III.Of the History of the Fine Arts.
Students of human culture have concentrated a great deal of attentive thought upon the history of fine art, and have put forth various comprehensive generalizations intended at once to sum up and to account for the phases andCurrent generalizations on the history of fine art: Hegel.vicissitudes of that history. The most famous formulae are those of Hegel, who regarded particular arts as being characteristic of and appropriate to particular forms of civilization and particular ages of history. For him, architecture was the symbolic art appropriate to ages of obscure and struggling ideas, and characteristic of the Egyptian and the Asiatic races of old and of the medieval age in Europe. Sculpture was the classical art appropriate to ages of lucid and self-possessed ideas, and characteristic of the Greek and Roman period. Painting, music and poetry were the romantic arts, appropriate to the ages of complicated and overmastering ideas, and characteristic of modern humanity in general. In the working out of these generalizations Hegel brought together a mass of judicious and striking observations; and that they contain on the whole a preponderance of truth may be admitted. It has been objected against them, from the philosophical point of view, that they too much mix up the definition of what the several arts theoretically are with considerations of what in various historical circumstances they have practically been. From the historical point of view there can be taken what seems a more valid objection, that these formulae of Hegel tend too much to fix the attention of the student upon the one dominant art chosen as characteristic of any period, and to give him false ideas of the proportions and relations of the several arts at the same period—of the proportions and relations which poetry, say, really bore to sculpture among the Greeks and Romans, or sculpture to architecture among the Christian nations of the middle age. The truth is, that the historic survey gained over any field of human activity from the height of generalizations so vast in scope as these are must needs, in the complexity of earthly affairs, be a survey too distant to give much guidance until its omissions are filled up by a great deal of nearer study; and such nearer study is apt to compel the student in the long run to qualify the theories with which he has started until they are in danger of disappearing altogether.
Another systematic exponent of the universe, whose system is very different from that of Hegel, Herbert Spencer, brought the doctrine of evolution to bear, not without interesting results, upon the history of the fine arts and theirHerbert Spencer and the evolution theory.development. Herbert Spencer set forth how the manual group of fine arts, architecture, sculpture and painting, were in their first rudiments bound up together, and how each of them in the course of history has liberated itself from the rest by a gradual process of separation. These arts did not at first exist in the distinct and developed forms in which we have above described them. There were no statues in the round, and no painted panels or canvases hung upon the wall. Only the rudiments of sculpture and painting existed, and that only as ornaments applied to architecture, in the shape of tiers of tinted reliefs, representing in a kind of picture-writing the exploits of kings upon the walls of their temple-palaces. Gradually sculpture took greater salience and roundness, and tended to disengage itself from the wall, while painting found out how to represent solidity by means of its own, and dispensed with the raised surface upon which it was first applied. But the old mixture and union of the three arts, with an undeveloped art of painting and an undeveloped art of sculpture still engaged in or applied to the works of architecture, continued on the whole to prevail through the long cycles of Egyptian and Assyrian history. In the Egyptianpalace-temple we find a monument at once political and religious, upon the production of which were concentrated all the energies and faculties of all the artificers of the race. With its incised and pictured walls, its half-detached colossi, its open and its colonnaded chambers, the forms of the columns and their capitals recalling the stems and blossoms of the lotus and papyrus, with its architecture everywhere taking on the characters and covering itself with the adornments of immature sculpture and painting—this structure exhibits within its single fabric the origins of the whole subsequent group of shaping arts. From hence it is a long way to the innumerable artistic surroundings of later Greek and Roman life, the many temples with their detached and their engaged statues, the theatres, the porticoes, the baths, the training-schools, the stadiums, with free and separate statues both of gods and men adorning every building and public place, the frescoes upon the walls, the panel pictures hung in temples and public and private galleries. In the terms of the Spencerian theory of evolution, the advance from the early Egyptian to the later Greek stage is an advance from the one to the manifold, from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and affords a striking instance of that vast and ceaseless process of differentiation and integration which it is the law of all things to undergo. In the Christian monuments of the early middle age, again, the arts, owing to the political and social cataclysm in which Roman civilization went down, have gone back to the rudimentary stage, and are once more attached to and combined with each other. The single monument, the one great birth of art, in that age, is the Gothic church. In this we find the art of applied sculpture exercised in fashions infinitely rich and various, but entirely in the service and for the adornment of the architecture; we find painting exercised in fashions more rudimentary still, principally in the forms of translucent imagery in the chancel windows and tinted decorations on the walls and vaultings. From this stage again the process of the differentiation of the arts is repeated. It is by a new evolution or unfolding, and by one carried to much further and more complicated stages than the last had reached, that the arts since the middle age have come to the point where we find them to-day; when architecture is applied to a hundred secular and civil uses with not less magnificence, or at least not less desire of magnificence, than that with which it fulfilled its two only uses in the middle age, the uses of worship and of defence; when detached sculptures adorn, or are intended to adorn, all our streets and commemorate all our likenesses; when the subjects of painting have been extended from religion to all life and nature, until this one art has been divided into the dozen branches of history, landscape, still life, genre, anecdote and the rest. Such being in brief the successive stages, and such the reiterated processes, of evolution among the shaping or space arts, the action of the same law can be traced, it is urged, in the growth of the speaking or time arts also. Originally poetry and music, the two great speaking arts, were not separated from each other and from the art of bodily motion, dancing. The father of song, music and dancing, all three, was that primitive man of whom so much has already been said, he who first clapped hands and leapt and shouted in time at some festival of his tribe. From the clapping, or rudimentary rhythmical noise, has been evolved the whole art of instrumental music, down to the entrancing complexity of the modern symphony. From the shout, or rudimentary emotional utterance, has proceeded by a kindred evolution the whole art of vocal music down to the modern opera or oratorio. From the leap, or rudimentary expression of emotion by rhythmical movements of the body, has descended every variety of dancing, from the stately figures of the tragic chorus of the Greeks to thekordaxof their comedy or the complexities of the modern ballet.
That the theory of evolution serves usefully to group and to interpret many facts in the history of art we shall not deny, though it would be easy to show that Herbert Spencer’s instances and applications are not sufficient to sustain all the conclusionsWeak and strong points of Spencer’s generalization.that he seems to draw from them. Thus, it is perfectly true that the Egyptian or Assyrian palace wall is an instance of rudimentary painting and rudimentary sculpture in subservience to architecture. But it is not less true that races who had no architecture at all, but lived in caverns of the earth, exhibit, as we have already had occasion to notice, excellent rudiments of the other two shaping arts in a different form, in the carved or incised handles of their weapons. And it is almost certain that, among the nations of oriental antiquity themselves, the art of decorating solid walls so as to please the eye with patterns and presentations of natural objects was borrowed from the precedent of an older art which works in easier materials, namely, the art of the weaver. It would be in the perished textile fabrics of the earliest dwellers in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile that we should find, if anywhere, the origins of the systems of surface design, whether conventional or imitative, which those races afterwards applied to the decoration of their solid constructions. Not, therefore, in any one exclusive type of primitive artistic activity, but in a score of such types equally, varying according to race, region and circumstances, shall we find so many germs or nuclei from which whole families of fine arts have in the course of the world’s history differentiated and unfolded themselves. And more than once during that history, a cataclysm of political and social forces has not only checked the process of the evolution of the fine arts, but from an advanced stage of development has thrown them back again to a primitive stage. Recent research has shown how the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations in the Mediterranean basin, with their developed fine arts, must have perished and been effaced before the second growth of art from new rudiments took place in Greece. The great instance of the downfall of the Roman civilization need not be requoted. By Spencer’s application of the theory of evolution, not less than by Hegel’s theory of the historic periods, attention is called to the fact that Christian Europe, during several centuries of the middle age, presents to our study a civilization analogous to the civilization of the old oriental empires in this respect, that its ruling and characteristic manual art is architecture, to which sculpture and painting are, as in the oriental empires, once more subjugated and attached. It does not of course follow that such periods of fusion or mutual dependence among the arts are periods of bad art. On the contrary, each stage of the evolution of any art has its own characteristic excellence. The arts can be employed in combination, and yet be all severally excellent. When music, dancing, acting and singing were combined in the performance of the Greek chorus, the combination no doubt presented a relative perfection of each of the four elements analogous to the combined perfection, in the contemporary Doric temple, of pure architectural form, sculptured enrichment of spaces specially contrived for sculpture in the pediments and frieze, and coloured decoration over all. The extreme differentiation of any art from every other art, and of the several branches of one art among themselves, does not by any means tend to the perfection of that art. The process of evolution among the fine arts may go, and indeed in the course of history has gone, much too far for the health of the arts severally. Thus an artist of our own day is usually either a painter only or a sculptor only; but yet it is acknowledged that the painter who can model a statue, or the sculptor who can paint a picture, is likely to be the more efficient master of both arts; and in the best days of Florentine art the greatest men were generally painters, sculptors, architects and goldsmiths all at once. In like manner a landscape painter who paints landscape only is apt not to paint it so well as one who paints the figure too; and in recent times the craft of engraving had almost ceased to be an art from the habit of allotting one part of the work, as skies, to one hand, another part, as figures, to a second, and another part, as landscape, to a third. This kind of continually progressing subdivision of labour, which seems to be the necessary law of industrial processes, is fatal to any skill which demands, as skill in the fine arts, we have seen, demands, the free exercise and direction of a highly complex cluster both of faculties and sensibilities.
In the second half of the 19th century a reaction set in against such over-differentiation of the several manual arts and crafts. This reaction is chiefly identified in England with the name of William Morris, who insisted by precept andReaction against over-evolution amongst the fine arts.example that one form of artistic activity was as worthy as another, and himself both practised and trained others in the practice of glass-painting, weaving, embroidery, furniture and wall-paper designing, and book decoration alike. His example has been to some extent followed in most European countries, and efforts have been made to reunite the functions of artist and craftsman, and to set a limit to the process of differentiation among the various manual arts. In the vocal or time arts also, a reformer of high genius and force of character, Richard Wagner, rose to contend that in music the process of evolution and differentiation had gone much too far. Music, he urged, as separated from words and actions, independent orchestral and instrumental music, had reached its utmost development, and its further advance could only be an advance into the inane; while operatic music had broken itself up into a number of set and separate forms, as aria, scena, recitative, which corresponded to no real varieties of instinctive emotional utterance, and in the aimless production of which the art was in danger of paralysing and stultifying itself. This process, he declared, must be checked; music and words must be brought back again into close connexion and mutual dependence; the artificial opera forms must be abolished, and a new and homogeneous music-drama be created, of which the author must combine in himself the functions of poet, composer, inventor, and director of scenery and stage appliances, so that the entire creation should bear the impress of a single mind; to the creation of such a music-drama he accordingly devoted all the energies of his being.
It is thus evident that the evolution theory, though it furnishes us with some instructive points of view for the history of the fine arts as for other things, is far from being the whole key to that history. Another key, employed withTaine’s philosophy or natural history of the fine arts.results perhaps less really luminous than they are certainly showy and attractive, is that supplied by Taine. Taine’s philosophy, which might perhaps be better called a natural history, of fine art consists in regarding the fine arts as the necessary result of the general conditions under which they are at any time produced—conditions of race and climate, of religion, civilization and manners. Acquaint yourself with these conditions as they existed in any given people at any given period, and you will be able to account for the characters assumed by the arts of that people at that period, and to reason from one to the other, as a botanist can account for the flora of any given locality, and can reason from its soil, exposure and temperature, to the orders of vegetation which it will produce. This method of treating the history of the fine arts, again, is one which can be pursued with profit in so far as it makes the student realize the connexion of fine arts with human culture in general, and teaches him how the arts of any age and country are not an independent or arbitrary phenomenon, but are essentially an outcome, or efflorescence, to use a phrase of Ruskin’s, of deep-seated elements in the civilization which produces them. But it is a method which, rashly used, is very apt to lead to a hasty and one-sided handling both of history and of art. It is easy to fasten on certain obvious relations of fine art to general civilization when you know a few of the facts of both, and to say, the cloudy skies and mongrel industrial population of Protestant Amsterdam at such and such a date had their inevitable reflection in the art of Rembrandt; the wealth and pomp of the full-fleshed burghers and burgesses of Catholic Antwerp had theirs in the art of Rubens. But to do this in the precise and conclusive manner of Taine’s treatises on the philosophy of art always means to ignore a large range of conditions or causes for which no corresponding effect is on the surface apparent, and generally also a large number of effects for which appropriate causes cannot easily be discovered at all.
These considerations have resulted in a reaction against Taine’s theories which goes probably too far. It is no complete confutation of his philosophy of art-history to contend, as has been done somewhat contemptuously byCriticisms and counter-criticisms on Taine’s methods.Professor Ernst Grosse and others, that the great artist, so far from representing the general tendencies of his time and environment, is commonly a solitary innovator and revolutionist, and has to educate and create his own public, often through years of obloquy or neglect. This is sometimes true when the traditions and ideals of art are undergoing revolution or swift experimental change, but hardly ever true in times of stable tradition and accepted ideals; and when true it only shows that the tendencies the innovating genius represents are tendencies which have till his time been working underground, and which he is born to bring into light and evidence. A new and revolutionary impulse in art, as in thought or politics, is like a yeast or ferment working at first secretly, affecting for a while only a few spirits, as a new epidemic may for a while only affect a few constitutions, and then gradually ripening and strengthening till it communicates itself to thousands. In its inception such a ferment is not, indeed, one of the obvious phenomena of the society in which it takes root, but it is none the less one of the most vital and significant phenomena. The truth is, that this particular efflorescence of human culture depends for its character at any given time upon combinations of causes which are by no means simple, but generally highly complex, obscure and nicely balanced. For instance, the student who should try to reason back from the holy and beatified character which prevails in much of the devotional painting of the Italian schools down to the Renaissance would be much mistaken were he to conclude, “like art, like life, thoughts and manners.” He would not understand the relation of the art to the general civilization of those days unless he were to remember that one of the chief functions of the imagination is to make up for the shortcomings of reality, and to supply to contemplation images of that which is most lacking in actual life; so that the visions at once peaceful and ardent embodied by the religious schools of art in the Italian cities are to be explained, not by the peace, but rather in great part by the dispeace, of contemporary existence, and by the longing of the human spirit to escape into happier and more calm conditions.
Any one of the three modes of generalization to which we have referred might no doubt yield, however, supposing in the student the due gifts of patience and of caution, a working clue to guide him through that immense region ofDifficulty of combining the study of the manual with that of the vocal group of fine arts.research, the history of the fine arts. But it is hardly possible to pursue to any purpose the history of the two great groups, the shaping group and the speaking group, together. At some stages of the world’s history the manual and the monumental arts have flourished, as in Egypt and Assyria, when there was no fine art of words at all, and the only literature was that of records cut in hieroglyph or cuneiform on palace walls and temples, and on tablets, seals and cylinders. At other times and in other communities there has existed a great tradition and inheritance of poetry and song when the manual arts were only beginning to emerge again from the wreck of an old civilization, as in the Homeric age of Greece, or where they had never flourished at all except by imitation and importation, as in Palestine. In historic Greece all three divisions of the art of poetry, the epic, lyric and the dramatic, had been perfected, and two of them had again declined, before sculpture had reached maturity or painting had passed beyond the stage of its early severity. The European poetry of the middle ages, abundant and rich as it was alike in France and Provence, in Germany and Scandinavia, can yet not take rank, among the creations of human genius, beside the great masterpieces of Romanesque and Gothic architecture; it was in Italy only that Dante, before the end of that age, carried poetry to a place of equality if not of primacy among the arts. Taking the England of the Elizabethan age, we find the great outburst of our national genius in poetry contemporary with nothing moreinteresting in the manual arts than the gradual and only half-intelligent transformation of late Gothic architecture by the adoption of Italian Renaissance forms imported principally by way of Flanders or France, together with a fine native skill shown in the art of miniature portrait-painting, and none at all worth mentioning in other branches of painting or in sculpture. If the course of poetry and that of the manual arts have thus run independently throughout almost the whole field of history, those of music and the manual arts have been more widely separated still. In ancient Greece music and poetry were, we know, most intimately connected, but of the true nature of Greek music we know but little, of that of the earlier middle ages less still, and throughout the later middle ages and the earlier Renaissance the art remained undeveloped, whether in the service of the church or in secular and popular use, and in both cases in strict subservience to words. The growth of independent music is entirely the work of the modern world, and will probably rank in the esteem of posterity as its highest spiritual achievement and claim to gratitude, when the mechanical inventions and applications of applied science, which now occupy so disproportionate a part of the attention of humanity, have become a normal and unregarded part of its existence.
Moments in history there have no doubt been when literature and the manual arts, and even music, have been swept simultaneously along a single stream of ideas and feelings. Such a moment was experienced in France in 1830 and the following years, when (to choose only a few of the greatest names) Hugo in poetry, Delacroix in painting, and Berlioz in music were roused to a high pitch of consentaneous inspiration by the new ideas and feelings of romanticism. But such moments are rare and exceptional. On the other hand, it is very possible to take the whole of the shaping or manual group of fine arts together and to pursue their history connectedly throughout the course of civilization. By the history of art what is usually meant is indeed the history of these three arts with that of some of their subordinate and connected crafts. Leaving aside the arts of the races of the farther East, which, profoundly interesting as they are, have but gradually and late become known to us, and the relations of which with the arts of the nearer East and the Mediterranean are still quite obscure—leaving these aside, the history of the manual arts of architecture, painting and sculpture falls naturally into several great periods or divisions to some extent overlapping each other but in the main consecutive.
These periods are roughly as follows:—
1. The period of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile, beginning approximately about 5000B.C.Main divisions of the history of art.and ending, roughly speaking (but some of them much earlier), with the spread of Greek power and Greek ideas under Alexander. On the main characteristics of the art of these empires we have already had occasion to touch.
2. The Minoan and Mycenaean period, partly contemporary with the above and dating probably from about 2500 to about 1000B.C.; our knowledge of this is due entirely to quite recent researches, confined at present to certain points in Greece and Asia Minor, in Crete and other islands in the Mediterranean basin; enough has already been revealed to prove the existence of an original and highly developed palace-architecture and of forms of relief-painting and of all the minor and decorative arts more free and animated than anything known to Egypt or Assyria. (SeeCreteandAegean Civilization.)
3. The Greek and Roman period, from about 700B.C.to the final triumph of Christianity, sayA.D.400. During the first two or three centuries of this period the Hellenic race, beginning again after the cataclysm which had swallowed up the earlier Mediterranean civilizations, carried to perfection its most characteristic art, that of sculpture, in the endeavour to embody worthily its ideas of the supernatural powers governing the world. Putting aside the monstrous gods of Egypt and the East, it found its ideals in varieties of the human form as presented by the most harmoniously developed specimens of the race under conditions of the greatest health, activity and grace. In the figures of Greek sculpture, both decorative and independent, and no doubt in Greek painting also (but of that we can only judge from such specimens of the minor handicrafts, chiefly vase-paintings, as have come down to us)—in these were set for the whole Western world the types and standards of human beauty, and in their grouping and arrangement the types and standards of rhythmical composition and design. Gradually human portraiture and themes of everyday life took their place beside representations of the gods and heroes. New schools struck out new tendencies within certain limits. But in the general standards of form and design there was in the imitative arts relatively little change, though towards the end there was much failure of skill, throughout the whole period. The one great change was in architecture. Greece had been content with the constructive system of columns and horizontal entablature, and under that system had invented and perfected her three successive modes or orders of architecture—the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. The genius of Rome invented the round arch, and by help of that system erected throughout her subject world a thousand vast constructions—temple, palace, bath, amphitheatre, forum, aqueduct, triumphal gate and the rest—on a scale of monumental grandeur such as Greece had never known.
4. The Christian period, from about 400 to about 1400. The decay or petrifaction of the imitative arts which had set in during the latter days of Rome continued during all the earlier centuries of the Christian period, while the Western world was in process of remaking. Free painting and free sculpture practically ceased to exist. Roman architecture underwent modifications under the influence of the church and of the new conditions of life; the Byzantine form, touched at certain times and places with oriental influences, developed itself wherever the Eastern Empire still stood erect in decay; the Romanesque form, as it is called, in the barbarian-conquered regions of the west and north. Sculpture existed for centuries only in rudimentary and subordinate forms as applied to architecture; painting only in forms of rigid though sometimes impressive hieratic imagery, whether as mosaic in the apses and vaults of churches, as rude illumination in MSS. and service-books, or as still ruder altar-painting carried on according to a frozen mechanical tradition. As time went on and medieval institutions developed themselves, a gradual vitality dawned in all these arts. In architecture the introduction of the pointed or Gothic arch at the beginning of the 13th century led to almost as great a revolution as that brought about by the use of the round or vaulted arch among the Romans. The same vital impulse that informed the new Gothic architecture breathed into the still quite subordinate arts of sculpture and painting (the latter now including the craft of glass-painting for church windows) a new spirit whether of devotional intensity or sweetness, or of human pathos or rugged humour, with a new technical skill for its embodiment. We have not set down, as is usually done, a specifically Gothic period in art, for this reason. The characteristic of the whole Christian period is that its dominant art is architecture, chiefly employed in the service of the church, with painting and sculpture only subordinately introduced for its enrichment. It makes no essential difference that from the 5th to the 12th century the forms of this art were derived with various modifications from the round-arched architecture of the Empire, and that by the 13th century new forms both of construction and decoration, in which the round arch was replaced by the pointed, had been invented in France, and from thence spread abroad to Germany and Scandinavia, Great Britain, Spain, and last and most superficially to Italy. The essential difference only begins when the imitative arts, sculpture and painting, begin to emancipate and detach themselves, to exist and strive after perfection on their own account. This happened first and very partially in Italy with the artificers of the 13th and 14th centuries—with the sculptors Nicola, Giovanni, and Andrea Pisano; the Sienese group of painters, Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti; and the Florentine group, Cimabue (if Cimabue is not a myth), Giotto and the Giotteschi. Thedevelopment of the rapid and flowing craft of fresco in place of the laborious and piecemeal craft of mosaic (henceforth for several centuries almost lost) was a great aid to this movement. After a period of something like stagnation, the movement received a vigorous fresh impulse soon after 1400, at about which date in Italy (not till near a century later in northern Europe) the beginning of the Renaissance is usually fixed.
5. The Renaissance period, from about 1400 to about 1600. The passion for classic literature, stimulated by the influence of Greek scholars into Italy after the fall of Constantinople; the enthusiastic revival of classic forms of architecture by architects like Brunelleschi and Alberti; the achievements in sculpture and painting of masters like Donatello and Masaccio, based on a new and impassioned study of nature and the antique together; these are the outstanding and universally known symptoms of the Italian Renaissance in the second and third quarters of the 15th century. Promptly and contemptuously in Italy, much more gradually and incompletely in the north, Gothic principles of construction and decoration were cast aside for classical principles, as reformulated by eager spirits from a combined study of Roman remains and of the text of Vitruvius. To the ideal types of devout and prayer-worn, ascetic and spiritualized humanity (tempered in certain subjects with elements of the homely and the grotesque), which the spirit of the middle ages had dictated to the sculptor and the painter, succeeded ideals of physical power, beauty and grace rivalling the Hellenic. The personages of the Christian faith and story were brought into visible kindred with those of ancient paganism. In the hands of certain artists a fortunate blending of the two ideals yielded results of a poignant and unique charm, which for us, who are the heirs both of antiquity and the middle ages, is far from being yet exhausted. At the same time, the love alike of republics, great princes, churchmen, nobles and merchants for works of art gave employment to sculptors and painters on themes other than ecclesiastical. The taste for civic or personal commemoration, for portraiture, for illustrations of allegory, romance and classic fable, covered with pictures the walls of council halls, of public and private palaces, and of villas. The invention of the oil medium by the painters of Flanders, and its gradual adoption by the Venetians and other schools of Italy for all purposes except the external decorations of buildings, added enormously to the resources of the art in rivalry with nature, and to the splendour of its results as objects of pride and luxury. The glories of matured Italian art reacted, not always favourably, on the north. The great days of Flemish painting had been from about 1430 to 1500, before any appreciable influence of the Renaissance had touched the schools of Brussels, of Bruges or of Antwerp. By about 1520 the artists of those schools had begun, except in portraiture, to lose their native vigour and originality by contact with the alien south. Among the great artists of Germany in the first half of the 16th century the work of one or two, like Burgkmair and Holbein, shows Italian influence reconciled not unsuccessfully with native instinct; but Dürer, the greatest of them, remained in all essentials Gothic and German to the end. During the last half of the century, the Netherlands and Germany alike yielded little but work of mongrel Teutonized Italian or Italianized Teutonic type, until towards its close Rubens accomplished, in the fire of his prodigious temperament, a true fusion of Flemish and Venetian qualities, at the same time closing gloriously the Renaissance period properly so called, and handing on an example which irresistibly affected a great part of modern painting.
6. Modern period, from about 1600 to the present time. During this period architecture remained in all European countries, until the 19th century, more or less completely under the influence of the Italian Renaissance. The principles of the classical revival had during a century or more of transition been gradually absorbed, first by France, then by Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain, and last by England, each country modifying the style according to its degree of knowledge or ignorance, its needs, instincts and traditions. Sculpture, which in the hands of the great masters of the earlier and later Renaissance in Italy had almost equalled its ancient glories, nay, in those of Michelangelo had actually surpassed them in the qualities at least of superhuman energy and intellectual expression—sculpture lost the sense of its true limitations, and entered, with the work of Bernini and even earlier, into an extravagant or “baroque” period of relaxed and bulging line, of exaggerated and ostentatious virtuosity. In this it followed the lead given by Italian architecture, by Jesuit church architecture especially, at and after the height of the Catholic reaction. From the monumental and memorial purposes which sculpture principally serves, it remained still, except in purely iconic uses, attached to or dependent on architecture. Not so painting, which asserted its independence more and more. In Protestant countries the old ecclesiastical patronage of the art had quite died out; in those that remained Catholic it continued, and even received a new stimulus from the anti-Protestant reaction. The demand for religious art was supplied with abundance of traditional facility, of technical accomplishment and devotional display, but with a loss of the old sincerity and inspiration. Almost all painting, even for the most extensive and monumental phases of decoration in church or palace or civic hall, was on canvas stretched over or fitted into its allotted space in the architecture, and the art of fresco, even in Venice, its last stronghold, was for a time neglected or forgotten. Portable paintings for princely or private galleries and cabinets became the chief and most characteristic products of the art. The subjects of painting multiplied themselves. All manner of new aspects of life and nature were brought within the technical compass of the painter. Besides devotional and classical subjects and portraiture, daily life in all its phases, down to the homeliest and grossest, the life of the parlour and the tavern, of field and shore and sea, with landscape in all its varieties, took their place as material for the painter. The truths of indoor and outdoor atmosphere were translated on canvas for the first time. The Dutchmen from about 1620 to 1670 were the most active innovators and path-breakers of modern art along all these lines. The greatest of them, Rembrandt, dealt, as has been said, like a master and a magician with the problems of human individuality as revealed in a mysterious colour and shadow world of his own invention. At the same time a painter of no less power in Spain, Velazquez, viewing the world in the natural light of every day, showed for the first time how vitally and subtly paint could render the relief and mutual values of figures and objects in space, the essential truth of their visible relations and reactions in the enveloping atmosphere. The achievement of these two victorious innovators has only come to be fully understood in our own day. The simultaneous conquest of Claude le Lorrain, on the other hand, over the atmospheric glow of summer and sunset on the Roman Campagna and the adjacent hills and coasts, found acceptance instantly, less perhaps for its own sake than because of the classical associations of the scenery which he depicted. The vast widening of the field of the painter’s art and multiplication of its subjects, which thus took place at the dawn of the modern period, were gains attended by one drawback, the loss, namely, of the sense of high seriousness and universal appeal which belonged to the art while its themes had been those of religion and classic story almost exclusively.
During the three hundred or so years of the modern period, academical schools attempting, more or less unsuccessfully, to carry on the great Italian and classical traditions of the Renaissance have not ceased to exist side byClassical and romantic revivals.side with those which have striven to express new ways of seeing and feeling. Sometimes, as in France first under Louis XIV., and again for forty years from the beginning of the Revolution to the dawn of romanticism, such schools have succeeded in crushing out and discrediting all efforts in other directions. Between these two epochs, say from 1710 to 1780, French 18th-century ideals of social elegance and brilliant frivolity expressed themselves in forms of great accomplishment and vivacity both in poetry and sculpture, from the days of Watteau to those of Fragonard and Clodion.At the same time England produced one of the finest and at the same time most national and downright masters of the brush in Hogarth; two of the greatest aristocratic portrait-painters of the world in Reynolds and Gainsborough, each of whom modified according to his own instincts the tradition imported in the previous century by Van Dyck, the greatest pupil of Rubens (Reynolds fusing with this influence those of Rembrandt and the Venetians in almost equal shares). Pastoral landscape in the hands of Gainsborough, classical, following Claude, in those of Wilson—these together with the humble but wholesome discipline of topographical illustration led on to the ambitious, wide-ranging and often inspired experiments of Turner, and to the narrower but more secure achievements of Constable in the same field, and made this country the acknowledged pioneer of modern landscape art. In the meantime the wave of classical enthusiasm which passed over Europe in the later years of the 18th century had produced in architecture generally a return to severer principles and purer lines, in reaction from the baroque and the rococo Renaissance styles of the preceding century and a half. In Italian sculpture, the same movement inspired during the Napoleonic period the over-honeyed accomplishment of Canova and his school; in northern sculpture, the more truly antique but almost wholly imitative work of Thorwaldsen, and the pure and rhythmic grace of the English Flaxman, a true master of design though scarcely of sculpture strictly so called. The same movement again was partly responsible in English painting and illustration from about 1770 to 1820 for much pastoral and idyllic work of agreeable but shallow elegance. In French painting the classic movement struck deeper. Along with much would-be Roman attitudinizing there was much real, if rigid, power in the work of David, much accomplished purity and sweetness in that of Prud’hon. The last and truest classic of France, and at the same time in portraiture the greatest realist, Ingres, held high the standard of his cause even through and past the great romantic revival which began with Géricault and culminated in Delacroix and the school of landscape painters who had received their inspiration from Constable. The main instincts embodied in the Romantic movement were the awakening of the human spirit to an eager retrospective love of the past, and especially of the medieval past, and simultaneously to a new passion for the beauties of nature, and especially of wild nature. Germany and England preceded France in this double awakening; in both countries the movement inspired a fine literature, but in neither did it express itself so fully and self-consciously through literature and the other arts together as it did in France when the hour struck. The revival of medieval sentiment in Germany had inspired comparatively early in the century the learned but somewhat aridly ascetic and essentially unpainterlike work of the group of artists who styled themselvesNazarener. In England the same revival expressed itself during a great part of the Victorian age in an enthusiastic return to the early Gothic ecclesiastical styles of architecture, a return unsuccessful upon the whole, because in pursuit of archaeological and grammatical detail the root qualities of right proportion and organic design were too often neglected.
Allied with this Gothic revival, and stimulated like it by the persuasive conviction and brilliant resource of Ruskin in criticism was the pre-Raphaelite movement in painting. Among the artists identified with this movement there wasThe pre-Raphaelites.little really in common except in impatience of the prevailing modes of empty academic convention or anecdotic frivolity. The name covered for a while the essentially divergent aims of a vigorous unintellectual craftsman like Millais, fired for a few years in youth by contact with more imaginative temperaments, of a strenuous imitator of unharmonized local colours and unsubordinated natural facts like Holman Hunt, and of born poets and impassioned medievalists like Rossetti and after him Burne-Jones. Meantime in France, putting aside the work of the great Delacroix, the impulse of 1830 expressed itself best and most lastingly in the monumental work of Daumier both in caricature and romance, the impressive and significant treatment of peasant life and labour by J.F. Millet, the vitally truthful pastoral and landscape work of Troyon, Corot, Daubigny and the rest.
Since the exhaustion of the Romantic movement, the other movements that have been taking place in European art have been too numerous and too rapid to be touched on here to any purpose. Both in sculpture and paintingContemporary tendencies.France has taken and held the lead. Mention has already been made of the special tendency in recent sculpture identified with the name and influence of Rodin. In painting there has been the fertilizing and transforming influence of Japan on the decorative ideals of the West; there have been successively the Realist movement, the movements of the Impressionists, the Luminists, the Neo-impressionists, the Independents, movements initiated almost always in Paris, and in other countries eagerly adopted and absorbed, or angrily controverted and denounced, or simply neglected and ignored according to the predilection of this or that group of artists and critics; there has been a vast amount of heterogeneous, hurried, confident and clamant innovating activity in this direction and in that, much of it perhaps doomed to futility in the eyes of posterity, but at any rate there has not been stagnation.
Bibliography.—To attempt in this place anything like a full bibliography covering so vast a field would be idle. Many of the books necessary to a first-hand study of the subject are cited in the articleAesthetics. The following are some of the most important writings actually referred to in the text, English translations being mentioned where they exist: Aristotle,Poetics, edited with critical notes and a translation by S.H. Butcher (1898); S.H. Butcher,Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, with a critical text and a translation of thePoetics(1902); Plato,Republic, bk. x. 596 ff., 600 ff. (Grote, iii. 117 ff.; Jowett, iii. 489 ff.); B. Bosanquet,Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art(Ästhetik), translation with notes and prefatory essay (1896);The Philosophy of Art, an Introduction to the Science of Aesthetics, by Hegel and C.L. Michelet, trans. Hastie (1886); Schiller,Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen(trans, by G.J. Weiss, with preface by J. Chapman, 1845; also in Bohn’s Standard Library, 1846); Herbert Spencer,First Principles, ch. xxii.; Gottfried Semper,Der Stil(1860-1863); Hippolyte Taine,De l’idéal dans l’art(1867),Philosophie de l’art en Grèce(1869),Philosophie de l’art en Italie,Philosophic de l’art dans les Pays-Bas(translations in 5 vols. by J. Durand, New York, 1889); Karl Groos,Die Spiele der Menschen(1899; trans, by E.L. Baldwin, 1901), andDie Spiele der Tiere(2nd ed., 1907; trans, by E.L. Baldwin, 1898); Ernst Grosse,Die Anfänge der Kunst(1894; trans, in the Anthropological Series, 1894); Yrjö Hirn,The Origins of Art(1900); G. Baldwin Brown,The Fine Arts(2nd ed., 1902); Felix Clay,The Origins of the Sense of Beauty(1908). For a general history of the manual or shaping group of arts, C.J.F. Schnasse,Geschichte der bildenden Künste(2nd ed., 1866-1879), though in parts obsolete, is still unsuperseded. A very summary general view is given in Salomon Reinach,The Story of Art through the Ages(trans. by Florence Simmonds, 1904); a general history of the same group was undertaken by Giulio Carotti (English translation by Alice Todd, 1909).
Bibliography.—To attempt in this place anything like a full bibliography covering so vast a field would be idle. Many of the books necessary to a first-hand study of the subject are cited in the articleAesthetics. The following are some of the most important writings actually referred to in the text, English translations being mentioned where they exist: Aristotle,Poetics, edited with critical notes and a translation by S.H. Butcher (1898); S.H. Butcher,Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, with a critical text and a translation of thePoetics(1902); Plato,Republic, bk. x. 596 ff., 600 ff. (Grote, iii. 117 ff.; Jowett, iii. 489 ff.); B. Bosanquet,Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art(Ästhetik), translation with notes and prefatory essay (1896);The Philosophy of Art, an Introduction to the Science of Aesthetics, by Hegel and C.L. Michelet, trans. Hastie (1886); Schiller,Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen(trans, by G.J. Weiss, with preface by J. Chapman, 1845; also in Bohn’s Standard Library, 1846); Herbert Spencer,First Principles, ch. xxii.; Gottfried Semper,Der Stil(1860-1863); Hippolyte Taine,De l’idéal dans l’art(1867),Philosophie de l’art en Grèce(1869),Philosophie de l’art en Italie,Philosophic de l’art dans les Pays-Bas(translations in 5 vols. by J. Durand, New York, 1889); Karl Groos,Die Spiele der Menschen(1899; trans, by E.L. Baldwin, 1901), andDie Spiele der Tiere(2nd ed., 1907; trans, by E.L. Baldwin, 1898); Ernst Grosse,Die Anfänge der Kunst(1894; trans, in the Anthropological Series, 1894); Yrjö Hirn,The Origins of Art(1900); G. Baldwin Brown,The Fine Arts(2nd ed., 1902); Felix Clay,The Origins of the Sense of Beauty(1908). For a general history of the manual or shaping group of arts, C.J.F. Schnasse,Geschichte der bildenden Künste(2nd ed., 1866-1879), though in parts obsolete, is still unsuperseded. A very summary general view is given in Salomon Reinach,The Story of Art through the Ages(trans. by Florence Simmonds, 1904); a general history of the same group was undertaken by Giulio Carotti (English translation by Alice Todd, 1909).
(S. C.)
FINGER,one of the five members with which the hand is terminated, a digit; sometimes the word is restricted to the four digits other than the thumb. The word is common to Teutonic languages, cf. Dutchvingerand Ger.Finger; probably the ultimate origin is to be found in the root of the words appearing in Greekπέντε, Lat.quinque, five. (SeeSkeleton:Appendicular.)
FINGER-AND-TOE,Club RootorAnbury, a destructive plant-disease known botanically asPlasmodiophora Brassicae, which attacks cabbages, turnips, radishes and other cultivated and wild members of the order Cruciferae. It is one of the so-called Slime-fungi or Myxogastres. The presence of the disease is indicated by nodules or warty outgrowths on the root, which sometimes becomes much swollen and ultimately rots, emitting an unpleasant smell. The disease is contracted from spores present in the soil, which enter the root. The parasite develops within the living cells of the plant, forming a glairy mass of protoplasm known as theplasmodium, the form of which alters from time to time. The cells which have been attacked increase enormously in size and the disease spreads from cell to cell. Ultimately the plasmodium becomes resolved into numerous minute round spores which, on the decay of the root, are set free in the soil. A preventive is quicklime, theapplication of which destroys the spores in the soil. It is important that diseased plants should be burned, also that cruciferous weeds, such as shepherd’s purse, charlock, &c., should not be allowed to grow in places where plants of the same order are in cultivation.
1, Turnip attacked by the disease, reduced.
2, A cell of the tissue containing the plasmodium; the smaller cells at the sides are unaffected.
3, Infected cell, showing spore formation. 2, 3, highly magnified.
FINGER-PRINTS.The use of finger-prints as a system of identification (q.v.) is of very ancient origin, and was known from the earliest days in the East when the impression of his thumb was the monarch’s sign-manual. A relic of this practice is still preserved in the formal confirmation of a legal document by “delivering” it as one’s “act and deed.” The permanent character of the finger-print was first put forward scientifically in 1823 by J.E. Purkinje, an eminent professor of physiology, who read a paper before the university of Breslau, adducing nine standard types of impressions and advocating a system of classification which attracted no great attention. Bewick, the English draughtsman, struck with the delicate qualities of the lineation, made engravings of the impression of two of his finger-tips and used them as signatures for his work. Sir Francis Galton, who laboured to introduce finger-prints, points out that they were proposed for the identification of Chinese immigrants when registering their arrival in the United States. In India, Sir William Herschel desired to use finger-prints in the courts of the Hugli district to prevent false personation and fix the identity upon the executants of documents. The Bengal police under the wise administration of Sir E.R. Henry, afterwards chief commissioner of the London metropolitan police, usefully adopted finger-prints for the detection of crime, an example followed in many public departments in India. A transfer of property is attested by the thumb-mark, so are documents when registered, and advances made to opium-growers or to labourers on account of wages, or to contracts signed under the emigration law, or medical certificates to vouch for the persons examined, all tending to check the frauds and impostures constantly attempted.
The prints depend upon a peculiarity seen in the human hand and to some extent in the human foot. The skin is traversed in all directions by creases and ridges, which are ineradicable and show no change from childhood to extreme old age. The persistence of the markings of the finger-tips has been proved beyond all question, and this universally accepted quality has been the basis of the present system of identification. The impressions, when examined, show that the ridges appear in certain fixed patterns, from which an alphabet of signs or a system of notation has been arrived at for convenience of record. As the result of much experiment a fourfold scheme of classification has been evolved, and the various types employed are styled “arches,” “loops,” “whorls” and “composites.” There are seven subclasses, and all are perfectly distinguishable by an expert, who can describe each by its particular symbol in the code arranged, so that the whole “print” can be read as a distinct and separate expression. Very few, and the simplest, appliances are required for taking the print—a sheet of white paper, a tin slab, and some printer’s ink. Scars or malformations do not interfere with the result.
The unchanging character of the finger-prints has repeatedly helped in the detection of crime. We may quote the case of the thief who broke into a residence and among other things helped himself to a glass of wine, leaving two finger-prints upon the tumbler which were subsequently found to be identical with those of a notorious criminal who was arrested, pleaded guilty and was convicted. Another burglar effected entrance by removing a pane of glass from a basement window, but, unhappily for him, left his imprints, which were referred to the registry and found to agree exactly with those of a convict at large; his address was known, and when visited some of the stolen property was found in his possession. In India a murderer was identified by the brown mark of a blood-stained thumb he had left when rummaging amongst the papers of the deceased. This man was convicted of theft but not of the murder.
The keystone to the whole system is the central office where the register or index of all criminals is kept for ready reference. The operators need no special gifts or lengthy training; method and accuracy suffice, and abundant checks exist to obviate incorrect classification and reduce the liability to error.