Harry Quilter

"All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to receive the divine glory; but do not impose upon us any Æsthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art, those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world."—George Eliot.

Before I speak in detail of Giotto's pictures, it will be well to consider very shortly what are the chief characteristics of good painting, and in what proportion the beauty of form, of colour, sentiment and thought, should be combined, in order to give us work of the highest order. And such a preliminary inquiry is the more needful, since the whole history of art is the history of the development of one or more of these characteristics, rather than the development of their just combination. If we look back at the greatest schools of the fifteenth century, we find that each of them had one main object in their art, which they pursued to the detriment of the others. However much, for instance, we may admire the feeling of Raphael, we perceive the lack of the qualities which we find in Titian—however much we delight in Titian or Tintoretto, we feel that there is something lacking which we had in Raphael. And so on with every school, till at last we discover that the deficiency is not one in the individual painter, but is rather owing to the end which he and those of his school proposed to themselves; and whether it be the Florentine striving after expression of emotion, or the Venetian after expression of the truths of shade and colour, each is alike defective. In later times this becomes still more evident in the works of the Dutch painters, and it may be seen at its utmost height in the works of the majority of modern artists, whose aim is commonly restricted not only to one phase of feeling, but to one special manifestation of such phase; not to the seeking of colour, say, as the main object, but to the seeking of one particular colour.

If then every art school which the world has hitherto known, has been in some way partial in its choice of subject and the aims it has proposed to itself, let us think which partiality is the least blameable, and, in fact, what is the best thing that a painter can give us. Is it perfection of form, or of colour, intensity of feeling, or depth of meaning? If we can't have all, what should we choose first and cling to most securely?

Now, at the present day, there is amongst those who care for art, a rapidly-increasing class who give a most decided answer to this question; one, which if we can at all accept its reasoning, will settle the matter for ever. "Art," they say, "has but one real province, that of the simply sensuous; in whatever degree you admit other elements you so far weaken the art." To use the expression of a member of this school, what is wanted is "a solid sensuousness."

Now whatever else is true, this is false—"falser than all fancy painted;" and, should it once come to be believed, will reduce art to a worse slavery than the one from which Giotto rescued it. It would really be hard to conceive that such a notion was really abroad did we not read it in book, essay, and article, and see the consequences of its prevalence in the works of our painters. Just think: here we have an influence notoriously one of the most powerful in the world, one that appeals equally to both sexes, to all classes, ages, and nations of men; and we are asked, or rather told, with the true sic volo, sic jubeo accent, that we must use it for but one thing, and that is the encouragement of sensuous pleasure. It is so utterly contrary to truth, and productive of such evil results, that I really lack the patience to speak of it and its exponents with common courtesy. But leaving on one side the injurious effects of such a doctrine, it is worth while to observe that it is really destructive of art itself. The one vital principle of all art is its freedom; its concern with every fact of nature or humanity, whether it be the form of a cabbage or the sufferings of a Christ. Take your solid sensuous feeling and welcome, but don't forget that that's but one, and a comparatively unimportant, fragment of men's nature; and give us also their power of endurance, their moments of rapture, their deeds of heroism, their every-day sufferings, and their rarer joys. I put that quotation from George Eliot at the top of the chapter, because it expresses far more clearly and beautifully than any words that lie in my power, this essential fact, that art is concerned with no one phase of human feeling or external nature, but finds adequate material in whatever is connected with men's lives.

Well, then, leaving on one side this pestilential heresy of art for art's sake, this talk about gracious curves, and sensuous images, secrets, twilights, silences, and all the rest of the jargon; we find on thinking over the subject carefully, that there is one truth, which art from its very nature is more fitted to express than any other, and indeed that it is a truth which can and should enter into every work of art, and that is the truth of beauty. The more we see of the world and its varying actions and interests, the more certainly do we discover one fact, that there is a kernel of beauty beneath almost the roughest husks and rinds of human nature, and that in the natural world there is also a beauty far superior to that which lies on the surface, a subtle essence of loveliness only to be perceived by earnest students, after long and patient study. All the subtler and rarer manifestations of this beauty, are necessarily disregarded by the mass of men engaged in the hard struggle of life, and it is these which form the great province of the artist. His work is to say to us in his picture "Look at this subject! It is beautiful, not only as you would have thought, for its arrangement of line and colour and the interest of its composition, but because I have penetrated into the depth of the meaning involved; I have seen something which you would not have seen, but yet something which was there, and if you think, you will see that it must have been so." Every picture worthy of the name of great, is thus a record of penetrative insight as well as mere skill of painting; and the greater it is, the nearer it approaches in the complexity of its meaning to the personality of a human being, and receives a different interpretation from every one who sees it.

Again, of landscape painting, why is it that a picture of any natural scene will move hundreds of people who would have derived little or no enjoyment from the scene itself? Why, for instance, could Fred Walker paint a street at Cookham or a country lane in a shower, so as to give an amount of pleasure quite incommensurate with the importance or loveliness of his subject? It is because he saw in it a beauty which cannot be seen, except through him; for it is a beauty made up of the scene itself and his actual feelings about it. Could you photograph instantaneously lane and figures, and rain clouds, in the very colours of nature, you would not gain a picture which would affect you in as powerful a way. Who ever derived real pleasure from a photograph of a landscape? Nature is beautiful always, but representations of nature made by machinery have little beauty, and no interest. I cannot dwell upon this theme—it would lead me too far from my subject—suffice it to say, that in landscape, no less than in figure painting, it is the spiritual insight of the painter which gives the highest value to his work.[49]

To sum up shortly—truth of form, and colour, and expression, will make a fine, perhaps even an impressive picture, but hardly a great one; in order to do that the artist must be possessed of the power of seizing the essence of the scene, of penetrating beneath the first commonplace view of the subject, and finding every element of true meaning and beauty which lies in his subject. If he once does this, he is a true artist, and his errors of detail will become fewer and fewer with time; if he fails in this first requisite, if he has no story to tell except one that every one of his spectators could tell equally well, then, no matter what may be his technical perfection, he will never be a great artist to the end of time. To close this somewhat long, but, I think, necessary digression, just remember what art was when Giotto's work began. It was in a condition of double bondage, first to the service of the Catholic Church, and second to itself, in the perpetuation of traditional methods of work.

Always representing the same thing in the same way, its records had become little more than variations in the arrangement of coloured draperies. Every detail of the composition was executed upon a given plan; the very position of the Virgin's head and the Saviour's hands were absolutely conventional. The study of animals was almost unknown; that of landscape nature absolutely so; all attempt at expression of any feeling but resignation, devotion, or divine peacefulness was perfectly discontinued; laughter, curiosity, or scorn, might have had no existence, for any trace of them which can be found in the pictures of the time. A picture was then nothing but a composition of traditionally graceful lines and pleasant colours, set against a gold background, and offered generally to the service of the Church, in much the same spirit as the coloured German prints of the Madonna are hung up at the little road-side shrines in Italy to this day.

In fact, art was very much in the way to which some good people of the present day would reduce it, and represented nothing save in a partial and symbolical manner. It was wholly unconnected with all the varying incidents and emotions of real life, and existed only to give form to certain traditions, and fulfil certain prescriptive offices. Its aim was not to become of real use to man, to enter into his joys and griefs, to console, and to enlighten him, but only to serve as a faithful servant to the Church. Painting had gazed so long at things heavenly, as to have almost forgotten there was an earth at all, and so to the very ordinary-minded people who fortunately compose nine-tenths of the world's population, its influence was too remote to have much significance. It might represent saints, martyrs, and angels faithfully, but what was wanted were true representations of men and women.

Bearing this well in mind, let us examine Giotto's works, and see what change, if any, he effected in the popular practice, and what is the peculiar merit of his works at this day, when we are six hundred years further on the march of progress.