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Art. VII.-ANDREA MANTEGNA.

1. Mantegna, sa vie, son œuvre, &c. Par Charles Yriarte. Paris: J. Rothschild, 1901.

2. Andrea Mantegna. By Paul Kristeller. English edition by S. Arthur Strong. London: Longmans, 1901. 3. Andrea Mantegna. By Maud Cruttwell. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1901.

4. Venetian Painting, chiefly before Titian. By Bernhard Berenson. London: Vacher and Sons, 1895.

5. The Study and Criticism of Italian Art. By Bernhard Berenson. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1901.

THE enthusiasm which has been shown of late years for the study of the art of the fifteenth century has more than one point of resemblance to the attitude adopted by the men of that time towards the study of classical art and archæology. In both cases æsthetic feeling and antiquarian curiosity have been curiously combined. In both cases the ardours of scientific research have been tinged with the emotions aroused by the recovery and interpretation of beauty. In both cases this has produced a certain loss of the sense of proportion, a tendency to magnify beyond its real value whatever belongs to the magic period towards which the investigator bends his gaze; and doubtless many of the questions about the authorship of fifth-rate pictures of the quattrocento will have less permanent value for mankind than the 'settling of Hoti's business,' which occupied the grammarian on his deathbed. Certain it is that for one person who concerns himself seriously with Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican, about which there is little fresh to be discovered, ten will become deeply interested in the question of whether a feeble picture is by Botticini or another.

It is for the same reason that the Hellenists devote themselves, not to Praxiteles, but to the problems of the comparatively rudimentary art of the Mycenæan age. In both cases the problem to be solved attracts the keenest and most adventurous spirits, not merely because it is a problem, but because it is a stimulus and a test of the powers of æsthetic discrimination. The problem acts as a gymnastic for the æsthetic faculties. It is not, in fact, the end to be attained-the complete labelling and sorting

of the works of art-which is valuable and interesting, but the process itself. It is only on the fringe of cultivation, only at the growing point of knowledge, that the attention of many minds is focussed on the objects of inquiry with sufficient intensity to endow them with a vivid reality. This, no doubt, applies especially to the critical and analytical faculties; poetical and creative minds, seizing as they do more readily upon slight hints and vague insinuations, are not so much affected by this convergence of the intellectual activity of their day upon a single point. Yet we can judge from the case of Sir Joshua Reynolds how much momentum in a particular direction is given even to a creator by the current of contemporary interest. No one who has read his Discourses can doubt his æsthetic insight; and yet how little was he able to divert his attention to those works of art which are of all-absorbing interest to the present generation!

In any case the fifteenth century now claims the attention of the most vigorous exponents of æsthetic ideas; and this movement, though long prepared by others, has been, in its present phase, associated very generally with the name of Morelli. He it is who has given to the study the aspect at least of scientific method. It may perhaps be doubted whether his actual results are comparable to those attained by such laborious and indefatigable chroniclers as Crowe and Cavalcaselle; but his influence on the culture of the day is undeniably greater. While they were content to compile long treatises, written in a painfully colourless style, making use of a cumbrous and almost meaningless æsthetic terminology-treatises which are as valuable for consultation as they are unfit for reading-Morelli published notes on the galleries of Rome and Germany, in which he allowed himself digressions covering, in a discursive and readable manner, the whole field of Italian painting. He not only impressed on everything he touched the sentiment of a vigorous and combative personality, whereby he gave to the subject a certain sporting interest which it had lacked before, but-and this is the important point-he endeavoured to explain the principles on which he founded his judgments, and to analyse for the benefit of others the processes of his own perceptions. As opposed to those who had arrived at their judgments by a vague instinctive percep

tion of likenesses and differences of style conveyed by the general aspect (total-eindruck) of the picture, Morelli advocated a close scrutiny of the least significant details of form-those in which the artist's unconscious habits were most likely to reveal themselves. Besides this, he made a vehement attack on the older methods of criticism by documentary evidence, according to which, if the subject of a given picture agreed with one described by Vasari as the work of a certain artist, its authorship was thereby determined out of hand.

Whether it has helped to attain more accurate results or not, the frank acceptance of the internal evidence of the pictures themselves as the supreme test has undoubtedly been of great value to the study of Italian art, by forcing attention to the aesthetic, as opposed to the antiquarian interest. The effect of Morelli's other thesis has been more dubious. In the first place it is, as he states it, essentially a narrow and insufficient view. There is perhaps nothing in which an artist reveals his personality more distinctly than in his placing of the figures within the limits of his panel, and this is one of the most decisive factors in that general impression, the value of which Morelli decries. Besides this, the way in which the artist has approached his theme, the effects of light and shade, of colour and atmosphere, are all of the highest æsthetic moment, are all more or less refractory to scientific analysis and description, and are all apprehended by a sensitive eye in the general impression.

In the second place, Morelli's thesis of characteristic form is liable to serious misapprehension. He called attention to the persistence throughout an artist's work of certain typical forms of ear and hand; he even endeavoured to give rough caricature outlines of these type-forms from various well-known artists. This apparently simple and easily applied test has proved a stumbling-block to many. It has appeared to be a kind of patent reagent which could be applied to pictures by any careful observer, with the happy result that the artist's name would appear writ plain, if not on the label of the frame, at least upon his handiwork. Now the fact is that this test requires so much care in its application that the man who can use it properly is already almost in a position to dispense with it; for these forms vary considerably in

the work of all artists; and what is constant is rather what an artist would call a feeling for form than any particular and easily definable form itself. It is conceivable, no doubt, that some day a mathematical analysis of the curves peculiar to a particular artist might educe a formula to which they habitually conformed; but, in the meanwhile, this so-called scientific analysis and scientific criticism merely means a more careful and searching scrutiny of the qualities of an artist's drawing and modelling, a more constant comparison and collation of his works with those of his nearest imitators or followers. It should be called systematic, rather than scientific criticism. The many serious errors which Morelli made in the attributions of pictures, some of which he himself frankly recognised, and some of which his own scholars have admitted, show that there is no such finality in his methods as an exaggerated estimate of their importance has at times claimed.

Mr Berenson, who may be regarded as Morelli's successor in the power of attracting to a difficult subject, usually found to be somewhat special and abstruse, a great share of general cultured intelligence, was at one time regarded as an ardent Morellian. In the preface to his 'Study and Criticism of Italian Art' he speaks of his earlier essays as 'crassly Morellian'; whereby we may suppose that he has cast off any strict adherence to one party in a dispute which involved no essential principles, and which was forced into undue prominence by the personal issues that originally accompanied it. Morelli's importance was, as we have said, in part due to his personality. He was a free-lance who entered a vigorous and necessary protest against the dogmatism of official authorities, particularly those of the German galleries. Nevertheless we do Mr Berenson no wrong in saying that he has made the work of Morelli, rather than that of any other critic, the starting-point for his investigations. In the preface to the first edition of his book on Lorenzo Lotto, he even expounds what may be called the Morellian method with exaggerated insistence and enthusiasm. He denies to the forms seen as a whole any indication of the permanent artistic temperament, while throughout the book the appeal to details of morphology is constant. In his later work, however, this attitude is sensibly

modified; and he has come to regard as of greater importance those less definable though equally definite characteristics of composition, of placing, and, in general, of the imaginative approach to his subject which distinguishes each artist.

The recent publications on Mantegna illustrate to some extent the schools of art-criticism which we have been discussing. The late M. Yriarte belonged essentially to the pre-Morellian school; his work shows no clear perception of the possibilities of intensive criticism. He accepts the most improbable attributions on hearsay or vague tradition. He never approaches close enough to Mantegna's work to feel that between a work by Mantegna and a work that is merely Mantegnesque lies a difference of supreme importance. He makes no serious endeavour to understand the course of Mantegna's development, to estimate the forces of external influence on his art, or to describe the unfolding of his character. He is content to relate the amusing stories to which Mantegna's litigious and curst humour gave rise, and to discuss at length the details of the house which Mantegna built but never lived in. Such an ancedotal view of art-history is not without its interest and charm, but it requires very different gifts, and envisages very different ends, from that of art-criticism proper. M. Yriarte throws no more light on Mantegna's genius than any ordinarily cultivated person would receive from a casual observation of his works.

Herr Kristeller, on the other hand, takes his responsibilities much more seriously. It is evident that he has studied, not only Mantegna's works, but all the documents which relate to the subject, as well as the artist's social and intellectual milieu, with extraordinary thoroughness. He has, moreover, aimed at that complete analysis of the influences under which the artist formed his style, and that chronological arrangement of his works, with a view to elucidating every stage of his artistic development, on which Morelli was the first formally to insist. What success has attended this attempt will be the subject of further discussion presently. Still, on the whole, though he enlarges much on the aesthetic side of the question, Dr Kristeller's work is most remarkable for the minuteness of its antiquarian studies and the completeness of

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