The Marriage of Mary. By Raphael. (Brera, Milan.)
Artists, on the other hand, having become infected by the public's original standpoint—the desire for order—either paint pictures like Raphael's "Marriage of Mary,"[49] his "Virgin and Child attended by St. John the Baptist and St. Nicholas of Bari,"[50] and Perugino's "Vision of St. Bernard,"[51] in which the perfectly symmetrical aspect and position of the architecture is both annoying and inartistic, owing to the fact that it was looked at by the artist from a point at which it was orderly and arranged before he actually painted it, and could not therefore testify to his power of simplifying or ordering—but simply to his ability to avail himself of another artist's power, namely, the architect's; or else, having become infected by the public's corrupt standpoint—the desire for disorder and chaos as an end in itself— they paint as Ruysdael, Hobbema and Constable painted—that is to say, without imparting anything of themselves, or of their power to order and simplify, to the content of the picture, lest the desire for disorder or chaos should be thwarted.[52]
This is an exceedingly important point, and its value for art criticism cannot be overrated. If one can trust one's taste, and it is still a purely public taste, it is possible to tell at a glance why one cannot get oneself to like certain pictures in which either initial regularity has been too great, thus leaving no scope for the artist's power, or in which final irregularity is too great, thus betraying no evidence of the artist's power.
Looking at Rubens' "Ceres,"[53] in which the architecture is viewed also in a frontal position, you may be tempted to ask why such a picture is not displeasing, despite the original symmetry of the architecture in the position in which the painter chose to paint it. The reply is simple. Here Rubens certainly placed the architecture full-face; but besides dissimulating the greater part of it in shadow— which in itself produces unsymmetrical shapes that have subsequently to be arranged by tone composition—lie carefully disordered it by means of garlands and festoons, and only then did he exercise his artistic mind in making a harmonious and orderly pictorial arrangement of it, which also included some cupids skilfully placed.
All realism, or Police Art, therefore, in addition to being the outcome of the will to truth which Christianity and its offshoot Modern Science have infused into the arts, may also be the result of the artist's becoming infected either with the public's pure taste, or with the public's corrupted or artist-infected taste, and we are thus in possession of one more clue as to what constitutes a superior work of graphic art.
[46] W. P., Vol. II, pp. 255, 256.
[47] In regard to this point it is interesting to note that Kant, in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, actually called landscape-painting a process of gardening.