Discourses on Art
We must next speak of the late President's Addresses and Discourses on Art, and of that other art of oratory, which, we shall find, as he conceived it, had something of the same monumental quality he imparted to his painting. His presidential speeches at the annual banquet of the Academy would alone be sufficient to show this; but it is of course to his Addresses and Discourses that we must turn if we would understand his feeling for the two unallied arts.
His success in the one is to be explained, we shall find, in very much the same way as his success in the other. Like most speakers of any distinction, Lord Leighton left nothing to chance. In his speeches and Discourses, as in his pictures, the most careful and exact preparation was made for every effect, however apparently casual it may have seemed. His Discourses were obviously based upon classic models; for their full periods, sonorously and deliberately arranged, have a rhythm that attends to the whole period, and not merely, as is often the way with English speakers, to each sentence in turn.
In quoting from these Discourses, we do so, however, with an eye to his own proper art as a painter, and to his whole theory and sentiment of that art and its functions, and its allied plastic arts, even more than to his art as a speaker. Indeed, the Discourses form a unique contribution to the art criticism of our time; they cover the most interesting and various periods in the history of the Art of Europe; and although the cycle he had mapped out was interrupted before he had completed it—first by illness which postponed the biennial discourse, and then by death—the portions already delivered touch incidentally on the theory and philosophy of all Art in a highly suggestive and eloquent way.
In his first Discourse, delivered to the Academy students on the 10th of December, 1879, the new President took occasion to estimate the modern predicament and general position of Art, as a prelude to the consideration of its special developments, in later Discourses. "I wish in so doing," he said, "to seek the solution of certain perplexities and doubts which will often, in these days of restless self-questioning in which we live, arise in the minds and weigh on the hearts of students who think as well as work."
In answering the question of questions in Art for us to-day—that is, what are its chances in the present, compared with the glory and splendour of its achievement in the past?—Leighton provides us with some memorable passages in his first Discourse. Speaking of the "Evolution of Painting in Italy," he turned it to notable account in his argument, as in this reference to the Florentine school:
"It is, perhaps," he said, "in Tuscany, and notably in Florence, that we see the national temperament most clearly declared in its art, as indeed in all its intellectual productions; here we see that strange mixture of Attic subtlety and exquisiteness of taste, with a sombre fervour and a rude Pelasgic strength which marks the Tuscans, sending forth a Dante, a Brunelleschi, and a Michael Angelo,—a Fiesole, a Boccaccio, and a Botticelli, and we find that eagerness in the pursuit of the knowledge of men and things, which was so characteristic of them, summed up in a Macchiavelli and a Lionardi da Vinci."
A CONTRAST