To Him A Priest Chucking A Small Boy Under
The Chin Was Simply Non-Existent.
He did not care for it, and had
therefore no eye for it.
If the reader will turn to the copy of a
fresco of St. Christopher on p. 209, he will see the conventional
treatment of the rocks on either side the saint. This was the best
thing the artist could do, and probably cost him no little trouble.
Yet there were rocks all around him - little, in fact, else than
rock in those days; and the artist could have drawn them well
enough if it had occurred to him to try and do so. If he could
draw St. Christopher, he could have drawn a rock; but he had an
interest in the one, and saw nothing in the other which made him
think it worth while to pay attention to it. What rocks were to
him, the common occurrences of everyday life were to those who are
generally held to be the giants of painting. The result of this
neglect to kiss the soil - of this attempt to be always soaring - is
that these giants are for the most part now very uninteresting,
while the smaller men who preceded them grow fresher and more
delightful yearly. It was not so with Handel and Shakespeare.
Handel's
"Ploughman near at hand, whistling o'er the furrowed land,"
is intensely sympathetic, and his humour is admirable whenever he
has occasion for it.
Leonardo da Vinci is the only one of the giant Italian masters who
ever tried to be humorous, and he failed completely: so, indeed,
must any one if he tries to be humorous. We do not want this; we
only want them not to shut their eyes to by-play when it comes in
their way, and if they are giving us an account of what they have
seen, to tell us something about this too. I believe the older the
world grows, the better it enjoys a joke. The mediaeval joke
generally was a heavy, lumbering old thing, only a little better
than the classical one. Perhaps in those days life was harder than
it is now, and people if they looked at it at all closely dwelt
upon its soberer side. Certainly in humorous art, we may claim to
be not only principes, but facile principes. Nevertheless, the
Italian comic journals are, some of them, admirably illustrated,
though in a style quite different from our own; sometimes, also,
they are beautifully coloured.
As regards painting, the last rays of the sunset of genuine art are
to be found in the votive pictures at Locarno or Oropa, and in many
a wayside chapel. In these, religious art still lingers as a
living language, however rudely spoken. In these alone is the
story told, not as in the Latin and Greek verses of the scholar,
who thinks he has succeeded best when he has most concealed his
natural manner of expressing himself, but by one who knows what he
wants to say, and says it in his mother-tongue, shortly, and
without caring whether or not his words are in accordance with
academic rules.
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