Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 / Studies from the Chronicles of Rome

by F. Marion Crawford

THE FORUM
Looking West

Of course, I do not mean to say that there was a succession of centuries, or even one century, during which no pictures were painted in Italy, or no sculptures carved. The tradition of the arts survived, like the tradition of Latin poetry, with the same result, that rude works were produced in the early churches and convents. But there was no life in those things; and when, after a long time, after the early Crusades, Byzantine artists came to Italy, their productions were even worse than those of the still ignorant Italians, because they were infinitely more pretentious, with their gildings and conventionalities and expressionless types, and were not really so near the truth. What I mean is that the revival of real art came from a new beginning deep down and out of sight, among humble craftsmen and hard-working artisans, who found out by degrees that their hands could do more than they had been taught to do, and that objects of daily use need not be ugly or merely plain in order to be strong and well made and serviceable. And as this knowledge grew among them with practice and by experiment, they rose to the power of using for new purposes of beauty the old methods of painting and sculpture, which had survived, indeed, but which were of no value to the old-fashioned artists who had learned them from generation to generation, without understanding and without enthusiasm.

The highest of the crafts in the Middle Age was goldsmithing. When almost every other artistic taste had disappeared from daily life in that rough time, the love of personal adornment had survived, and when painters and sculptors were a small band of men, trained to represent certain things in certain ways—trained like a church choir, in fact, to the endless repetition of ancient themes—the goldsmiths had latitude and freedom to their hearts' desire and so many buyers for their work that their own numbers were not nearly so limited as those of 'artists' in the narrow sense. One chief part of their art lay in drawing and modelling, another in casting metals, another in chiselling, and they were certainly the draughtsmen of an age in which the art of drawing was practically lost among painters; and it was because they learned how to draw that so many of them became great painters when the originality of two or three men of genius had opened the way.

One says 'two or three,' vaguely, but the art had grown out of infancy when they appeared, and there was an enormous distance between Cimabue, whom people call the father of painting, and the Cosmas family, of whom the last died about the time that Cimabue was born. But though Cimabue was a noble, the Cosmas family who preceded him were artisans first and artists afterwards, and men of the people; and Giotto, whom Cimabue discovered sketching sheep on a piece of slate with a pointed stone, was a shepherd lad. So was Andrea Mantegna, who dominated Italian art a hundred and fifty years later—so was David, one of the greatest poets that ever lived, and so was Sixtus the Fifth, one of the strongest popes that ever reigned—all shepherds.

It is rather remarkable that although so many famous painters were goldsmiths, none of the very greatest were. Among the goldsmiths were Orcagna, Ghiberti, Ghirlandajo, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Francia, Verrocchio, Andrea del Sarto. But Benvenuto Cellini, the greatest of goldsmiths, was never a painter, and the very greatest painters were never goldsmiths, for Cimabue, Giotto, Mantegna, Lionardo da Vinci, Perugino, Raphael, Michelangelo, all began in the profession that made them the greatest artists of their age. It is very hard to get at an idea of what men thought about art in those times. Perhaps it would be near the truth to say that it was looked upon as a universal means of expression. What strikes one most in the great pictures of that time is their earnestness, not in the sense of religious faith, but in the determination to do nothing without a perfectly clear and definite meaning, which any cultivated person could understand, and at which even a child might guess. Nothing was done for effect, nothing was done merely for beauty's sake. It was as if the idea of usefulness, risen with art from the hand-crafts, underlay the intentions of beauty, or of devotion, or of history, which produced the picture. In those times, when the artist put in any accessory he asked himself: 'Does it mean anything?' whereas most painters of today, in the same case, ask themselves: 'Will it look well?' The difference between the two points of view is the difference between jesting and being in earnest—between an art that compared itself with an ideal future, and the art of today that measures itself with an ideal past. The great painters of the Renascence appealed to men and to men's selves, whereas the great painters of today appeal chiefly to men's eyes and to that much of men which can be stirred through the eye only.

It was not that those early artists were religious enthusiasts, moved by a spiritual faith such as that which inspired Fra Angelico and one or two others. Few of them were religious men; several of them, like Perugino, were freethinkers. It was not, I think, because they looked upon art itself as a very sacred matter, not to be jested with, since they used their art against their enemies for revenge and ridicule. It was rather because everyone was in earnest then, and was forced to be by the nature of the times; whereas people now are only relatively in earnest, and stake their money only where men once staked their lives. That was one reason. Another may be that the greatest painters of those times were practically men of universal genius and were always men of vast reading and cultivation, the equals and often the superiors of the learned in all other branches of science, literature and art. They were not only great painters, but great men and great thinkers, and far above doing anything solely 'for effect.' Lionardo da Vinci has been called the greatest man of the fifteenth century—so has Michelangelo—so, perhaps, has Raphael. They seemed able to do everything, and they have not been surpassed in what they did as painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, fortifiers of cities, mathematicians, thinkers. No one nowadays ever thinks of a painter as being anything but a painter, and people shrug their shoulders at the idea that an artist can do anything of the kind called 'serious' in this age.

EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS