Patronage and Taste
Men of Taste. By Martin S. Briggs. (Batsford. 15s.)
IN Men of Taste Mr. Briggs has compressed the biographies of twenty-six men and but one woman covering a span of years that starts with Genesis and closes with die dawn of the present century. The book calls for admiration of the author's assiduity in research and biographical accuracy. It also claims our sympathetic apprecia- tion of the very awkward problems of selection and abbreviation encountered in his ambitious undertaking. These closely packed pages will prove factually informative to the casual reader, but how far they will enrich the scholar's enquiring mind remains to be estab- lished. In embarking upon his task did Mr. Briggs consider with due care the definition of the word "taste," and the message he intended to convey? My dictionary (Webster's) defines " taste " as "the power of discerning and appreciating fitness, beauty, order, congruity, proportion, symmetry, or whatever constitutes excellence, especially in the fine arts and belles-lettres," sentiments more or less forestalled by William Hazlitt, who wrote, "Taste is nothing but sensibility to the different degrees and kinds of excellence in the works of Art and Nature."
Bearing in mind these definitions I have little hesitation in eliminating several of the otherwise august personages whom Mr. Briggs upholds to us as exemplary aesthetes. I am not at all con- vinced that Charlemagne, Henry VIII (the begetter of Nonesuch Palace and despoiler of monasteries), Louis XIV, Sarah Jennings, Beau Nash, Napoleon I (in Mr. Briggs's own words "a complete philistine ") or Lord Grimthorpe (the designer of Big Ben and defacer of St. Albans Cathedral) were blessed with "the power of discerning and appreciating fitness, beauty or congruity." On the other hand, I can at random think of names omitted—Dom Manoel I of Portugal, Charles I of England, Winckelmann, Gustav III of Sweden, Walter Pater, "whose sensibility to the different degrees and kinds of excellence in works of art" have been of positive and far- reaching influence.
I deduce then that the subject Mr. Briggs kept chiefly before his mind was patronage rather than taste, and these two attributes can be entirely dissimilar _and even conflicting. Had his book been entitled Some Patrortg and Occasional Men of Taste I should have felt far less inclined to criticise the selection of his studies for within the narrow compass of each essay he endeavours with scholarly precision to disclose the relations that existed between great patrons and great artists. Thus we learn from him how Cosimo de' Medici (who affirmed that "geniuses are celestial forms and not pack asses ") treated as friends and equals BrunellesChi, Donatello and Michellozzo, whereas that megalomaniac Napoleon I (" Anything big is always beautiful ") bullied and goaded Ceracchi, David and Fontaine into. abortive projects of cyclopean absurdity.
I wish, moreover, that Mr. Briggs could have expanded his theme somewhat by correlating the various motives that actuate the good patron. Judging from results it is not easy to determine whether religion, compassion politics or self-aggrandisement has been the patron's most fruitful and successful incentive. It is true that we owe Westminster Abbey and King's College Chapel to the relentless piety of Kings Henry III and Henry VI ; the Parthenon to the deter- mination of Pericles to relieve unemployment in Athens ; Saint Sophia at Constantinople and the Nuremberg Stadium to the fanatical beliefs in extreme forms of despotism by Justinian I and Hitler ; Hampton Court and St. Peter's, Rome, to the inflated self-importance of Cardinal Wolsey and Pope Julius II. We must not perhaps overlook the disinterested motiVe a pure love of art, that induced Lord Burlington to engender ;he Assembly Rooms at York, and Horace Walpole Strawberry Hill. But, alas, the fruits of this most com- mendable of motives are in the history of art patronage comparatively exiguous. No, it appears that to exhort artists to produce truly great creations some of the least attractive human qualities are essential in the patron. Of all individual patrons—and corporate art patrons have yet to prove themselves effective—the Emperor Hadrian most nearly combined the requisite virtues—limitless power, extravagance, ambition, ruthlessness—virtues unpopular at the present time but quite likely to recur in the totalitarian future. Above all, the patron must not himself be creative, nor must he interfere with the artist's work once it is happily in train. So long as the artist pleases, the patron should give him his head. The moment he displeases, by all means let it, without any ado, be cut straight off.
JAMES LEES-MILNE.
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