Art Principles with Special Reference to Painting. Ernest Govett

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СКАЧАТЬ been one of the first understandings in life after the primal instincts of self-preservation and the continuation of the species. Some of the sketches made by the cave men of France are equal to anything of the kind produced in a thousand years of certain ancient civilizations, commencing countless centuries after the very existence of the cave men had been forgotten; and even if executed now, would be recognized as indicating the possession of considerable talent by the artists. The greatest poem ever written was given birth in a country near which barbaric hordes had recently devastated populous cities, and wrecked a national fabric with which were interwoven centuries of art and culture. That the author of this poem had seen great works of art is certain, or he could not have conceived the shield of Achilles, but the laboured sculpture that had fired his imagination, and the legends which had perhaps been the seed of his masterpieces were doubtless buried with his own records beneath the tramp of numberless mercenaries. Fortunately here and there the human voice could draw from memory's store, and so the magic of Homer was whispered by the dying to the living; but even his time and place are now only vaguely known, and he remains like the waratah on the bleached pasture of some desert fringe—a solitary blaze of scarlet where all else is drear and desolate.

       PLATE 1

Head of Cephren, 4th Egyptian Dynasty (Cairo Museum) Chaldean Head: About 2600 B.C. (Louvre)

      (See page 7)

      Strong is the root of art, though frail the flower. Stifled in sun-burnt ground ere it can welcome the smile of light; fading with the first blast of air upon its delicate shoots; shrivelling back to dust when the buds are ready to break; or falling in the struggle to spread its branches after its beautiful blossoms have scattered their fragrance around: whatever condition has brought it low, it ever fights again—ever seeks to assure mankind that while it may droop or disappear, its seed, its heart, its life, are imperishable, and surely it will bloom again in all its majesty. Sometimes with decades it has run a fitful course; sometimes with centuries; sometimes with millenniums. It has heralded every civilization, but its breath is freedom, and it flourishes and sickens only with liberty. Trace its course in the life of every nation, and the track will be found parallel with the line of freedom of thought. A solitary plant may bloom unimpeded far from tyranny's thrall, but the art and soul of a nation live, and throb, and die, together.

Egypt, Babylon, Crete, Greece, Rome, tell their stories through deathless monuments, and all are alike in that they demonstrate the dependence of art expansion upon freedom of action and opinion. An art rises, develops another and another, and they proceed together on their way. Sooner or later comes catastrophe in the shape of crushing tyranny which curbs the mind with slavery, or steel-bound sacerdotal rules which say to the artist "Thou shalt go no further," or annihilation of nation and life. What imagination can picture the expansion of art throughout the world had its flight been free since the dawn of history? Greece reached the sublime because its mind was unfettered, but twenty or thirty centuries before Phidias, Egyptian art had arrived at a loftier plane than that on which the highest plastic art of Greece was standing but a few decades before the Olympian Zeus uplifted the souls of men, while whole civilizations with their arts had lived and died, and were practically forgotten.

It is to be observed that while in its various isolated developments, art has proceeded from the immature to the mature, there has been no general evolution, as in natural life, but on the other hand there seems to be a limit to its progress. So far as our imagination can divine, no higher reaches in art are attainable than those already achieved. The mind can conceive of nothing higher than the spiritual, and this cannot be represented in art except by means of form; while within the range of human intelligence, no suggestion of spiritual form can rise above the ideals of Phidias. Of the purely human form, nothing greater than the work of Praxiteles and Raphael can be pictured on our brains. There may be poets who will rival Homer and Shakespeare, but it is exceedingly doubtful. In any case we must discard the law of evolution as applicable to the arts, with the one exception of music, which, on account of the special functioning of its signs, must be put into a division by itself.[a]

      But although there has been no general progression in art parallel with the growth of the sciences and civilization, there have been, as already indicated, many separate epochs of art cultivation in various countries, sometimes accompanied by the production of immortal works, which epochs in themselves seem to provide examples of restricted evolution.4 It is desirable to refer to these art periods, as they are commonly called, for the purpose of removing, if possible, a not uncommon apprehension that they are the result of special conditions operating an æsthetic stimulus, and that similar or related conditions must be present in any country if the flame of art there is to burn high and brightly.5 The well-defined periods vary largely both in character and duration, the most important of them—the Grecian development and the Italian Renaissance—covering two or three centuries each, and the others, as the French thirteenth century sculpture expansion, the English literary revival in the sixteenth century,6 and the Dutch development in painting in the seventeenth, lasting only a few decades. These latter periods can be dispensed with at once because they were each concerned with one art only, and therefore can scarcely have resulted from a general æsthetic stimulus. But the Grecian and Italian movements applied to all the arts. They represented natural developments from the crude to the advanced, of which all nations produce examples, and were only exceptional in that they reached higher levels in art than were attained by other movements. But there is no evidence to show that they were brought about by special circumstances outside of the arts themselves. While there were national crises preceding the one development, there was no trouble of consequence to herald the other, nor was there any parallel between the conditions of the two peoples during the progress of the movements. A short reference to each development will show that its rise and decline were the outcome of simple matter-of-fact conditions of a more or less accidental nature, uninfluenced by an æsthetic impulse in the sense of inspiration.

      The most common suggestion advanced to account for the rise in Grecian art, is that it was due to the exaltation of the Greek mind through the victories of Marathon, Platæa, and Salamis. That a people should be so trampled upon as were the Greeks; that their cities should be razed, their country desolated, and their commerce destroyed; that notwithstanding all this they should refuse to give way before enemies outnumbering them twenty, fifty, or even a hundred to one; and that after all they should crush these enemies, was no doubt a great and heroic triumph, likely to exalt the nation and feed the imagination of the people for a long time to come; but that these victories were responsible for the lofty eminence reached by the Greek artists, cannot be maintained. From what we know of Calamis, Myron, and others, it is clear that Grecian art was already on its way to the summit reached by Phidias when Marathon and Salamis were fought, though the victories of the Greek arms hastened the development for the plain reason that they led to an increased demand for works of art. And the decline in Grecian art resulted purely and simply from a lessened demand. Though this was the reason for the general decay, there was a special cause for the apparent weakening with the commencement of the fourth century B.C. In the fifth century Phidias climbed as high in the accomplishment of ideals as the imagination could soar. He reached the summit of human endeavour. Necessarily then, unless another Phidias arose, whatever in art came after him would appear to mark a decline. But it is scarcely proper to put the case of Phidias forward for comparative purposes. He carried the art of sculpture higher than it is possible for the painter to ascend, and so we should rather use the giants of the fourth century—Scopas, Praxiteles, Lysippus, Apelles—as the standards to be compared with the foremost spirits of the Italian Renaissance—Raphael and Michelangelo—for each of these groups achieved the human ideal, though failing with the spiritual ideal established by Phidias.

      It must be remembered that all good art means slow work—long thinking, СКАЧАТЬ