The meaning of pictures

by John C. Van Dyke

And now we are confronted with the fact that if there are many men of many minds in this world of ours there are also many men with many eyes. No two pairs of eyes see alike. Are we to infer then that any one pair of eyes or any one race or its school of painters sees truth and all the others see only error? Is truth on one side of the Alps and falsehood on the other? Titian in Italy made a different report of nature from Rembrandt in Holland—which told the truth? Does truth abide exclusively in the Orient or the Occident? A landscape in Japan by Hokousai, how very different from a Seine landscape by Daubigny! But is either of them false? And after all does not something of truth—I do not say the whole of it—consist in the fidelity with which the point of view is maintained? We must cultivate liberality in this matter. For Creation ordained that there should be a Babel of eyes, all seeing differently, and consequently there must be a standard of truth peculiar to each individual.

II.—BENOZZO GOZZOLI, Adoration of Kings (detail). Riccardi Palace, Florence.

Does “truth to nature” then mean to each man what his eyes tell him and to each painter what the sincerity of his make-up enables him to record? Yes, certainly; but, mind you, it may be a very limited truth, not necessarily an absolute truth, not a world-embracing truth applicable to all classes and conditions of men. The child with his chalk-lined horse may be maintaining his childish point of view with the utmost fidelity, but it is apparent from his drawing that he does not fully comprehend his subject, does not see the object in its entirety. The horses by Spinello Aretino, shown in his Campo Santo pictures at Pisa, are not very different from the child’s conception. They contain more truths without by any means being exhaustive. They are still crude, but true enough as regards the maintenance of the point of view. The fine horses of Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Riccardi palace fresco (Plate [2]), are an improvement upon those of Spinello without being complete, and the Gattamelata horse of Donatello, the Colleoni of Verrocchio, may make us enthusiastic about the special truth of their pushing power, and again not make a full report of the horse. Perhaps when we reach the height of realism and come to a horse as seen by Gérôme or Rosa Bonheur we are not so pleased with it as with Benozzo’s square-framed beast; but that may be for a cause which we shall discuss hereafter. The completeness of the truth, the fulness of the report, may not be denied, however wearisome it may be as art.

Now we must add to this individuality, which everyone possesses in measure and which must warp the vision somewhat, a further influence or bias which the individual takes from his race and his country. I have already asked Pascal’s question about truth being on one side of the Alps and error on the other side. Applied to the arts it is pertinent to inquire: Is a Siena landscape by Pintoricchio false because it does not look like a Vosges landscape by Courbet? Not at all. They are both true—that is, not only true to locality but true to that native flavor which makes a pine-tree in Japanese art look “Japanesey” and a pine-tree in Norwegian art look Norwegian.[^[1]] Moreover, each landscape is true in exhibiting its time, its country, and its race. The Pintoricchio shows the attenuated purist landscape of the Tuscan country—the landscape admirably suited to serve as a background for the sensitive, sentimental saints he depicted. It speaks truly enough for a portion of Italy during the Early Renaissance, that portion which lies in the Tuscan country; but it goes no farther. Giovanni Bellini at Venice was Italian, too; but he was at this very time producing quite a different landscape—one that spoke for the mountainous country lying to the north of Venice, but not for Tuscany. The landscape by Courbet is not so limited. It is nineteenth-century work and has the advantage of the great advance made in landscape work since the Renaissance; and yet no one could fail to see that it was French, that it depicted a French country in a French way. With all its large truth of appearance it shows its localized Parisian point of view. To be sure Paris in Courbet’s day was very cosmopolitan. His vision was broader, his grasp of truths greater than the sculptor who carved, in bas-relief, Sargon feasting with his wives; but nevertheless the local truths of France and of Assyria are each apparent in each.

[1]. “If we will take the trouble to look at the wood-cuts illustrative of some given celebrity as they appear in the illustrated newspapers of various nations, we shall see that, though copied very mechanically from the same photograph, Mr. Gladstone becomes a Frenchman in France, a Spaniard in Spain, and, though less visible to us, in the same way the Continental, the Spaniard, or the Frenchman becomes English in the engraving of an English magazine. Even in the handling of the tool called the graver which cuts the wood there is, then, a nationality.”—John La Farge, in International Monthly, Nov., 1900.

Is every artist then biassed in his conception of truth by his race and age; and is every art significant of its environment? Certainly. Thus far in the world’s history all art has been provincial—expressive at least of a nationality if not of a locality. The art of Holland in the sixteenth century never travelled beyond the dikes and dunes except in the case of a genius like Rembrandt. As a truth for universal application a roystering party by Jan Steen would go no farther to-day than a garden party under the cherry blossoms by Hiroshighe. Both are peculiarly provincial and belong in their own lands with their own peoples. Outside of their own countries they meet with appreciative understanding only from the artistic few. A century ago no one in the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic world cared very much for Dutch art, and not fifty years ago Japanese art was regarded as little more than an interesting absurdity because of its unfamiliar perspective. Neither of them at this day has any world-wide reach. They have not travelled to us, but the cosmopolitan art-lover has gone out and discovered them. Transportation may eventually make us all cosmopolitan—make all art kin; but it has not done so as yet.

Of course all painting is not so strictly local as the pictures of Jan Steen and Hiroshighe would suggest. A work of art, in subject and in method, appeals more strongly perhaps to its own people than to any other—an Osiris to an Egyptian, a Zeus to a Greek, and a Madonna to a Christian. But the carved Buddha, seated with crossed legs, open palms, and a vacant stare into space appeals only to a Buddhist. It will not travel elsewhere except as a curio. Nor will the Osiris or the Madonna go very far. But what of a Zeus! what of a Hermes by Praxiteles! what of the Greek ideal! Have they not a universal quality about them—a grasp of universal truths—that carry them beyond the frontier lines of Hellas? Think for a moment of the “Venus of Milo.” Has it not something supremely true about it that a person of any nationality cannot choose but see? And think for a moment of the “Ariadne” of Tintoretto. Again is there not something here that compels the admiration of the Asiatic as well as the European and the American? There is individual and local and racial truth in all these works, but there is also universal truth—truth applicable to all humanity.

III.—VAN DYCK, Cornelius van der Geest. National Gallery, London.