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A History of Painting the Renaissance in Central Italy by Haldane Macfall

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A History of Painting the Renaissance in Central Italy by Haldane Macfall " G : ; "' ;." ':?:'.- : "_.- :V: / ; ;i:''i,-,-' l'\' lit .'..;.''.:;.'.;;:' -ilSTORY OF- PAINTIN r^ r THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF Mrs. WILLIAM A. NITZE Iat\ti. (x M/j^. /!/*.* /I^Ut o^ / /-<y'^T THE RENAISSANCE IN CENTRAL ITALY A HISTORY OF PAINTING THE RENAISSANCE IN CENTRAL ITALY BY HALDANE MACFALL WITH A PREFACE BY FRANK BRANGWYN ILLUSTRATED WITH TWENTY-SEVEN PLATES IN COLOUR LONDON : T. C. AND E. C. JACK 16 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C. AND EDINBURGH 1911 Art Library *VD so PREFACE Although I have little practice with the pen, I feel impelled to say a few words upon this History of Painting, and upon the man who has written it. Here is a book on painting in which the writer comes into the art and tries to appreciate it, instead of dishing up hackneyed laws and recipes for the making of it. All arts are akin ; and Haldane Macfall realises this vital fact. If the writers upon art would only hesitate at times, and remember that those who practise it have been through the difficulties of the perplexing business in their apprenticeship to their craft, and have accepted or rejected most of the theories that they pour forth as discoveries, there would be less hidebound talk about painting. I take it that Haldane Macfall has done what we do : he has been through the toil of apprenticeship to his craft ; he has found all the bookish theories to be dead stuff; and then he has gone straight to life, come to grips with life, and discovered that living art is only to be found in the interpretation of Life— in the personal expression of the impressions that life has made upon him. That, it seems to me, is the foundation of the whole thing ; and that is what he here states it to be. But it is easier to say that art should interpret life than it is to create art. The artist has to go through a mighty labour of craftsmanship before the hand answers at will to the brain. The eye runs ahead of the fingers. And the v PREFACE temptation comes, after a while, to mistake the craft of the fingers for the impression or the moods that, however blundering our hands, we try to arouse in our fellow-men by our art. It is a healthy thing, then, to find a man stepping out of his art of literature, and understanding the motives that the painters have given, and are giving, their lives and careers to create, instead of trying to shackle the feet of the artist with cast-iron laws that artists do not understand, and that the writers of the next generation will scrap. No artist of power works, or has worked, on bookish systems. No master drags out a canvas and says : By '11 thunder ! I achieve the Pyramidal ; here goes for Unity, inspired by Vitality, brushed in with Infinity, and qualified by Repose. This is all very well if you are trying to teach a student to become an artist in twelve lessons. I do not say that no man so paints ; for one sees work at times that could have been created in no other way. But it is not the way of the masters, if it is the way of the schoolmasters. The methods and aims of an artist are deeper and more profound ; they are beyond the reach of explanation and outside all recipe. No man has yet explained how to create a work of art ; and, thank God, no man ever will. I do not say that the critics cannot invent a system to fathom it ; I go much further, and say that the artists cannot. Here is a book in which the writer has not concerned himself with the fact whether one master is greater than another ; but has sought to understand what each artist has given his strength to express. The writers on the history of art as a rule give too much importance to the greatness of one artist over another ; here we have an endeavour to find in the works of so-called lesser men those vi PREFACE qualities of sincerity and truth that are as vital as the greater efforts of men more richly endowed. Here we have a history, whether we agree with it or disagree with it, which is an estimate of painting by a man who, instead of slavishly accepting cast-iron tradition, has challenged tradition from its beginnings ; who has always looked upon works of art from the point of view of the artist ; who has always questioned the merely scholarly verdicts on art wheresoever he has found them. I can quite understand that the exact date at which an artist's pictures were painted, the documentary evidence as to what pictures can be attributed with certainty to him, and the complicated scientific rules and theories for deciding the authority of paintings, have an antiquarian value. But all this leaves the vital facts of art untouched. The value of the Old Masters is enormous if we look upon their works as a superb expression of their age ; more valuable still if they inspire modern painters to try and express their own age with the same power ; but they are disastrous if we only try to mimic them. There is one note in particular in these volumes that is struck again and again, and cannot be sounded too often. The moment that an artist ceases to interpret life and thinks in terms of pictures by other men instead, his creation withers, however much his craftsmanship may gain. The moment that a painter becomes a mimic of a dead Master, and only strives to repeat what has been already said with unmatchable skill, he becomes an imitator, and ceases to be an artist. This loss of origin- ality in the endeavour to paint like others has been the chief cause of decay in every school in the past. Haldane Macfall points to this cause of decay as he reviews school vii PREFACE after school. It is a warning note that cannot be too strongly insisted upon to-day ; for it is unfortunately only too often the proportion of his skill in imitation that draws the acclaim of critics to the work of a painter. But personality is the supreme triumph of an artist, though originality is the very thing for which he has often to suffer neglect. In these volumes the reader is led through the great achievement of the Masters in the past, with no lack of reverence for their splendid and immortal genius ; but I am glad to see this constant warning raised against the mere imitation of the dead. These Masters expressed their age once and for all. A writer to-day might just as well imi- tate the language and spelling of Chaucer and think that thereby he was creating art, as a painter to-day imitate the great Italians. The age that produced them is dead and gone. We live in a new age, in a changed atmosphere, and see things in a wholly different way. We can never call back the dead past with the skill and truth with which it was recorded by the men who lived in the past, whose blood tingled with the enthusiasms and hopes and ambitions of their day. But we can learn the mighty lesson from the dead Masters to see life true. And we are fortunate to have the vast heritage of hundreds of masterpieces which, had they perished, would have left us worlds the poorer. The man who cannot understand the relation of art to life in his own day, is little likely to understand that relation in the past. But if he has been granted this gift, it will enable him to appreciate all that is significant in the art of the past. Frank Brangwyn. vm — — FOREWORD 'That man who is without the arts is little above the beasts of the field. Vet, there is no question about it, your ordinary man dreads the word Art. To him Art means Babble of strange sounds, of weirdphrases ; to him it standsfor a little coterie of men " who give themselves exclusive airs of " being in the know men who preen themselves upon being ofa cult to which in some mysterious way they have been admitted, or the inner sanctuary of which, by some profound gifts, they have usurped, but to which the ordinary man may never even hope to attain. Indeed, it is the chief source of pride of these self-constituted elect that art is only for the few —the Chosen Souls—meaning themselves. Tour ordinary man is easily convinced of his limitations ; and straightway takes the apologetic attitude ; avers that he " does not know anything about " art ; shrugs his shoulders ; andfies at the sound of the word. As one who has essayea to create art in letters and painting, I have read the effusions and listened to the loud talk and dogged dogmas of the Cult ; and I soon discovered that they knew far less of the real significance of art than many of the hundreds ofyoungsters who have taken a canvas and brush and paint and tried to create art. I soon discovered even more than this ; I found that the creators of this exclusive cult, not only do not understand the full significance of art, but they create a wordy code of laws and rules, and try to explain by long-winded efforts, the facts of art which they do not fully understand, and they thereby set up a tangle of misleading futilities that impress the ordinary man, and drive him still farther away from art.
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