VOL. XXVI. JULY, 1899. NO. 1.
Copyright, 1899, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.
Printed in New York.
JOHN LA FARGE
By Russell Sturgis
A Study.
The artist of four hundred years ago, or of any great time for individual effort as opposed to the associated and unrecorded work of more primitive times, was a many-sided man. He was probably a traveller, if not a monk; he was almost certainly a man of adventure; a man of thought, whether monk or layman. The artist did not travel far; but he encountered more personal risk between Florence and Naples than our contemporary does in voyaging to the Isles of Summer; he encountered in Sicily, in Hungary, or in Spain a people as remote from him as the Japanese are from us; and he had still Constantinople and Cairo to visit, places more distant and as inaccessible to him as Thibet or Kafiristan in the nineteenth century. The old artist was something of a scholar, too, with a habit of study and meditation, if not master of many books. And, moreover, the old artist was very much in love with his work and loved to play with it as well as to work in it; so that he touched many materials, handled many processes, and used many methods of artistic utterance. Again it is worth noting that no one had discovered, in 1499, that architecture was an art to be practised without regard to the other manifestations of the artistic spirit; nor yet that the sculptor and the painter were two workmen whose art was to be practised apart from and independent of building or other industrial occupation.
