French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and SculptureBrownell, W. C. (William Crary)
General
French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture
Brownell, W. C. (William Crary)
Art, French; Painting, French; Sculpture, French
This has been measurably true since the disappearance of the classic
dress and the concealment of the body by modern costume. The nudes of
the early Renaissance, in painting still more than in sculpture, are
differentiated by the faces. The rest of the figure is generally
conventionalized as thoroughly as the face itself is in Byzantine and
the hands in Giottesque painting. Giotto could draw admirably, it need
not be said. He did draw as well as the contemporary feeling for the
human figure demanded. When the Renaissance reached its climax and the
study of the antique led artists to look beneath drapery and interest
themselves in the form, expression made an immense step forward. Color
was indeed almost lost sight of in the new interest, not to reappear
till the Venetians. But owing to the lack of visible nudity, to the lack
of the classic gymnasia, to the concealments of modern attire, the
knowledge of and interest in the form remained, within certain limits,
an esoteric affair. The general feeling, even where, as in the Italy of
the _quattro_ and _cinque centi_, everyone was a connoisseur, did not
hold the artist to expression in his anatomy as the general Greek
feeling did. Everyone was a connoisseur of art alone, not of nature as
well. Consequently, in spite of such an enthusiastic genius as
Donatello, who probably more than any other modern has most nearly
approached the Greeks--not in spiritual attitude, for he was eminently
of his time, but in his attitude toward nature--the human form in art
has for the most part remained, not conventionalized as in the Byzantine
and Gothic times, but thoroughly conventional. Michael Angelo himself
certainly may be charged with lending the immense weight of his majestic
genius to perpetuate the conventional. It is not his distortion of
nature, as pre-Raphaelite limitedness glibly asserts, but his
carelessness of her prodigious potentialities, that marks one side of
his colossal accomplishment. Just as the lover of architecture as
architecture will protest that Michael Angelo's was meretricious,
however inspiring, so M. Rodin declares his sculpture unsatisfactory,
however poetically impressive. "He used to do a little anatomy
evenings," he said to me, "and used his chisel next day without a model.
He repeats endlessly his one type--the youth of the Sistine ceiling. Any
particular felicity of expression you are apt to find him borrowing from
Donatello--such as, for instance, the movement of the arm of the
'David,' which is borrowed from Donatello's 'St. John Baptist.'" Most
people to whom Michael Angelo's creations appear celestial in their
majesty at once and in their winningness would deny this. But it is
worth citing both because M. Rodin strikes so many crude apprehensions
as a French Michael Angelo, whereas he is so radically removed from him
in point of view and in practice that the unquestionable spiritual
analogy between them is rather like that between kindred spirits working
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