Part 4 (1/2)

What do I mean by a slope? That I hope to make clear in the course of this chapter and the next But, as readers o on with, I will explain inise the continuity of the stream of art, I believe that it is possible and proper to divide that stream into slopes and movements About the exact line of division there can be no certainty It is easy to say that in the passage of a great river from the hills to the sea, the depth, the width, the colour, the tee; to fix precisely the point of change is another matter If I try to picture for myself the whole history of art from earliest times in all parts of the world I ale thread The stuff of which it is eable, it is alater that flon the river, but there is more than one channel: for instance, there is European art and Oriental To me the universal history of art has the look of a e of mountains to the same sea They start from different altitudes but all descend at last to one level Thus, I should say that the slope at the head of which stand the Buddhist reat deal higher than the slope at the head of which are the Greek priher than that of which early Sumerian sculpture is the head; but e have to consider contemporary japanese art, Graeco-Roman and Roman sculpture, and late assyrian, we see that all have found the same sea-level of nasty naturalisreat pri, when men create art because they must, and that darkest hour when men confound imitation with art These slopes can be subdivided into movements The doard course of a slope is not smooth and even, but broken and full of accidents Indeed the procession of art does not so much resemble a river as a road from the mountains to the plain That road is a sequence of ups and downs An up and a down together form a moveh as the apex of the movement that preceded it, but always its base carries us farther down the slope Also, in the history of art the su erect froh of its predecessor The upward stroke is vertical, the doard an inclined plane For instance, from Duccio to Giotto is a step up, sharp and shallow Fro and, at times, almost imperceptible fall Duccio is a fine decadent of that Basilian movement which half survived the Latin conquest and cai The peak of that h Duccio near its base is below him Giotto's art is definitely inferior to the very finest Byzantine of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and Giotto is the crest of a new movement destined and doomed inevitably to sink to depths undreamed of by Duccio

All that was spiritual in Greek civilisation was sick before the sack of Corinth, and all that was alive in Greek art had died many years earlier That it had died before the death of Alexander let his tomb at Constantinople be my witness Before they set the last stone of the Parthenon it was ailing: the big nificant exa, being mere artisan work But the man who made what one may as well call ”The Theseus” and ”The Ilissus,” the man whom one may as well call Phidias, crowns the last vital enius, but he is no oddity: he falls quite naturally into his place as the master of the early decadence; he is the man in whom runs rich and fast but a little coarsened the streaave life to archaic Greek sculpture He is the Giotto--but an inferior Giotto--of the slope that starts frohth century BC--so inferior to the sixth century AD--to peter out in the bogs of hellenistic and Ro that hellenic impulse? As yet we cannot tell Probably, froainst the cos, I dare say, a reaction The story of its prihout Europe, and studied in the National Museu from about 600, reveal the excellences and defects of Greek art at its best Of its early decline in the fifth century Phidias is the second-rate Giotto; the copies of his famous contemporaries and immediate predecessors are too loathsome to be at all just; Praxiteles, in the fourth century, the age of accohtful trifler your feeling for art and chronology est Fifth and fourth century architecture forbid us to forget the greatness of the Greeks in the golden age of their intellectual and political history The descent froh the tasteful and accomplished to the feebly forcible may be followed in the pots and vases of the sixth, fifth, fourth, and third centuries In the long sands and flats of Roman realism the stream of Greek inspiration is lost for ever

Before the death of Marcus Aurelius, Europe was as weary of land before the death of Victoria But what poas to destroy a machine that had enslaved men so completely that they dared not conceive an alternative? The er peer over its side;but its cranks and levers, could hear nothing but its hu fly-wheel and fancy hi spheres

Annihilation was the only escape for the Roman citizen fro the Imperial talent for brutalisation to a systeypt, or in Asia Minor, or, more probably in Syria, in Mesopotamia, or even Persia, the new leaven was at work That pohich was to free the world was in fer to birth Here and there, in face of the flat contradiction of circumstances, one would arise and assert that man does not live by bread alone Orphisinning tomore than curious ritual and discreet debauch Very slowly a change was coe before the signs of it becas in the catacombs are purely classical If the early Christians felt anything new they could not express it But before the second century was out Coptic crafts vital The academic patterns are queerly distorted and flattened out into fornificance, as we can feel for ourselves if we go to the textile rooton

Certainly, these second century Coptic textiles arethat had been produced in the Ros of the third century bear less positive witness to the fu of the fourth century Diocletian built his palace at Spalato, where we have all learned to see classicis it out side by side; and, if we owski, from the end of that century dates the beautiful church of Kodja-Kalessi in Isauria The century in which the East finally dominated the West (350-450) is a period of incubation It is a ti activity that precedes the unmistakable launch of art upon the Christian slope I would confidently assert that every artistic birth is preceded by a period of uneasy gestation in which the unborn child acquires the organs and energy that are to carry it forward on its long journey, if only I possessed the data that would give a tottering support to so coreat slopes of antiquity are shrouded in a night scarcely ruffled by the ists and i discoveries by experts of eries Of these critical periods we dare not speak confidently; nevertheless we can compare the fifth century with the nineteenth and draw our own conclusions

In 450 they built the lovely Galla Placidia at Ravenna It is a building essentially un-Ros to it is accidental and adds nothing to its significance The mosaics within, however, are still coarsely classical There is a nasty, woolly realisood shepherd y, Graeco-Ro battle, with significant forun in 526 the battle on Sta Sophia at Constantinople was building between 532 and 537; the finest mosaics in S Vitale, S

Apollinare-Nuovo and S Apollinare-in-Classe belong to the sixth century; so do SS Sergius and Bacchus at Constantinople and the Duo the most majestic monuments of Byzantine art It is the primitive and supre from the levels of Graeco-Romanism is immeasurable The terms in which it could be stated have yet to be discovered It is the whole length of the slope froht to stand on a base of a hundred years We are on heights fro here, one can hardly believe that the flats ever were, or, at any rate, that they will ever be again Go to Ravenna, and you will see the o to the Tate Gallery or the Luxe, and you will see the end of that slope--Christian art at its last gasp These _e of assurance when, looking at the pictures of Cezanne, we feel, not inexcusably, that we are high above the mud and malaria

Between Cezanne and another Tate Gallery, what lies in store for the human spirit? Are we in the period of a new incubation? Or is the new age born? Is it a new slope that we are on, or are we orous premonitory flutter? These are queries to ponder

Is Cezanne the beginning of a slope, a portent, or merely the crest of a movement? The oracles are dumb This alone seems to me sure: since the Byzantine primitives set their reater significance unless it be Cezanne

With Sta Sophia at Constantinople, and the sixth century churches and mosaics at Ravenna, the Christian slope establishes itself in Europe[10] In the same century it took a doard twist at Constantinople; but in one part of Europe or another the new inspiration continued to manifest itself supremely for more than six hundred years

There were ups and downs, of course, moveood, in others it was never first-rate; but there was no universal, irreparable depreciation till Norave way to Gothic, till twelfth-century sculpture becauration

Christian art preserved its prinificance for more than half a millennium Therein I see no marvel Even ideas and emotions travelled slowly in those days In one respect, at any rate, trains and steam-boats have fulfilled the predictions of their exploiters--they havequite so positive that this is a blessing In those dark ages things moved slowly; that is one reason why the new force had not spent itself in six hundred years Another is that the revelation caround Always there was a virgin tract at hand to take the seed and raise a lusty crop Between 500 and 1000 AD the population of Europe was fluid So and expressing it with primitive sensibility and passion The last to be infected was one of the finest; and in the eleventh century Norence produced in the west of Europe a manifestation of the Christian ferment only a little inferior to that which five hundred years earlier had ain that, when I speak of the Christian ferious spirit of which Christianity, with its dogmas and rituals, is one manifestation, Buddhism another And when I speak of art as a ious spirit I do not ious eical I have said that if art expresses anything, it expresses an eives pure fornificance So, when I speak of Christian art, I mean that this art was one product of that state of enthusiasm of which the Christian Church is another So far was the new spirit fro a mere ebullition of Christian faith that we find manifestations of it in Moharaph of the Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem knows that The e of Christian doctrines, but it was through Christian doctrine that Europe canificance of the Universe Christian art is not an expression of specific Christian emotions; but it was only when an to feel the emotions that express themselves in form It was Christianity that put Europe into that state of e Christian art

For a moment, in the sixth century, the flood of enthusiasm seems to have carried the Eastern world, even the official world, off its feet

But Byzantine officials were no fonder of swi than others The men orked the imperial machine, studied the Alexandrine poets, and dabbled in classical archaeology were not the men to look forward Only the people, led by the uely, and doubtless stupidly, on the side of emotion and the future Soon after Justinian's death the Ean to divide itself into two caious art was the standard of the popular party, and around that standard the battle raged ”No man,” said Lord Melbourne, ”has ion than I; but when it co it into private life” At Constantinople they began dragging religion, and art too, into the sanctity of private capital Now, no official worth his salt can watch the shadow being recklessly sacrificed to the substance without itching to set the police on soacity of Byzantine civilians has becoory II to the Eive their estates for a picture This, to Pope, Eh of appalling demoralisation For a parallel, I suppose, they recalled the shadalene There were people at Constantinople who took art seriously, though in a rather too literary spirit--”dicunt eni had to be stopped Early in the eighth century began the iconoclast onslaught The history of that hundred years' war, in which the popular party carried on a spirited and finally successful resistance, does not concern us One detail, however, is worth noticing During the iconoclast persecution a new popular art makes its appearance in and about those reholds of the mystics

Of this art the Chloudof Psalter is the most famous exareat A desire to be illustrative generally n It s sonificant persists There is, however, always too much realism and too much literature But neither the realism nor the literature is derived froinal It is also essentially popular Indeed, it is so of a party pamphlet; and in one place we see the E duty as a conclave of the damned It would be easy to overrate the artistic value of the Chloudof Psalter, but as a docus out clearly the opposition between the official art of the iconoclasts that leaned on the hellenistic tradition and borrowed bluntly frodad, and the vital art that drew its inspiration fro into so new Side by side with this live art of the Christian movement we shall see a continuous output of work based on the imitation of classical models Those coarse and dreary objects that crop up ian, Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque, and early Italian art, are not, however, an inheritance fro shadow thrown across history by the gigantic finger of imperial Rome The mischief done by the iconoclasts was not irreparable, but it was grave True to their class, Byzantine officials indulged a taste for furniture, giving thereby an unintentional sting to their attack Like the grandees of the Classical Renaissance, they degraded art, which is a religion, to upholstery, a menial trade They patronised craftsmen who looked not into their hearts, but into the past--who froht pretty patterns, and fronificant design They looked to Greece and Rome as did the men of the Renaissance, and, like them, lost in the science of representation the art of creation In the age of the iconoclasts, e and curl luxuriously at Constantinople The eighth century in the East is a portent of the sixteenth in the West It is the restoration of materialism with its paramour, obsequious art The art of the iconoclasts tells us the story of their days; it is descriptive, official, eclectic, historical, plutocratic, palatial, and vulgar

Fortunately, its triuorous to be strangled by a pack of cultivated ent Theodora (842) the ies were finally restored; under the Basilian dynasty (867-1057) and under the Coh I cannot rate the best Byzantine art of the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries quite so high as I rate that of the sixth, I a that was to coes of Egypt, Crete, and Greece

II

GREATNESS AND DECLINE

Having glanced at the beginnings of Christian art, we er over the history of Byzantine Eastern traders and artisans, pushi+ng into Western Europe fro the valley of the Rhone, carried with them the ferment Monks driven out of the East by the iconoclast persecutions found Western Europe Christian and left it religious The strength of the movement in Europe between 500 and 900 is commonly under-rated That is partly because its extant s to catch the eye, and, outside Ravenna, there is comparatively little Christian architecture of this period Also the cultivated, spoon-fed art of the renaissance court of Charleust another Of course the bulk of those opulent knick-knacks ian and Ottonian Emperors, and now to be seen at Aachen, are as beastly as anything else that is made simply to be precious They reflect Ger the line, or esti the value, of the Christian slope it is prudent to overlook even the best of Teutonic effort[11] For the bulk of it is not primitive or mediaeval or renaissance art, but German art At any rate it is a manifestation of national character rather than of aesthetic inspiration Most aesthetic creation bears the mark of nationality; very few manifestations of German nationality bear a trace of aesthetic creation The differences between the treasures of Aachen, early German architecture, fifteenth-century German sculpture, and the work produced to-day at Munich are superficial Al else That is to say, it is conscientious, rightly intentioned, excessively able, and lacking in just that which distinguishes a work of art fro else in the world The inspiration and sensibility of the dark ages can be felt most surely and most easily in the works of minor art produced in France and Italy[12] In Italy, however, there is enough architecture to prove up to the hilt, were further proof required, that the spirit was vigorous It is the age of what Sig

Rivoira calls Pre-Loe of the Byzantine school of painting at Rome[13]

What the ”Barbarians” did, indirectly, for art cannot be over-estiuished the tradition of culture, they began to destroy the bogey of imperialism, they cleaned the slate They were able to provide new bottles for the neine Artists can scarcely repress their envy when they hear that academic painters and masters were sold into slavery by the score The Barbarians handed on the torch and wrought hting and ploughing and praying to haveelse Material needs absorbed their energies without fattening them; their spiritual appetite was ferocious, but they had a live religion as well as a live art to satisfy it It is supposed that in the dark ages insecurity and want reduced hu little better than bestiality To this their art alone gives the lie, and there is other evidence If turbulence and insecurity could reduce people to bestiality, surely the Italians of the ninth century were the arians, Greeks, French, and every sort of Gerements to labour and create which in the vast security of the _pax Rolorious fruits of private virtue and public arian scouts report that northern Italy is thickly populated and full of fortified towns[14] At the sack of Parma (924) forty-four churches were burnt, and these churches were certainly more like Santa Maria di Pomposa or San Pietro at Toscanella than the Colosseum or the Royal Courts of Justice That the artistic output of the dark ages was to some extent limited by its poverty is not to be doubted; nevertheless, more first-rate art was produced in Europe between the years 500 and 900 than was produced in the sa the artistic value of a period one tends first to consider the splendour of its capital achievements After that one reckons the quantity of first-rate work produced Lastly, one computes the proportion of undeniable works of art to the total output In the dark ages the proportion seeh This is a characteristic of primitive periods The market is too small to tempt a crowd of capable manufacturers, and the conditions of life are too severe to support the ordinary academy or salon exhibitor who lives on his privateelse This sort of producer, whose existence tells us less about the state of art than about the state of society, ould be the worst navvy in his gang or the worst trooper in his squadron, and is the staple product of official art schools, is unheard of in pri inferences, therefore, we e enjoyed by barbarous periods in the fact that of those who coift I would hazard a guess that of the works that survive froh a proportion as one in twelve has real artistic value Were a proportion of the work produced between 1450 and 1850 identical with that of the work produced between 500 and 900 to survive, it le work of art In fact, we tend to see only the s of this period and to leave unvisited the notorious trash Yet judging froalleries, exhibitions, and private collections, I cannot believe that more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 can be properly described as a work of art

Between 900 and 1200 the capital achievements of Christian art are not superior in quality to those of the preceding age--indeed, they fall short of the Byzantine masterpieces of the sixth century; but the first-rate art of this second period was more abundant, or, at any rate, has survived e that has bequeathed us Ron of dissolution We are still on the level heights of the Christian Renaissance Artists are still prinificance of form sufficiently to create it copiously Increased wealth purchases increased leisure, and some of that leisure is devoted to the creation of art I do not h I think inexact, opinion that this was the period in which Christian Europe touched the summit of its spiritual history: its monuments are everywhere majestic before our eyes Not only in France, Italy, and Spain, but in England, and as far afield as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, we can see the triue on the long journey from Santa Sophia to St John's Wood

With Gothic architecture the descent began Gothic architecture is juggling in stone and glass It is the convoluted road that ends in a bridecake or a cucumber frame A Gothic cathedral is a _tour de force_; it is also a melodrama Enter, and you will be impressed by the incredible skill of the constructor; perhaps you will be iht; you will not be roan ”A-a-h” and collapse: you will not be strung to austere ecstasy Walk round it, and take your pleasure in subtleties of the builder's craft, quaint corners, gargoyles, and flying buttresses, but do not expect the thrill that answers the perception of sheer rightness of form In architecture the new spirit first came to birth; in architecture first it dies