Sometimes, again, I have even thought I have detected a ray of sunset upon a milkman’s window-blind in London, and once upon an undertaker’s, but it was too faint a ray to read by. The best thing of the kind that I have seen in London is the picture of the lady who is cleaning knives with Mr. Spong’s patent knife-cleaner, in his shop window nearly opposite Day & Martin’s in Holborn. It falls a long way short, however, of a good Italian votive picture: but it has the advantage of moving.
I knew of a little girl once, rather less than four years old, whose uncle had promised to take her for a drive in a carriage with him, and had failed to do so. The child was found soon afterwards on the stairs weeping, and being asked what was the matter, replied, “Mans is all alike.” This is Giottesque. I often think of it as I look upon Italian votive pictures. The meaning is so sound in spite of the expression being so defective—if, indeed, expression can be defective when it has so well conveyed the meaning.
I knew, again, an old lady whose education had been neglected in her youth. She came into a large fortune, and at some forty years of age put herself under the best masters. She once said to me as follows, speaking very slowly and allowing a long time between each part of the sentence;—“You see,” she said, “the world, and all that it contains, is wrapped up in such curious forms, that it is only by a knowledge of human nature, that we can rightly tell what to say, to do, or to admire.” I copied the sentence into my notebook immediately on taking my leave. It is like an academy picture.
But to return to the Italians. The question is, how has the deplorable falling-off in Italian painting been caused? And by doing what may we again get Bellinis and Andrea Mantegnas as in old time? The fault does not lie in any want of raw material: the drawings I have already given prove this. Nor, again, does it lie in want of taking pains. The modern Italian painter frets himself to the full as much as his predecessor did—if the truth were known, probably a great deal more. It does not lie in want of schooling or art education. For the last three hundred years, ever since the Carracci opened their academy at Bologna, there has been no lack of art education in Italy. Curiously enough, the date of the opening of the Bolognese Academy coincides as nearly as may be with the complete decadence of Italian painting.
This is an example of the way in which Italian boys begin their art education now. The drawing which I reproduce here was given me by the eminent sculptor, Professor Vela, as the work of a lad of twelve years old, and as doing credit alike to the school where the lad was taught and to the pupil himself. [147]
So it undoubtedly does. It shows as plainly the receptiveness and docility of the modern Italian, as the illustrations given above show his freshness and naïveté when left to himself. The drawing is just such as we try to get our own young people to do, and few English elementary schools in a small country town would succeed in turning out so good a one. I have nothing, therefore, but praise both for the pupil and the teacher; but about the system which makes such teachers and such pupils commendable, I am more sceptical. That system trains boys to study other people’s works rather than nature, and, as Leonardo da Vinci so well says, it makes them nature’s grandchildren and not her children. The boy who did the drawing given above is not likely to produce good work in later life. He has been taught to see nature with an old man’s eyes at once, without going through the embryonic stages. He has never said his “mans is all alike,” and by twenty will be painting like my old friend’s long academic sentence. All his individuality has been crushed out of him.
I will now give a reproduction of the frontispiece to Avogadro’s work on the sanctuary of S. Michele, from which I have already quoted; it is a very pretty and effective piece of work, but those who are good enough to turn back to p. 93, and to believe that I have drawn carefully, will see how disappointing Avogadro’s frontispiece must be to those who hold, as most of us will, that a draughtsman’s first business is to put down what he sees, and to let prettiness take care of itself. The main features, indeed, can still be traced, but they have become as transformed and lifeless as rudimentary organs. Such a frontispiece, however, is the almost inevitable consequence of the system of training that will make boys of twelve do drawings like the one given on p. 147.
If half a dozen young Italians could be got together with a taste for drawing like that shown by the authors of the sketches on pp. 136, 137, 138; if they had power to add to their number; if they were allowed to see paintings and drawings done up to the year A.D. 1510, and votive pictures and the comic papers; if they were left with no other assistance than this, absolutely free to please themselves, and could be persuaded not to try and please any one else, I believe that in fifty years we should have all that was ever done repeated with fresh naïveté, and as much more delightfully than even by the best old masters, as these are more delightful than anything we know of in classic painting. The young plants keep growing up abundantly every day—look at Bastianini, dead not ten years since—but they are browsed down by the academies. I remember there came out a book many years ago with the title, “What becomes of all the clever little children?” I never saw the book, but the title is pertinent.
