The Gate of Appreciation: Studies in the Relation of Art to Life

by Carleton Eldredge Noyes

A voice: Oh, that's beautiful. I love that.

A man: Foreshortened; well, I should say so! But I say, you can't remember all these pictures.

The other man: Let's get out of this!

The guide, indicating a picture of the Grand Canal: This one has been restored.

A girl's voice: Why, that's the house where we are staying!

The guide: The next picture . . .

The squad shuffles out of range.

This little comedy, enacted in fact and here faithfully reported, is not without its pathos. These people are "studying art." They really want to understand, and if possible, to enjoy. They have visited galleries and seen many pictures, and they will visit other galleries and see many more pictures before their return home. They have read guide-books, noting the stars and double stars; they have dipped into histories of art and volumes of criticism. They have been told to observe the dramatic force of Giotto, the line of Botticelli, the perfect composition of Raphael, the color of Titian; all this they have done punctiliously. They know in a vague way that Giotto was much earlier than Raphael, that Botticelli was rather pagan than Christian, that Titian belonged to the Venetian school. They have come to the fountain head of art, the very works themselves as gathered in the galleries; they have tried to remember what they have read and to do what they have been told; and now they are left still perplexed and unsatisfied.

The difficulty is that these earnest seekers after knowledge of art have laid hold on partial truths, but they have failed to see these partial truths in their right relation to the whole. The period in which an artist lived means something. His way of thinking and feeling means something. The quality of his color means something. But what does his picture mean? These people have not quite found the key by which to piece the fragments of the puzzle into the complete design. They miss the central fact with regard to art; and as a consequence, the ways of approach to the full enjoyment of art, instead of bringing them nearer the centre, become for them a network of by-paths in which they enmesh themselves, and they are left to wander helplessly up and down and about in the blind-alleys of the labyrinth. The central fact with regard to art is this, that a work of art is the expression of some part of the artist's experience of life, his vision of some aspect of the world. For the appreciator, the work takes on a meaning as it becomes for him in his turn the expression of his own actual or possible experience and thus relates itself by the subtle links of feeling to his own life. This is the central fact; but there are side issues. Any single work of art is in itself necessarily finite. Because of limitations in both the artist and the appreciator the work cannot express immediately and completely of itself all that the author wished to convey; it can present but a single facet of his many-sided radiating personality. What is actually said may be reinforced by some understanding on the beholder's part of what was intended. In order to win its fullest message, therefore, the appreciator must set the work against the large background out of which it has proceeded.

A visitor in the Salon Carré of the Louvre notes that there are arrayed before him pictures by Jan van Eyck and Memling, Raphael and Leonardo, Giorgione and Titian, Rembrandt and Metsu, Rubens and Van Dyck, Fouquet and Poussin, Velasquez and Murillo. Each one bears the distinctive impress of its creator. How different some of them, one from another,—the Virgin of Van Eyck from the Virgin of Raphael, Rembrandt's "Pilgrimsat Emmaus" from the "Entombment" by Titian. Yet between others there are common elements of likeness. Raphael and Titian are distinguished by an opulence of form and a luxuriance of color which reveal supreme technical accomplishment in a fertile land under light-impregnated skies. The rigidity and restraint of Van Eyck and Memling suggest the tentative early efforts of the art of a sober northern race. To a thoughtful student of these pictures sooner or later the question comes, Whence are these likenesses and these differences?