The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-09-15
A WORD ABOUT ART


the ife-blood of art. When Athene and
Zeus ceased to excite veneration in the
minds of men, sculpture and architecture
both lost their greatness. When the Ma
donna and her son lost that mystery and
divinity, which for the simple minds of
the early painters they possessed, the soul
went out of canvas and of wood. When
we carve Venus now, she is but a
frivolous woman; when we paint Jesus
now, it is but little sucking, or sorrow
full prisoner.
We want great inspiration. We ought
to find it in the things that are really beau
tiful but we arc not sure enough, perhaps,
what is so. What does dominate US is a
passion for nature; for the sea, for the sky.
for the mountain, for the forest, for the
evening storm, for the break of day. Per-
haps when we are thoroughly stepped in
this we shall reach greatness once more.
But the artiiciality of all modern life is
against it, so is cynicism. Sadness and
sarcasm make great Lucretius and a
great JuvenaI; and scorn makes strong
Aristophanes; but they do not make a
Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not
even make Raffaelle or Flaxman.
Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual
uplifting of what is beautiful in the sight
of the multitude the perpetual alteration
of that loneliness, material and moral,
which men in the haste and greed of their
lives are everlastingly forgetting; unless it
be that, it is empty and useless as child's
reed pipe when the reed is snapped and
the child's breath spent.
1t must have been such good life, q
painters, In those days-those early days
of art. Fancy the gladness of it then !;
modern painters can know nothing of it.
When all the delicate delights of dis
lance were only alf perceived; when the
treatment of light and shadow was barely
dreamed of; when aerial perspective was
just breaking on the mind in It's wonder
and power; when it was still regarded as
marvellous boldness to draw from the
natural form In a natural fashion-in
those early days only fancy the delights of
a painter.
Something fresh to be won at each step;
something new to be penetrated at each
moment; something beautiful and rash
to be ventured on with each touch of color
the painter in those days had all the
breathless pleasure of an explorer; with
out leaving his birthplace he knew the
joys of Columbus.
And one can fancy nothing better than
life such as Spinello led for nigh on a CEN
he loved it, till death took him. OF all
lives, perhaps, that this world has ever
seen, the lives of painters, l say, in those
days were the most perfect.
and volterra, and Mooena and Ur-
bino, and CorIona and Perugia, there
would grow up gentle lad who from in
fancy most loved to stand and gaze at the
missal paintings in his mothers house
and when he had fulfilled some twelve or
fifteen years his people would give in to
his wish and send him to some bottega to
learn the management of colors.
Then he would grow to be a man, and
his town would be proud of him and find
him the choicest of all work in it's churches
and in its converts, so that all his days
were filled without his ever wandering out
of reach of his native vesper bells.
He would make his dwelling in the heart
of his birthplace, close under its cathedral,
with the tender sadness of the olive hills
stretching above and around; in the BASIL
iche or the monasteries his labor would
daily lie; he would have docile band of
hopeful boyish pupils with innocent eyes
VI WOhueI loI Ill Ae sdlu OF uld,
he would paint his wife's face for
the Madonna's and his little son for the
child angels; he would go out into the
fields and gather the olive bow and the
feathery corn, and the golden fruits, and
paint them tenderly on ground of gold or
blue. in symbol of those heavenly things
of which the bells were forever telling all
those who chose to hear; he would sit in
the lustrous nights in the shade of his own
vines and pity those who were not as he was:
now and then horsemen would come
squirting in across the hills and bring news
with them of battles fought, of cities lost
and won; and he would listen with the
rest in the marketplace, and go home
through the moonlight thinking that 1t
was well to create the holy things before
which the fiercest rider and the rudest
free-lance would drop the point of the
sword and make the sign of the cross.
1t must have been good life-gcod to
its close in the cathedral crypt-and so
common, too; there were scores of such
lived out in these little towns of Italy, half
monastery and half fortress, that were
scattered over hill and plain, by sea and
river, on marsh and mountain, from the
daydawn of Cimabue to the afterglow of
the Carracci.
And their work lives after them; the
little towns are all gray and still and half
peopled now; the iris grows on the ram
parts, the canes wave in the moats, the
shadows sleep in the silent marketplace,
the great converts shelter half dozen
monks, the dim majestic churches are
damp and desolate. and have the scent of
the sepulcher.
But there, before the affairs, the wife lives
in the Madonna and the child smiles in
the angel, and the olive and the wheat are
fadeless on their ground of blue and cold