But we must not push our argument too hard, for we are not the special advocates of the story-picture. Nor should we, while stating the contention of the public for the subject-picture, be unjust to the contention of the painter for the decorative picture. It is true enough that the religious or classic theme of Renaissance art is not its most enduring quality with us to-day. The pictures live more by their excellences of form and color than by their subjects. Still the painters found no great hardship in having to paint designated themes. They worked easily under imposed conditions. When Mantegna was asked to paint a chapel in the Eremitani at Padua and the life of St. Christopher was given him as a subject he did not cry out against subjects in painting and talk about the absurdity of devotion and patriotism in art. He accepted the conditions and fulfilled them nobly. When Correggio was asked to paint an Assumption of the Madonna in the cupola of the Duomo at Parma he, too, accepted the conditions of subject and architectural surroundings and produced that wonderful circle of whirling angels which, seen from below, seems to rise higher and higher in the dome as though actually disappearing in the blue sky.
XXX.—POUSSIN, Shepherds in Arcadia. Louvre, Paris.
Hundreds of the Renaissance painters filled wall and altar spaces under similar limitations, producing Nativities, Flights into Egypt, Crucifixions, Resurrections, without ever a thought of quarrelling with their themes. They were hackneyed themes, too; but they knew that their success in the estimation of their fellow-craftsmen was largely dependent upon the degree of freshness and originality with which the subjects were treated. One of the astonishing things about Tintoretto at Venice is that, coming at the final day of the Renaissance, he should have handled the old time-worn and art-worn themes with such novelty and power. The Annunciation, the Nativity, the Flight, the Crucifixion in the Scuola San Rocco at Venice are marvellous pieces of originality and invention. Before Tintoretto’s time there were innumerable “Marriages in Cana” painted for the Church, but that wonderful picture in the Sacristy of the Salute at Venice goes beyond them all (Plate [27]). What was it to Titian or Moretto that the early men had painted the “Assumption of the Madonna”? They did it over again with greater originality and splendor.
Nor did the Renaissance painters wholly ignore the audience for which their pictures were intended. When Raphael painted the “Sistine Madonna” (Plate 28), he was most careful about the composition of the group, about the drawing, the draperies, the light, the color, the action of the figures. He studied long and hard every decorative feature of the picture, that it might have grace of line and charm of hue. Yes; and he also studied long and hard the story it should tell to the congregation of the Black Friars’ Church at Piacenza, for whom the picture was originally painted. It hung over the high altar of the church and was so conspicuously placed that the whole kneeling throng could see it. The curtains painted at the top of the picture are supposed to be the real altar-curtains, the ledge at the bottom where the cherubs rest is supposed to be the real altar-top. The angel-throng with the Madonna is coming down from heaven. She is walking on the clouds, coming forward to meet the kneeling worshippers and holding up to them the Child as the Hope of the World. Behind them is a great halo of light made up of angel-heads—the light of the Eternal Day. At the right St. Barbara kneeling turns away her face as though blinded by the radiance; at the left San Sisto the martyr looks up to the Madonna and with one deprecating hand upon his bosom points outward with the other to the congregation as though saying: “Not for me, but for these poor souls in my keeping.” It is impossible to ignore the story told in the picture; impossible to say that it is an intrusion or should have been left out. There is nothing very decorative about the large round eyes of the Mother and Child—they were taken almost verbatim from the old Byzantine mosaics—but again it is impossible not to recognize the look of wonder they express and the specific meaning they must have had for the audience.
All of which would seem to suggest once more that the theme in painting is at least not a hindrance, not a something to be got rid of, but a condition to be dealt with and handled illustratively in the same way that a given space of wall, panel or canvas is a condition to be dealt with decoratively. To say that painting shall reveal only “the appearance of things” and that the significance of those things shall count for naught is one extreme; to say that objects shall depend solely upon their meaning and be regardless of decorative charm is the other extreme. Painters may choose either one or the other as becomes partisans (the great painters have always chosen both), but the spectator should cultivate a broader taste and exhibit a more discriminative mind. To Mr. Whistler, for instance, was given the sense of color, light, air, and the power to produce the glamour and the mystery of these in harmonies, symphonies, nocturnes—all of them decorative things lovely to look upon. Let us by all means admire them and love them; but we should not allow ourselves to think that this alone is art, and all the products of the other men but so much rags and scrap-iron. Mr. Watts has a differently endowed mind. He grasps elemental truths of life and presents them in allegorical forms that are beautiful to think about, and Mr. Whistler does not like that. But never mind; let us listen to Mr. Watts, too. He is a man of imagination, and what he has to say is well worth listening to, though he has not Mr. Whistler’s point of view, and is somewhat lacking in the decorative quality.
Nor need we despise those painters whose equipment leads them to care as little for things decorative as for things symbolical. There are artistic minds that love to deal with facts as facts. Realism is healthful at least, and besides there may be much that is interesting in facts if we only study them long enough. Men like Courbet and Bonnat and Meissonier and Gérôme are not to be ignored. They are great students, great artists of their kind. Their minds move along scientific and archæological grooves, and in that respect they are quite different from the Whistlers, the Millets, and the Delacroixs; but I do not see why they are not entitled to admiration for what they do, especially when they do it so very well.
We should find something to admire in all of them, if we had more judgment and less prejudice. Unfortunately, we allow our likes to dictate to our taste. A certain form of art is agreeable to us, and therefore everything else is bad form and not art at all. Because one likes the Madonnas of Raphael is no reason for condemning the Madonnas of Holbein and Rubens. The landscape of Claude Lorraine is not incompatible with the landscape of Claude Monet. Both are good. But it is very difficult to make people see and believe that. Raising ourselves above prejudice is not easy of accomplishment. It is what is called, broadly, education—a difficult attainment to many, an absolute impossibility to some.
Indeed when we come to sum up these lectures we find their burden to be chiefly “Raising ourselves above prejudice.” The special pleas of painters, whether for realization or decoration or illustration, are, of course, to be heard and accepted in part; but we are not to believe in any one of them to the utter exclusion of the others. Each is excellent of its kind, so far as it goes; but in our final judgment of the work of art we may conclude that the sum of the whole is greater than any of its parts, and that truth to nature, individuality, imagination, pictorial poetry, decorative beauty, subject—all the elements—go to the making of what is called “great art.” Titian, Rubens, and Velasquez scorned none of these elements, advocated none of them exclusively; and you and I, who help make up the public, can perhaps do no better than base our principles of taste upon the works of those famed masters of the craft.