STUDY OF A HEAD
"We have seen Art," he concluded, "such Art as it was given to Rome to achieve—rise and fall with the virtues of the Roman people. From the lips of the most seeing of its sons we know the solvent in which those virtues perished: that solvent was the greed, the insatiate greed, of gold—'auri sacra fames'—the rot of luxury. 'More deadly than arms,' Juvenal magnificently exclaims, 'luxury has swept down upon us, and avenges the conquered world.'
...... 'Sævior armis
Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem.'"
From Rome we are taken, in the fifth Discourse, delivered on the 10th December, 1887, to the making and the racial re-shaping of Italy, that began with the fifth century. All through these Discourses the speaker laid great stress upon the ethnological history of the European races, as he turned to one after another, and essayed to trace their artistic idiosyncracy and their artistic evolution. Italy is, to the ethnologist as well as to the art student, one of the most interesting countries in Europe. Rome almost alone, among the Italian provinces, retained her racial and æsthetic peculiarities, unaffected to the end of the chapter; and even when she wielded "the sceptre of the Christian world," still she produced no one flower of native genius, we are reminded, unless Giulio Romano, that "brawny and prolific plagiarist of Raphael," as Leighton well stigmatizes him, be thought a genius; which criticism forbid!
It was different with Tuscany, where the introduction of new racial elements had a distinct effect. This "new amalgam" produced in the field of Art, we are told, an infinitely nobler and more exquisite result than had grown out of the old conditions. Still, however, the old Etruscan allied grace and harsh strength lingered on in the art of Christian Etruria. "Of the subtle graces which breathe in that art, from Giotto to Lionardo, it is needless to speak; and surely in the rugged angularities of a Verocchio, a Signorelli, or a Donatello, and in the shadow of sadness which broods over so much of the finest Florentine work, the more sombre phase of the Etruscan temper still lives on."
In the end, if we try to account for the artistic power and mastery of one people in Italy, and the lack of that power in another, we are driven to the conclusion that the source of the artistic gift is hidden and obscure. One may cite the opposite examples of Venice and of Genoa,—the one so masterfully artistic; the other so impotent. And yet the same favouring conditions, à priori, might have seemed to exist for both.
With the intermingling of the peoples, and the rejuvenescence of the physical life, came the spiritual outburst of Christianity. And the influence, again, of Christianity upon Italian Art was immense. In place of joy in the ideals of bodily perfection, "loathing of the body and its beauty, as of the vehicle of all temptation, a yearning for a life in which the flesh should be shaken off, a spirit of awe, of pity, and of love, became the moving forces that shaped its creations."
After great religious periods, we often find that great scientific periods follow. The ethical impulse that religion gives, is converted into other forms of energy, by reason of man's awakened consciousness of the meaning of things, physical and material as well as spiritual.
