VI
And now, with the 16th Century, the decisive epochal turn begins for Western painting. The trusteeship of architecture in the North and that of sculpture in Italy expire, and painting becomes polyphonic, “picturesque,” infinity-seeking. The colours become tones. The art of the brush claims kinship with the style of cantata and madrigal. The technique of oils becomes the basis of an art that means to conquer space and to dissolve things in that space. With Leonardo and Giorgione begins Impressionism.
In the actual picture there is transvaluation of all the elements. The background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as a fill-up and, as space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance. A development sets in that is paralleled in no other Culture, not even in the Chinese which in many other respects is so near to ours. The background as symbol of the infinite conquers the sense-perceptible foreground, and at last (herein lies the distinction between the depicting and the delineating styles) the depth-experience of the Faustian soul is captured in the kinesis of a picture. The space-relief of Mantegna’s plane layers dissolves in Tintoretto into directional energy, and there emerges in the picture the great symbol of an unlimited space-universe which comprises the individual things within itself as incidentals—the horizon. Now, that a landscape painting should have a horizon has always seemed so self-evident to us that we have never asked ourselves the important question: Is there always a horizon, and if not, when not and why not? In fact, there is not a hint of it, either in Egyptian relief or in Byzantine mosaic or in vase-paintings and frescoes of the Classical age, or even in those of the Hellenistic in spite of its spatial treatment of foregrounds. This line, in the unreal vapour of which heaven and earth melt, the sum and potent symbol of the far, contains the painter’s version of the “infinitesimal” principle. It is out of the remoteness of this horizon that the music of the picture flows, and for this reason the great landscape-painters of Holland paint only backgrounds and atmospheres, just as for the contrary reason “anti-musical” masters like Signorelli and especially Mantegna, paint only foregrounds and “reliefs.” It is in the horizon, then, that Music triumphs over Plastic, the passion of extension over its substance. It is not too much to say that no picture by Rembrandt has a foreground at all. In the North, the home of counterpoint, a deep understanding of the meaning of horizons and high-lighted distances is found very early, while in the South the flat conclusive gold-background of the Arabic-Byzantine picture long remained supreme. The first definite emergence of the pure space-feeling is in the Books of Hours of the Duke of Berry (that at Chantilly and that at Turin) about 1416. Thereafter, slowly and surely, it conquers the Picture.
The same symbolic meaning attaches to clouds. Classical art concerns itself with them no more than with horizons, and the painter of the Renaissance treats them with a certain playful superficiality. But very early the Gothic looked at its cloud-masses, and through them, with the long sight of mysticism; and the Venetians (Giorgione and Paolo Veronese above all) discovered the full magic of the cloud-world, of the thousand-tinted Being that fills the heavens with its sheets and wisps and mountains. Grünewald and the Netherlanders heightened its significance to the level of tragedy. El Greco brought the grand art of cloud-symbolism to Spain.
It was at the same time that along with oil-painting and counterpoint the art of gardens ripened. Here, expressed on the canvas of Nature itself by extended pools, brick walls, avenues, vistas and galleries, is the same tendency that is represented in painting by the effort towards the linear perspective that the early Flemish artists felt to be the basic problem of their art and Brunellesco, Alberti and Piero della Francesca formulated. We may take it that it was not entirely a coincidence that this formulation of perspective, this mathematical consecration of the picture (whether landscape or interior) as a field limited at the sides but immensely increased in depth, was propounded just at this particular moment. It was the proclamation of the Prime-Symbol. The point at which the perspective lines coalesce is at infinity. It was just because it avoided infinity and rejected distance that Classical painting possessed no perspective. Consequently the Park, the deliberate manipulation of Nature so as to obtain space and distance effects, is an impossibility in Classical art. Neither in Athens nor in Rome proper was there a garden-art: it was only the Imperial Age that gratified its taste with ground-schemes of Eastern origin, and a glance at any of the plans of those “gardens” that have been preserved[[306]] is enough to show the shortness of their range and the emphasis of their bounds. And yet the first garden-theorist of the West, L. B. Alberti, was laying down the relation of the surroundings to the house (that is, to the spectators in it) as early as 1450, and from his projects to the parks of the Ludovisi and Albani villas,[[307]] we can see the importance of the perspective view into distance becoming ever greater and greater. In France, after Francis I (Fontainebleau) the long narrow lake is an additional feature having the same meaning.
The most significant element in the Western garden-art is thus the point de vue of the great Rococo park, upon which all its avenues and clipped-hedge walks open and from which vision may travel out to lose itself in the distances. This element is wanting even in the Chinese garden-art. But it is exactly matched by some of the silver-bright distance-pictures of the pastoral music of that age (in Couperin for example). It is the point de vue that gives us the key to a real understanding of this remarkable mode of making nature itself speak the form-language of a human symbolism. It is in principle akin to the dissolution of finite number-pictures into infinite series in our mathematic: as the remainder-expression[[308]] reveals the ultimate meaning of the series, so the glimpse into the boundless is what, in the garden, reveals to a Faustian soul the meaning of Nature. It was we and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless range of vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving—to be alone with endless space. The great achievement of Le Nôtre and the landscape-gardeners of Northern France, beginning with Fouquet’s epoch-making creation of Vaux-le-Vicomte, was that they were able to render this symbol with such high emphasis. Compare the Renaissance park of the Medicean age—capable of being taken in, gay, cosy, well-rounded—with these parks in which all the water-works, statue-rows, hedges and labyrinths are instinct with the suggestion of long range. It is the Destiny of Western oil-painting told over again in a bit of garden-history.
But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history. At a distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future. The Baroque park is the park of the Late season, of the approaching end, of the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of mortality. It is perspective that begins to awaken a premonition of something passing, fugitive and final. The very words of distance possess, in the lyric poetry of all Western languages, a plaintive autumnal accent that one looks for in vain in the Greek and Latin. It is there in Macpherson’s “Ossian” and Hölderlin, and in Nietzsche’s Dionysus-Dithyrambs, and lastly in Baudelaire, Verlaine, George and Droem. The Late poetry of the withering garden avenues, the unending lines in the streets of a megalopolis, the ranks of pillars in a cathedral, the peak in a distant mountain chain—all tell us that the depth-experience which constitutes our space-world for us is in the last analysis our inward certainty of a Destiny, of a prescribed direction, of time, of the irrevocable. Here, in the experience of horizon as future, we become directly and surely conscious of the identity of Time with the “third dimension” of that experienced space which is living self-extension. And in these last days we are imprinting upon the plan of our megalopolitan streets the same directional-destiny character that the 17th Century imprinted upon the Park of Versailles. We lay our streets as long arrow-flights into remote distance, regardless even of preserving old and historic parts of our towns (for the symbolism of these is not now prepotent in us), whereas a megalopolis of the Classical world studiously maintained in its extension that tangle of crooked lanes that enabled Apollinian man to feel himself a body in the midst of bodies.[[309]] Herein, as always, practical requirements, so called, are merely the mask of a profound inward compulsion.
With the rise of perspective, then, the deeper form and full metaphysical significance of the picture comes to be concentrated upon the horizon. In Renaissance art the painter had stated and the beholder had accepted the contents of the picture for what they were, as self-sufficient and co-extensive with the title. But henceforth the contents became a means, the mere vehicle of a meaning that was beyond the possibility of verbal expression. With Mantegna or Signorelli the pencil sketch could have stood as the picture, without being carried out in colour—in some cases, indeed, we can only regret that the artist did not stop at the cartoon. In the statue-like sketch, colour is a mere supplement. Titian, on the other hand, could be told by Michelangelo that he did not know how to draw. The “object,” i.e., that which could be exactly fixed by the drawn outline, the near and material, had in fact lost its artistic actuality; but, as the theory of art was still dominated by Renaissance impressions, there arose thereupon that strange and interminable conflict concerning the “form” and the “content” of an art-work. Mis-enunciation of the question has concealed its real and deep significance from us. The first point for consideration should have been whether painting was to be conceived of plastically or musically, as a static of things or as a dynamic of space (for in this lies the essence of the opposition between fresco and oil technique), and the second point, the opposition of Classical and Faustian world-feeling. Outlines define the material, while colour-tones interpret space.[[310]] But the picture of the first order belongs to directly sensible nature—it narrates. Space, on the contrary, is by its very essence transcendent and addresses itself to our imaginative powers, and in an art that is under its suzerainty, the narrative element enfeebles and obscures the more profound tendency. Hence it is that the theorist, able to feel the secret disharmony but misunderstanding it, clings to the superficial opposition of content and form. The problem is purely a Western one, and reveals most strikingly the complete inversion in the significance of pictorial elements that took place when the Renaissance closed down and instrumental music of the grand style came to the front. For the Classical mind no problem of form and content in this sense could exist; in an Attic statue the two are completely identical and identified in the human body.
The case of Baroque painting is further complicated by the fact that it involves an opposition of ordinary popular feeling and the finer sensibility. Everything Euclidean and tangible is also popular, and the genuinely popular art is therefore the Classical. It is very largely the feeling of this popular character in it that constitutes its indescribable charm for the Faustian intellects that have to fight for self-expression, to win their world by hard wrestling. For us, the contemplation of Classical art and its intention is pure refreshment: here nothing needs to be struggled for, everything offers itself freely. And something of the same sort was achieved by the anti-Gothic tendency of Florence. Raphael is, in many sides of his creativeness, distinctly popular. But Rembrandt is not, cannot be, so. From Titian painting becomes more and more esoteric. So, too, poetry. So, too, music. And the Gothic per se had been esoteric from its very beginnings—witness Dante and Wolfram. The masses of Okeghem and Palestrina, or of Bach for that matter, were never intelligible to the average member of the congregation. Ordinary people are bored by Mozart and Beethoven, and regard music generally as something for which one is or is not in the mood. A certain degree of interest in these matters has been induced by concert room and gallery since the age of enlightenment invented the phrase “art for all.” But Faustian art is not, and by very essence cannot be, “for all.” If modern painting has ceased to appeal to any but a small (and ever decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because it has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street can understand. It has transferred the property of actuality from contents to space—the space through which alone, according to Kant, things are. And with that a difficult metaphysical element has entered into painting, and this element does not give itself away to the layman. For Phidias, on the contrary, the word “lay” would have had no meaning. His sculpture appealed entirely to the bodily and not to the spiritual eye. An art without space is a priori unphilosophical.