| Paolo Ucello. St. George and the Dragon | Collection Jacquemart-André |
| Plate VIII. |
THE JACQUEMART-ANDRÉ COLLECTION[38]
THE Jacquemart-André collection is not merely one of those accumulations of the art of the past by which it has become the fashion for rich people to impose themselves on the wonder of an ignorant public. It shows that the lady who created it did so partly, at all events, because of a quite personal and intimate love of beautiful things, a love which did not have to seek for its justification and support in the opinion of the world.
The three pictures reproduced here are proof of the sincerity and courage of Mdme. André’s artistic convictions. They offer scarcely any foothold for the sentimental and associative understanding of pictures. The “S. George” of Paolo Uccello (see Plate) might, it is true, be taken as a “naïve,” “quaint,” or “primitive” rendering of an “old world” legend—indeed, whilst I was admiring it I gathered from the comments of those who lingered before it for a few seconds that this was the general attitude—but to do so would be to misunderstand the picture completely. Uccello, in fact, lends himself to misunderstanding, and Vasari, with his eye to literary picturesqueness, has done his best to put us off the scent. He made him an “original,” a harmless, ingenious, slightly ridiculous crank, gifted, no doubt, but one whose gifts were wasted by reason of his crankiness. And the legend created by Vasari has stuck. Uccello has always seemed to be a little aside from the main road of art, an agreeable, amusing diversion, one that we can enjoy with a certain humorous and patronising detachment, as we enjoy the innocence of some mediæval chronicler. Uccello, I admit, has lent himself to this misunderstanding because from every other point of view but that of pure design he comes up to the character Vasari has made current. No artist was ever so helpless as he at the dramatic presentment of his theme. Nothing can well be imagined less like a battle than his battle pieces, nor if we think of the Deluge would our wildest fancies have ever conceived anything remotely resembling the scene which he painted with such literal precision, with such a mass of inconclusive and improbable invention, in the Chiostro Verde of Sta. Maria Novella.
The idea of verisimilitude is entirely foreign to him. And here comes in the oddity and irony of his situation. He was the first or almost the first great master of linear perspective. The study of perspective became so engrossing to him that according to Vasari it wasted his talent as an artist.
Now perspective is the scientific statement of the nature of visual appearance. To the modern artist it becomes an occasional assistance in giving to his images an air of verisimilitude. Wherever a strict adherence to the laws of perspective would give to his objects a strange or unlikely look he frankly neglects it. But to Uccello perspective seemed, perhaps wrongly, to have an altogether different value. To him it appears to have been a method of recreating a visual world. That is to say, he took certain data of appearance from observation, and by handling them according to the laws of perspective he created a world, which, owing to the simplicity of his data and the rigid application of his laws, has far less resemblance to what we see than his contemporaries and predecessors had contrived by rule of thumb. Had he taken the whole of the data of observed form the application of the laws of perspective would have become impossible, and he would have been thrown back upon imitative realism and the literal acceptance of appearance. Such was indeed what happened to the painters of Flanders and the north, and such has become the usual method of modern realistic art. But nothing was more abhorrent to the spirit of fifteenth-century Florence than such an acceptance of the merely casual, and nothing is more fundamentally opposed to the empirical realism of a Van Eyck or a Frith than the scientific and abstract realism of Paolo Uccello.
This passion, then, for an abstract and theoretical completeness of rendering led Uccello to simplify the data of observed form to an extraordinary extent, and his simplification anticipates in a curious way that of the modern cubists, as one may see from the treatment of his horses in the National Gallery battle-piece.
It is one of the curiosities of the psychology of the artist that he is generally trying very hard to do something which has nothing to
