Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art.

by P. H. Emerson

There was a struggle at this period for the study of nature, and the tyranny of the Church was being thrown off; there was then hope that art would at last advance, and advance it did. What was wanting was a deeper insight into nature, for nature is not a book to be read at a glance, she requires constant study, and will not reveal all her beauties without much wooing. |Thirteenth century sketch-book.| And though we read of a sketch-book of this time, the thirteenth century, in which appears a sketch of a lion, which “looks extremely heraldic,” and to which the artist has appended the remark, “N.B.—Drawn from life,” this in no way surprises us, for have we not been seriously told in this nineteenth century by the painters of catchy, meretricious water-colours, with reds, blues and greens such as would delight a child, that they had painted them from nature; pictures in which no two tones were correct, in which detail, called by the ignorant, finish, had been painfully elaborated, whilst the broad facts of nature had been ignored. Such work is generally painted from memory or photographs. Happily work of this kind will never live, however much the gullible public may buy it. Next we read that “the germs of realism already existing in art by degrees unfold themselves further, and artists venture upon a closer grip of nature.” |Niccola Pisano.| Here, then, were the signs of coming success, and the great effect of these gradual changes was first manifested in the work of Niccola Pisano, who “made a sudden and powerful return to the example of the antique.” All honour to this man, who was an epoch-maker, who based his conception “upon a sudden and powerful return to the example of the antique, of the Roman relief.” His work is by no means naturalistic or perfect, but it was enough for one man to do such a herculean task as to ignore his own times and rise superior to them. |Cimabue.| Painting, however, took no such quick turn, but Cimabue was the first of those who were to bring it into the right way. The principal works ascribed to him, however, are not authenticated.

Giotto.

Another epoch-maker, Giotto, now appears. He seems to have been a remarkable man in himself, which however hardly concerns us. The historian of his works says, “The bodies still show a want of independent study of nature; the proportions of the several members (as we know by the handbook of Cemieno hereafter to be mentioned) were regulated by a fixed system of measurement;” again, “The drawing is still on the whole conventional, and the modelling not carried far.” His trees and animals are like toys. Yet we read that “their naturalism is the very point which the contemporaries of Giotto extol in his creations,” but, as Woltmann and Woermann say, this must be accepted according to the notion entertained of what nature was, and we are by this means able to see how crude the notions of nature can become in educated men when they neglect the study of it. But from all this evidence we gather that Giotto’s intellect was great, and that his strides towards the truthful suggesting of nature were enormous. His attempts too at expression are wonderful for his age, see his “Presentations,” the figures are almost natural notwithstanding their crude drawing; he got some of the charm and life of the children around him. We read that in some of his pictures, he took his models direct from nature, as also did Dante in his poetry, but like Dante he attempted at times the doctrinal in his pictures, as in the “Marriage of St. Francis and Poverty,” he tried in fact what many moderns are still trying to do, and daily fail to do, namely, to teach by means of their pictures—a fatal error. Doctrinal subjects are unsuitable for pictorial art, and will never live. Who cares now for Giotto’s “Marriage of St. Francis and Poverty”? but who would not care for a landscape or figure subject taken by Giotto from the life and landscape of his own times?—it would be priceless. Owing to circumstances, we hear that he had to put “much of his art at the service of the Franciscans,” and though not a slave to them, yet we read this disgusted him with the monkish temper. In 1337 Giotto died, but he had done much. Without Kepler there might have been no Newton, so without Giotto there might have been no Velasquez.

The guilds.

Artists at this time belonged to one of the seven higher of the twenty-one guilds into which Florentine craftsmen were divided, namely, that of the surgeons and apothecaries (medici and speziali). Here art and science were enrolled in the same guild, and so were connected, as they always will be, for the study of nature is at the foundation of both, the very first principle of both. Together they have been enslaved, persecuted, and their progress hampered; together they have endured; and now to-day together they stand out glorious in their achievements, free to study, free to do. The one is lending a hand to the other, and the other returns the help with graceful affection. Superstition, priestcraft, tyranny, all their old persecutors are daily losing power, and will finally perish, as do all falsehoods.

Summary.

We thus leave the art of the Middle Ages, as we left the catacombs, with a wish never to see any more of it. One feels the deepest sympathy for great intellects like Giotto, and his greatest followers, whose lots were cast in times of darkness, and we cannot but respect such as struggled with this darkness, and fought to gain the road to nature’s fountains of truth and beauty. But at the same time, though we may in these pictures see a graceful pose here, a good expression there, or a beautiful and true bit of colour or quality elsewhere, yet we cannot get away from the subject-matter of many of the pictures, which, allegorical and doctrinal as they are, do not lie within the scope of art, and above all one cannot in any way get rid of the false sentiment and untruthfulness of the whole work. Such works will always be interesting to the historian and to the philosopher, but beyond that, to us they are valueless, and we would far rather possess a drawing by Millet than a masterpiece by Giotto.

When abroad, and being actually persuaded of their great littleness, we have been moved with pity for the victims we have met, victims of the pedant and the guide-book, who are led by the nose, and stand gaping before middle-age monstrosities, whilst some incompetent pretender pours into their ears endless cant of grace, spirituality, lustrous colouring, mellifluous line, idealism, et id genus omne, until, bewildered and sick at heart, they return home to retail their lesson diluted, and to swell the number of those who pay homage at the shrine of pedantry and mysticism. Had these travellers spent their short and valuable time in the fields of Italy, they would have “learnt more art,” whatever they may mean by that term of theirs, than they ever did in the bourgeois Campo Santo or dark interior of Santa Croce or Santa Maria Novella. Alas! that the painters of the Middle Ages were unable to paint well. Had they been able to paint, as can some of the moderns, and had they painted truthfully the life and landscape around them, there is no distance some of us would not go to see a gallery of their works: works showing men and women as they were, and as they lived, and in their own surroundings. There at once would have been the pictures, the history, and the idyllic poetry of a bygone age; and what have we now in their place? Diluted types of repulsive asceticism, sentimental types of ignorance and credulity, pictures hideous and untrue and painful to gaze upon, lies and libels on our beautiful world, and on our own race. And whom have we to thank for this? Religion—the so-called encourager of truth, charity, and all that is beautiful and good.

Eastern Art.

Before beginning the renascence we must glance through Mohammedan, Chinese, and Japanese art. |Mohammedan Art.| With Mohammedan art we have little to do, as it was entirely decorative. It is seen at its best in the Alhambra, and was not the outcome of any study of nature. The Arabian mind seems to have been unable to rise beyond a conventional geometrical picture-writing. Such minds are seen to-day in all countries amongst the undeveloped. Quite recently we have seen some of the best modern negro work from the West Coast of Africa; there too was the love of geometrical ornamentation as strong as in the Arabian art. |Art amongst the Philistines.| We repeat, this artistically-speaking low standard of development is often seen among the people of to-day, and though highly educated in all else, in art they are uneducated, in short they are survivals; and the mischief is, that they judge pictures by their survival decorative standard; they look for bright colours placed in Persian-rug juxtaposition, and talk of “glorious colouring.” It never seems to occur to them what art really is, and what the artist has tried to express, and how well he has expressed it; and they never refer their “glorious colouring” to the infallible standard—nature; but seem to imagine there are abstract standards of colour and form. |Water-colours.| “Glorious colourings” are oftener than not meretricious lies dressed out in gaudiest, vulgarest apparel, and when compared with nature these “colourings” will be found veritable strumpets. Look carefully at many of the much-vaunted water-colours, and then carefully study the same scene in nature, and if many of those water-colours please you afterwards—well, in matters artistic, you have the taste of a frugivorous ape. But apply this test to the water-colours of Israels or Mauve, and you will see they interpret nature. But they have painted chiefly in oils, and wisely so, as there is more to be expressed by oil-painting, and we know of few, if any, great men who confine themselves to water-colour as a medium. But it serves the turn of a host of men—painters, but not artists, who, with their pretty paints, make pot-boilers, of which the form and idea are often stolen—stolen, perhaps, from a photograph. Do such ever study nature? No. They sit at home, and coin vulgar counterfeits with no more of nature in them than the perpetrators have of honesty. It is time that it was clearly and distinctly understood that the man who copies a photograph is as despicable as the man who copies a painting, and it is very certain neither will ever be respected by his contemporaries, or remembered by his successors. Yet the “cheap” work of these men sells well, and the gulled public talk glibly over them of “strength” and “tone” and “colouring,” and what not. Nature is so subtle and astonishing in her facts that but few even of those who do paint directly from her can come anywhere near her, whereas, those who do not study her at all, who do not paint coram ipse, fake and fake, and by faking they lie, and set the example to others to lie, and, if not fought against, this sort of thing would speedily take us back to the art of the Middle Ages, when we should be under the tyranny of Crœsus, instead of Clericus.