The figures which in 1855 filled Courbet’s picture “The Studio”—beggar-women, agricultural labourers, artisans, sailors, tippling soldiers, buxom girls, porters, rough members of the proletariat of uncouth stature—now crowd the stage of French art, and impart even to the heroes of history, bred through centuries from degenerated gods, something of their full-blooded, rough, hearty, and plebeian force of life. The artists of Italian taste only gave the rights of citizenship to “universal forms”; every reminiscence of national customs or of local character was counted vulgar; they did not discover the gold of beauty in the rich mines of popular life, but in the classic masters of foreign race. But now even what is unearthly is translated into the terms of earth. If religious pictures are to be painted, artists take men from the people for their model, as Caravaggio did before them—poor old peasants with bones of iron, and bronzed, weather-beaten faces, porters with figures bowed and scarred by labour, men of rough, common nature, though of gnarled and sinewy muscles. The pictures of martyrs, once artificial compositions of beautiful gesture and vacant, generalised countenances, receive a tone local to the scaffold, a trait of merciless veracity—the heads the energy of a relief, the gestures force and impressiveness, the bodies a science in their modelling which would have rejoiced Ribera. As Caravaggio said that the more wrinkles his model had the more he liked him, so no one is any longer repelled by horny hands, tattered rags, and dirty feet. In the good periods of art it is well known that the beauty or uncomeliness of a work has nothing to do with the beauty or uncomeliness of the model, and that the most hideous cripple can afford an opportunity for making the most beautiful work. The old doctrine of Leonardo, that every kind of painting is portrait painting, and that the best artists are those who can imitate nature in the most convincing way, comes once more into operation. The apotheosis of the model has taken the place of idealism. And during these same years England reached a similar goal by another route.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER XVI
Leopold Boilly: