ECCLESIASTICAL
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ECCLESIASTICAL
towards the family itself, and to make a suitable offer-
ing in recompense for crimes committed. Another
course sometimes adopted was to call in two painters,
rivals in their profession, to decorate diiferent walls of
a church, or the two sides of an altar-piece, or again,
when some great addition was made to the fabric, on
account of an important event, such as the canoniza-
tion of a local saint, or a marked interposition of Provi-
dence on behalf of the town, diiferent influential per-
sons in the place would undertake to be responsible for
portions of the building, each calling in his own favour-
ite painter, and in this way the work would be com-
pleted. Or it might be that an order desired to deco-
rate a church dedicated to its patron .saint, and the
commission would be given to some notable artist, who
perhaps was unable to complete the task, or who died
before its completion. In such cases, others were
called in to complete it, and in this way the fabric was
beautified by various successive hands.
The numljer of definitely personal commissions which the si.xteenth-centurj' artist had was small, as even in the instances where a patron ordered a picture, it was generally an altar-piece for the family chapel, or else the decoration of some building belonging to the trade guild to which he was attached, and this trade guild being nearly always a religious association, the commission came under the categorj' of religious work. It is all this which marks the great distinction between art and craftsmanship previous to the sixteenth cen- tury and after it. In the period from the triumph of Christianity to about 1260 in Italy, and about 1400 in Northern Europe, the dominant art is architecture, chiefly employed in the service of the Church, and the arts of painting and carving were only applied subor- dinately for its enrichment. During the Renaissance period the imitative arts, sculpture, painting, and the various art-crafts began to develop and detach them- selves, to exist and strive after perfection on their own account, and while architecture still held an im- portant position, it was no longer dominant; the arts which supplied the interior decoration of the building, and the objects needed in the service of the Church, ceased to be considered as subordinate, but were tak- ing each its own high position under the guidance of workers of supreme genius. From the period, how- ever, of the Full Renaissance, the great dignity of architecture begins to diminLsh, especially as regards ecclesiastical buildings, and architects flevoted them- selves almost exclusively to domestic and civic work. Architecture cea.sed to be personal, democratic, local, and became professional and more or less uniform throughout the whole of Europe, while it suffered severely because the designing of detail became in many cases the work of others than the executant workmen. The same sort of difficulty was befalling the pictorial art and the arts of the craftsmen. The personal element was no longer the main strength of an art. The ecclesiastical side of the work was almost non-exi.stent, and the crafts suffered by reason of the fact that the commercial element had entered into art, and the adornment of the house, the palace, and the person was considered of far greater importance than the adornment of the church, and the sacrifice of the life of the worker for the greater glorj- of God.
Post-Ren.\issaxce Period. — There are certain po- litical explanations of this great change between the art of the sixteenth and the art of the seventeenth cen- turj'. There were several forces at work which were hostile or indifferent to artistic development, s\ich as the religious, dynastic, and commercial wars, the diffi- culties of the Reformation, and constitutional prob- lems, while the grouping together of small towns into larger provinces and countries was doing away with the rivalrj' of the craftsmen in the smaller places, and permitting a spirit of greater uniformity in style to spread throughout a larpe section of Europe. Add to all these colonial expansion, huge enterprise, and great
commercial prosperity, constantly broken ioto by rav-
aging wars, and the causes for the decay of that spirit
of religious activity in art characterizing earlier peri-
ods are apparent. Spain and Italy were, in the seven-
teenth centurj', almost the only two countries in which
any close connexion between art and the Church was
kept up. England was troubled with the religious
question, and struggling with great constitutional
problems, while it had given itself over to the faith of
the Reformers, and such art as it was producing was
the great architectural triumph of Sir Christopher
Wren in the rebuilding of the churches of London, and
the various sections of craftsmanship concerned with
the adornment of the house and the person. In Spain
there were still some great goldsmiths at work, and
some even greater workers in wrought iron, preparing
the rejas for the Spanish cathedrals, while pictorial art
was at its very highest in that country, and its master-
pieces, with the exception of those of the very greatest
artist of all, Velazquez, were devoted to subjects sug-
gested by the Church. Yet there had been no country
in which the painter had been so trammelled by tradi-
tional restrictions as in Spain. The very manner In
which each saint was to be represented, the method in
which his or her clothing was to be painted, and the
colouring which was to be applied to each garment,
had been a matter of stern decree, it had needed the
profound genius of a Velazquez to break through the
traditional rules, and to open for his successors, and
especially for Murillo, a period of greater freedom.
Commencing with such painters as Pantoja della
Cruz and Vicente Carducci, the great .Spanish School
had produced the Ribaltas and Ribera, and then the
majestic Velazquez. In Spain the only great painter
to foUow Velazquez was Murillo, but there were manj'
whose works were marked by distinction, excellence,
and beauty, especially Zurbaran, Iriarte, Juan de
Valdes, Alonso Cano, and Orrente. The seventeenth
century was, in various countries of Europe, one of the
important periods of artistic production, and although
the Italian schools, the Realists, and the painters of
the Second Revival were men whose productions at the
present time are out of favour, yet they deserve more
than a passing notice, while contemporary with
them there are others who rank among the veritable
giants of the artistic craft. The late Italian artists,
the Carracci, Caravaggio, Sasso Ferrato, Carlo Dolci,
Domenichino, Luca Giordano, Carlo Maratta, Guido
Reni, Salvator Rosa, and others, show in their work
melodramatic style, love of magnificent colouring, and
intense shades. The draughtsman.ship of the.se artists
should cause their works to be more hijjhly esteemed
than they are at present, for they certainly represent
an important epoch in the art history of the world,
and one which must never be overlooked. Many of
their works were altar-pieces painted for churches, or
were intended for church decoration, but at the same
time they were greatly influenced by the Humanistic
movement, and by the eager desire to represent the
stories of classical writers in pictorial eflect. The com-
mercial prosperity of Holland, at a time when other
nations were lacking in material wealth, was one of the
reasons for the existence of a veritable crowd of artists
just at this time. The Church had ceased to commis-
sion pictures in Holland, and verj' seldom were stories,
either from Holy Writ, or from the lives of the saints,
represented by this school of arti.sts.
In dealing with the arts and crafts of the eighteenth centurj', a new and destructive factor which had arisen must be taken into consideration. " The genius of handicraft", as has been well said, "passes now into invention", and the commencement of a system now appears that was eventually to strike at the very roots of the manner in which supreme works of genius had been produced in the preceding centuries. It must also be noticed that, in painting especially, the artistic centre of gravity had shifted from Italy to
