A Child's Guide to Pictures

by Charles H. Caffin

But note the character of these pictures. Sometimes, for example, the Virgin is seated on a throne, surrounded by angels and apostles, saints and bishops; or at other times, Christ and his apostles are represented in some scene from the New Testament story. The first presents an entirely imaginary arrangement of the figures; the second makes no pretence to representing the scene as it may have actually occurred. The apostles, many of whom were fishermen, have heads as noble as philosophers; robes arranged in beautiful folds of drapery, and conduct themselves with the grace and dignity of some fine classic statue. Every line, every arrangement of form and space, is designed to assist in building up a composition of ideal beauty.

Or with the same motive the artist would treat some subject of Greek mythology, such as the story of Psyche. This again was a response to a strong need of the public. Not so wide a one as the religious need, but still a strong one, for among the cultivated classes there was an intense interest in the old classic myths.

Or from the same idealistic point of view the artist would decorate the walls of a City Hall. To this also he was impelled by a strong public need: the desire of the citizens to express their pride in themselves and their city by means of beauty. For by this time the Italians had learned to express all their highest ideals in forms of ideal beauty.

But a change came. The Italians, long a prey to foreign enemies and quarrelling among themselves, at length lost their liberty and their pride in themselves. Other nations surpassed them in learning and culture; and even Religion lost its intense hold on the public mind. With the loss of high ideals the glory of idealistic painting in Italy waned and disappeared.

But artists of other lands continued to regard the idealistic painting of the Italians as a model of what came to be called “the Grand Style.” During the Seventeenth Century Spanish artists imitated it in their religious pictures. But elsewhere it was used chiefly for great works of decoration; as by Rubens in Flanders (Belgium) and Le Brun in France. The former, for example, built up a series of magnificent compositions in honor of Marie de Médicis, the wife of Henry IV of France. They are now in the Louvre in Paris. Le Brun’s vast paintings and tapestries, that decorate the palace of Versailles, were designed to extol the glory in war and peace of Louis XIV, who at the end of his long reign left his country poor and his subjects miserable.

In fact, idealistic painting that had once been great, because nourished by an intense religious motive or by the motive of civic pride, had sunk to being a means of flattering the vanity of monarchs or pandering to the luxury of the idle rich. So during the Eighteenth Century it continued to languish. The form alone remained, growing less and less beautiful; the old spirit of it was dead.

A new one, however, arose and had a brief spell of life, for it was based on the awakened desire of the French people for liberty. In the years before the Revolution David painted idealistic pictures. He chose his subjects from the history of the Roman Republic, in order that by the example of its patriotism he might stir his own countrymen to action. The models for his figures he took from old Roman sculpture. His pictures fitted the temper of the time and helped the cause of liberty; but when Napoleon made himself Emperor David passed into his service, and the high motive for his idealistic pictures ceased.

Later painters have turned again to Italy, and by building up imposing arrangements of figures have tried to make the spirit of Italian idealism live again. They have not succeeded. Perhaps for two reasons. First, that the old Italian compositions are mostly of an allegorical character, and allegory does not interest the modern mind. We are interested in realities. Second, that those compositions were based on the beauty of form of the human figure; the artists made their forms as perfect as possible and placed them in an artificial arrangement that would produce a pattern or composition of beauty and dignity. But modern art is more concerned with rendering the natural appearances of the world; and, if it idealises them, does so, as we shall presently see, by means of light and atmosphere.

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Meanwhile, that Seventeenth Century, in which Italian idealistic painting dwindled, saw a new outburst of the naturalistic or realistic motive in two parts of the world; simultaneously, in Spain and Holland.