These obvious observations on the importance of the Arts, lead to the question so often discussed, and at no time more important than ours—on the causes that raised them at various times, and among different nations—on the means of assisting their progress, and how to check their decay. Of much that has been said on it, much must be repeated, and something added.
The Greeks commonly lead the van of the arguments produced to answer this question. Their religious and civil establishments; their manners, games, contests of valour and of talents; the Cyclus of their Mythology, peopled with celestial and heroic forms; the honours, the celebrity of artists; the serene Grecian sky and mildness of the climate, are the causes supposed to have carried that nation within the ken of perfection.
Without refusing to each of these various advantages its share of effect, History informs us that if Religion and Liberty prepared a public, and spread a technic taste over all Greece, Athens and Corinth must be considered as the principal nurses of Art, without whose fostering care the general causes mentioned could not have had so decided an effect; for nothing surely contributed so much to the gradual evolution of Art, as that perpetual opportunity which they presented to the artist of public exhibition; the decoration of temples, halls, porticoes, a succession of employments equally numerous, important, and dignified: hence that emulation to gain the heights of Art; the fervour of public encouragement, the zeal and gratitude of the artists were reciprocal: Polygnotus prepared with Cimon what Phidias with Pericles established, on public taste, Essential, Characteristic, and Ideal Styles.
Whether human nature admitted of no more, or other causes prevented a farther evolution of powers, nothing greater did arise; Polish, Elegance, and Novelty supplied Invention: here is the period of decay; the Art gradually sunk to mediocrity, and its final reward—Indifference.
The artist and the public are ever in the strictest reciprocity: if the Arts flourished nowhere as in Greece, no other nation ever interested itself with motives so pure in their establishment and progress, or allowed them so ample a compass. As long as their march was marked with such dignity, whilst their union excited admiration, commanded attachment, and led the public, they grew, they rose; but when individually to please, the artist attempted to monopolize the interest due to Art, to abstract by novelty and to flatter the multitude, ruin followed. To prosper, the Art not only must feel itself free, it ought to reign: if it be domineered over, if it follow the dictate of Fashion or a Patron's whims, then is its dissolution at hand.
To attain the height of the Ancient was impossible for Modern Art, circumscribed by narrower limits, forced to form itself rapidly and on borrowed principles; still it owes its origin and support to nearly similar causes. During the fourteenth, and still more in the course of the fifteenth century, so much activity, so general a predilection for Art spread themselves over the greater part of Italy, that we are astonished at the farrago of various imagery produced at those periods. The artist and the Art were indeed considered as little more than craftsmen and a craft; but they were indemnified for the want of honours, by the dignity of their employment, by commissions to decorate churches, convents, and public buildings.
Let no one to whom truth and its propagation are dear, believe or maintain that Christianism was inimical to the progress of Arts, which probably nothing else could have revived. Nothing less than Christian enthusiasm could give that lasting and energetic impulse whose magic result we admire in the works that illustrate the period of Genius and their establishment. Nor is the objection that England, France, and Germany professed Christianity, built churches and convents, and yet had no Art, an objection of consequence; because it might with equal propriety be asked, why it did not appear sooner in Italy itself. The Art forms a part of social education and the ultimate polish of man, nor can it appear during the rudeness of infant societies; and as, among the Western nations, the Italians were the first who extricated themselves from the bonds of barbarism and formed asylums for industry, Art and Science kept pace with the social progress, and produced their first legitimate essays among them.
How favourably religious enthusiasm operated on Art, their sympathetic revolutions still farther prove; they flourished, they languished, they fell together. As zeal relented and public grandeur gave way to private splendour, the Arts became the hirelings of Vanity and Wealth; servile they roamed from place to place, ready to administer to the whims and wants of the best bidder: in this point of sight we can easily solve all the phænomena which occur in the history of Art,—its rise, its fall, eclipse, and re-appearance in various places, with styles as different as various tastes.