THE ART OF HUMANISM
Five Hundred Self-Portraits. Edited by L. Goldscheider' (Allen and Unwin. los. 6d.)
Titian. By H. Tietze. (Allen and Unwin. 7s. 6d.)
Tux two new volumes in the Phaidon series, published in English translation by Messrs. Allen and Unwin, have little more in common with each other than the quality of production which puts them on a level with the earlier volumes of the set. As value for money they still represent something which it is quite impossible to get in any other kind of art book in English. One of them has over 300, the other over 40o plates, in each case about half a dozen of them being in colour. If a criticism has to be made of the production of these voluines it would be that the coloured plates are not up to the standard of the rest of the plates, even when all difficulties and expense of colour printing have been taken into account ; but it is to be supposed that the presence Gf even inferior coloured plates increases the sale of the book to a very large extent. They must, therefore, be forgiven.
The Five Hundred Self-Portraits will be of little interest to the student of pure style ; but it provides the general art-historian with material of the- greatest importance. The very existence of self-portraits at one period and their absence at another are signs of the changing attitude of the artist towards himself and his relation to the world. In the Middle Ages, when the artist was primarily anonymous, and was one of a group of workers producing a communal whole, there was no reason for the artist to paint or carve himself. He had no cause to consider himself more worthy of preservation for the contemplation of posterity than the masons or other craftsmen with whom he collaborated. It is only towards the end of the Middle Ages that we find the sculptors or architects of Gothic cathedrals carved as little figures half-hidden among the other decoration. In the next stage the artist puts himself into his compositions as one of the participants in the scenes painted. Sometimes he is Saint Luke painting the Virgin ; sometimes he is only a figure peering in at the corner of the canvas. As usual Florence is ahead of other towns in this matter, and it is there that we find the first definite attempt to show the artist as an artist, in the relief of Nanni di Banco representing the sculptor's studio on Or San Michele. By the end of the fifteenth century, when artists had established themselves as men of learning, on a par with other Humanists, painted self-portraits become relatively common, and from then onwards, with the increasing self-consciousness of painters and their increasing belief in themselves as creatures of a different cast from the ordinary man, they become more and more frequent. It is characteristic that they should occur most often in the nineteenth century, by which period the painter had so far lost touch with his public that he was liable to be short of themes which would inspire him to paint and had to fall back on his own imagination or his own face.
Dr. Tietze's volume on Titian is an entirely different kind of work. In many ways it is the most useful book published on Titian. The plates include almost all the artist's authentic paintings. They are particularly valuable in having excellent details of figures and landscapes which might escape notice. Moreover, the author has done what should always be done in any book which claims to give a complete idea of an artist's oeuvre ; he has added plates of engravings after lost paintings. The most important drawings are also included, and a few details from other artists are inserted for relevant comparison. The notes are short but packed with useful scholarly informa- tion, with references to all the most vital literature on Titian. This book will therefore in many ways supersede the volume on Titian in the Klassiker der Kunst, which has been till now the most efficient repertory of reproductions of the artist's work. There are one or two minor errors : Federigo Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, is referred to on page 13 as Margrave Federigo d'Este of Mantua ; and the owner of the Temple Newsam portrait is referred to as Lord Irwin on the plate, but Lord Halifax in the note.
In the five-page preface Dr. Tietze gives some account of Titian's artistic development, and of his position in Venetian and Italian art of the sixteenth century. He is concerned to show that at the time of Titian Venetian art became fused with the main tradition of central Italian art. He makes certain qualifications of this statement, but one vital point seems to be omitted. Venetian art could never become completely fused with the Florentine or Roman traditions, because the development of Venice had been entirely different from that of the other Italian towns. In the Middle Ages Venice had been the most advanced of all Italian towns in trade, and it consequently developed a style (most completely expressed in Venetian Gothic architecture) which was a first and mediaeval approximation to rational art. But in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was Florence that made the vital advances in trade, while Venice sank slowly under defeats of one kind and another. Therefore Venice never made the essential step to the early and rational Renaissance which is represented in Florence by Masaccio and Brunelleschi. Instead it went on practising an art which was a development out of a late Gothic manner, with the idioms of classical mixed in with it, not always in complete harmony. In the sixteenth century, when- the next step in the development of full Renaissance art was being made in Rome, which had now become the great centre of progress, both politically and artistically, Venice still could not absorb the rationalism of Raphael, and instead evolved the much more purely sensuous style of Giorgione and Titian. It is often said that Venetian art of the Cinquecento differs from Roman only in that it is less influenced by antiquity ; but this is only the less importarit part of the truth. Venetian artists studied antiquity with almost as great interest as Roman, but they took from it some- thing quite different, namely, its mythological fantasies, and some of its more mystical elements. In the state of Venice in the sixteenth century, declining because not progressing, it was impossible that its painters should take from antiquity the severe rationalism which had been the inspiration of the Florentine Humanists of the early fifteenth century, and which, in a softened form, still underlay the art of the early sixteenth century in Rome, which continued the Florentine
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