PHOTOS. BY VARELA
ornamentation such as interlacings, and billets, began to disappear and their place was filled by local vegetation. There is plenty of this new decorative sculpture in the choir of Notre Dame de Paris, which was begun in 1163 and finished before 1190, the work of the lay-school, l’Isle de France. The sculptors went out into the fields to search for the leaves and buds that would best suit their purpose. Every man wished his block of stone to become a capital whose beauty distinguished it from all the rest.[168] The work of this period is wonderfully original, but it is far from being realistic.
The general composition of the Paris capitals resembles that of those of Santiago Cathedral, but is not nearly so beautiful. The foliage, too, that grew in the neighbourhood of Paris, and was adapted by the sculptors there, is quite different from the foliage of the Santiago capitals, which seem to have been copied from the cabbages which form the staple food of the Gallegan peasants. These cabbages shoot up with long thick stems more than a yard above ground before they spread out their long, curling leaves, and more nearly resemble wild bracken than English cabbages. The fact that the leaves on the Santiago capitals seem to be full of sap and lifelike, must likewise be due to the sculptor’s keen observation and study of the original plant as it grew in its native soil. Viollet le Duc says that it was in Notre Dame de Paris that this stone vegetation first unfolded its leaves, and that other sculptors of northern France took thence their ideas; but it was not till some years later that they learned to represent the leaves as they grew. It needed consummate art to form, out of many parts, one combined whole which should resemble an individual and real plant or animal; even the imaginary and fantastic animals that twelfth-century artists represented as creeping out from between the foliage looked real and lifelike. The zenith of ornamental sculpture, in the opinion of Viollet le Duc, was reached at that moment when Roman tradition had disappeared, and when the search after reality had not yet imposed its exigencies upon the sculptor. This was the most brilliant period of the French school, and it lasted for about twenty-five years, between 1199 and 1215. The new school spread its influence into every province of France and even into foreign countries, but at the same time the work of each province preserved a certain individuality of its own. In Bourgogne there was a tendency even to exaggerate nature.
When the lay schools were formed, when art had come forth from the monasteries and taken its place in the family and in the workshop of the artisan, the members of each corporation were free to do as they pleased with their blocks of marble or stone, they had no written rules to follow; the father taught his son, and the master explained his method to his disciple or apprentice. It seems to have been their first care to break with the past, and to study nature in the woods and fields in search of fresh inspiration. “Alas,” cries Viollet le Duc, “that in Art progress should lead us to a zenith and then force us to descend!” Sculpture falls at last through her very zeal for reality.
The capitals of Santiago like those in France were sculptured before the mason lifted them to their place. Each workman was responsible for the work of his own capital, and we often find the name of the proud sculptor cut into the stone.
But how did such perfect sculpture spring up in this remote town of Galicia, contemporaneously with, if not earlier than, the best French work? “Pour former l’artiste,” says the writer we have been quoting, “il est besoin d’un public appréciateur, pénétrable au langage de l’art; pour former le public, il faut un art comprehensible, en harmonie âvec les idées du moment.” And what sort of a public had Santiago in those days. Was it not one of the most brilliant of the world’s intellectual centres? All this exquisite sculpture was produced during Galicia’s second Golden Age. In the Middle Ages there was a far stronger tie between the artist and the public than there is in our day. “Le moyen age n’aurait pas fait un si grand nombre de sculpteurs pour plaire a’ une coterie, l’art s’était democratisé autant qu’il pent l’être.” In our day art speaks only to the few, the chosen and the cultivated few, with money in their pockets. It is a dead language to four-fifths of the world, not because the people have rejected it, but because it has neglected the people.
One of the glories of the lay schools of the thirteenth century, remarks Viollet le Duc, is the way in which they helped to spread art among the people. From the moment that you begin to teach the people that art is only for a caste, a select few, you cannot continue to spread it abroad. You cannot command taste. Art is a tree which can only spread and grow when it is given fair play. “Le régime féodal n’avait ni Acadèmies ni conseils de batiments civils, ni comités protecteurs des Arts.” In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
