Kenyon Cox - Artist and Public
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Kenyon Cox >> Artist and Public
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We can see plainly enough that in at least some of these cases the sense
of progress was an illusion. There was movement, but it was not always
forward movement. And if progress was illusory in some instances, may it
not, possibly, have been so in all? It is at least worth inquiry how far
the fine arts have ever been in a state of true progress, going forward
regularly from good to better, each generation building on the work of
its predecessors and surpassing that work, in the way in which science
has normally progressed when material conditions were favorable.
If, with a view to answering this question, we examine, however
cursorily, the history of the five great arts, we shall find a somewhat
different state of affairs in the case of each. In the end it may be
possible to formulate something like a general rule that shall accord
with all the facts. Let us begin with the greatest and simplest of the
arts, the art of poetry.
In the history of poetry we shall find less evidence of progress than
anywhere else, for it will be seen that its acknowledged masterpieces
are almost invariably near the beginning of a series rather than near
the end. Almost as soon as a clear and flexible language has been formed
by any people, a great poem has been composed in that language, which
has remained not only unsurpassed, but unequalled, by any subsequent
work. Homer is for us, as he was for the Greeks, the greatest of their
poets; and if the opinion could be taken of all cultivated readers in
those nations that have inherited the Greek tradition, it is doubtful
whether he would not be acclaimed the greatest poet of the ages. Dante
has remained the first of Italian poets, as he was one of the earliest.
Chaucer, who wrote when our language was transforming itself from
Anglo-Saxon into English, has still lovers who are willing for his sake
to master what is to them almost a foreign tongue, and yet other lovers
who ask for new translations of his works into our modern idiom; while
Shakespeare, who wrote almost as soon as that transformation had been
accomplished, is universally reckoned one of the greatest of world
poets. There have, indeed, been true poets at almost all stages of the
world's history, but the pre-eminence of such masters as these can
hardly be questioned, and if we looked to poetry alone for a type of the
arts, we should almost be forced to conclude that art is the reverse of
progressive. We should think of it as gushing forth in full splendor
when the world is ready for it, and as unable ever again to rise to the
level of its fount.
The art of architecture is later in its beginning than that of poetry,
for it can exist only when men have learned to build solidly and
permanently. A nomad may be a poet, but he cannot be an architect; a
herdsman might have written the Book of Job, but the great builders are
dwellers in cities. But since men first learned to build they have never
quite forgotten how to do so. At all times there have been somewhere
peoples who knew enough of building to mould its utility into forms of
beauty, and the history of architecture may be read more continuously
than that of any other art. It is a history of constant change and of
continuous development, each people and each age forming out of the old
elements a new style which should express its mind, and each style
reaching its point of greatest distinctiveness only to begin a further
transformation into something else; but is it a history of progress?
Building, indeed, has progressed at one time or another. The Romans,
with their domes and arches, were more scientific builders than the
Greeks, with their simple post and lintel, but were they better
architects? We of to-day, with our steel construction, can scrape the
sky with erections that would have amazed the boldest of mediaeval
craftsmen; can we equal his art? If we ask where in the history of
architecture do its masterpieces appear, the answer must be: "Almost
anywhere." Wherever men have had the wealth and the energy to build
greatly, they have builded beautifully, and the distinctions are less
between style and style or epoch and epoch than between building and
building: The masterpieces of one time are as the masterpieces of
another, and no man may say that the nave of Amiens is finer than the
Parthenon or that the Parthenon is nobler than the nave of Amiens. One
may say only that each is perfect in its kind, a supreme expression of
the human spirit.
Of the art of music I must speak with the diffidence becoming to the
ignorant; but it seems to me to consist of two elements and to contain
an inspirational art as direct and as simple as that of poetry, and a
science so difficult that its fullest mastery is of very recent
achievement. In melodic invention it is so far from progressive that its
most brilliant masters are often content to elaborate and to decorate a
theme old enough to have no history--a theme the inventor of which has
been so entirely forgotten that we think of it as sprung not from the
mind of one man, but from that of a whole people, and call it a
folk-song. The song is almost as old as the race, but the symphony has
had to wait for the invention of many instruments and for a mastery of
the laws of harmony, and so symphonic music is a modern art. We are
still adding new instruments to the orchestra and admitting to our
compositions new combinations of sounds, but have we in a hundred years
made any essential progress even in this part of the art? Have we
produced anything, I will not say greater, but anything as great as the
noblest works of Bach and Beethoven?
Already, and before considering the arts of painting and sculpture, we
are coming within sight of our general law. This law seems to be that,
so far as an art is dependent upon any form of exact knowledge, so far
it partakes of the nature of science and is capable of progress. So far
as it is expressive of a mind and soul, its greatness is dependent upon
the greatness of that mind and soul, and it is incapable of progress. It
may even be the reverse of progressive, because as an art becomes more
complicated and makes ever greater demands upon technical mastery, it
becomes more difficult as a medium of expression, while the mind to be
expressed becomes more sophisticated and less easy of expression in any
medium. It would take a greater mind than Homer's to express modern
ideas in modern verse with Homer's serene perfection; it would take,
perhaps, a greater mind than Bach's to employ all the resources of
modern music with his glorious ease and directness. And greater minds
than those of Bach and Homer the world has not often the felicity to
possess.
The arts of painting and sculpture are imitative arts above all others,
and therefore more dependent than any others upon exact knowledge, more
tinged with the quality of science. Let us see how they illustrate our
supposed law.
Sculpture depends, as does architecture, upon certain laws of proportion
in space which are analogous to the laws of proportion in time and in
pitch upon which music is founded. But as sculpture represents the human
figure, whereas architecture and music represent nothing, sculpture
requires for its perfection the mastery of an additional science, which
is the knowledge of the structure and movement of the human body. This
knowledge may be acquired with some rapidity, especially in times and
countries where man is often seen unclothed. So, in the history of
civilizations, sculpture developed early, after poetry, but with
architecture, and before painting and polyphonic music. It reached the
greatest perfection of which it is capable in the age of Pericles, and
from that time progress was impossible to it, and for a thousand years
its movement was one of decline. After the dark ages sculpture was one
of the first arts to revive; and again it develops rapidly--though not
so rapidly as before, conditions of custom and climate being less
favorable to it--until it reaches, in the first half of the sixteenth
century, something near its former perfection. Again it can go no
further; and since then it has changed but has not progressed. In
Phidias, by which name I would signify the sculptor of the pediments of
the Parthenon, we have the coincidence of a superlatively great artist
with the moment of technical and scientific perfection in the art, and a
similar coincidence crowns the work of Michelangelo with a peculiar
glory. But, apart from the work of these two men, a the essential value
of a work of sculpture is by no means always equal to its technical and
scientific completeness. There are archaic statues that are almost as
nobly beautiful as any work by Phidias and more beautiful than almost
any work that has been done since his time. There are bits of Gothic
sculpture that are more valuable expressions of human feeling than
anything produced by the contemporaries of Buonarroti. Even in times of
decadence a great artist has created finer things than could be
accomplished by a mediocre talent of the great epochs, and the world
could ill spare the Victory of Samothrace or the portrait busts of
Houdon.
As sculpture is one of the simplest of the arts, painting is one of the
most complicated. The harmonies it constructs are composed of almost
innumerable elements of lines and forms and colors and degrees of
light and dark, and the science it professes is no less than that of the
visible aspect of the whole of nature--a science so vast that it never
has been and perhaps never can be mastered in its totality. Anything
approaching a complete art of painting can exist only in an advanced
stage of civilization. An entirely complete art of painting never has
existed and probably never will exist. The history of painting, after
its early stages, is a history of loss here balancing gain there, of a
new means of expression acquired at the cost of an old one.
We know comparatively little of the painting of antiquity, but we have
no reason to suppose that that art, however admirable, ever attained to
ripeness, and we know that the painting of the Orient has stopped short
at a comparatively early stage of development. For our purpose the art
to be studied is the painting of modern times in Europe from its origin
in the Middle Ages. Even in the beginning, or before the beginning,
while painting is a decadent reminiscence of the past rather than a
prophecy of the new birth, there are decorative splendors in the
Byzantine mosaics hardly to be recaptured. Then comes primitive
painting, an art of the line and of pure color with little modulation
and no attempt at the rendering of solid form. It gradually attains to
some sense of relief by the use of degrees of light and less light; but
the instant it admits the true shadow the old brightness and purity of
color have become impossible. The line remains dominant for a time and
is carried to the pitch of refinement and beauty, but the love for solid
form gradually overcomes it, and in the art of the high Renaissance it
takes a second place. Then light-and-shade begins to be studied for its
own sake; color, no longer pure and bright, but deep and resonant, comes
in again; the line vanishes altogether, and even form becomes
secondary. The last step is taken by Rembrandt, and even color is
subordinated to light-and-shade, which exists alone in a world of
brownness. At every step there has been progress, but there has also
been regress. Perhaps the greatest balance of gain against loss and the
nearest approach to a complete art of painting were with the great
Venetians. The transformation is still going on, and in our own day we
have conquered some corners of the science of visible aspects which were
unexplored by our ancestors. But the balance has turned against us; our
loss has been greater than our gain; and our art, even in its scientific
aspect, is inferior to that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
And just because there never has been a complete art of painting,
entirely rounded and perfected, it is the clearer to us that the final
value of a work in that art never has depended on its approach to such
completion. There is no one supreme master of painting but a long
succession of masters of different yet equal glory. If the masterpieces
of architecture are everywhere because there has often been a complete
art of architecture, the masterpieces of painting are everywhere for the
opposite reason. And if we do not always value a master the more as his
art is more nearly complete, neither do we always value him especially
who has placed new scientific conquests at the disposal of art. Palma
Vecchio painted by the side of Titian, but he is only a minor master;
Botticelli remained of the generation before Leonardo, but he is one of
the immortal great. Paolo Ucello, by his study of perspective, made a
distinct advance in pictorial science, but his interest for us is purely
historic; Fra Angelico made no advance whatever, but he practised
consummately the current art as he found it, and his work is eternally
delightful. At every stage of its development the art of painting has
been a sufficient medium for the expression of a great man's mind; and
wherever and whenever a great man has practised it, the result has been
a great and permanently valuable work of art.
For this seems, finally, to be the law of all the arts--the one
essential prerequisite to the production of a great work of art is a
great man. You cannot have the art without the man, and when you have
the man you have the art. His time and his surroundings will color him;
his art will not be at one time or place precisely what it might be at
another; but at bottom the art is the man and at all times and in all
countries is just as great as the man.
Let us clear our minds, then, of the illusion that there is in any
important sense such a thing as progress in the fine arts. We may with
a clear conscience judge every new work for what it appears in itself to
be, asking of it that it be noble and beautiful and reasonable, not that
it be novel or progressive. If it be great art it will always be novel
enough, for there will be a great mind behind it, and no two great minds
are alike. And if it be novel without being great, how shall we be the
better off? There are enough forms of mediocre or evil art in the world
already. Being no longer intimidated by the fetich of progress, when a
thing calling itself a work of art seems to us hideous and degraded,
indecent and insane, we shall have the courage to say so and shall not
care to investigate it further. Detestable things have been produced in
the past, and they are none the less detestable because we are able to
see how they came to be produced. Detestable things are produced now,
and they will be no more admirable if we learn to understand the minds
that create them. Even should such things prove to be not the mere
freaks of a diseased intellect that they seem but a necessary outgrowth
of the conditions of the age and a true prophecy of "the art of the
future," they are not necessarily the better for that. It is only that
the future will be very unlucky in its art.
IV
RAPHAEL
There used to be on the cover of the "Portfolio Monographs" little
medallions of Raphael and Rembrandt, placed there, as the editor, Mr.
Hamerton, has somewhere explained, as portraits of the two most widely
influential artists that ever lived. In the eighteenth century, one
imagines, Rembrandt's presence by the side of Raphael would have been
thought little less than a scandal. To-day it is Raphael's place that
would be contested, and he would be superseded, likely enough, by
Velazquez.
There is no more striking instance of the vicissitudes of critical
opinion than the sudden fall of Raphael from his conceded rank as "the
prince of painters." Up to the middle of the nineteenth century his
right to that title was so uncontested that it alone was a sufficient
identification of him--only one man could possibly be meant. That he
should ever need defending or re-explaining to a generation grown cold
to him would have seemed incredible. Then came the rediscovery of an
earlier art that seemed more frank and simple than his; still later the
discovery of Rembrandt and Velazquez--the romanticist and the
naturalist--and Raphael, as a living influence, almost ceased to exist.
It was but a few years ago that the author of a volume of essays on art
was gravely praised by a reviewer for the purely accidental circumstance
that that volume contained no essay on Raphael; and a little later the
writer of a book on the pictures in Rome "had to confess unutterable
boredom" in the presence of the Stanze of the Vatican.
It is not probable that any critic who greatly valued his reputation, or
who had any serious reputation to value, would take quite this tone;
but, leaving out of consideration the impressionistic and ultra-modern
criticism which ignores Raphael altogether, it is instructive to note
the way in which a critic so steeped in Italian art as Mr. Berenson
approaches the fallen prince. The artist who used to be considered the
greatest of draughtsmen he will hardly admit to be a draughtsman at all,
ranking him far below Pollaiuolo and positively speaking of him as "a
poor creature, most docile and patient." As a colorist and a manipulator
of paint, he places him with Sebastiano del Piombo--that is, among the
mediocrities. Almost the only serious merit, from his point of view,
which he will allow him is a mastery in the rendering of space, shared
in nearly equal measure by Perugino, as, to some extent, by nearly all
the painters of the Umbrian school. For, while he admits that Raphael
was the greatest master of composition that Europe has produced, he
evidently thinks of composition, as do so many other moderns, as a
matter of relatively little importance.
It is not Raphael's popularity that is in question; that is, perhaps, as
great as ever it was. His works, in one form or another of reproduction,
from the finest carbon print to the cheapest lithograph, are still to be
found, in the humblest homes as in the most splendid, in nearly every
quarter of the globe. That popularity was always based on what Berenson
calls the "illustrative" qualities of Raphael's work, on the beauty of
his women, the majesty of his men; on his ability to tell a story as we
like it told and to picture a world that we wish might be real. One may
not be prepared to consider these illustrative qualities so negligible
as do many modern critics, or to echo Mr. Berenson's phrase about "that
which in art ... is so unimportant as what ... we call beauty." One
might point out that the greatest artists, from Phidias to Rembrandt,
have occupied themselves with illustration, and that to formulate the
ideals of a race and an epoch is no mean task. But, for the moment, we
may neglect all that, our present inquiry being why an artist, once
counted the greatest of all, is no longer considered very significant by
those who measure by purely artistic standards rather than by that of
illustrative success and consequent popularity.
We may also leave out of our present consideration Raphael's achievement
in the suggestion of space. It is a very real quality and a high one. It
has doubtless always been an important element in the enjoyability of
Raphael's art, as it is almost the only enjoyable element, for many of
us, in the art of Perugino. But it is an element that has only very
recently been clearly perceived to exist. If it was enjoyed by the
artists and critics, from Raphael's day almost to our own, they were
unconscious of the fact, and the probability is that we enjoy it more
than they did. It will not account for the estimation in which they held
Raphael, and still less will it account for the relative lack of
interest in him to-day.
In truth the reason why many modern critics and painters almost dislike
Raphael is the very reason for which he was so greatly revered. Coming
in the nick of time, at the close of an epoch of investigation, himself
a man of wide culture and quick intellect but of no special originality
or emotional power, he learned from all his predecessors what they had
to teach and, choosing from the elements of their art those which were
suited to his purpose, formed a perfectly balanced and noble style which
was immediately accepted as the only style suitable to the expression of
lofty ideas in monumental form. He became the lawgiver, the founder of
classicism, the formulator of the academic ideal. Not to admire him was
to confess oneself a barbarian, and even those who did not really care
for his art hardly dared to say so. As long as the academic ideal
retained any validity his supremacy endured, and it was only with the
definitive turning of modern art into the paths of romanticism and
naturalism that revolt became possible.
But when the world became tired of Raphaelism it inevitably became
unjust to Raphael. It forgot that it was not he who had made his art the
test of that of others--who had erected what, with him, was a
spontaneous and original creation into a rigid system of laws. It
confounded him with his followers and imitators, and, being bored by
them, began to find the master himself a bore.
For, eclectic as he was by nature, and founder as he was of the academic
regime, the "grand style" of Raphael was yet a new and personal
contribution to art. He drew from many sources, but the principle of
combination was his own. His originality was in that mastery of
composition which no one has ever denied him, but which is very
differently rated as a quality of art by different temperaments. Almost
everything specifically Raphaelesque in his work is the offspring of
that power of design in which he is still the unapproached master.
Modern criticism is right in denying that he was a draughtsman, if by
draughtsman is meant one deeply preoccupied with form and structure for
its own sake. His distinction was to invest the human figure with such
forms as should best fit it to play its part in a scheme of monumental
composition. The "style" of his draperies, so much and so justly
admired, is composition of draperies. He was not a colorist as Titian
was a colorist, or a painter as Velazquez was a painter--he was just so
much of a colorist and a painter as is compatible with being the
greatest of decorative designers. Everything in his finest works is
entirely subordinated to the beauty and expressiveness of composition,
and nothing is allowed to have too great an individual interest for its
predestined part in the final result. Probably he could not have drawn
like Michelangelo or painted like Hals--certainly, when he once
understood himself, he would not have desired to do so.
Even in his early work he showed his gifts as a composer, and some of
the small pictures of his Florentine period are quite perfect in
design. Nothing could be better composed within their restricted field
than the "Madonna del Cardellino" or the "Belle Jardiniere." Nearly at
the end of the period he made his greatest failure, the "Entombment" of
the Borghese Gallery. It was his most ambitious effort up to this time
and he wanted to put everything that he had learned into it, to draw
like Michelangelo and to express emotion like Mantegna. He made a host
of studies for it, tried it this way and that, lost all spontaneity and
all grasp of the ensemble. What he finally produced is a thing of
fragments, falling far below his models in the qualities he was
attempting to rival and redeemed by little or nothing of the quality
proper to himself. But, apparently, it answered its purpose. It freed
him from preoccupation with the work of others. When his great
opportunity came to him, in the commission to decorate the Camera della
Segnatura, his painfully acquired knowledge was sufficiently at his
command to give him no further trouble. He could concentrate himself on
the essential part of his problem, the creation of an entirely
appropriate, dignified, and beautiful decorative design. It was the work
for which he was born, and he succeeded so immediately and so admirably
in it that neither he nor any one else has ever been able to fill such
spaces so perfectly again.
There are fourteen important compositions in the room. The decoration of
the ceiling had already been begun by Sodoma, and Sodoma's decorative
framework Raphael allowed to remain; partly, perhaps, from courtesy,
more probably because its general disposition was admirable and not to
be improved on. If Sodoma had begun any of the larger paintings which
were to fill his frames they were removed to make way for the new work.
There has always been a great deal of discussion as to whether Raphael
himself invented the admirable scheme of subjects by which the room was
made to illustrate the Renaissance ideal of culture with its division
into the four great fields of learning: divinity, philosophy (including
science), poetry, and law. In reality, the question is of little
importance. There seems to be at least one bit of internal evidence, to
be mentioned presently, that even here the artist did not have a
perfectly free hand, as we know he did not later. Whoever thought of the
subjects, it was Raphael who discovered how to treat them in such a way
as to make of this room the most perfectly planned piece of decoration
in the world. Sodoma had left, on the vaulting, four circular medallions
and four rectangular spaces which were to be filled with figure
compositions. In the circles, each directly above one of the great wall
spaces, Raphael placed figures personifying Theology, Philosophy,
Poetry and Justice; in the rectangles he illustrated these subjects with
the stories of "The Fall of Man," "Apollo and Marsyas," and "The
Judgment of Solomon," and with that figure, leaning over a celestial
globe, which must be meant for Science. All of these panels are on
curved surfaces, and Raphael's decorative instinct led him, on this
account and to preserve the supremacy of the great wall spaces below, to
suppress all distance, placing his figures against a background of
simulated gold mosaic and arranging them, virtually, upon one plane.
There is, therefore, no possible question of "space composition" here.
These panels depend for their effect entirely upon composition in two
dimensions--upon the perfect balancing of filled and empty spaces, the
invention of interesting shapes, and the arrangement of beautiful lines.
It is the pattern that counts, and the pattern is perfect.
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