Italian art

“ I must confess that my knowledge of the intricacies of Italian art, aside from the lines of its general development, is slim. Alas, dabbling in Italian art, and in art in general, is like trifling with some soothing drug—the more you know the more you want to know. ”

“ But there has been no true restoration of Italian art. The painting of Italy in our time has been largely a commercial enterprise rather than an outcome from artistic genius or impulse, and the few works which are exceptions to this rule are not sufficient to encourage the hope that this nation can again attain to her former rank or regain the fame of her past in the history of modern art. ”

“ And then as a portraitist—we are dealing, be it remembered, with Italian art only—there must be conceded to him the first place, as a limner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner in his secret heart for some other master. ”

“ Willard, Modern Italian Art.
THE DECLINE: An art movement in history seems like a wave that rises to a height, then breaks, falls, and parts of it are caught up from beneath to help form the strength of a new advance. In Italy Christianity was the propelling force of the wave. In the Early Renaissance, the antique, and the study of nature came in as additions. At Venice in the High Renaissance the art-for-art's-sake motive made the crest of light and color. ”

“ The hero of the tale was an ardent and imaginative Italian; at once a painter and an improvisatore; a man of powerful and expansive intellect; and glowing with intense enthusiasm for [Pg 8] classic and ancient lore, and for the beautiful in art and nature. The diction of this manuscript was, like the man it portrayed, lofty and impassioned; and, when describing the rich landscapes of Italy, or the wonders of human art which adorn that favoured region, it occasionally rose into a sustained harmony, a rhythmical beauty and balance, of which no modern language but that of Italy is susceptible. ”

“ Of the merits of the best Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there can be no question, but the belief that this art is altogether superior to that of the Middle Ages will not bear examination in the light of impartial comparison.
The Fine Arts are always an expression of the historical antecedents, the intellectual, moral, and material conditions, and the religious beliefs of the peoples and epochs to which they belong. ”

“ If then we trace the development of Italian art, we shall first observe in such work as that of Masaccio in the Brancacci chapel at Florence just the same characteristic interest in the appearance and the varieties of human life as we find in the work of Boccaccio and Chaucer, and in the succession of the great Tuscan and Umbrian and Venetian painters and sculptors the same transformation of the bare reality of life by the magic of the imaginative sense of beauty and of passion as in the great drama. ”

“ I have already spoken of the way in which the vast aggregation of beautiful works of art in the Italian cities strikes the visitor nowadays—so far as present Italy is concerned—as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty people. It is this spiritual solitude, this conscious disconnection of the great works of architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain weight upon the heart; when we see a great tradition broken we feel something of the pain with which we hear a stifled cry. ”

“ It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student of Italian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to him at first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent young poet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willingly allowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have hard, clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours. ”

“ The Italian Renaissance, supreme in the arts which require a subtle and strong perception of the excellence of mere lines and colours and lights and shadows, which demand unflinching judgment of material qualities; was condemned to inferiority in the art which requires subtle and strong perception of the excellence of human emotion and action; in the art which demands unflinching judgment of moral motives. ”

“ Every Italian was, in a way, an art critic, because every church in Italy was an art school. The artists may have led the people, but the people spurred on the artists, and so the Italian mind went on developing and unfolding until at last it produced the great art of the Renaissance. ”

“ His importance in the history of Italian art rests not merely on his numerous and beautiful productions, but also on his widespread influence, transmitted to his successors through a large and carefully-trained school of pupils. ”

“ It may, indeed, be argued that devotional painting in Italy had assumed, in the sixteenth century, a stereotyped form from which a stronger genius than Correggio’s could hardly have freed it; and that the triumphs of that day should be sought rather in the domain of decorative art, where conventionality becomes a strength, and where the æsthetic imagination finds expression in combinations of mere line and colour. Many of the decorative paintings of the sixteenth century are indeed among the most delightful products of Italian art ”

“ Italian art may be said to have died out more completely in the beginning of the middle ages than did the art of northern nations; its period of decline, too, was longer; but when its awakening came it aroused itself and took on new strength by a method of its own, and may be said to have been distinct from northern art in every respect, and divided from it by its different spirit as clearly as Italy was divided from other lands by the towering summits of the Alps.
About the beginning of the thirteenth century there dawned upon the northern nations a new era in literature. ”

“ I have seen so many of the Italian pictures of a gloomy cast, that, for my part, I have rather enjoyed the cheerful domestic scenes of life and landscape of the best Flemish masters, and English too.
Curate.—Art has no power of injunction, or the hand of many an artist would be stayed from perilling a profanation. Minds of all grades have been employed in the profession. The Italians have not been exempted from a corruption of taste and of power. Yet, without question, the grandest and the most touching creations of art have been the work of Italian hands, and the conceptions of Italian minds. ”

“ The native art, so prolific during the two preceding centuries, which commands our admiration to-day by its originality and simplicity, was essentially French in feeling and execution, but towards the close of the fifteenth century the [Pg 95] all-powerful influence of the great Italians manifested itself, partly by the general spread of knowledge which noised abroad the fame of achievements in Italy to which the civilized world was then paying homage, and again by the migration of Italian artists to adjacent countries, which, in the majority of cases, received them with acclamation. ”

“ All Venice was both model and painter, and life was so pictorial that art couldn't help becoming so. With all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an extraordinary freshness to one's perception of the great Venetian works. You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and you enjoy them because they are so social and so true. Perhaps of all works of art that are equally great they demand least reflection on the part of the spectator--they make least of a mystery of being enjoyed. ”

“ There can be small doubt that this particular theory of the indefatigable critics, to whom the history of Italian art owes so much, will little by little be allowed to die a natural death, if it be not, indeed, already defunct. ”

“ In most histories of Italian art we are conscious of a vast hiatus of several centuries, between the ancient classic art of Rome—which was in its decadence when the Western Empire ceased in the fifth century after Christ—and that early rise of art in the twelfth century which led to the Renaissance. ”

“ One who has not been abroad—I might almost say, who has not lived abroad—cannot realize how much art takes hold of the imagination of a people, and enters into their very life. It is the form in which Italian genius has most often expressed itself. What poetry is in some countries, art is in Italy. England had great poets in the days of Elizabeth, but no great painters, at a time when the churches and galleries of Italy were illuminated by the genius of Raphael and Titian and Leonardo da Vinci. ”

“ All assisted to mould that grand complexity which we call the Italian Renaissance The leaders of public opinion in all these centres, men and women alike, were continually moving about. Artists were invited now to one court now to another; scholars and poets were welcomed at Siena and Ferrara as they were at Milan and Florence. Hence that all-embracing experience of men and things, which must lie at the foundation of every art which is not only to grow, but to live and bear fruit.
But it is one thing to realize the presence of a number of factors favourable to a great art. ”

“ The flower of “great” art in these latter years ceased to bloom very powerfully anywhere; but nowhere does it seem so drooping and withered as in the shadow of the immortal embodiments of the old Italian genius. You go into a church or a gallery and feast your fancy upon a splendid picture or an exquisite piece of sculpture, and on issuing from the door that has admitted you to the beautiful past are confronted with something that has the effect of a very bad joke. ”

“ It was not unnatural that such distaste for the pointed style should be felt in Italy, for the style was foreign to Italian genius and Italian traditions. It had been adopted merely as a fashion, and the very modifications which the Italians wrought in it show how little suited it was to their wants. It is, indeed, impossible for a people possessed of an art, which is a natural outgrowth of their wants and tastes, and hence proper to them, to adopt and practise rationally, and to make their own, another art which is an outgrowth of other and different needs and predilections. ”

“ About 1600, the beginning of the seventeenth century, there arose a new movement in Italian art, which resulted in forming two schools between which there came to be much bitterness of feeling, and even deadly hatred. On one side there were those who wished to continue the study and imitation of the works of the old masters, but with this they united a study of nature. ”

“ All intelligent travellers must have felt this; vast series of frescoes, causing epochs in art, consummate oil pictures; the crowning efforts of Italian civilisation and ingenuity are crowded together in one confused chaos in their minds, because, when they saw them they could not identify the true positions of their authors, and thus grasp an adequate impression to be treasured in the memory. ”

“ He who knows but one art knows none. The Muses do not singly disclose themselves; for the favor of one you must sue to all. Consider the great Italian painters, from Angelo and Rafael down the line of merit to the modern masters. As a rule they were men of wisdom, accomplished in all the learning of their time. They were statesmen, scientists, engineers—men of affairs. They knew literature, architecture, sculpture and music, as well as painting. ”

“ Later in Rome and other Italian cities, the splendor of ancient art filled my soul, and more than ever before I should like to lay my homage at the feet of those great masters whose example of industry and passionate knowledge lives on through the ages and carries high the torch of Beauty, so that all may see and learn. ”

“ Italian painting suddenly declined for lack of taste. The followers of Raphael and Michelangelo possessed astonishing power and knowledge, but, save their own cleverness, no longer had anything to express. Thus painting became merely an art of self-exploitation and display, a matter of difficult foreshortenings, complicated groupings, and novel constructions in light and shade. Such at least was the case at Rome, and partly at Florence. At Venice, Milan, Cremona, Ferrara, and generally in the North the decline was gradual and benign. ”

“ To establish a rough distinction, it might be said that French art has always been intellectual and Italian art emotional; and this distinction is felt even in the treatment of the pleasure-house and its garden. In Italy the architectural detail remained baroque till the end of the eighteenth century, and the architect permitted himself far greater license in the choice of forms and the combination of materials. ”

“ It is difficult to conceive how the present Italian painters, who live in the midst of the treasures of art, should be contented with their own style. They proceed in their commonplace inventions, and never think it worth while to visit the works of those great artists with which they are surrounded. ”

“ The most vivid impressions of each age and individual are necessarily derived from the forms of life around them, and these are therefore the best suited to inspire their art-faculty. The sculptors of the Parthenon did not carve Egyptian dances but Attic festivals; the great Italian masters painted, whether as Virgin, God, or Saint, their own countrymen or women in the scenery of their own homes. In the dulness of our outer lives, the deadness of our souls to natural enjoyments, lies assuredly one of the chief causes of the artistic barrenness of our century. ”