The meaning of pictures

by John C. Van Dyke

The step from ancient to modern art is a long one, but the decorating motive did not die with the Greeks. The Gothic age had perhaps more need for it than the age of Pericles. When painting began to rise in Italy, the chief patron of it was the all-powerful Church. At that time artists were not artists, in name at least. They were mechanics, members of trades-unions called guilds, and were hired to do certain kinds of work like carpenters, masons, stone-cutters, and other mechanics. The painter at that time was often a layer of colors, a gilder of altar-pieces, a modeller in clay, a hewer of marble, a goldsmith, a frame-maker—all in one. When the church was built he was called in to decorate it—that is, to make it beautiful to look at, attractive in appearance. There were certain architectural spaces—ovals, triangles, squares, panels—certain recesses in the apse, the dome, the ceiling, that had to be filled with carvings, designs, pictures. He filled them, and he was praised or criticised as he filled those spaces decoratively or otherwise. He was a decorator pure and simple. Then came Giotto. The same kind of spaces needed filling, but Giotto filled them better than his predecessors. His decorative sense was larger, his taste in color more refined; and he could draw a figure nobler and with more flexibility as regards its muscular play and action. Painting advanced with a bound. It did not do so because of Giotto’s subjects, because he painted the traditional Church themes like those before him; but because Giotto was, for his time, a great craftsman.

A hundred or more years later came Masaccio. Art was once more pushed suddenly forward, for Masaccio rounded the archaic line, drew drapery with ease, fathomed the tones of colors, gave light-and-shade, perspective, values. Then another hundred years to Michael Angelo and Raphael. With these two last-named artists drawing reached a great height. It could not at that time be carried further, and no painters in Florence were so famed for drawing and composition as Michael Angelo and Raphael. They filled space quite perfectly with lines and forms. (Plates [21] and [28].)

Contemporary with Michael Angelo and Raphael lived Leonardo da Vinci. He was an excellent draughtsman but you do not often hear him spoken of as such. His fame rests largely upon his discovery and mastery of light-and-shade. Here was something new with which to fill space. It made no difference that at this time painting often came down from the apse and the ceiling and spread itself upon canvas and wooden panel to make what we to-day call the easel-picture. The decorative motive was not lost sight of for a moment. Leonardo was just as solicitous that the panel should be decoratively beautiful as the wall fresco, and he made it beautiful by his mystery of light-and-shade, by his figures and colors. He was for Florence the perfect craftsman, and many students followed his initiative. Then came Correggio at Parma (Plate [8]) and Giorgione at Venice (Plate [24]), varying the use of light-and-shade and making of it a magnificent background upon which to weave colors. These three men for Italy perfected and completed the decorative use of light-and-shade, and you will always hear them spoken of as the masters of chiaroscuro, the inventors of composition by masses of light and dark.

One moment more to the school of Venice! You will remember that from her infancy Venice was a trader with the East. She was the carrier by sea, the broker, between Europe and that realm of Mahomet lying back of Constantinople which has never known any other art than colored ornament. This Moslem empire and its color-glamour had its influence upon the Venetians through their ships and traders, and when the painters began the fabrication of altar-pieces and mosaics for the Venetian churches it was not line or form or light or shade that primarily interested them. It was color—the color of the old decadent Eastern world—to which they were devoted. The Bellinis began it, their pupils Giorgione and Titian made it glorious, Paolo Veronese gave it final brilliancy and splendor. (Plates 5 and 14.) Again the height was reached. Space-filling at Venice was done primarily by masses of color, and to-day you will always hear the Venetians spoken of as the great colorists in art.

Now have you noticed that I have given you, in this little outline of art-history, the names of the great masters in painting? Have you noticed that the rise of that greatest school of all, the Italian, can be adequately explained on purely decorative grounds? Art was great in Italy primarily because the Italians were great technicians, great decorators, great space-fillers. If you will turn back and read their lives, their adventures, and their quarrels among themselves you will discover that they were not wholly absorbed by the Madonnas and Holy Families and the religious sentiment of art. Many of them had piety and strong belief, and some of them had neither the one nor the other. The subjects were dealt out to all of them alike by the Church; but the manner in which they should be painted was something taught in the bottega of the master, something dictated in each case by the space (the wall or altar) which had to be decorated.

Even the pietists like Fra Angelico were not free of obligation to the decorative. Nor did a single one of them ever wish to be free. Whether they believed in religion or not, whether they had pietistic sentiment or not, they all believed in the beauty of good form and good color. If you will look again at Andrea del Sarto’s Holy Families you will see little holiness about them or in them. They are only Florentine people posed in traditional attitudes, with Andrea’s wife enacting the part of the Madonna. But they are not wanting in decorative charm. Andrea knew how to fill space if not how to paint soul, and it was because he did fill space beautifully in the convent of the Annunziata that his townspeople called him “the faultless painter.” No one ever referred to him as “the faultless thinker” or “the faultless sentimentalist” or “the pietistic painter.”

If you will look again at the pictures of Titian you will see only handsome, well-fed, richly robed Venetians. Their brows are not burdened with Christian ecstasy nor their faces furrowed with classic thought. There is little to them but fine form and fine color. And yet I venture to think that Titian, taking him for all in all, was the greatest painter known to history. It was by and with such men—men devoted to the material and technical side of their art—that Italian craftsmanship rose step by step through three hundred years of severe training until the Renaissance height was reached and great art was the result. The pictorial voice of Italy would never have been heard in this world had it not been for the decorative skill of the workman, the craftsman of the Renaissance, the man we to-day call a technician. And from beginning to end the first consideration of Italian art was not religion, nor nature, nor the ideal nor the classic, but rather the making of a beautiful decoration by the use of lines, lights, shadows, and colors.

XXIV.—GIORGIONE, Madonna and Saints. Cathedral, Castelfranco.

I am aware that you regard all this as decidedly heterodox, and possibly you may think I am distorting the facts to make a point in argument. But no. I am stating the artist’s contention, giving his idea of the development of art—the view held by the ancients and still upheld to-day by the moderns. But let me ramble on a little further, and consider this matter negatively. You know that with Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian art in Italy reached its climax, and that after them came that deluge known to history as the Decadence. But why was there a decadence? What caused it? Nothing more nor less than that the followers of the great men came to regard craftsmanship as something of a trick to be readily picked up, and failed to study with the severity of the early men. They thought to be technicians without labor, to gain facility without skill, to produce great pictures without knowledge. Their predecessors had achieved technique, and the followers thought they had nothing to do but help themselves to the result without bothering about going to the fountain-head. So they tried to combine certain line-effects of Raphael with Titian’s color and Correggio’s light-and-shade. Of course this attempt at a unity of technical excellences was an absurdity. Then, too, they began to think that the sublime or sentimental subject was worth more than good workmanship, and that Michael Angelo’s greatness lay in his mystery-haunted figures, as Raphael’s in his round-faced Madonnas. So they began copying these features, too. And as a result there appeared the ponderous scowling Titans of Salviati and Vasari, the sugary, empty-headed Madonnas of Carlo Dolci and Sassoferrato. They could not draw or paint like the great masters, because their hands had not been thoroughly trained; they could not design decoratively, because their taste had become corrupted; they could not think effectively, because they were following other people’s ideas rather than their own. No wonder there was decadence. It would have been very strange had there been anything else.