| MENZEL. REIFSPIEL. |
Nobility of line was paramount in Gallait and Piloty, movement with grand, kingly gestures, lofty dignity, aristocratic bearing, knightliness, and a conventional piling up of rich stuffs, alluring to the eye. Leys, Menzel, and Meissonier were the first who sacrificed beauty to truth, or, more properly, who perceived that a beauty without truth is not really beautiful. They came gradually and by an indirect way to this knowledge as they studied German and Netherlandish masters instead of the Italians, and set up the angular, natural outlines of the Germans against the grace of the Latin masters, which had become banal through a lengthy course of imitation. And thus a return was made to the manner of our true ancestors, which had been forgotten during half a century. The place of the Antinous heads of Gallait was taken by physiognomies of vigorous characterisation; gesticulating heroes made way for peaceful, quiet persons, who did not consider themselves under an obligation to acquire artistic citizenship by a parade of attitude, but appeared in their picture as they were in reality. Impassioned movement yielded quietly to arms hanging downwards and natural postures. Even the traditional rules of concave and convex composition were broken so that the free play of life might more easily come to its rights. Not less did all three show themselves true painters by preferring rightness of observation and truth and delicacy of reproduction to anecdote and richness of invention, and by feeling the need of painting figures in their real surroundings. Instead of the conventional velvet and brocade stuffs, and the folios everywhere and nowhere in place, the settles and the brass caskets, there was a naturally painted fragment of reality, authentically reflecting the whole atmosphere of the period. The treatment of nature, hitherto idealistic and arbitrary, became synthetic and naturalistic. There was no more abstraction, but direct observation of the man and his milieu. And if, for the time being, this milieu was a rococo milieu, artificially reconstructed so that it could be realistically transferred to the picture, Menzel and Meissonier, even on account of this realism, would have to be reckoned as outposts of the modern tendency, and as having very decided points of contact with it; and this, even if they had not themselves actually become the pioneers of modernity, forcing their way through against the literary and historical movement. It is owing to their works in the past that the preference of the public turned less and less to compositions of fine sentiment, even though grounded on more attentive observation, and that artists began to regard reality as the most important element, the point of departure for every picture. Thus life itself came to be painted, and preparation was made for the coming demand of a new generation, who wished no more to see old heroes, but themselves, in the mirror of art.
| WHEN WILL GENIUS AWAKE? MENZEL. |
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER I