The sun., 1907-12-10

forced upon 10 burdens too big to bear.
Yet what magnificent victories are theirs.
with their "ghastly glories OF saints, dead
limbs Of gibbeted gods" Doubtless Michel
angelo groaned over the Sistine Chapel,
prefsrring his giant cartoon Of soldiers
bathing; nevertheless the world lie grateful
TO the @papal tyranny" that urged his
colossal imagination to the completion Of
his task. It would be we'll for the reader
Interested in this point to look nc page 81
OF Mr.. Berenson's @Florentine Painters.'
New ideas give birth to a new sesthetio;
so to modern eyes much OF the Renaissance
painting, with its grandiloquent rhetoric
and its grandeur OF pose and extravaganza
Of design. seems operatic.
II.
Berenson attacks with a sure touch the
idea Of prettiness in art (-North Italian
Painters"). and while we cannot accompany
him 80 far az to deny expressvsness as an
emotional element in the delineation OF the
human countenanoe-B -Berenson Is. we re-
peat. a very Spartan in his large simplicities
and larger renunciation Of hedonism in art
there Is not a question that with the ad-
vent Of sentimentalism began the deoa-
dence. Furthermore he remarks that new
world Of art. In that world it is the intrinsic
quality only that counts. and that quality.
no matter by what materials and with what
vision 1t Is obtained. must always be- Form.
Movement and Space harmonized together"
or Paul Veronese no says; Taken as a
whole. he was as much the greatest master
Of the pictorial vision as MicheIangelo was
Ofthe plastic. and it may be doubted whether
L.
been surpassed One of Foppa's follow
ers. Ambrogio Borgognone, -as a painter
came perhaps as near as was possible for
a man firmly fixed in habits of plastic Wis.,
ualizing to being a Renaissance Whistler.
He had Whistler's passion for harmonies
Of tone and synthetized. abbreviated. sym
bolized drawing :" +" He reminds one.
as no other Italian. Of the exquisite Amer
ican." He refers also to Francesca Bianchi.
whose Madonna with st. Benedict and st.
Quentin" is in the Louvre. charming can
vas. This is the picture Of which the late
J. n. Huysmans ingeniously wrote that for
him it exhaled insidious sacrileges. troubled
prayers and delicious emanations.
Now that he has so profitably titled the
field OF Renaissance art, what pleasure Mr..
Berenson would give his reading public II
he should move on Dutch and Flemish and
Spanish art. He knows that the creators.
the pioneers. are In the past. Greater art
lists than Raphael. Titan. Giorgione. Tin
toretto. Cagliari. Leonardo, Donatello and
Michelangelo and the rest cannot be
conjured up. Yet Rembrandt and Velas-
quez followed them. and the -iend" Rubens
as Blake called him, and Vandyck and the
Dutch landscapists. With the breaking
down Of line began the downfall of art.
However. this critic admits that in land
scape the moderns actually have said some
thing new: indeed, he is convinced that the
landscape art of this century will be as
vastly surpassed in the future as the mod
erns," Corot, Courbet, Monet-who stem
from Constable-surpassed the artificial
classical landscape at the end Of the eigh-
teenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
centuries. What many lovers of antique
art do not care to see is that while they
swallow much Of the primitive landscapes.
usually repainted in glaring primary tints.
with their funny mannikins all on one plane,
they balk at the fidelity to nature revealed
in modern landscape work. IL, too. has
its beauty. Every age has it's character
istic beauty. Ours seems ugly to the ideal
lists. but not to the sincere artist or observer.
All, the pathos Of distancel
How much may be set down TO it's still
small voice. Much Renaissance art is
defaced symbol for our eyes Time has
played with its discoloring tongue pranks
with color and form. Overpaintings and
the hand of Needless man have defaced the
originals. There is GiorGione with his lyric
golden gamut What did he really paint
besides the beautiful Louvre "Fete Cham
petre"? Berenson allows him only seventeen
pictures. while Herbert Cook in "A rebound
Of generosity gives him about sixty
five, rating Moreli for his ascription TO
Titan Of the exquisite "Pitti Concert" &"
Poor Giorgionel Even the Castelfranco
altar piece is quite decayed. The very
color of Claude has ripened into mushy
mellowness. In the twenty-second century
picture lovers may read with wonder OF
the Renaissance painters. just as now we
lift our eyebrows when we read of the
legendary picturea of Apelles Yet it was
the divine stammering of the Trecentists
that gave us Giotto and after him the
glorious giant brood. those Titans who
developed design and color and compost
ton. How different is the history Of music,
when Frescobald composed and Bach
eInerReu irOtn polyTHonlc rleInisn mlslS,
down to the last century. when Beethoven
said all there was to be- said in the sym
phony. Happily for the living. the torch
OF art has been passed on. even If IL does
not fare 50 supremely. If we haven't
Gotto we have Manet (who was salutcd by
Baudelaire as the first in the decrepitude
Of your art"). II we haven't Michelangelo
we must perforce submit to the shuddering
marble semitones Of Rodin. Claude Lor-
raine not being with us. we gaze upon Claude
Monet. Wagner ia our music maker now.
and Whistler our etcher And in the Prado
there is always VelasqueS. more modern
than all the moderns. more modern than to-
morrow. That sense of the liberation OF
the spirit which Mr.. Berenson is fond of
adducing as the grandest attribute OF the
Space Composers, Raphael and the rest.
may be discovered in Las Meninas' or in
-The Weavers." space overhead. with mys-
terry superadded. The brumous North was
the home of mysticism. of Gothic architect
ure. The note Of tragic mystery was seldom
sounded by the Italians Faith Itself seems
more real in the North. II remained for
Rambrandt to give il out in hia chorda of