ANGELS COULD DO
NO MORE.
There are three places where you always find art in Italy: First and foremost, the churches; second, the public buildings; third, the art galleries and museums. The churches come first, because the Catholic Church has always been the support and promoter of art. For centuries it was the only strong power that encouraged artists. It had the tasteful men of the age and it had the money. The great artists both in painting and sculpture would have had no opportunity and their works would have been destroyed if it had not been for the church. In return, the artists took the subjects of religion and portrayed them most beautifully and effectively. There is hardly a church in Italy which does not have paintings by some of those old painters which would be worth a fortune now if they were for sale. The Catholic faith especially appeals to the artistic sense, and the history of the church furnished a boundless field of subjects. Walls and ceilings of churches are covered with magnificent pictures, the exteriors are decorated with sculpture, and the architecture of the buildings is brilliant and effective. To see paintings, statues or architecture in Italy you first go to the churches, and there you see the greatest and best.
After the churches the art treasures and galleries are found in the public buildings, and there we get what is left of the art of Greece and Rome, together with much of a later time. The old pagan mythology furnished most of the ancient art, together with a few attempts at transferring abstract ideas into concrete form. Of course I don’t want to set up as an art critic—I have trouble enough without that. But according to the way I was raised, a large per cent. of ancient sculpture isn’t fit to be exhibited to young folks—or to old men. Probably the times were different and fashions in art were acute, but the Grecian and Roman sculptors paid no attention to the rules of common decency as generally understood in this generation. While doing my duty in the art galleries I have actually blushed so much that it grew noticeable to the other art critics, and I fear that I lost standing with them. Of course I am not a regular critic, but I know a few things, and this is one of them.
Another objection I have to the old masters is that they never considered any subject too big for them. I have written something of this when I kicked on Michael Angelo attempting to make a picture of God Almighty. There is too much of that kind of business in Italian art. And another thing is that they couldn’t paint good animals. Some of the pictures by the great masters have horses or lions in them, and I believe even the horses would laugh at their own appearance.
Aside from these unimportant objections and a trifling criticism of a great deal of ignorance about drawing and the fitness of things, the “old masters,” by which is meant the great painters from about 1400 to 1600, are certainly worthy of their reputation. Everybody I met knew more about art than I did—so they thought—and everyone said: “What wonderful color.” The old masters certainly did know how to mix paints so as to make the most beautiful and most lasting colors. I think Titian’s red-headed girls are the prettiest reds I have ever seen. Raphael’s paintings cannot be criticized by me—their feeling and their execution will make a cynical Kansan stand and admire. Michael Angelo I did not take to so well as I did Titian and Raphael, but he did a lot of work, and he, too, had the ability to make his pictures like life. The other great painters of Italy in these two centuries of the renaissance have not been equaled in any period since, and in spite of the fact that the experience of one generation ought to help the next, I do not believe that the modern Italian painters, or the Englishmen and Americans who go to Italy and copy, can come within several blocks of equaling the work of the “old masters.”
There is one more objection I have to the “old masters,” and I would like to tell it to their faces. They had the habit of taking a great subject and making it a means of flattery for wealthy patrons. For example, a picture of Christ or the Virgin sitting and talking confidentially with some old scamp of a Medici. Of course I don’t blame the old artists. The Medici were a lot of thugs, thieves, highwaymen, murderers, and lovers of art. They put up handsomely for the great masters, and undoubtedly assisted much in promoting art at a time when the princes and nobility of Italy were not respectable according to our standard. This flattery by the old masters may have been necessary to make a living, but I don’t think it is Art.