feeling are of a kind which make a lasting appeal to the needs of the human heart and mind, and that this fact is one of the causes of their being held in perpetual honor.
There is also another cause: If only experience and feeling were necessary to make an artist, some of us would be better artists than many who follow the profession of art. But there is another necessity—the power of expressing the experience and feeling. This, by its derivation from the Greek, is the real meaning of the word “art,” the capacity to “fit” a form to an idea, The artist the “fitter” who gives shape and construction to the visionary fabric of his imagination; and this method of “fitting” is called his “technique.”
So the making of a picture involves two processes: a taking in of the impression, and a giving of it out by visible expression; a seeing of the subject with the eye and the mind, and a communicating of what has been so seen to the eyes and minds of others; and both these processes are influenced by the experience and feeling of the artist and make their appeal to our own. From this it should be clear that the beauty of a picture depends much less upon its subject than upon the artist's conception and treatment of it. A grand subject will not of itself make a grand picture, while a very homely one, by the way in which it is treated, may be made to impress us profoundly.
The degree of beauty in a picture depends, in fact, upon the artist’s feeling for beauty and upon his power to express it; and in order that we may discover how, at successive times and in various countries, different men have conceived of life and have expressed their feeling and experience in pictures, I propose that we shall study this out in a series of comparisons.
Our plan, therefore, will be:
“Look here, upon this picture, and on this”; not to decide offhand which you like the better,—for in some cases perhaps you will not like either, since they were painted in times so remote from ours as to be outside our twentieth-century habit of understanding,— but in order that we may get at the artist's way of seeing in each case. In this way I hope, too, that we may be able to piece together the story of modern painting; beginning with its re-birth in the thirteenth century, when it emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, and following it through its successive stages in different countries down to our own day.
I.
Giovanni Cimabue (1240-1302); Giotto
[Giotto di Bondone] (1276-1337),
Florentine School.
For the first comparison I invite you to study the two pictures, shown on pages 26 and 27, of “The Madonna Enthroned.” One was painted by Cimabue, the other by his pupil, Giotto. Both were painted on wooden panels in distemper, that is to say, with colors that have been mixed with some gelatinous medium, such as the white and the yolk of an egg beaten up together, for it was not until the fifteenth century that the use of oil-colors was adopted. The colors used in Giotto’s panel are tints of blue and rose and white; in Cimabue’s the blues and reds are deep and dusky, the background in each case being golden.
We notice at once a general similarity between these two pictures, not only in choice of subject but in the manner of presentation: the Madonna seated upon a throne; her mantle drawn over her head; her right hand resting on the knee of the infant Saviour, who has two fingers of his right hand raised in the act of blessing; kneeling angels at the foot, and figures in tiers above them; all the heads being surrounded by the nimbus, or circular cloud of light, showing, like a halo, their sacred character.
The reason of this general similarity is that the choice of a subject in painting and the manner of its presentation were fixed by the Christian Church of that time: for long before this thirteenth century the methods of old Greek art had been lost, and the Church had adopted a form of art known as Byzantine. I will try to explain what this means.
Briefly, the cause of the change was this. In old Greece, art and religion were bound together. The gods and goddesses[1] in whom they believed were always represented in sculpture and painting as human beings of a higher
order; physical perfection was the ideal alike- ↑ Zeus, Ares, Athene, and the rest—or, as the Romans called them, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva, etc.
