I repeat, then, that he who does not select from beautiful nature with studious love shows little faith in her beauty, and thence come carelessness and unwillingness to portray her, and then a headlong fall into the conventional. He, however, who finds the beautiful in everything, or rather, he who despises antique art and calls it conventional, even though it be by Phidias, is quite as conventional himself in his realism. His wish is to be considered naturalistic and realistic at all hazards, even to denying nature itself, in case it reminds him of anything classic (as we have already seen), and at last he goes so far as to puzzle his brains and struggle to arrange the model and draperies so as to make them appear naturalistic.
I have seen an artist get into a rage because his draperies would not come upon the natural model just as he wished, and who kept tossing them about and disarranging them so that they should not seem to be artificially disposed. I observed to him that he was really arranging them artificially, so that they should not appear to be so arranged. He was making a seated figure in a cloak. After the model had seated himself, and thrown the cloak about him in folds which were perfectly natural, and fell beautifully about his body and knees, the artist kept foolishly changing them, putting them out of their proper place, because, he said, that as they came naturally, they looked as if they had been artificially disposed.
ARRANGEMENT OF DRAPERIES.
"But that is not so," said I. "They arrange themselves naturally, and you keep disarranging them exactly like those artists whom you blame for being imitators of the antique and conventionalists, and you are in this neither more nor less than a conventionalist like them, and even worse, for they always strive to put the folds in their proper place, in a certain number and a certain disposition; and though this is detestable and tiresome pedantry, because it destroys that variety which is the first attribute of nature, still they are not renegades to it as you are, when you thus obstinately insist on placing the folds where they cannot possibly be, with the pretence that otherwise they would seem adjusted. You, even more than they, are an illogical conventionalist."
But to be just, I must say that at this time the neophytes of the new school were few and scattered. The school, indeed, is new only in so far as it has carried us into the excessive, the negative, and the illogical; for the school of the veristi is as old as art itself, and its principles are correct. Indeed, strictly speaking, it has one single principle, the imitation of nature; but what the ancients meant was imitation of life in its perfection, while the moderns (at least some of them) mean all life, all nature, even though it be ugly. More than this, they prefer the ugly and deformed, not perceiving that the deformity of nature is outside of true nature, since any defect alters the essential character of nature, which consists of a harmony of parts answering to beauty. In a word, the deformed, which is the same thing as the ugly, is nature debased, and thus ceases to be nature. I am well aware that the veristi deny that they prefer vulgar and ugly nature; and if their denial were justified by their works, I should entirely agree with them, and my discourse on this subject would be entirely futile. But saying is not the same as doing.
RETURN TO FLORENCE WITH A FRESH MIND.
I returned to Florence quite restored in health, strengthened by the example of the works of art in Rome, and inspirited by the brotherly words of those old and venerated artists, who, alas! now sleep the eternal sleep, or rather, who have waked from the brief sleep of life to one eternal day. The discovery of the famous head and neck of that Trasteverina had cured me of my prejudiced belief that the ancients corrected nature according to their completely ideal mode of looking at it—a belief which induces in the mind of the artist a weak faith, slight esteem of nature, and thence an unwillingness to imitate it, and an effrontery in correcting it.
Before going to work in my studio I wished again to see and study, in view of my new convictions, our own monuments. I made the tour of the churches, palaces, and public and private galleries, just as if I was a stranger. To many things indeed I might call myself really a stranger, for I had either never seen them, or but slightly and superficially. From this examination I came to the conclusion that the artists of all times studied their predecessors, and only imitated nature after having studiously selected what was conformable to the idea which first rose in their minds. Henceforth the way was clear, the light shone upon it, and the objects of art which I examined came out distinctly and really in their true aspect. Never to my intellect had the veil which covers the subtle and recondite reasons of the beautiful seemed so clear and transparent; and I felt tranquil, satisfied, strong, and ready to devote myself to my new works in the studio. One incident, however, did momentarily disturb this peace and security of mine.
AN ADVENTURE IN THE PITTI.
One day I was in the Pitti Gallery, and passing through the room where the two statues of Cain and Abel are placed, I saw a youth who was drawing from the latter. He seemed from his aspect to be a foreigner. I spoke to him not only to assure myself of this fact, but also (I confess) because it gave me pleasure to see him copying my statue, and I wished by exchanging a few words with him to taste still more strongly this pleasure, which, for the rest, is excusable in a young author. Approaching him I said—