Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art.

by P. H. Emerson

Like the Greeks have the leading men of the modern French school adhered to nature,—a school in our mind more akin to the Greek school at its best than any other, and for the simple reason that it is more loyal to nature than any art has been since the time of Apelles. |Horizon-line.| As an example of the kinship between the two schools we quote Woltmann and Woermann, who tell us the Greeks “placed their horizon abnormally high according to our ideas; and distributed the various objects over an ample space in clear and equable light.” Now modern painters have happily discarded all laws for the position of the horizon-line, and common sense shows that the height of the horizon naturally depends on how much foreground is included in the picture. The angle included by the eye vertically as well as horizontally varies with the distance of the object from us, and the only law therefore is to include in the picture as much as is included by the eye; and this of course varies with the position of the motif or chief point of interest. |Millet.| Millet has a good many high horizons, and we feel they are normal not abnormal. On this point therefore we think the Greeks were very advanced.

Early Christian Art.

Early Christian art.

Leaving Greek art, we now come to the art of the early Christians. Woltmann and Woermann tell us that “Early Christian art does not differ in its beginnings from the art of antiquity.... The only perceptible differences are those differences of subject which betoken the fact that art has now to embody a changed order of religious ideas, and even from this point of view the classical connection is but gradually, and at first imperfectly, severed.... At the outset Christianity, as was inevitable from its Jewish origin, had no need for art. In many quarters the aversion to works of material imagery ...—the antagonism to the idolatries of antiquity—remained long unabated. Yet when Christianity, far outstepping the narrow circle of Judaism, had been taken up by classically educated Greeks and Romans, the prejudice against works of art could not continue to be general, nor could Christendom escape the craving for art which is common to civilized mankind. The dislike of images used as objects of worship did not include mere chamber decorations, and while independent sculpture found no footing in the Christian world, or at least was applied only to secular and not to religious uses, painting, on the other hand, found encouragement for purely decorative purposes, in the execution of which a characteristically Christian element began to assert itself by degrees.”

The catacombs.

The pure Christian element began to assert itself silently in decorative work in the catacombs, and “these cemeteries are the only places in which we find remains of Christian paintings of earlier date than the close of the fourth century.” These works, however, “constituted no more than a kind of picture writing,” as any one who has seen them can certify. But this symbolism got very mixed with pagan stories, and we get Orpheus in a Phrygian cap, and Hermes carrying a ram, both representing the Good Shepherd. At other times the artists seem to have set themselves to represent a Christ constructed on their knowledge of the attributes ascribed to him, and we get a beardless youth approaching “closely to the kindred types of the classical gods and heroes.” “Mary appears as a Roman matron, generally praying with uplifted hands.” |St. Peter’s statue at Rome.|Peter and Paul “appear as ancient philosophers,” and the well-known bronze statue of St. Peter, in the cathedral dedicated to him at Rome, is no less than a bonâ fide antique statue of a Roman consul. Here we have the same neglect of nature, and the bad work always to be expected from this neglect and from enslaved minds.

Mosaics.

The mosaics of Christian art were also handed down from classical antiquity. Though rarely found in the catacombs, this art was being much used above ground for architectural decoration. This art, as Woltmann and Woermann rightly say, was “only a laborious industry, which by fitting together minute coloured blocks produces a copy of a design, which design the workers are bound by. They may proceed mechanically, but not so flimsily and carelessly as the decorative painters.” From about A.D. 450 we are told that church pictures become no longer only decorative, but also instructive. Here then was a wrong use of pictorial art—it is not meant to be symbolic and allegorical, or to teach, but to interpret the poetry of nature.

A new conception of Christ it seems now appeared in the mosaics,—a bearded type,—and this time we get the features of Zeus represented. |The emperors' school.| By means of the mosaics a new impulse was given to art, and in A.D. 375 a school was founded by the Emperors Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian, of which we read, “The schools of art now once more encourage the observance of traditions; strictness of discipline and academical training were the objects kept in view; and the student was taught to work, not independently by study from nature, but according to the precedent of the best classical models.”

Byzantine art.