[357]. It has never been sufficiently noticed that the few sculptors who came after Michelangelo had no more than a mere workaday relation with marble. But we see at once that it is so when we think of the deeply intimate relation of great musicians to their favourite instruments. The story of Tartini’s violin, which shattered itself to pieces on the death of the master—and there are a hundred such stories—is the Faustian counterpart of the Pygmalion legend. Consider, too, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Johannes Kreisler the Kapellmeister”; he is a figure worthy to stand by the side of Faust, Werther and Don Juan. To see his symbolic significance and the inward necessity of him, we have only to compare him with the theatrical painter-characters in the works of contemporary Romanticists, who are not in any relation whatever with the idea of Painting. As the fate of 19th-Century art-romances shows—a painter cannot be made to stand for the destiny of Faustian art.
(E. T. A. Hoffmann, the strange many-sided genius who was at once musician, caricaturist, novelist, critic, wit, able public official and winebibber, at one time in his career wrote in the character of “Johannes Kreisler.” See his Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier and Der Kater Murr, also Thomas Carlyle’s “Miscellanies” and the biographical sketches of Hoffmann in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and the Ency. Brit.—Tr.)
[358]. Although gunpowder is much older than the Baroque, its application in real earnest to long-ranging fire-arms was only accomplished during the 16th Century. It cannot be said that there was any technical reason why 100 years should have elapsed between the first use of powder in European warfare and the first effective soldier’s fire-arm. No careful student of this period of military history can fail to be struck with this fact—the significance of which, not being technical, must be cultural. Much the same could be said of printing, which, so far as concerns technical factors, might just as well have been invented in the 10th as in the 15th Century.—Tr.
[359]. Uffizi, Florence.—Tr.
[360]. Sistine Chapel, Rome.—Tr.
[361]. “Doctor Marianus.”—Tr.
[362]. Vatican.—Tr.
[363]. In Renaissance work the finished product is often quite depressingly complete. The absence of “infinity” is palpable. No secrets, no discoveries.
[364]. Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on plein-air principles. The world-feeling that underlies it is so thoroughly[thoroughly] irreligious, so worthless for any but a “religion of reason” so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction, even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes us as hollow and false. One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to secularize the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.
[365]. State Museum, Berlin.—Tr.