Exhumations in Art
THE exhumation of properly interred and long. forgotten phases of art has for long been a pastime among those would-be art experts who seek for easy fame. It has also become in recent years a fashionable hobby for litter' uteurs. The boom in negro sculpture of a few years ago, which started in Germany and spread throughout Europe, was an exhumation of just this type. The subject soon left the hands of those who really knew about it and fell into the hands of those who did not. In a short while anything negroid was acclaimed as a mas- terpiece, with a result that the real African works of art were lost sight of in a confusion of fantastic horrors which should have been reinterred in the forests and swamps from which they came. And all the while the master- pieces of Benin, the astonishing terra-cotta sculpture of the Yoruba lands, and the superb ivories of the Congo were submerged and forgotten. Nor was any attempt made to understand or explain this strange outburst of high art in a continent so largely inartistic.
So, too, in recent years with Baroque art. There are some who know it as experts and whose work upon it is scholarly and profound. But there are many who treat it merely as fodder for their pens or as powder with which to propel from their ancient mortars the bombs that burst with such unfailing regularity among the long-suffering public. To the Sitwell family anything Baroque would seem to be good. They seem not to distinguish between the vulgarity of so much of Italian Baroque and the exquisite refinement of the Austrian. They are content to compare the tedious horrors of Lecce with the per- fection of Vienna, and leave it at that.
Another comparatively recent exhumation is the mediaeval painting of Russia and the Balkans—icon- painting properly so called. At first, some ten years or so before the War, the Russians, in a fervour of patriotism, thrust unselected and unexpurgated upon the world a mass of material which illustrated their mediaeval art. Here, they said, was the source and origin of the Italian primitives, and a better art than theirs ; here were the masters, here the fans et origo of the Renaissance. Those who knew looked at what the Russians had to show, profited by it, and turned away. The rest of the world— the connoisseurs who felt their collections of Italian primitives to be in jeopardy, the art critics who were alarmed at the prospect of having to learn something difficult and new—held up their hands in horror and said, " Take it away." So it was taken away, and we have heard nothing more of it until the last few years when scientific restoration in Russian museums and galleries has taught us much that we did not know, while patient research in the Balkans and among the relics of Byzantine art has produced information which it would be foolish to ignore or brush aside.
But the prejudices are still strong. Pride of knowledge and pride of possession are not the chief among them. The prejudice against Byzantine and Balkan schools of painting cannot be dissipated in a day by the literary trumpetings of a few poseurs anxious to sell their own wares. It is of long standing and of reputable origin. There is obviously some good reason why our own National Gallery shows as its earliest paintings mainly the Italian primitives of the period of Cimabue, Margaritone and Simone Martini, and adds but a handful of not very good Russian and Byzantine icons and three or four of the Romano-Egyptian panel paintings which are admitted to be the parents of Byzantine painting. And this reason must be sought for in the past. It will be found in the pages of Vasari's Lives of the Painters. Read what are his views of Byzantine or Greek painting, and you will see how generations that followed him, imbued with the beauty and genius of the High Renaissance, followed his essentially Renaissance view and despised the formalism of Byzantine. art. Of Cimabue (whoever r c ,ually that uncertain artist may have been) he says that " although he imitated the Greeks, he introduced improvements in the art and in a great measure emancipated himself from their stiff manner . . . there was a certain quality of excellence in the turn of the heads and the fall of drapery which was not to be found in the Byzantine style." And all the time Cimabue was working with and under Byzan- tine artists, who then had almost a monopoly of com- missions for church painting in Italy. Of Niccola and Giovanni Pisani he says (of their sculpture) that they "emancipated themselves from the clumsy and ill-pro- portioned Byzantine style." Of the paintings of Margari- tone he says : " Although they were executed in the Byzantine style, yet it was recognized that he had done them with good judgment and with love of art." And of his sculpture : " Although his first sculptures were in the Byzantine manner, yet he adopted a much better manner after he had visited Florence." More significantly of the same artist he says that " All these works of his were greatly prized by the people of the time, although they are not valued to-day except on account of their age : indeed, they could only be considered good in an age when art was not at its zenith." Here in a word we have the clue. Vasari lived in the middle of the High Renais- sance. Like the Greeks of the fifth century, he looked back upon the past as a thing rather discreditable and better forgotten. Art to him, as to Aristotle, was a development from the formal to the realistic. Pictures and statues had to be " as alive as possible," for that was the creed of the Renaissance and largely the intention of Greek artists of the fifth century. Aristotle said tersely of the work of the Greek Primitives : " They are all bad ; not one is good." Vasari, who lived in an age when life did not move quite so swiftly and triumphantly as in early Greece, said with more kindness and modera- tion that the Primitives were well-intentioned but un- successful, and that their works were stepping-stones from a dead past to a promising future. The Byzantines were merely the " rude Greeks " who did not know how to make a picture live or a statue come to life.
But all this is to as to-day rather childish. We know the beauty of the early Italian primitives and the per- fection of Greek Archaic art. We admire them simply because they are the finest examples of formal art and because they both have the primary merits of simplicity which we feel sometimes to be distressingly absent in the art of the full Renaissance or of the time of Praxiteles and Lysippos. Yet here is the genesis of the prejudice against Byzantine and Balkan art. More than twelve generations Of readers of Vasari have been taught to regard it as primitive in the sense of it being undeveloped and unso- phisticated, when all the time it is one of the most sophis- ticated of arts in the history of Europe. Vasari knew nothing and cared less for the superb Byzantine carving, mosaic and painting of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Relatively Italy was a barbarous land in comparison at that time, while Byzantium was the centre of the art and culture of all the inhabited world. Nor did Vasari hear of the great Byzantine renaissance in the fourteenth Century after the expulsion of the Latins from Constan- tinople, a renaissance in which the Byzantines absorbed whatever the Italians at that time had to teach them. Neither did he know, nor did we know until recently, what a strangely exotic and yet wholly independent school of painting was growing in Russia, based entirely on the Byzantine model. Pre-eminently concerned with colour and form, the Russian painters are in advance of many of the Italian primitives—at any rate in the subtlety of their choice of colours. Equally in Byzantine painting of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries the gradations of colour and their subtleties are beyond the skill of the Italians, who chose bright simple and con- trasting tones. Similarly with the icon-painting of the Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. While there is a falling off in quality and a tedious repetition of types, yet there are, for the searching, to be found some masters who still carry on the tradition. The trouble is that the best works of Russian and Balkan and Byzantine masters have never been seen in European countries of the west. Only this year has a really scientific exhibition been at last brought over. It contains the best Byzantine and Russian paintings in the Russian museums, and has been open at Berlin and Frankfort and at Cologne. It is shortly going to Paris. Recent publications, however, have done more, and the patient research of Professor Grabar at Moscow, of the Byzantinists of Paris, and of a growing body of workers will perhaps at last clear the air of some of these prejudices.
S. C.
Previous page
