Harry Quilter

“ Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to receive the divine glory; but do not impose upon us any æsthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art, those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world."—George Eliot. ”

“ But it surely is not the case that art alone, of all the great influences of the world, reached its apogee in the Middle Ages, and that nothing henceforth remains for it but stagnation or decline. Can we believe that progress will go on in all else, and that art alone is doomed to stand still for ever, like a sort of Lot's wife, looking backward to Venice and Florence, as she to Sodom? ”

“ In the extreme distance, purple mountains enclose the valley on every side, and immediately behind us rises the mountain on which Assisi is built, crowned with a ruined citadel, and black against the sky, the sharp pinnacles of cypress-trees. Whichever way one turns, there is beauty—in the quaint architecture of the old town, in the wild growth of the ancient olive-trees, and their delicate tints of greyish-green and silver ”

“ Such, I say, is the history of Giotto as I have gathered it from the chronicles of Vasari, Baldinucci, and Lanzi, Kugler, Rumohr, Crowe, and Jameson; but there is another history of the man, of greater worth and fuller meaning than can be found in these musty records; there is that which the painter has written with his own hand, in colours which yet retain much of their pristine brightness. The best record of the artist is neither his questionable witticisms, nor these rough outlines of his life, but that which shines forth clearly still on the walls of Santa Croce and the arches of Assisi. ”

“ Such are the men whom Art wants nowadays, as it wanted them then, those who are men as well as artists, who will not dream in courtly isolation of beauties which never existed, but will go down into the markets, and the streets, where men sin and sorrow, or by the rivers and fields, where they toil and hope, and use their genius to brighten the facts of every day, to interpret the strange gleams of beauty, which fall here and there upon a weary world. ”

“ ART IN ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. If we would gain a true and adequate conception of the works and merit of any painter, it is necessary for us not only to examine his special productions, but to become in some measure acquainted with the state in which art was during his time. And not only is it necessary to take into account the actual amount of progress then manifested in one particular branch, such as painting, but to consider also the tendencies of the age, if we would separate the influence exercised by the artist's work, and define its true significance. ”

“ For it must be noticed that many modern writers on art seem to hold, and artists to exemplify, the principle, that one subject is as good as another; in fact, that the treatment is everything, the meaning of the work wholly subsidiary. Art no longer exists to depict worthily worthy things, but rather like an æsthetic Blondin balances itself solemnly on a tight-rope of its own construction, seeming to pride itself upon its removal from the vulgar crowd, and moves onward with abstracted gaze, heedless of the oft repeated cries of "Come down." ”

“ The style of the architecture is Gothic in so far as it makes use of the pointed arch, but can hardly be described as such without giving a false impression to those who are accustomed to the Gothic of the north; and who think of that style as one of varied, if somewhat gloomy, masses, of irregular arches, pinnacles, and buttresses; colourless save for the lichen that grows between the grey stones, and owing their beauty more to the unwearied inventiveness of their builders' fancy than to any symmetrical unity of design. ”

“ The Taj, too, owes much of its effect to the beauty of its surroundings; to the stately entrance, the long paved approach of white marble, the great daïs of the same, on which the tomb stands, and last, not least, to thick rows of dark cypress trees which surround it to right and left, and toss their fretted spires towards the sky, a hundred feet below the great dome. ”

“ The figures of Christ and Judas are both grand in their respective ways, and stand out vividly from the crowd that surrounds them. There is no mistake about what is transpiring; one does not have to look for the action in a middle of graceful lines, but it presents itself strongly and at the first glance. The figure of the high priest who points out Christ to the soldiery is also very fine, dignified and yet eager in action, and with a mixed expression of triumph and anxiety. In colour this fresco bears comparison with any in the chapel. ”

“ In sculpture, the Pisani, father and son, and their pupils and fellow workers, trying to revive classicalism as a barrier against the false state of religious art, but failing to see that, after all, the strength of the ancients lay not in their ideal, but in their real perfection of nature—and so losing itself in the wilds of imitative and traditional art; and lastly, there were flourishing in Italy, two great schools of architecture closely allied, the Byzantine and the Lombard, and gradually spreading was a third school destined to destroy them both, which we have nicknamed Gothic. ”

“ Isaac is half sitting, half lying on the sacrificial altar, and Abraham stands beside him with one hand upon the child's head, his left foot firmly planted on the step of the altar, and his right arm swung up to its fullest height above his head. Seldom have I seen a more vivid bit of arrested motion depicted in any work of art; the painter has actually caught the pause caused by the sudden appearance of the angel, bidding the father to stay his hand. The action of all the limbs is most remarkable in its intensity, even Abraham's long robes fly out wildly behind his outstretched arm. ”

“ And so it is that from the time when he draws the meditations of a puppy, to that in which he hangs his massive tower of coloured marble, between the earth and heaven, his work seems simple, grand, and sincere. He is not painting pictures to aggrandise himself, he is only lovingly recording what he knows, feels, or hopes. He is not above, nor below his work ”

“ Eastern magnificence covered the walls with gold and colours, while the necessities of excluding the fierce sunshine of the East, narrowed the windows, and produced the chequered gloom, through which the lustre of the golden crucifix, and the silver lamp, alone shone clearly. Such was the rise of the Byzantine architecture, which, however lacking it may be in strictness of taste and correctness of method, has always been powerful over men's minds to an almost unparalleled extent. ”

“ If we would knit into firmer unison the varying struggles, failures, and triumphs of our great brotherhood, we must learn to look upon genius, not as some cold, unapproachable excellence that finds its work in alien spheres of imagination and action, but rather as a keener insight into the truths of thought and feeling, with its relations to the everyday aspects of life, no less than to its most exalted phases. ”

“ Descriptions of pictures are stupid things at the best, and when the attempt is made to describe a work whose beauty consists less in any hard tangible perfection of form and colour, than in a delicate purity of feeling and an intense belief in the subject treated of, when we have to catalogue as beauties, the expressions of a choir of angels, and the raptures of the surrounding saints, words seem totally inadequate to the task. ”

“ They are not so much an improvement upon Byzantine art, as a wholly new departure; the difference is something like that between the gallop of a horse, and the fierce rush of a locomotive, not only a greater pace, but a changed mode of progression. It is difficult to see how the one could have ever developed into the other, and there is no clue left, save such as may be found in that lonely shepherd life led by the young artist, amidst the olive groves and grey hills of Vespignano. ”

“ Wherever the eye turns it meets a bewilderment of colour pure and radiant, and yet restful to the eye; tints which resemble in their perfect harmony of brightness the iridescence of a shell, and seem to be possessed of something of the same strange quality of imprisoned light. From the blue ceiling, with its medallions and golden stars, to the lowest range of mosaic, there is literally not a spot where the eye cannot rest with pleasure ”

“ I almost despair of conveying an idea of the peculiarities of this architecture to those who have never seen any examples of it, its chief elements being those of simplicity and intricacy, solidity and lightness; it appearing, in fact, to be a mass of contradictions. Its Byzantine origin, or rather the influence on it at some time of Byzantine art, is clearly perceptible in the variety of colour which is employed; yellow, 26 and white, and red, and green, and black tiles and bricks being used alternately, with the utmost skill and the greatest variety of effect. ”

“ Even the massive ironwork seems to partake of the general desolation, and is coated with the 98 grey dust of centuries. Here and there we pass a fountain, generally situated in a small grass-grown open space, with a couple of earthen pitchers left to fill themselves leisurely; and over all there is still the sense of death in life, needing a vigorous effort on our part to endure. We begin to think there was some sense in that philistine American we met at Florence, who smiled so scornfully at our determination to visit Assisi, and to have thoughts of the next train to a more lively spot. ”

“ Yet now, as in the older centuries, men sorrow and hope, succeed and fail, and woman's beauty is as fair, and her heart as tender, as under the Italian sunshine six hundred years ago; there may be at the present hour in the cottages of England, as then mid the hills of Vespignano, peasants' children in whom the inspiration of art is struggling for utterance, needing but the chance that Cimabue gave to Giotto, to give to mankind new lessons of beauty and truth. ”

“ To sum up shortly—truth of form, and colour, and expression, will make a fine, perhaps even an impressive picture, but hardly a great one; in order to do that the artist must be possessed of the power of seizing the essence of the scene, of penetrating beneath the first commonplace view of the subject, and finding every element of true meaning and beauty which lies in his subject. ”

“ If the lover of nature found the prospect without to his mind, the lover of art can hardly fail to be satisfied with the prospect within. Above the high-altar shine the four greatest works of Giotto, and to right and left of the choir, roof and wall are covered with frescoes by Giotto, Cimabue, Memmi, Gaddi, and others, every inch of space being filled with paintings. Chapel after chapel opens in long series from the choir, each rich in paintings, even the huge round arches of the nave are painted in delicately-involved patterns to represent mosaics of coloured marble. ”

“ The perfection of technique reached by those masters and their contemporaries, has raised the admiration of all later painters to such a degree that they have exalted the methods of this Renaissance painting into a religion, and seek to find in the laws of chiaroscuro, composition, balance, and harmony of colour, which they can deduce from the pictures of that period, the source of the inspiration that renders those works immortal. Thus art is still in service, in service to itself ”

“ The whole spirit of the Greek frieze is as vivid in Giotto's work as it is in the original sculpture, executed more than a thousand years before. It merely shows the extraordinary unity of all good art, that a mediæval Italian, working purely from nature and life, should be able to arrive by himself, at a representation which has all the feeling of that which is acknowledged to be the finest art the world has ever seen. It must be noticed that where Giotto falls short of his Grecian predecessor, is chiefly in the nobility of the types both of man and horse. ”

“ Again, of landscape painting, why is it that a picture of any natural scene will move hundreds of people who would have derived little or no enjoyment from the scene itself? Why, for instance, could Fred Walker paint a street at Cookham or a country lane in a shower, so as to give an amount of pleasure quite incommensurate with the importance or loveliness of his subject? ”

“ Francis chanted their 3 earliest anthems, and took their first solemn vows of poverty and obedience. It will not be wasted time, if a thrill of kindly sympathy can be raised within us for that old life without whose struggles our fuller knowledge could never have existed, when the world was plainly divided into soldiers and scholars, rulers and ruled, men of action and men of thought, when the good was encrusted with no uncertainties, and the evil mitigated by no doubts, and all the lives of men were poured along a deeper and narrower channel than now. ”

“ Nor is it alone in shape of roof and dimness of light that the resemblance to a cavern exists, for it is visible too in the low walls, whence the arched roof springs in massive curves, and in the seeming absence of all support for the great arches, for the plain stone pillars that support them, half embedded in the walls, and only reaching to a height of eight feet from the ground, attract little notice, and the arches seem to grow out of the walls as if in a building of nature's own construction. ”

“ In the course of many years' travel in every quarter of the globe, I have come upon but one building which had at all the same sort of power over the imagination which is possessed by this tower of Giotto. That structure was the Taj, at Agra, which in its exquisiteness of finish, its delicacy 137 of involved ornament, its perfectly unsullied whiteness, and above all, in its completeness of design, resembled the Florentine Campanile, though for beauty of proportion, no less than for that of colour, the Indian tomb must yield precedence to the Italian bell-tower. ”

“ The more we see of the world and its varying actions and interests, the more certainly do we discover one fact, that there is a kernel of beauty beneath almost the roughest husks and rinds of human nature, and that in the natural world there is also a beauty far superior to that which lies on the surface, a subtle essence of loveliness only to be perceived by earnest students, after long and patient study. ”

“ Hung in the dim recess of a chapel or an oratory, lighted by the faint glimmer of the silver lamps, these works of Christian art may well have harmonised with the dark ages of superstition which gave them life, but they were essentially unsuitable for having any real effect upon men's minds, apart from their religious uses. ”

“ It is difficult to say whence comes the sense of extreme desolation which oppresses us, not from the absence of life certainly, for at this point there are commonly a few of the villagers and townspeople chatting round an old fountain, and on every side resounds the squeaking of the pigs, that every well-to-do inhabitant of Assisi keeps tethered on the ground-floor of his house. ”

“ It is, we think, impossible for any one with a heart which is not entirely dead to all human sympathies not to be somewhat moved at this combination of fading art and faded faith, but it is a feeling the power of which we can hardly hope to explain to our readers, apart from the influences which produced it. The religio loci is, of all other influences, the one which is least capable of deliberate analysis, and the combination between colour-beauty and a peculiar solemnity of feeling, one of which many people even deny the existence. ”

“ The composition gains, perhaps, in dramatic unity, gains certainly if judged by the canons of later art, but loses in dramatic intensity, and, it seems to me, in truth to life. Again, there is much more composition, and that of a more elaborate kind, than in the Arena work: the figures are larger proportionately to the fresco in which they are placed, and possessed of a uniform grace and dignity which were absent from the earlier frescoes. Increased knowledge of form and power of arrangement, is seen in the figures of the men, and the treatment of the draperies ”

“ The author says:—"Cimabue 38 of Florence, a painter of the time of our author (i.e. Dante) knew more of the noble art (that of painting) than any other man, but he was so arrogant and proud withal, that if any one discovered a fault in his work, or if he perceived one himself (as will often happen to the artist who fails from the defects in the material that he uses, or from insufficiency of the instrument with which he works) , he would instantly destroy that work, however costly it might be." ”