As with the study of Italian pictures, so it is with Italy herself. The country is divided, not in partes tres, but in two: a foreground and a background. The foreground is the property of the guide-book and of its product, the mechanical sight-seer; the background, that of the dawdler, the dreamer and the serious student of Italy. This distinction does not imply any depreciation of the foreground. It must be known thoroughly before the middle distance can be enjoyed: there is no short cut to an intimacy with Italy. Nor must the analogy of the devotional picture be pushed too far. The famous paintings, statues and buildings of Italy are obviously the embodiment of its historic and artistic growth; but they have become slightly conventionalized by being too long used as the terms in which Italy is defined. They have stiffened into symbols, and the life of which they were once the most complete expression has evaporated in the desiccating museum-atmosphere to which their fame has condemned them. To enjoy them, one must let in on them the open air of an observation detached from tradition. Since they cannot be evaded they must be deconventionalized; and to effect this they must be considered in relation to the life of which they are merely the ornamental façade.
Thus regarded, to what an enchanted region do they form the approach! Like courteous hosts they efface themselves, pointing the way, but giving their guests the freedom of their domain. It is not too fanciful to say that each of the great masterpieces of Italy holds the key to some secret garden of the imagination. One must know Titian and Giorgione to enjoy the intimacy of the Friulian Alps, Cima da Conegliano to taste the full savour of the strange Euganean landscape, Palladio and Sansovino to appreciate the frivolous villa-architecture of the Brenta, nay, the domes of Brunelleschi and Michael Angelo to feel the happy curve of some chapel cupola in a nameless village of the hills.
“Une civilisation,” says Viollet-le-Duc, “ne peut prétendre posséder un art que si cet art pénètre partout, s’il fait sentir sa présence dans les œuvres les plus vulgaires.” It is because Italian art so interpenetrated Italian life, because the humblest stonemason followed in some sort the lines of the great architects, and the modeller of village Madonnas the composition of the great sculptors, that the monumental foreground and the unregarded distances behind it so continually interpret and expound each other. Italy, to her real lovers, is like a great illuminated book, with here and there a glorious full-page picture, and between these, page after page of delicately-pencilled margins, wherein every detail of her daily life may be traced. And the pictures and the margins are by the same hand.
III
As Italy is divided into foreground and background, so each city has its perspective; its premier plan asterisked for the hasty traveller, its middle distance for the “happy few” who remain more than three days, and its boundless horizon for the idler who refuses to measure art by time. In some cases the background is the continuation, the amplification, of the central “subject”; in others, its direct antithesis. Thus in Umbria, and in some parts of Tuscany and the Marches, art, architecture, history and landscape all supplement and continue each other, and the least imaginative tourist must feel that in leaving the galleries of Siena or Florence for the streets and the surrounding country, he is still within the bounds of conventional sight-seeing.
In Rome, on the contrary, in Milan, and to some extent in Venice, as well as in many of the smaller towns throughout Italy, there is a sharp line of demarcation between the guide-book city and its background. In some cases, the latter is composed mainly of objects at which the guide-book tourist has been taught to look askance, or rather which he has been counselled to pass by without a look. Goethe has long been held up to the derision of the enlightened student of art because he went to Assisi to see the Roman temple of Minerva, and omitted to visit the mediæval church of Saint Francis; but how many modern sight-seers visit the church and omit the temple? And wherein lies their superior catholicity of taste? The fact is that, in this particular instance, foreground and background have changed places, and the modern tourist who neglects Minerva for Saint Francis is as narrowly bound by tradition as his eighteenth-century predecessor, with this difference, that whereas the latter knew nothing of mediæval art and architecture, the modern tourist knows that the temple is there and deliberately turns his back on it.
IV
Perhaps Rome is, of all Italian cities, the one in which this one-sidedness of æsthetic interest is most oddly exemplified. In the Tuscan and Umbrian cities, as has been said, the art and architecture which form the sight-seer’s accepted “curriculum,” are still the distinctive features of the streets through which he walks to his gallery or his museum. In Florence, for instance, he may go forth from the Riccardi chapel, and see the castle of Vincigliata towering on its cypress-clad hill precisely as Gozzoli depicted it in his fresco; in Siena, the crenellated palaces with their iron torch-holders and barred windows form the unchanged setting of a mediæval pageant. But in Rome for centuries it has been the fashion to look only on a city which has almost disappeared, and to close the eyes to one which is still alive and actual.
The student of ancient Rome moves among painfully-reconstructed débris; the mediævalist must traverse the city from end to end to piece together the meagre fragments of his “epoch.” Both studies are absorbing, and the very difficulty of the chase no doubt adds to its exhilaration; but is it not a curious mental attitude which compels the devotee of mediæval art to walk blindfold from the Palazzo Venezia to Santa Sabina on the Aventine, or from the Ara Cœli to Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, because the great monuments lying between these points of his pilgrimage belong to what some one has taught him to regard as a “debased period of art”?
Rome is the most undisturbed baroque city of Italy. The great revival of its spiritual and temporal power coincided with the development of that phase of art of which Michael Angelo sowed the seed in Rome itself. The germs of Bernini and Tiepolo must be sought in the Sistine ceiling and in the Moses of San Pietro in Vincoli, however much the devotees of Michael Angelo may resent the tracing of such a lineage. But it is hard at this date to be patient with any form of artistic absolutism, with any critical criteria not based on that sense of the comparative which is the nineteenth century’s most important contribution to the function of criticism. It is hard to be tolerant of that peculiar form of intolerance which refuses to recognize in art the general law of growth and transformation, or, while recognizing it, considers it a subject for futile reproach and lamentation. The art critic must acknowledge a standard of excellence, and must be allowed his personal preferences within the range of established criteria: æsthetically, the world is divided into the Gothically and the classically minded, just as intellectually it is divided into those who rise to the general idea and those who pause at the particular instance. The lover of the particular instance will almost always have a taste for the Gothic, which is the personal and anecdotic in art carried to its utmost expression, at the cost of synthetic effect; but if he be at all accessible to general ideas, he must recognize the futility of battling against the inevitable tendencies of taste and invention. Granted that, from his standpoint, the art which evolved from Michael Angelo is an art of decadence: is that a reason for raging at it or ignoring it? The autumn is a season of decadence; but even by those who prefer the spring, it has not hitherto been an object of invective and reprobation. Only when the art critic begins to survey the modifications of art as objectively as he would study the alternations of the seasons, will he begin to understand and to sympathize with the different modes in which man has sought to formulate his gropings after beauty. If it be true in the world of sentiment that il faut aimer pour comprendre, the converse is true in the world of art. To enjoy any form of artistic expression one must not only understand what it tries to express, but know