Charles H. Caffin

“ Leonardo loved to peer into the mysteries and secrets of nature and life. He was at once an artist and a man of science; turning aside, for a time, from painting to build canals, contrive engines of war, to make mechanical birds which flew, and animals that walked. He foresaw the possibilities of steam and of balloons, and several important discoveries of later scientists. Mathematician, chemist, machinist, and physiologist, geologist, geographer, and astronomer, he was also a supreme artist. ”

“ Yet it is just this feeling and experience of another man which a picture gives us, If you consider a moment you will understand why. The world itself is a vast panorama, and from it the painter selects his subject—not to copy it exactly, since it would be impossible for him to do this, even if he tried. ”

“ In a general way, the difference consists in this: that the one is full of mystery; the other, of clear picturing. Leonardo has given us a painting which appeals to our imagination; Dürer presents one that delights the eye. The former’s picture we feel to be an imaginary scene; the latter’s, a wonderfully natural representation of an actual incident. In brief, while Dürer has tried to make everything plain to our eyes and mind, Leonardo has evidently used all his effort to make us forget the facts and realize the picture. ”

“ While the Greek artist carved or painted human or animal forms, striving to give them a perfection of shape in every part that would express his ideal, the artist of the Fast reached his ideal through the perfection of beautiful lines, of beautiful patterns of form and color. ”

“ For instance, we may quickly discover that an artist's experience of life is meager, his feeling commonplace and paltry, There are not a few men of this sort in the occupation of art, just as in every other walk of life, and their pictures, so far as we ourselves are concerned, will be disappointing. But among the pictures which have stood the test of time we shall always find that the fruits of the artist’s experience and 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Therefore, since none of us can include in ourselves the whole range of possible experience and feeling, it is through the experience and the feeling of others that we deepen and refine our own. It is this that we should look to pictures to accomplish, which, as you will acknowledge, is a very different thing from offhand like or dislike. For example, we may not be attracted at first, but we reason with ourselves: “No doubt this picture meant a good deal to the man who painted it; it embodies his experience of the world and his feeling toward the subject. ”

“ Leonardo left numerous drawings and comparatively few paintings, while Dürer is even more celebrated for his engravings on wood and copper than for his paintings.
Now, Dürer was born a German; Leonardo an Italian. This sums up much of the difference between their work as painters. The Italian race, under its sunny skies, has an inborn love of beauty. The Germans, in a sterner climate, retain, to this day, the energy that carved its way through the vast forests of their country. ”

“ It is most important to realize the part which is played by these two qualities of experience and feeling, Experience, the fullness or the deficiency of it, must affect the work of every one of us, no matter what our occupation may be, And if the work is of the kind which appeals to the feelings of others, as in the case of the preacher, the writer, the actor, the painter, sculptor, architect, or art-craftsman, the musician or even the dancer, then it must be affected cqually by the individual's capacity of feeling and by his power of expressing what he feels. ”

“ Perhaps you will best understand the meaning and value of perfect composition by contrasting Raphael’s picture with Wohlgemuth’s “Death of the Virgin.” In the latter there is no composition, in the sense in which we are using the word—that is to say, of an arrangement carefully planned. It presents only a crowd of figures more or less naturally grouped. Our attention is not engrossed by the whole, but is scattered over the parts. And you will find, as you continue your studies, that there is even more art in knowing what to leave out than in knowing what to put in ”

“ The world is full of beauty which many people hurry past or live in front of and do not see, There is also a world of beauty in pictures, but it escapes the notice of many, because, while they wish to see it, they do not know how.
The first necessity for the proper seeing of a picture is to try to see it through the eyes of the artist who painted it. This is not a usual method. Generally people look only through their own eyes, and like or dislike a picture according as it does or docs not suit their particular fancy. ”

“ In old Greece, art and religion were bound together. The gods and goddesses [2] in whom they believed were always represented in sculpture and painting as human beings of a higher order; physical perfection was the ideal alike of religion and of art. But the Christianity of those earlier times met the ideal of physical perfection with the spiritual doctrine of mortifying the flesh, and the pagan art of old Greece was condemned by the Church, Yet pictures of some sort were needed as an aid to the teachings of religion, and the Church found what it required in the art of Byzantium. ”

“ From him and from his pupils the knowledge of Greek literature spread rapidly over Italy, accompanied by an extraordinary enthusiasm for Roman and Greek art, and for Greek thought and Greek ideals. Artists of that time soon began to cherish the old Greek devotion to the beauty of the human form ”

“ In the present case the subject is religious, but we may doubt if the Bible version of the story was in the artist’s mind. He was commissioned to paint a Madonna and Child with attendant angels, and, poet and dreamer that he was, took the familiar theme and made it the basis of a picture from his own imagination, In the figure of the Christ-child there is a grave dignity, a suggestion of authority. The only gesture of infancy is in the left arm and hand, and the mother’s face is bowed in timid meekness, and is rather sad in expression.
But beauty of face he does not give to his Madonna ”

“ When we study it we discover that one reason why it impresses us so strongly is the skill with which the artist has represented all these things.
Here is the point at which the genius of Dürer, and that of Leonardo, similar in many respects, branch out like a Y into separate directions. It is not the outward appearance of objects, but their inward meaning, that most interested Leonardo, A glance at his picture “The Virgin of the Rocks” is sufficient to make us feel that the artist is not trying to impress us with the actual appearance of things ”

“ Hans Memling (1430-1494) , Flemish School. We have seen that the revival of painting began with a study of the appearances of objects, and an attempt to represent them as real to the senses of sight and touch; that the painters learned from the sculptors, who themselves had learned from the remains of antique sculpture, and that the result was a closer truth to nature, in the representation of the human form.
We have now to consider the effect produced upon painting by the revival of the study of Greek, which revealed to Italy of the fifteenth century a new light. ”

“ It is true that it does not, as a whole, represent a real scene, for the Virgin’s throne with its embroidered hanging or dossal, the canopy or baldachin above it, and the richly decorated arch which frames it in are not what you would expect to see set up in a landscape. ”

“ The throne actually has length, breadth, and thickness; so have all the figures, and they rest firmly upon the ground; the artist has called in the aid of perspective to enforce the reality of his group. Now how has he accomplished this appearance of reality? By the use of light and shade, and by making his lines express the structure and character of the object. Compare, again, for example, the figure of the infant Saviour in the two pictures. In Cimabue’s the drapery is scored with lines which vaguely hint at folds
“The Madonna Enthroned.” ”

“ The angel on the left is simply an older child playfully attracting the baby’s attention to an apple; the Christ-child is simply a baby, attracted by the colored, shining object, and the pretty scene is watched intently by the other angel. ”

“ From the mill is issuing a man with a sack of flour on his shoulders, which he will set upon the back of the donkey that waits patiently before the door, while a little way along the road stands a dog, all alert and impatient to start. ”

“ The picture was painted probably during the years of his apprenticeship to Cimabue, and shows much less freedom and practised skill than the works of Giotto’s later years. Giotto was the first
“The Madonna Enthroned” by Giotto.
artist to introduce the faces of living people of his own time into pictures, and the “Paradise” on the walls of the Bargello in Florence contains the famous portrait of Dante, the great Italian poet, in his early manhood. It had remained covered with whitewash for two hundred years, until once more brought to light in 1840. ”

“ In 1494 his father also died, leaving the boy, then eleven years old, to the care of an uncle, who, it is supposed, arranged for him to continue his studies under the painter Timoteo Viti, who was then living in Urbino, At about the age of sixteen he was sent to Perugia and entered the studio of the painter called Perugino. ”

“ These incidents illustrate Memling’s fondness for detail, and his delight in the representation of facts as facts.
By comparison, Botticelli is a painter, not of facts, but of ideas, and his pictures are not so much a representation of certain objects as a pattern of forms. Nor is his coloring rich and lifelike, as Memling’s is; it is often rather a tinting than actual color. His figures do not attract us by their suggestion of bulk, but as shapes of form, suggesting rather a flat pattern of decoration, Accordingly, the lines which inclose the ”