Shall we say, then, that beauty is an illusion? Certainly it is no falsity; we may call it provisional truth,—truth at a certain stage, as appearance, not yet as idea. It is appearance seen as final, as the highest the mind has reached. Hence its miraculousness. It is in advance of consciousness; we cannot account for it any more than the savage could account for his fetich,—why this bunch of rags and feathers should be more venerable to him than other rags and feathers. But to deny that the impressiveness it adds to matter comes from a deeper sense of the truth would be as unwise as for him to deny his fetich. The fetich is false, not as compared with other rags and feathers, but as compared with a higher conception of God. The falsity is not that he sees God in this rubbish, but that he does not see Him elsewhere. Coleridge said that a picture is something between a thought and a thing. It must keep the mean; either extreme is fatal. Plato makes Eros intermediate between wisdom and ignorance, born of unequal parentage, neither mortal nor immortal, forever needy, forever seeking the Psyche whom he can never meet face to face.
The history of Art has a certain analogy to the growth of the corals. Like them, it seeks the light which it cannot endure. A certain depth beneath the surface is most favorable to it,—a dim, midway region of twilight and calm, remote alike from the stagnant obscurity of mere sensation and from the agitated surface of day, the dry light of the intellect. When it is laid bare, it dies,—its substance, indeed, enduring as the basis of new continents, but the life gone, and only the traces of its action left in the stony relics of the past. Greek Art perished when its secret was translated into clearer language by Plato and Aristotle; and Duccio and Cimabue and Giotto must go the same way as soon as St. Francis of Assisi or Luther or Calvin puts into words what they meant. It is its own success that is fatal to Art; for just in proportion as the expressiveness it insists upon is shown to be pervading, universal, and not the property of this or that shape, the particular manifestation is degraded. Color and form are due to partial opacity; the light must penetrate to a certain depth, but not throughout.
The name of Giotto has come to stand for Devotional Art, for an earnestness that subordinates all display to the sacredness of the theme. But his fellow-citizens knew him for a man of quick worldly wit, who despised asceticism, and was ready with the most audacious jokes, even at sacred things. Ghiberti and Cennini do not praise him for piety, but for having "brought Art back to Nature" and "translated it from Greek into Latin,"—that is, from the language of clerks into the vernacular. It is not anything special in the intention that gives Giotto his fame, but the freedom, directness, and variety of the language with which it is expressed. The effort to escape from traditional formulas and conventional shapes often makes itself felt at the expense even of beauty. Instead of the statuesque forms of the earlier time, it is the dramatic interest that is now prominent,—the composition, the convergent action of numerous figures, separately, perhaps, insignificant, but pervaded by a common emotion that subordinates all distinctions and leaves itself alone visible. Even in the traditional groups, as, for instance, the Holy Families, etc., the aim is more complete realization, in draperies, gestures, postures, rather than beauty of form. We miss in Giotto much that had been attained before him. What Madonna of his can rank with Giovanni Pisano's? The Northern cathedral-sculptures, even some of the Byzantine carvings, have a dignity that is at least uncommon in his pictures. Especially the faces are generally wooden,—destitute alike of individuality and of the loveliness of Duccio's and even of some of Cimabue's. On the other hand, in the picture wherein the school attained, perhaps, its highest success as to beauty of the faces, Orcagna's "Paradise" at Santa Maria Novella, the blessed are ranged in row above row, with mostly no relation to each other but juxtaposition. We see here two directions,—one in continuation of the antique, seeking beauty as the property of certain privileged forms, the other as the hidden possibility that pervades all things. One or the other must abate something: either the image must become less sacred, or the meaning narrower; for the language of painting is not figurative, like the language of poetry, but figure, and unless the form bear on its face that it is not all that is meant, its inherent limitations are transferred to the thought itself. When Dante tells us that Brunetto Latini and his companions looked at him,—
"Come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna,"
it is the intensity of the gaze that is present with us, not the old tailor and his needle. But in Painting the image is usurping and exclusive.
Of these divergent tendencies it is easy to see which must conquer. The gifts of the spirit are more truly honored as the birthright of humanity than as the property of this or that saint. The worship of the Madonna is better than the worship of Athene just so far as the homage is paid to a sentiment and not to a person. Now the Madonna, too, must come down from her throne. The painters grew tired of painting saints and angels. Giotto already had diverged from the traditional heads and draperies, and begun to put his figures into the Florentine dress. Masaccio and Filippino Lippi brought their fellow-citizens into their pictures. Soon the Holy Family is only a Florentine matron with her baby. The sacred histories are no longer the end, but only the excuse; everything else is insisted on rather than the pretended theme. The second Nicene Council had declared that "the designing of the holy images was not to be left to the invention of artists, but to the approved legislation and tradition of the Catholic Church." But now the Church had to take a great deal that it had not bargained for. Perspective, chiaroscuro, picturesque contrast and variety, and all that belongs to the show of things, without regard to what they are,—this is now the religion of Art.
These things may seem to us rather superficial, and Art to have declined from its ancient dignity. But see how they took hold of men, and what men they took hold of. In the midst of that bloody and shameless fifteenth century, when only force seems sacred, men hunted these shadows as if they were wealth and power. Paolo Uccello could not be got away from his drawing to his meals or his rest, and only replied to his wife's remonstrances, "Ah, this perspective is so delightful!" With what ardor Mantegna and Luca Signorelli seized upon a new trait or action! Leonardo da Vinci, "the first name of the fifteenth century," a man to whom any career was open, and who seemed almost equally fit for any, never walked the streets without a sketch-book in his hand, and was all his life long immersed in the study of Appearance, with a persistent scrutiny that is revealed by his endless caricatures and studies, but perhaps by nothing more clearly than by his incidental discovery of the principle of the stereoscope, which he describes in his treatise on Painting. This was no learned curiosity, nor the whim of seeing the universe under drill, but only a clearer instinct of what the purpose of Art is, namely, to see the reality of the actual world in and as the appearance, instead of groping for some ulterior reality hidden behind it. Leonardo has been called the precursor of Bacon. Certainly the conviction that underlies this passion for the outside of things is the same in both,—the firm belief that the truth is not to be sought in some remote seventh heaven, but in a truer view of the universe about us.
Donatello told Paolo Uccello that he was leaving the substance for the show. But the painter doubtless felt that the show was more real than any such "substance." For it is the finite taken as what it truly is, nothing in itself, but only the show of the infinite. If it seem shadowy and abstract, it is to be considered with what it is compared. What an abstraction is depends on what is taken away and what left behind. For instance, the Slavery question in our politics is sometimes termed an abstraction. Yes, surely, if the dollar is almighty, is the final reality,—if peace and comfort are alone worth living for,—then the Slavery question and several other things are abstractions. So in the world of matter, if the chemical results are the reality of it, the appearance may well be considered as an abstraction. But this is not the view of Art; Art has never magnified the materiality of the finite; on the contrary, its history is only the record of successive attempts to dispose of matter, the failure always lying in the hasty effort to abolish it altogether in favor of an immaterial principle outside of it, something behind the phenomena, like Kant's noumenon,—too fine to exist, yet unable to dispense with existence, and so, after all, not spirit, but only a superfine kind of matter; or as in a picture in the Campo Santo at Pisa, where the world is figured as a series of concentric circles, held up like a shield by God standing behind it.
It may be asked, Was not the appearance, and this alone, from all time, the object of Art? But so long as the figment of a separate reality of the finite is kept up, an antagonism subsists between this and truth, and the appearance cannot be frankly made the end, but has only an indirect, derivative value. In the classic it was the human form in superhuman perfection; in the early Christian Art, God condescending to inhabit human shape; in each case, what is given is felt to be negative to the reality,—a fiction, not the truth.
But now the antagonism falls away, and the truth of Art is felt to be a higher power of the truth of Nature. Perspective puts the mind in the place of gravitation as the centre, thus naïvely declaring mind and not matter to be the substance of the universe. It will see only this, feeling well that there is no other reality. It may be said that Perspective is as much an outward material fact as any other. So it is, as soon as the point of sight is fixed. The mind alters nothing, but gives to the objects that coherency that makes them into a world. The universe has no existence for the idiot, not because it is not there, but because he makes no image of it, or, as we say, does not mind it. The point of sight is the mark of a foregone action of the mind; what is embraced in it is seen together, because it belongs to one conception. The effect can be simulated to a certain extent by mechanical contrivance; but before the rules of perspective were systematized, the perspective of a picture betrays its history, tells how much of it was seen together, and what was added. Even late in the fifteenth century pictures are still more or less mosaics,—their piecemeal origin confessed by slight indications in the midst even of very advanced technical skill. Thus, in Antonio Pollaiuolo's "Three Archangels," in the Florence Academy,—three admirably drawn figures, abreast, and about equally distant from the frame, the line of the right wing touches the head at the same point in each, with no allowance for their different relations to the centre of the picture.