still more at the wonders of scientific evolution and the
promises of evolutionary philosophy.
Memling is the third of the great trio of Flemings, and though there
were innumerable others whose art was near perfection, these three stand
for ever by themselves apart. There is more of human tenderness in his
work and a certain spiritualisation informing everything that gives a
different quality; the portraiture and differentiation of character are
possibly beyond what any other ever attained, but his composition as it
gains in complexity and facile ease loses something of that broad and
powerful directness, that supreme quality of rhythm and serenity that
marked the Van Eycks. The colour also is less invariably sonorous, less
pure and splendid and luminous both in its single tones and its
harmonies, while now and then the universal Flemish passion for
sumptuous stuffs and gorgeous patterns and glittering accessories
betrays him into a loss of unity and balance. Still, any criticism is
impudent; his St. Ursula series, his St. John Baptist, his St. Bertin
and Floreins and Moreel altar-pieces are amongst the greatest pictures
that
[Illustration: A MEMLING ALTAR-PIECE
_From a photograph by Hanfstaengl_]
have been painted, while his portraits are pure life expressed through
the terms of pure beauty.
It would be impossible to review all the work of all the great Flemings.
Driven by the same impulse, each gave his own personality to all he did,
and the sequence is as astonishing as it is priceless. Gerard, David,
Roger Van der Weyden, Quentin Metsys, Dierick Bouts, Lucas Cranach, as
well as numberless unknown whose work survives their contemporary fame,
all reached their several heights of attainment on their own individual
lines, and their pictures still remain in Bruges and Ghent, in Brussels
and Antwerp (or remain to-day, in August, 1915) to bear witness to the
full and vigorous life, the wholesome and happy religious devotion, the
astonishing physical beauty of Flemish environment of those last years
of the fifteenth century in Europe when the fair day of mediævalism came
to its golden close.
Between this whole-souled art of the Middle Ages and that of the
Renaissance came an intervening group that served to effect the
necessary modulation from one key to quite another. Mabeuse, Van Orley,
the younger Porbus, and the Breughels are the chief representatives and
through them one sees the old and masculine qualities dying away, the
new and alien elements from the south entering in to take possession.
When this transition was effected it was in Holland that it found its
opportunity, and as the Dutch provinces are outside our consideration we
need not consider here the products of a school that ranged in quality
from Rubens to Rembrandt, from Frans Hals to Vermeer of Delft. The
succession was broken, the torch (with whatever flame that remained) was
passed from the Flemings to the Dutch, and only Vandyck appeared in the
line of true Flemish descent to demonstrate the possibilities that still
remained in spite of Rubens (and at the hands of his own pupil) for the
development of a restrained and self-respecting and beautiful art, even
though the moving spirit had been dissolved and the great tradition
become no more than a memory. The great period of mediæval painting (for
it was this in spirit and in truth) had begun and ended in this Cor
Cordium, this Flemish concentration of the Heart of Europe. It had begun
with the monkish illuminations of the fourteenth century, culminated in
the great century from 1395, when Hubert Van Eyck began to paint, to
1494, when Memling died, and
[Illustration: MADONNA AND CHILD WITH ST. LUKE, VAN DER WEYDEN
_From a photograph by Hanfstaengl_]
slowly disappeared under the influence of the Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the Spanish oppression; by the year 1600 it had ceased
to exist, and the Renaissance, which had established itself in all
secular and ecclesiastical matters, now took over art also for the
purpose of developing its own exact expression. The five centuries of
Catholic civilisation had come to an end.
XII
GOTHIC SCULPTURE
Long before the days of the Pisani in Italy, who were erroneously held
to have been the restorers of the lost art of sculpture, France had
initiated and developed three great schools, one of which at least
reached greater heights even than the later schools of Italy, even than
Donatello and Michael Angelo if you test this art by the established
principles of the greatest sculpture the world has ever known--that of
Greece. These three were: The school of the south with Toulouse as a
centre, the school of Burgundy, or Vezelay, and the school of the Île de
France. The first is of the late eleventh century, the second of the
twelfth, the third of the latter part of this century and the first half
of the thirteenth. The earlier work south of the Loire is part Roman,
part Byzantine, and it occasionally reaches, as at Moissac, a level of
extraordinary decorative value, with, in its bas reliefs, a feeling for
rhythmical line and space composition that are quite astounding. In
Burgundy, combined with great rudeness and an almost savage directness,
there is far greater humanism, with much action and an unusual amount of
character differentiation; much of the best work of this school is to be
found at Autun and Vezelay. With the middle years of the twelfth century
the sculpture of the Île de France seems suddenly to burst forth at St.
Denis and Chartres like some miraculous happening. It was not this, but
the result of many years of cumulative and progressive effort; but all
that went before has perished, while fortunately some examples at St.
Denis and a supreme collection at Chartres remain to give the impression
of an unwonted and unheralded event. This sculpture of Chartres is more
superbly architectural, more intimately a part of the whole artistic
scheme than any other on record; all is formal, conventionalised; the
figures are erect, rigid, immensely elongated; the multiplied fine lines
and delicate zigzags of the drapery, the simple figure-modelling, the
immobile, dispassionate faces, all show a most curious self-abnegation
on the part of the sculptor and a profound conviction that both he and
his art are only part of a greater whole, for they are purely
architectural and indeed nothing but the architectural spirit
expressing itself through an allied artistic mode. They are startlingly
akin to archaic Greek work and, as Professor Moore has said of the
sculpture from Delos: “One of these ancient Greek statues might, if
wrought in French limestone and slightly modified in outline, stand in
the west portal of Chartres without apparent lack of keeping.” Yet there
is manifestly no possible point of historical contact between the
Hellenic and the French work, and the kinship simply shows the
persistence of certain ways of looking at and feeling about things, and
the inevitable if unconscious return of one generation to the ways of
another, that form a commentary, both cruel and humorous, on the
evolutionary philosophy current during the last century, and quite
unjustifiably claiming descent from the innocent speculations of Darwin
and Herbert Spencer.
Out of this sculpture of Chartres grew the very wonderful art of the
thirteenth century, which gives a sorely diminished glory to the
Cathedral of Paris and gave, a year ago, a still greater glory to that
immortal group of churches now slowly crumbling under gun-fire. Very
notable examples of the transition are at Senlis, but they have been
shockingly mutilated, and only one of the two wonderful carved lintels
still gives much idea of its original beauty. The panel of the
“Resurrection of the Virgin,” has all the architectural form and the
decorative sense of Chartres, but it has as well an added human quality
that makes it enduringly vital and appealing. The same can be said of
the surrounding statues and reliefs that are of the same period, and
altogether the almost unique work at Senlis strikes a singularly happy
balance, as sculptured architecture, between the rigid formalism of
Chartres and Vezelay and the exquisite humanism and the almost
too-surpassing art of Paris, Amiens, and Reims. But for the Revolution
Senlis would not have stood so alone for sculptural art of the
transition. Laon once possessed far more, and of an even higher type,
but all the column figures of the west doors, and indeed practically all
the free-standing statues, were then ruthlessly destroyed and those that
have taken their places are merely modern assumptions. The tympana of
the doors are original, though mutilated: the Coronation of the Virgin,
scenes from her life, the Last Judgment; while in the archivolts and
around the windows are remains of singularly beautiful effigies of the
wise and foolish virgins, the seven liberal arts, episodes from the
lives of the saints. More or less of the original polychromatic
decoration remains, and the statues themselves, even in their battered
state, are marvels of art. Every trace of archaism and of uncertainty is
gone, the sculptor works with a definiteness and a certainty of touch
that are amazing, while his sense of the eternally sculpturesque is
infallible. Every face--where a face remains--is brilliantly
characterised; the poses are graceful, unaffected, constantly varied;
the gestures are convincing, the stone quality never lost, while there
is nothing outside Hellas--except Amiens and Reims--so faultless in its
composition of drapery. From the very first this was one of the strong
points in French sculpture; each artist strove for, and attained, not
only distinction, but naturalism expressed through and by an almost
classic formalism; the line composition, from Vezelay to Reims, is a
succession of ever-waxing marvels. At Laon are even now mutilated
figures that are as perfect in their composition of lines and masses as
anything in Athens, and the same was true of Reims. Personally I have
always thought of the figure work at Amiens
[Illustration: A HEAD, NOW DESTROYED, FROM REIMS]
(apart from the bas reliefs) as less perfect in this respect, in spite
of expert opinion, than that of Paris, Laon, and Reims; less brilliantly
composed, more heavy and realistic, while the figures themselves are
certainly not as slender and graceful, or so varied in pose. Moissac and
Vezelay are hieratic abstractions, Chartres pure architecture, Soissons
a breathing of divine life into ancient forms, but Laon and Paris and
Reims are pure and perfect sculpture against which no criticism of any
kind can be brought. Never has actual life been better expressed through
the necessarily transforming modes of art than here; in these exquisite
and rhythmical compositions the barbarous folly of the naturalistic and
realistic schools of modern times is made cruelly apparent, and the base
products of the average nineteenth-century practitioners (barring a few
exceptions such as St. Gaudens at his best, as in the Rock Creek figure)
become in comparison as absurd as do the shameless vulgarities of
Bernini and his unhappy ilk.