Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to EuphorionLee, Vernon
History
Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to Euphorion
Lee, Vernon
Art, Italian; Art, Renaissance -- Italy
This is one kind of artistic imagination, this which I have rudely
symbolised in the symbol of the three carved roses--the imagination
which delights the mind by holding before it some charming or uncommon
object, and conjuring up therewith a whole train of feeling and fancy;
the school, we might call it, of intellectual decoration, of arabesques
formed not of lines and colours, but of associations and suggestions.
And to this school of the three carved roses in the Square of Purgatory
belong, among others, Angelico, Benozzo, Botticelli, and all those
Venetians who painted piping shepherds, and ruralising magnificent
ladies absorbed in day-dreams.
But besides this kind of imagination in art, there is another and
totally different. It is the imagination of how an event would have
looked; the power of understanding and showing how an action would have
taken place, and how that action would have affected the bystanders; a
sort of second-sight, occasionally rising to the point of revealing, not
merely the material aspect of things and people, but the emotional value
of the event in the eyes of the painter. Thus, for instance, Tintoret
concentrated a beam of sunlight into the figure of Christ before Pilate,
not because he supposed Christ to have stood in that sunlight, but
because the white figure, shining yet ghost-like, seemed to him, perhaps
unconsciously, to indicate the position of the betrayed Saviour among
the indifference and wickedness of the world. Hence I would divide all
imaginative art, particularly that of the old Italian masters, into art
which stirs our own associations, and suggests to us trains of thought
and feeling perhaps unknown to the artist, and art which exhibits a
scene or event foreign to ourselves, and placed before us with a
deliberate intention. Both are categories of imaginative activity
due to inborn peculiarities of character; but one of them, namely, the
suggestive, is probably spontaneous, and quite unintentional, hence
never asked for by the public, nor sought after by the artist; while the
other, self-conscious and intentional, is therefore constantly sought
after by the artist, and bargained for by the public. I shall begin
with the latter, because it is the recognised commodity: artistic
imagination, as bought and sold in the market, whether of good quality
or bad.
II
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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