# St. Nicholas/Volume 32/Number 1/How To Study Pictures

How to Study Pictures.
By Charles H. Caffin.
A series of articles for the older girls and boys who read “St. Nicholas.”
Introduction.
“Having eyes, see ye not?”
The world is full of beauty which many people hurry past or live in front of and do not see, There is also a world of beauty in pictures, but it escapes the notice of many, because, while they wish to see it, they do not know how.
The first necessity for the proper seeing of a picture is to try to see it through the eyes of the artist who painted it. This is not a usual method. Generally people look only through their own eyes, and like or dislike a picture according as it does or docs not suit their particular fancy. These people will tell you: “Oh, I don’t know anything about painting, but I know what I like”; which is their way of saying: “If I don’t like it right off, I don’t care to be bothered to like it at all.”
Such an attitude of mind cuts one off from growth and development, for it is as much as to say: “I am very well satisfied with myself and quite indifferent to the experiences and feelings of other men.” Yet it is just this feeling and experience of another man which a picture gives us, If you consider a moment you will understand why. The world itself is a vast panorama, and from it the painter selects his subject—not to copy it exactly, since it would be impossible for him to do this, even if he tried. How could he represent, for example, each blade of grass, each leaf upon a tree? So what he does is to represent the subject as he sees it, as it appeals to his sympathy or interest; and if twelve artists painted the same landscape the result would be twelve different pictures, differing according to the way in which each man had been impressed by the scene; in fact, according to his separate point of view or separate way of seeing it, influenced by his individual experience and feeling.
It is most important to realize the part which is played by these two qualities of experience and feeling, Experience, the fullness or the deficiency of it, must affect the work of every one of us, no matter what our occupation may be, And if the work is of the kind which appeals to the feelings of others, as in the case of the preacher, the writer, the actor, the painter, sculptor, architect, or art-craftsman, the musician or even the dancer, then it must be affected cqually by the individual's capacity of feeling and by his power of expressing what he feels.
Therefore, since none of us can include in ourselves the whole range of possible experience and feeling, it is through the experience and the feeling of others that we deepen and refine our own. It is this that we should look to pictures to accomplish, which, as you will acknowledge, is a very different thing from offhand like or dislike. For example, we may not be attracted at first, but we reason with ourselves: “No doubt this picture meant a good deal to the man who painted it; it embodies his experience of the world and his feeling toward the subject. It represents, in fact, a revelation of the man himself, and if it is true that ‘the noblest study of mankind is man,’ then possibly in the study of this man, as revealed in his work, there may be much that ought to interest me.”
I am far from wishing you to suppose that all pictures will repay you for such intimate study. For instance, we may quickly discover that an artist's experience of life is meager, his feeling commonplace and paltry, There are not a few men of this sort in the occupation of art, just as in every other walk of life, and their pictures, so far as we ourselves are concerned, will be disappointing. But among the pictures which have stood the test of time we shall always find that the fruits of the artist’s experience and ​feeling are of a kind which make a lasting appeal to the needs of the human heart and mind, and that this fact is one of the causes of their being held in perpetual honor.
There is also another cause: If only experience and feeling were necessary to make an artist, some of us would be better artists than many who follow the profession of art. But there is another necessity—the power of expressing the experience and feeling. This, by its derivation from the Greek, is the real meaning of the word “art,” the capacity to “fit” a form to an idea, The artist the “fitter” who gives shape and construction to the visionary fabric of his imagination; and this method of “fitting” is called his “technique.”
So the making of a picture involves two processes: a taking in of the impression, and a giving of it out by visible expression; a seeing of the subject with the eye and the mind, and a communicating of what has been so seen to the eyes and minds of others; and both these processes are influenced by the experience and feeling of the artist and make their appeal to our own. From this it should be clear that the beauty of a picture depends much less upon its subject than upon the artist's conception and treatment of it. A grand subject will not of itself make a grand picture, while a very homely one, by the way in which it is treated, may be made to impress us profoundly.
The degree of beauty in a picture depends, in fact, upon the artist’s feeling for beauty and upon his power to express it; and in order that we may discover how, at successive times and in various countries, different men have conceived of life and have expressed their feeling and experience in pictures, I propose that we shall study this out in a series of comparisons.
Our plan, therefore, will be:
“Look here, upon this picture, and on this”; not to decide offhand which you like the better,—for in some cases perhaps you will not like either, since they were painted in times so remote from ours as to be outside our twentieth-century habit of understanding,— but in order that we may get at the artist's way of seeing in each case. In this way I hope, too, that we may be able to piece together the story of modern painting; beginning with its re-birth in the thirteenth century, when it emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, and following it through its successive stages in different countries down to our own day.
I.
Giovanni Cimabue (1240-1302); Giotto [Giotto di Bondone] (1276-1337), Florentine School.
For the first comparison I invite you to study the two pictures, shown on pages 26 and 27, of “The Madonna Enthroned.” One was painted by Cimabue, the other by his pupil, Giotto. Both were painted on wooden panels in distemper, that is to say, with colors that have been mixed with some gelatinous medium, such as the white and the yolk of an egg beaten up together, for it was not until the fifteenth century that the use of oil-colors was adopted. The colors used in Giotto’s panel are tints of blue and rose and white; in Cimabue’s the blues and reds are deep and dusky, the background in each case being golden.
We notice at once a general similarity between these two pictures, not only in choice of subject but in the manner of presentation: the Madonna seated upon a throne; her mantle drawn over her head; her right hand resting on the knee of the infant Saviour, who has two fingers of his right hand raised in the act of blessing; kneeling angels at the foot, and figures in tiers above them; all the heads being surrounded by the nimbus, or circular cloud of light, showing, like a halo, their sacred character.
The reason of this general similarity is that the choice of a subject in painting and the manner of its presentation were fixed by the Christian Church of that time: for long before this thirteenth century the methods of old Greek art had been lost, and the Church had adopted a form of art known as Byzantine. I will try to explain what this means.
Briefly, the cause of the change was this. In old Greece, art and religion were bound together. The gods and goddesses in whom they believed were always represented in sculpture and painting as human beings of a higher order; physical perfection was the ideal alike ​of religion and of art. But the Christianity of those earlier times met the ideal of physical perfection with the spiritual doctrine of mortifying the flesh, and the pagan art of old Greece was condemned by the Church, Yet pictures of some sort were needed as an aid to the teachings of religion, and the Church found what it required in the art of Byzantium.
This old Greek city stood where Constantinople now stands, and was the gateway between the Eastern and Western worlds. Now the ideals of the East and West are very different. While the Greek artist carved or painted human or animal forms, striving to give them a perfection of shape in every part that would express his ideal, the artist of the Fast reached his ideal through the perfection of beautiful lines, of beautiful patterns of form and color. Thus the one art is represented at its best by the sculptures of Phidias on the Parthenon, the other by a decorated porcelain vase.
The arrival, therefore, at Byzantium of this Oriental art, so far removed from the pagan study of the human form, so beautifully decorative, was welcomed by the Church, both for the decorating of the sacred buildings and for the illuminating of the sacred manuscripts; and it was as decorators and illuminators that the Byzantine artists did their finest work. But as the old Greek study of the human figure had been abandoned, the ignorance of the artists regarding the real character of the human form increased; their types of figure became less and less like nature and more and more according to an unnatural figure established by the Church. As “mortifying the flesh” was preached, the figures must be thin and gaunt, their gestures angular, the expression of their emaciated faces one of painful ecstasy. And so, in time, all that was required of or permitted to the painters of those days was to go on reproducing certain chosen subjects in a sort of stencil-like way.
Now, therefore, we can understand why those two pictures of “The Madonna Enthroned,” by Cimabue and Giotto, are so similar in arrangement. They both followed the rules prescribed by the Church. Yet the Florentines of Cimabue’s day found his picture so superior to anything they had seen before—so much more splendid in color, if not much nearer to the true representation of life— that, when it was completed, they carried it in joyous procession from the artist’s home, through the streets of Florence, and deposited it with ceremony in the Church of Santa Maria Novella.
Cimabue had chanced upon the boy Giotto as, like David of old, he watched his flock upon the mountain; and he found him drawing the form of one of the goats upon a rock with a sharp piece of slate, The master must have seen some hint of genius in the work, for he straightway asked the boy if he would like to be his pupil, and, having received a glad assent and the father's permission, carried him off to Florence to his bottega. This, the artist’s studio of that period and for long after, was rather what we should call a workshop, in which the pupils ground and prepared the colors under the master’s direction; and it was not until they had thoroughly mastered this branch of the work, a task which in Giotto’s time was supposed to occupy about six years, that they were permitted to use the brushes. How often, as he worked in the gloom of the bottega, must the shepherd-boy have peeped wistfully at the master standing in the shady garden, before a great glory of crimson drapery and golden background, and wondered if he himself should ever acquire so marvelous a skill!
He was destined to accomplish greater things, for in the free air of the mountain the boy’s eager eyes had learned to love and study nature. It was the love of form that had set him to try to picture a goat upon the surface of the rock; it was the actual appearance of objects that he sought to render when in due time he learned to use the brush.
“The Madonna Enthroned.” by Cimabue.
“The Madonna Enthroned” by Giotto.
All Giotto’s paintings were executed in fresco, that is to say, were painted on the plaster before ​it was dry, with water-colors mixed in a glutinous medium, so that as the surface hardened the colors became fixed and blended in it. While the technical knowledge displayed in them may seem to you hardly greater than that of a school-boy of our own day, yet they are so simple and unaffected, so earnest in feeling, that they arouse the interest and enthusiasm of the modern student,
In his own day Giotto’s fame as a painter was supreme. He had numerous followers, and these “Giotteschi,” as they were styled, continued his methods for nearly 2 hundred years. But, like all the great men of the Florentine school, he was a master of more than one craft. “Forget that they were painters,” writes Mr, Berenson, “they remain great sculptors; forget that they were sculptors, and still they remain architects, poets, and even men of science.”
The beautiful Campanile, which stands beside the cathedral in Florence, and represents a perfect union of strength and elegance, was designed by Giotto and partly erected in his lifetime. Moreover, the sculptured reliefs which decorate its lower part were all from his designs, though he lived to execute only two of them.
Thus, architect, sculptor, painter, friend of Dante and of other great men of his day, Giotto was the worthy forerunner of that brilliant band of artists which a century later made Florence forever renowned as the birthplace of that great revival, or “new birth” of art, generally called “The Renaissance.”
II
We have seen that the revival of painting began with a study of the appearances of objects, and an attempt to represent them as real to the senses of sight and touch; that the painters learned from the sculptors, who themselves had learned from the remains of antique sculpture, and that the result was a closer truth to nature, in the representation of the human form.
We have now to consider the effect produced upon painting by the revival of the study of Greek, which revealed to Italy of the fifteenth century a new light. Botticelli represents this new inspiration, and I have coupled with him the Flemish painter, Memling, because these two artists, though they worked apart and under different conditions, had one quality of mind in common, An unaffected simplicity, frank and artless, fresh and tender, like the child-mind or the opening buds of spring flowers, appears in each.
In the year 1396 Manuel Chrysoloras, a Byzantine scholar, was appointed professor of Greek at Florence. From him and from his pupils the knowledge of Greek literature spread rapidly over Italy, accompanied by an extraordinary enthusiasm for Roman and Greek art, and for Greek thought and Greek ideals. Artists of that time soon began to cherish the old Greek devotion to the beauty of the human form; the scholars gave themselves up to admiration of Plato’s philosophy. Artists and scholars thronged the court of Duke Lorenzo de’ Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent), patron of arts and letters, and among the brilliant throng none was more highly honored than Sandro Botticelli. His father was in comfortable circumstances, and he had been “instructed in all such things as children are usually taught before they choose a calling.” But he refused to give his attention to reading, writing, and accounts, so that his father, despairing of his ever becoming a scholar, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticello; whence the name by which the world remembers him. His own family name was Filipepi.
In those day's, as we have noted before, men were often masters of more than one craft, One well-known painter was also a goldsmith; another was goldsmith, painter, and sculptor. Botticello’s Sandro, a stubborn-featured youth with large, quietly searching eyes and a shock of yellow hair,—he has left a portrait of himself in one of his pictures,— would also fain have been a painter, and to that end was placed with a well-known painter, who was also a monk, Fra Philippo Lippi. Sandro made rapid progress, and loved his master. But his own pictures show that Sandro was a dreamer and a poet.
You will feel this if you refer to the two pictures and compare his “Virgin Enthroned” with Memling’s. The latter’s is much more realistic. It is true that it does not, as a whole, represent ​a real scene, for the Virgin’s throne with its embroidered hanging or dossal, the canopy or baldachin above it, and the richly decorated arch which frames it in are not what you would expect to see set up in a landscape. These are features repeated, with variations, in so many Madonna pictures intended for altarpicces,
But how very real are the two bits of landscape, which are drawn, we may feel sure, from nature: a great man’s castle and a water-mill, two widely separated phases of life, suggesting, perhaps, that the Christ came to save rich and poor alike. Then, too, the introduction of the apple may be intended to remind us of the circumstances of the fall of man, which the Saviour came into the world to redress. But Memling was satisfied merely to suggest these things; and then devoted himself to rendering with characteristic truth a little scene of realism. The angel on the left is simply an older child playfully attracting the baby’s attention to an apple; the Christ-child is simply a baby, attracted by the colored, shining object, and the pretty scene is watched intently by the other angel. On the Madonna’s face, however, is an abstracted expression, as if her thoughts were far away: not in pursuit of any mystical dreams, but following that quiet, happy pathway along which a young mother’s thoughts will roam,
So we find in Memling’s picture close studies of the way in which the facts present themselves to the eye, This is seen, too, in the landscape, in the carved and embroidered ornament, in the character of the figures, and in the little story which they are enacting. As I have said, the spirit of the picture is realistic.
But turn to Botticelli’s. Here the spirit is imaginative or allegorical. He was fond of allegorical subjects. In the present case the subject is religious, but we may doubt if the Bible version of the story was in the artist’s mind. He was commissioned to paint a Madonna and Child with attendant angels, and, poet and dreamer that he was, took the familiar theme and made it the basis of a picture from his own imagination, In the figure of the Christ-child there is a grave dignity, a suggestion of authority. The only gesture of infancy is in the left arm and hand, and the mother’s face is bowed in timid meekness, and is rather sad in expression.
But beauty of face he does not give to his Madonna; she is meek and timid—oppressed with gentle sadness. In the faces of the angels, the young fair creatures who stand around the throne, what wistful and unsatisfied yearning!
The strain of sadness, indeed, is in all Botticelli’s pictures; they have the note of infinite but ineffectual longing. So that, when we understand this, we forget the ugliness of many of his faces, and find in them a spiritual meaning, which we learn to feel is a very touching and beautiful expression of the artist’s own mind, of his particular way of looking at the world of his time.
He looked at it as a poet, moved alike by the love of beauty and by the beauty of love; and out of the world’s realities he fashioned for himself dreams, and these he pictured. So his pictures, as I have said, are not records of fact, treated with a very pleasing fancifulness and reverence, as in this Madonna of Memling’s, but visions, the beauty of which is rather spiritual than material. It is almost as if he tried to paint not only the flower but also its fragrance, and it was the fragrance that to him seemed the more precious quality.
So now, perhaps, we can begin to understand the difference between his technique—that is to say, his manner of setting down in paint what he desired to express—and Memling’s. The latter, serene and happy, had all a child’s delight in the appearances of things, attracted by them as the infant in his picture is attracted by the apple, and offering them to us with the same winning grace, and certainty that they will please, as the angel in his picture exhibits. So it is the facts, clear to the senses of sight and touch, that he presents, with a loving, tender care to make them as plain to us as possible, working out to perfection even the smallest details.
You have examined the beautiful workmanship in the ornamentation of the arch and in the garlands suspended by the charming little baby forms; but have you discovered the tiny figures in the landscape? And with a reading-glass you will sec that the castle drawbridge is down, and a lady on horseback is passing over it, following a gentleman who is evidently riding forth to hunt, as a greyhound comes along be-​hind him. From the mill is issuing a man with a sack of flour on his shoulders, which he will set upon the back of the donkey that waits patiently before the door, while a little way along the road stands a dog, all alert and impatient to start. These incidents illustrate Memling’s fondness for detail, and his delight in the representation of facts as facts.
“The Virgin Enthroned.” by Botticelli.
You will see this at-once if you compare the draperies of the angels in the two pictures. Those of Memling’s are commonplace compared with the fluttering grace of Botticelli’s. But there is more in this flutter of draperies than mere beauty of line: it expresses lively and graceful movement. These angels seem to have alighted like birds, their garments still buoyed up with air and agitated by their speed of flight, each being animated with its individual grace of movement. Compared with the spontaneousness and freedom of these figures, those of Memling look heavy, stock-still, and posed for effect.
“The Virgin Enthroned.” by Memmling.
This power of making every line count, both in significance and beauty, distinguishes the great master draftsmen of all time.
(To be continued.)
* ↑ See page 94.
* ↑ Zeus, Ares, Athene, and the rest—or, as the Romans called them, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva, etc.