The decline of the West

II
ACT AND PORTRAIT

I

The Classical has been characterized as a culture of the Body and the Northern as a culture of the Spirit, and not without a certain arrière-pensée of disprizing the one in favour of the other. Though it was mainly in trivialities that Renaissance taste made its contrasts between Classical and Modern, Pagan and Christian, yet even this might have led to decisive discoveries if only men had seen how to get behind formula to origins.

If the environment of a man (whatever else it may be) is with respect to him a macrocosm with respect to a microcosm, an immense aggregate of symbols, then the man himself, in so far as he belongs to the fabric of actuality, in so far as he is phenomenal, must be comprised in the general symbolism. But, in the impress of him made upon men like himself, what is it that possesses the force of Symbol, viz., the capacity of summing within itself and intelligibly presenting the essence of that man and the signification of his being? Art gives the answer.

But this answer is necessarily different in different Cultures. As each lives differently, so each is differently impressed by Life. For the mode of human imagining—metaphysical, ethical, artistic imagining alike—it is more than important, it is determinant that the individual feels himself as a body amongst bodies or, on the contrary, as a centre in endless space; that he subtilizes his ego into lone distinctness or, on the contrary, regards it as substantially part of the general consensus, that the directional character is asserted or, on the contrary, denied in the rhythm and course of his life. In all these ways the prime-symbol of the great Culture comes to manifestation: this is indeed a world-feeling, but the life-ideal conforms to it. From the Classical ideal followed unreserved acceptance of the sensuous instant, from the Western a not less passionate wrestle to overcome it. The Apollinian soul, Euclidean and point-formed, felt the empirical visible body as the complete expression of its own way of being; the Faustian, roving into all distances, found this expression not in person, σῶμα, but in personality, character, call it what you will. “Soul” for the real Hellene was in last analysis the form of his body—and thus Aristotle defined it. “Body” for Faustian man was the vessel of the soul—and thus Goethe felt it.

But the result of this is that Culture and Culture differ very greatly in their selection and formation of their humane arts. While Gluck expresses the woe of Armida by a melody combined with drear gnawing tones in the instrumental accompaniment, the same is achieved in Pergamene sculptures by making every muscle speak. The Hellenistic portraiture tries to draw a spiritual type in the structure of its heads. In China the heads of the Saints of Ling-yan-si tell of a wholly personal inner life by their look and the play of the corners of the mouth.

The Classical tendency towards making the body the sole spokesman is emphatically not the result of any carnal overload in the race (to the man of σωφροσύνη wantonness was not permitted^[324]), it was not, as Nietzsche thought, an orgiastic joy of untrammelled energy and perfervid passion. This sort of thing is much nearer to the ideals of Germanic-Christian or of Indian chivalry. What Apollinian man and Apollinian art can claim as their very own is simply the apotheosis of the bodily phenomenon, taking the word perfectly literally—the rhythmic proportioning of limbs and harmonious build of muscles. This is not Pagan as against Christian, it is Attic as against Baroque; for it was Baroque mankind (Christian or unbeliever, monk or rationalist) that first utterly put away the cult of the palpable σῶμα, carrying its alienation indeed to the extremes of bodily uncleanliness that prevailed in the entourage of Louis XIV,^[325] whose full wigs and lace cuffs and buckled shoes covered up Body with a whole web of ornament.

Thus the Classical plastic art, after liberating the form completely from the actual or imaginary back-wall and setting it up in the open, free and unrelated, to be seen as a body among bodies, moved on logically till the naked body became its only subject. And, moreover, it is unlike every other kind of sculpture recorded in art-history in that its treatment of the bounding surfaces of this body is anatomically convincing. Here is the Euclidean world-principle carried to the extreme; any envelope whatever would have been in contradiction, however slightly, with the Apollinian phenomenon, would have indicated, however timidly, the existence of the circum-space.

In this art, what is ornamental in the high sense resides entirely in the proportions of the structure^[326] and the equivalence of the axes in respect of support and load. Standing, sitting, lying down but always self-secure, the body has, like the peripteros, no interior, that is, no “soul.” The significance of the muscle-relief, carried out absolutely in the round, is the same as that of the self-closing array of the columns; both contain the whole of the form-language of the work.

It was a strictly metaphysical reason, the need of a supreme life-symbol for themselves, that brought the later Hellenes to this art, which under all the consummate achievement is a narrow one. It is not true that this language of the outer surface is the completest, or the most natural, or even the most obvious mode of representing the human being. Quite the contrary. If the Renaissance, with its ardent theory and its immense misconception of its own tendency, had not continued to dominate our judgment—long after the plastic art itself had become entirely alien to our inner soul—we should not have waited till to-day to observe this distinctive character of the Attic style. No Egyptian or Chinese sculptor ever dreamed of using external anatomy to express his meaning. In Gothic image-work a language of the muscles is unheard of. The human tracery that clothes the mighty Gothic framework with a web of countless figures and reliefs (Chartres cathedral has more than ten thousand such) is not merely ornament; as early as about 1200 it is employed for the expression of schemes and purposes far grander than even the grandest of Classical plastic. For these masses of figures constitute a tragic unit. Here, by the North even earlier than by Dante, the historical feeling of the Faustian soul—of which the deep sacrament of Contrition is the spiritual expression and the rite of Confession the grave teacher—is intensified to the tragic fullness of a world-drama. That which Joachim of Floris, at this very time, was seeing in his Apulian cell—the picture of the world, not as Cosmos, but as a Divine History and succession of three world-ages^[327]—the craftsmen were expressing at Reims, Amiens and Paris in serial presentation of it from the Fall to the Last Judgment. Each of the scenes, each of the great symbolic figures, had its significant place in the sacred edifice, each its rôle in the immense world-poem. Then, too, each individual man came to feel how his life-course was fitted as ornament in the plan of Divine history, and to experience this personal connexion with it in the forms of Contrition and Confession. And thus these bodies of stone are not mere servants of the architecture. They have a deep and particular meaning of their own, the same meaning as the memorial-tomb brings to expression with ever-increasing intensity from the Royal Tombs of St. Denis onward; they speak of a personality. Just as Classical man properly meant, with his perfected working-out of superficial body (for all the anatomical aspiration of the Greek artist comes to that in the end), to exhaust the whole essence of the living phenomenon in and by the rendering of its bounding surfaces, so Faustian man no less logically found the most genuine, the only exhaustive, expression of his life-feeling in the Portrait. The Hellenic treatment of the nude is the great exceptional case; in this and in this only has it led to an art of the high order.^[328]

Act and Portrait have never hitherto been felt as constituting an opposition, and consequently the full significance of their appearances in art-history has never been appreciated. And yet it is in the conflict of these two form-ideals that the contrast of two worlds is first manifested in full. There, on the one hand, an existence is made to show itself in the composition of the exterior structure; here, on the other hand, the human interior, the Soul, is made to speak of itself, as the interior of a church speaks to us through its façade or face. A mosque had no face, and consequently the Iconoclastic movement of the Moslems and the Paulicians—which under Leo III spread to Byzantium and beyond—necessarily drove the portrait-element quite out of the arts of form, so that thenceforward they possessed only a fixed stock of human arabesques. In Egypt the face of the statue was equivalent to the pylon, the face of the temple-plan; it was a mighty emergence out of the stone-mass of the body, as we see in the “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis and the portrait of Amenemhet III. In China the face is like a landscape, full of wrinkles and little signs that mean something. But, for us, the portrait is musical. The look, the play of the mouth, the pose of head and hands—these things are a fugue of the subtlest meaning, a composition of many voices that sounds to the understanding beholder.

But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we have to consider the deep change in the language of the West that began in Merovingian times to foreshadow the dawn of a new life-feeling. This change extended equally over the old German and the vulgar Latin, but it affected only the tongues spoken in the countries of the coming Culture (for instance, Norwegian and Spanish, but not Rumanian). The change would be inexplicable if we were to regard merely the spirit of these languages and their “influence” of one upon another; the explanation is in the spirit of the mankind that raised a mere way of using words to the level of a symbol. Instead of sum, Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; instead of fecisti, we say tu habes factum, tu as fait, du habes gitân; and again, daz wîp, un homme, man hat. This has hitherto been a riddle^[329] because families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of this specific “I” is the first dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and personal absolution. This “ego habeo factum,” the insertion of the auxiliaries “have” and “be” between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the “feci” which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this “I” and “Thou” is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an attitude—a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something sui generis, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around, exactly as the grammatical subject “I” becomes the centre of force in the Faustian sentence.

It has been shown how the experience of the extended has its origin in the living direction, time, destiny. In the perfected “being” of the all-round nude body the depth-experience has been cut away, but the “look” of a portrait leads this experience into the supersensuous infinite. Therefore the Ancient art is an art of the near and tangible and timeless, it prefers motives of brief, briefest, pause between two movements, the last moment before Myron’s athlete throws the discus, or the first moment after Pæonius’s Nike has alighted from the air, when the swing of the body is ending and the streaming draperies have not yet fallen—attitudes devoid equally of duration and of direction, disengaged from future and from past. “Veni, vidi, vici” is just such another attitude. But in "I—came, I—saw, I—conquered" there is a becoming each time in the very build of the sentence.

The depth-experience is a becoming and effects a become, signifies time and evokes space, is at once cosmic and historical. Living direction marches to the horizon as to the future. As early as 1230 the Madonna of the St. Anne entrance of Notre-Dame dreams of this future: so, later, the Cologne “Madonna with the Bean-blossom” of Meister Wilhelm. Long before the Moses of Michelangelo, the Moses of Klaus Suter’s well in the Chartreuse of Dijon meditates on destiny, and even the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel are forestalled by those of Giovanni Pisano in Sant’ Andrea at Pistoia (1300). And, lastly, there are the figures on the Gothic tombs—how they rest from the long journey of Destiny and how completely they contrast with the timeless grave and gay that is represented on the stelæ of Attic cemeteries.^[330] The Western portraiture is endless in every sense, for it begins to wake out of the stone from about 1200 and it has become completely music in the 17th Century. It takes its man not as a mere centre of the World-as-Nature which as phenomenon receives shape and significance from his being, but, above all, as a centre of the World-as-History. The Classical statue is a piece of present “Nature” and nothing besides. The Classical poetry is statuary in verse. Herein is the root of our feeling that ascribes to the Greek an unreserved devotion to Nature. We shall never entirely shake off the idea that the Gothic style as compared with the Greek is “unnatural.” Of course it is, for it is more than Nature; only we are unnecessarily loath to realize that it is a deficiency in the Greek that our feeling has detected. The Western form-language is richer—portraiture belongs to Nature and to history. A tomb by one of those great Netherlanders who worked on the Royal graves of St. Denis from 1260, a portrait by Holbein or Titian or Rembrandt or Goya, is a biography, and a self-portrait is a historical confession. To make one’s confession is not to avow an act but to lay before the Judge the inner history of that act. The act is patent, its roots the personal secret. When the Protestant or the Freethinker opposes auricular confession, it never occurs to him that he is rejecting merely the outward form of the idea and not the idea itself. He declines to confess to the priest, but he confesses to himself, to a friend, or to all and sundry. The whole of Northern poetry is one outspoken confession. So are the portraits of Rembrandt and the music of Beethoven. What Raphael and Calderon and Haydn told to the priests, these men put into the language of their works. One who is forced to be silent because the greatness of form that can take in even the ultimate things has been denied him ... goes under like Hölderlin. Western man lives in the consciousness of his becoming and his eyes are constantly upon past and future. The Greek lives point-wise, ahistorically, somatically. No Greek would have been capable of a genuine self-criticism. As the phenomenon of the nude statue is the completely ahistoric copy of a man, so the Western self-portrait is the exact equivalent of the “Werther” or “Tasso” autobiography. To the Classical both are equally and wholly alien. There is nothing so impersonal as Greek art; that Scopas or Polycletus should make an image of himself is something quite inconceivable.

Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master later than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the brow, the lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of entirely non-personal, plantlike, soulless vitality? And may we not ask ourselves whether this is the form-language that is capable even of hinting at an inner experience? Michelangelo devoted himself with all passion to the study of anatomy, but the phenomenal body that he works out is always the expression of the activity of all bones, sinews and organs of the inside; without deliberate intention, the living that is under the skin comes out in the phenomenon. It is a physiognomy, and not a system, of muscles that he calls to life. But this means at once that the personal destiny and not the material body has become the starting-point of the form-feeling. There is more psychology (and less “Nature”) in the arm of one of his Slaves^[331] than there is in the whole head of Praxiteles’s Hermes.^[332] Myron’s Discobolus,^[333] on the other hand, renders the exterior form purely as itself, without relation of any sort to the inner organs, let alone to any “soul.” One has only to take the best work of this period and compare it with the old Egyptian statues, say the “Village Sheikh”^[334] or King Phiops (Pepi), or again with Donatello’s “David,”^[335] to understand at once what it means to recognize a body purely with reference to its material boundaries. Everything in a head that might allow something intimate or spiritual to become phenomenal the Greeks (and markedly this same Myron) most carefully avoid. Once this characteristic has struck us, the best heads of the great age sooner or later begin to pall. Seen in the perspective of our world-feeling, they are stupid and dull, wanting in the biographical element, devoid of any destiny. It was not out of caprice that that age objected so strongly to votive images. The statues of Olympian victors are representatives of a fighting attitude. Right down to Lysippus there is not one single character-head, but only masks. Again, considering the figure as a whole, with what skill the Greeks avoid giving any impression that the head is the favoured part of the body! That is why these heads are so small, so un-significant in their pose, so un-thoroughly modelled. Always they are formed as a part of the body like arms and legs, never as the seat and symbol of an “I.”

At last, even, we come to regard the feminine (not to say effeminate) look of many of these heads of the 5th, and still more of the 4th, Centuries^[336] as the—no doubt unintentional—outcome of an effort to get rid of personal character entirely. We should probably be justified in concluding that the ideal facial type of this art—which was certainly not an art for the people, as the later naturalistic portrait-sculpture at once shows—was arrived at by rejecting all elements of an individual or historical character; that is, by steadily narrowing down the field of view to the pure Euclidean.

The portraiture of the great age of Baroque, on the contrary, applies to historical distance all those means of pictorial counterpoint that we already know as the fabric of their spatial distance—the brown-dipped atmosphere, the perspective, the dynamic brush-stroke, the quivering colour-tones and lights—and with their aid succeeds in treating body as something intrinsically non-material, as the highly expressive envelope of a space-commanding ego. (This problem the fresco-technique, Euclidean that it is, is powerless to solve.) The whole painting has only one theme, a soul. Observe the rendering of the hands and the brow in Rembrandt (e.g., in the etching of Burgomaster Six or the portrait of an architect at Cassel), and again, even so late, in Marées and Leibl^[337]—spiritual to the point of dematerializing them, visionary, lyrical. Compare them with the hand and brow of an Apollo or a Poseidon of the Periclean age!

The Gothic, too, had deeply and sincerely felt this. It had draped body, not for its own sake but for the sake of developing in the ornament of the drapery a form-language consonant with the language of the head and the hands in a fugue of Life. So, too, with the relations of the voices in counterpoint and, in Baroque, those of the “continuo” to the upper voices of the orchestra. In Rembrandt there is always interplay of bass melody in the costume and motives in the head.

Like the Gothic draped figure, the old Egyptian statue denies the intrinsic importance of body. As the former, by treating the clothing in a purely ornamental fashion, reinforces the expressiveness of head and hands, so the latter, with a grandeur of idea never since equalled (at any rate in sculpture), holds the body—as it holds a pyramid or an obelisk—to a mathematical scheme and confines the personal element to the head. The fall of draperies was meant in Athens to reveal the sense of the body, in the North to conceal it; in the one case the fabric becomes body, in the other it becomes music. And from this deep contrast springs the silent battle that goes on in high-Renaissance work between the consciously-intended and the unconsciously-insistent ideals of the artist, a battle in which the first—anti-Gothic—often wins the superficial, but the second—Gothic becoming Baroque—invariably wins the fundamental victory.

II

The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may now be stated concisely. Act and Portrait are to one another as body and space, instant and history, foreground and background, Euclidean and analytical number, proportion and relation. The Statue is rooted in the ground, Music (and the Western portrait is music, soul woven of colour-tones) invades and pervades space without limit. The fresco-painting is tied to the wall, trained on it, but the oil-painting, the “picture” on canvas or board or other table, is free from limitations of place. The Apollinian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows above all a becoming.

It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are amongst the finest and most intimately right achievements of the Western art. In the Attic sculpture this motive is entirely absent, and although in Hellenistic times the playful motive of the Cupid or Putto came into favour, it was expressly as a being different from the other beings and not at all as a person growing or becoming. The child links past and future. In every art of human representation that has a claim to symbolic import, it signifies duration in the midst of phenomenal change, the endlessness of Life. But the Classical Life exhausted itself in the completeness of the moment. The individual shut his eyes to time-distances; he comprehended in his thought the men like himself whom he saw around him, but not the coming generations; and therefore there has never been an art that so emphatically ignored the intimate representation of children as the Greek art did. Consider the multitude of child-figures that our own art has produced from early Gothic to dying Rococo—and in the Renaissance above all—and find if you can in Classical art right down to Alexander one work of importance that intentionally sets by the side of the worked-out body of man or woman any child-element with existence still before it.

Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of Motherhood, Woman as Mother is Time and is Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in which thereupon he has a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of maternity. Care is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly. It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies both. Care may be either affirmed or denied—one can live care-filled or care-free. Similarly, Time may be looked at in the light of eternity or in the light of the instant, and the drama of begetting and bearing or the drama of the nursing mother with her child may be chosen as the symbol of Life to be made apprehensible by all the means of art. India and the Classical took the first alternative, Egypt and the West the second.^[338] There is something of pure unrelated present in the Phallus and the Lingam, and in the phenomenon of the Doric column and the Attic statue as well. But the nursing Mother points into the future, and she is just the figure that is entirely missing in the Classical art. She could not possibly be rendered in the style of Phidias. One feels that this form is opposed to the sense of the phenomenon.

But in the religious art of the West, the representation of Motherhood is the noblest of all tasks. As Gothic dawns, the Theotokos of the Byzantine changes into the Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of God. In German mythology she appears (doubtless from Carolingian times only) as Frigga and Frau Holle. The same feeling comes out in beautiful Minnesinger fancies like Lady Sun, Lady World, Lady Love. The whole panorama of early Gothic mankind is pervaded by something maternal, something caring and patient, and Germanic-Catholic Christianity—when it had ripened into full consciousness of itself and in one impulse settled its sacraments and created its Gothic Style—placed not the suffering Redeemer but the suffering Mother in the centre of its world-picture. About 1250, in the great epic of statuary of Reims Cathedral, the principal place in the centre of the main porch, which in the cathedrals of Paris and Amiens was still that of Christ, was assigned to the Madonna; and it was about this time, too, that the Tuscan school at Arezzo and Siena (Guido da Siena) began to infuse a suggestion of mother-love into the conventional Byzantine Theotokos. And after that the Madonnas of Raphael led the way to the purely human type of the Baroque, the mother in the sweetheart—Ophelia, Gretchen—whose secret reveals itself in the glorious close of Faust II and in its fusion with the early Gothic Mary.

As against these types, the imagination of the Greeks conceived goddesses who are either Amazons like Athene or hetæræ like Aphrodite. In the root-feeling which produced the Classical type of womanhood, fruitfulness has a vegetal character—in this connexion as in others the word σῶμα exhaustively expresses the meaning of the phenomenon. Think of the masterpieces of this art, the three mighty female bodies of the East Pediment of the Parthenon,^[339] and compare with them that noblest image of a mother, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. In the latter, all bodiliness has disappeared. She is all distance and space. The Helen of the “Iliad,” compared with Kriemhild, the motherly comrade of Siegfried, is a courtesan, while Antigone and Clytæmnestra are Amazons. How strangely even Æschylus passes over in silence the mother-tragic in Clytæmnestra! The figure of Medea is nothing less than the mythic inverse of the Faustian “Mater Dolorosa”; her tragic is not one of future or children, it is with her lover, the symbol of wholly-present life, that her universe collapses. Kriemhild revenges her unborn children—it is this future that has been murdered in her—but Medea revenges only a past happiness. When the Classical sculpture, late art that it is,^[340] arrives at secularizing^[341] the pictures of the god, it creates the antique ideal of female form in a Cnidian Aphrodite—merely a very beautiful object, not a character or an ego but a piece of Nature. And in the end Praxiteles finds the hardihood to represent a goddess entirely naked. This innovation met with severe criticism, for it was felt to be a sign of the decline of the Classical world-feeling; suitable as it was to erotic symbolism, it was in sharp contradiction with the dignity of the older Greek religion. But exactly then, too, a portrait-art ventured to show itself, simultaneously with the invention of a form that has never since been forgotten, the bust. Unfortunately (here as elsewhere) art-research has made the mistake of discovering in this the “beginnings” of “the” portrait. In reality, whereas a Gothic visage speaks of an individual destiny, and even an Egyptian—in spite of the rigid formalism of the figure—has the recognizable traits of the individual person (since otherwise it could not serve as dwelling for the higher soul of the dead, his Ka), the Greeks developed a taste for typical representations just as the contemporary comedy produced standard men and situations, to which any names whatever could be affixed. The “portrait” is distinguishable not by personal traits but by the label only. This is the general custom amongst children and primitive men, and it is connected with name-magic. The name serves to capture some essence of what is named and to bind it as an object which thereupon becomes specific for every beholder. The statues of the Tyrannicides,^[342] the (Etruscan) statues of Kings in the Capitol and the “iconic” portraits of victors at Olympia must have been portraits of this sort, viz., not likenesses but figures with names. But now, in the later phase, there was an additional factor—the tendency of the time towards genre and applied art, which produced also the Corinthian column. What the sculptors worked out was the types of life’s stage, the ἦθος which we mistranslate by character but which is really the kinds and modes of public behaviour and attitude; thus there is “the” grave Commander, “the” tragic poet, “the” passion-torn actor, “the” absorbed philosopherphilosopher. Here is the real key to the understanding of the celebrated Hellenistic portraiture, for which the quite unjustifiable claim has been set up that its products are expressions of a deep spiritual life. It is not of much moment whether the work bears the name of someone long dead—the Sophocles^[343] was sculptured about 340—or of a living man like the Pericles of Cresilas.^[344] It was only in the 4th Century that Demetrius of Alopeke began to emphasize individual traits in the external build of the man and Lysistratus the brother of Lysippus to copy (as Pliny tells us) a plaster-of-paris cast of the subject’s face without much subsequent modification. And how little such portraiture is portraiture in Rembrandt’s sense should surely have been obvious to anyone. The soul is missing. The brilliant fidelity of Roman busts especially has been mistaken for physiognomic depth. But what really distinguishes the higher work from this craftsman’s and virtuoso’s work is an intention that is the precise opposite of the artistic intention of a Marées or a Leibl. That is, in such work the importantimportant and significant is not brought out, it is put in. An example of this is seen in the Demosthenes statue,^[345] the artist of which possibly saw the orator in life. Here the particulars of the body-surface are emphasized, perhaps over-emphasized (“true to Nature,” they called this then), but into the disposition so conceived he works the character-type of the Serious Orator which we meet again on different bases in the portraits of Æschines and Lysias at Naples. That is truth to life, undoubtedly, but it is truth to life as Classical man felt it, typical and impersonal. We have contemplated the result with our eyes, and have accordingly misunderstood it.

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III

In the oil-painting age that followed the end of the Renaissance, the depth of an artist can be accurately measured by the content of his portraits. To this rule there is hardly an exception. All forms in the picture (whether single, or in scenes, groups or masses)^[346] are fundamentally felt as portraits; whether they are meant to be so or not is immaterial, for the individual painter has no choice in the matter. Nothing is more instructive than to observe how under the hands of a real Faustian man even the Act transforms itself into a portrait-study.^[347] Take two German masters like Lucas Cranach and Tilmann Riemenschneider who were untouched by any theory and (in contrast to Dürer, whose inclination to æsthetic subtlety made him pliant before alien tendencies) worked in unqualified naïveté. They seldom depict the Act, and when they do so, they show themselves entirely unable to concentrate their expression on the immediately-present plane-specified bodiliness. The meaning of the human phenomenon, and therefore of the representation of it, remains entirely in the head, and is consistently physiognomical rather than anatomical. And the same may be said of Dürer’s Lucrezia, notwithstanding his Italian studies and the quite opposite intention. A Faustian act is a contradiction in itself—hence the character-heads that we so often see on feeble act-representations (as far back as the Job of old French cathedral-sculpture) and hence also the laborious, forced, equivocal character that arouses our dislike in too manifest efforts to placate the Classical ideal—sacrifices offered up not by the soul but by the cultivated understanding. In the whole of painting after Leonardo there is not one important or distinctive work that derives its meaning from the Euclidean being of the nude body. It is mere incomprehension to quote Rubens here, and to comparecompare his unbridled dynamism of swelling bodies in any respect whatever with the art of Praxiteles and even Scopas. It is owing precisely to his splendid sensuality that he is so far from the static of Signorelli’s bodies. If there ever was an artist who could put a maximum of “becoming” into the beauty of naked bodies, who could treat bodily floridness historically and convey the (utterly un-Hellenic) idea of an inexhaustible outflowing from within, it was Rubens. Compare the horse’s head from the Parthenon pediment^[348] with his horses’ heads in the Battle of the Amazons,^[349] and the deep metaphysical contrast between the two conceptions of the same phenomenal element is felt at once. In Rubens (recalling once more the characteristic opposition of Apollinian and Faustian mathematics) the body is not magnitude but relation. What matters is not the regimen of its external structure but the fullness of life that streams out of it and the stride of its life along the road from youth to age, where the Last Judgment that turns bodies into flames takes up the motive and intertwines it in the quivering web of active space. Such a synthesis is entirely un-Classical; but even nymphs, when it is Corot who paints them, are likewise shapes ready to dissolve into colour-patches reflecting endless space. Such was not the intention of the Classical artist when he depicted the Act.

At the same time, the Greek form-ideal—the self-contained unit of being expressed in sculpture—has equally to be distinguished from that of the merely beautiful bodies on which painters from Giorgione to Boucher were always exercising their cleverness, which are fleshly still-life, genre-work expressing merely a certain gay sensuousness (e.g., “Rubens’s wife in a fur cloak.”^[350]) and in contrast with the high ethical significance of the Classical Act have almost no symbolic force.^[351] Magnificent as these men’s painting is, therefore, they have not succeeded in reaching the highest levels either of portraiture or of space-representation in landscape. Their brown and their green and their perspective lack “religiousness,” future, Destiny. They are masters only in the domain of elementary form, and when it has actualized this their art is exhausted. It is they who constitute the substance-element in the development-history of a great art. But when a great artist pressed on beyond them to a form that was to be capable of embracing the whole meaning of the world, he had necessarily to push to perfection the treatment of the nude body if his world was the Classical, and not to do so if it was our North. Rembrandt never once painted an Act, in this foreground sense, and if Leonardo, Titian, Velasquez (and, among moderns, Menzel, Leibl, Marées and Manet) did so at all, it was very rarely; and even then, so to say, they painted bodies as landscapes. The portrait is ever the touchstone.^[352]

But no one would ever judge masters like Signorelli, Mantegna, Botticelli or even Verrocchio, by the quality of their portraits. The equestrian statue of Can Grande^[353] of 1330 is in a far higher sense a portrait than the Bartolommeo Colleoni is; and Raphael’s portraits (the best of which e.g., Pope Julius II were done under the influence of the Venetian Sebastian del Piombo), could be ignored altogether in an appreciation of his creative work. It is only with Leonardo that the portrait begins to count seriously. Between fresco-technique and oil-painting there is a subtle opposition. In fact, Giovanni Bellini’s “Doge” (Loredano)^[354] is the first great oil-portrait. Here too the character of the Renaissance as a protest against the Faustian spirit of the West betrays itself. The episode of Florence amounts to an attempt to replace the Portrait of the Gothic style (as distinct from the “ideal” portrait of late-Classical art, which was well known through the Cæsar-busts) by the Act as human symbol. Logically, therefore, the entire art of the Renaissance should be wanting in the physiognomic traits. And yet the strong undercurrent of Faustian art-will kept alive, not only in the smaller towns and schools of middle Italy, but also in the instincts of the great masters themselves, a Gothic tradition that was never interrupted. Nay, the physiognomic of Gothic art even made itself master of the Southern nude body, alien as this element was. Its creations are not bodies that speak to us through static definition of their bounding surfaces. What we see is a dumb-show that spreads from the face over all parts of the body, and the appreciative eye detects in this very nudity of Tuscany a deep identity with the drapery of the Gothic. Both are envelopes, neither a limitation. The reclining nude figures of Michelangelo in the Medici chapel are wholly and entirely the visage and the utterance of a soul. But, above all, every head, painted or modelled, became of itself a portrait, even when the heads were of gods or saints. The whole of the portrait-work of A. Rossellino, Donatello, Benedetto de Maiano, Mino da Fiesole, stands so near in spirit to that of Van Eyck, Memlinc and the Early Rhenish masters as to be often indistinguishable from theirs. There is not and there cannot be, I maintain, any genuine Renaissance portraiture, that is, a portraiture in which just that artistic sentiment which differentiates the Court of the Palazzo Strozzi from the Loggia dei Lanzi and Perugino from Cimabue applies itself to the rendering of a visage. In architecture, little as the new work was Apollinian in spirit, it was possible to create anti-Gothically, but in portraiture—no. It was too specifically Faustian a symbol. Michelangelo declined the task: passionately devoted as he was to his pursuit of a plastic ideal, he would have considered it an abdication to busy himself with portraiture. His Brutus bust is as little of a portrait as his de’ Medici, whereas Botticelli’s portrait of the latter is actual, and frankly Gothic to boot. Michelangelo’s heads are allegories in the style of dawning Baroque, and their resemblance even to Hellenistic work is only superficial. And however highly we may value the Uzzano bust of Donatello^[355]—which is perhaps the most important achievement of that age and that circle—it will be admitted that by the side of the portraits of the Venetians it hardly counts.

It is well worth noting that this overcoming of, or at least this desire to overcome, the Gothic portrait with the Classical Act—the deeply historical and biographical form by the completely ahistoric—appears simultaneously with, and in association with, a decline in the capacity for self-examination and artistic confession in the Goethian sense. The true Renaissance man did not know what spiritual development meant. He managed to live entirely outwardly, and this was the great good fortune and success of the Quattrocento. Between Dante’s “Vita Nuova” and Michelangelo’s sonnets there is no poetic confession, no self-portrait of the high order. The Renaissance artist and humanist is the one single type of Western man for whom the word “loneliness” remained unmeaning. His life accomplished its course in the light of a courtly existence. His feelings and impressions were all public, and he had neither secret discontents nor reserves, while the life of the great contemporary Netherlanders, on the contrary, moved on in the shadow of their works. Is it perhaps permissible to add that it was because of this that that other symbol of historic distance, duration, care and ponderation, the State, also disappeared from the purview of the Renaissance, between Dante and Michelangelo? In “fickle Florence”—whose great men one and all were cruelly maltreated and whose incapacity for political creation seems, by the side of other Western state-forms, to border on sheer bizarrerie—and, more generally, wherever the anti-Gothic (which in this connexion means anti-dynastic) spirit displayed itself vigorously in art and public life, the State made way for a truly Hellenic sorriness of Medicis, Sforzas, Borgias, Malatestas, and waste republics. Only that city where sculpture gained no foothold, where the Southern music was at home, where Gothic and Baroque joined hands in Giovanni Bellini and the Renaissance remained an affair of occasional dilettantism, had an art of portraiture and therewith a subtle diplomacy and a will to political duration—Venice.

IV

The Renaissance was born of defiance, and therefore it lacked depth, width and sureness of creative instinct. It is the one and only epoch which was more consistent in theory than in performance and—in sharp contrast to Gothic and Baroque—the only one in which theoretically-formulated intention preceded (often enough surpassed) the ability to perform. But the fact that the individual arts were forced to become satellites of a Classicist sculpture could not in the last analysis alter the essence of them, and could only impoverish their store of inward possibilities. For natures of medium size, the Renaissance theme was not too big; it was attractive indeed from its very plainness, and we miss consequently that Gothic wrestling with overpowering imprecise problems which distinguishes the Rhenish and Flemish schools. The seductive ease and clarity of the Renaissance rests very largely upon evasion—the evasion of deeper reluctances by the aid of speciously simple rule. To men of the inwardness of Memlinc or the power of Grünewald such conditions as those of the Tuscan form-world would have been fatal. They could not have developed their strength in and through it, but only against it. Seeing as we do no weakness in the form of the Renaissance masters, we are very prone to overrate their humanity. In Gothic, and again in Baroque, an entirely great artist was fulfilling his art in deepening and completing its language, but in Renaissance he was necessarily only destroying it. “ So it was in the cases of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, the only really great men of Italy after Dante. Is it not curious that between the masters of the Gothic—who were nothing but silent workers in their art and yet achieved the very highest that could be achieved within its convention and its field—and the Venetians and Dutch of 1600—who again were purely workers—there should be these three men who were not “sculptors” or "painters” but thinkers, and thinkers who of necessity busied themselves not merely with all the available means of artistic expression but with a thousand other things besides, ever restless and dissatisfied, in their effort to get at the real essence and aim of their being? Does it not mean—that in the Renaissance they could not “find themselves”? Each in his own fashion, each under his own tragic illusion, these three giants strove to be “Classical” in the Medicean sense; and yet it was they themselves who in one and another way—Raphael in respect of the line, Leonardo in respect of the surface, Michelangelo in respect of the body—shattered the dream. In them the misguided soul is finding its way back to its Faustian starting-points. What they intended was to substitute proportion for relation, drawing for light-and-air effect, Euclidean body for pure space. But neither they nor others of their time produced a Euclidean-static sculpture—for that was possible once only, in Athens. In all their work one feels a secret music, in all their forms the movement-quality and the tending into distances and depths. They are on the way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral. Raphael thawed the Florentine fresco, and Michelangelo the statue, and Leonardo dreamed already of Rembrandt and Bach. The higher and more conscientious the effort to actualize the ideas of the age, the more intangible it became.

Gothic and Baroque, however, are something that is, while Renaissance is only an ideal, unattainable like all ideals, that floats over the will of a period. Giotto is a Gothic, and Titian is a Baroque, artist. Michelangelo would be a Renaissance artist, but fails. Visibly, the plastic in him, for all its ambitiousness, is overpowered by the pictorial spirit—and a pictorial spirit, too, in which the Northern space-perspective is implicit. Even as soon as 1520 the beautiful proportion, the pure rule—that is, the conscious Classical—are felt as frigid and formal. The cornice which he put on to Sangallo’s purely “Classical” façade of the Palazzo Farnese was no doubt, from the strictly Renaissance standpoint, a disfigurement, but he himself and many with him felt it to be far superior to the achievements of Greeks and Romans.

As Petrarch was the first, so Michelangelo was the last Florentine who gave himself up passionately to the Antique. But it was no longer an entire devotion. The Franciscan Christianity of Fra Angelico, with its subtle gentleness and its quiet, reflective piety—to which the Southern refinement of ripe Renaissance work owes far more than has been supposed^[356]—came now to its end. The majestic spirit of the Counter-Reformation, massive, animated, gorgeous, lives already in Michelangelo. There is something in Renaissance work which at the time passed for being “Classical” but is really only a deliberately noble dress for the Christian-German world-feeling; as we have already mentioned, the combination of round-arch and pillar, that favourite Florentine motive, was of Syrian origin. But compare the pseudo-Corinthian column of the 15th Century with the columns of a real Roman ruin—remembering that these ruins were known and on the spot! Michelangelo alone would tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The question of form was for him a religious matter; for him (and only for him) it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art; of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the terribile in his forms that frightened his contemporaries. The one half of his nature drew him towards the Classical and therefore to sculpture—we all know the effect produced upon him by the recently-discovered Laocoön. No man ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel into a buried world. Everything that he created he meant sculpturally—sculpturally, that is, in a sense of the word that he and he alone stood for. “The world, presented in the great Pan,” the element which Goethe meant to render when he brought Helena into the Second Part of Faust, the Apollinian world in all its powerful sensuous corporal presence—that was what Michelangelo was striving with all his might to capture and to fix in artistic being when he was painting the Sistine ceiling. Every resource of fresco—the big contours, the vast surfaces, the immense nearness of naked shapes, the materiality of colour—was here for the last time strained to the utmost to liberate the paganism, the high-Renaissance paganism, that was in him. But his second soul, the soul of Gothic-Christian Dante and of the music of great expanses, is pulling in the opposite sense; his scheme for the ensemble is manifestly metaphysical in spirit.

His was the last effort, repeated again and again, to put the entirety of the artist-personality into the language of stone. But the Euclidean material failed him. His attitude to it was not that of the Greek. In the very character of its being the chiselled statue contradicts the world-feeling that tries to find something by, and not to possess something in, its art-works. For Phidias, marble is the cosmic stuff that is crying for form. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea expresses the very essence of that art. But for Michelangelo marble was the foe to be subdued, the prison out of which he must deliver his idea as Siegfried delivered Brunhilde. Everyone knows his way of setting to work. He did not approach the rough block coolly from every aspect of the intended form, but attacked it with a passionate frontal attack, hewing into it as though into space, cutting away the material layer by layer and driving deeper and deeper until his form emerged, while the members slowly developed themselves out of the quarry. Never perhaps has there been a more open expression of world-dread in the presence of the become—Death—of the will to overpower and capture it in vibrant form. There is no other artist of the West whose relation to the stone has been that of Michelangelo—at once so intimate and so violently masterful. It is his symbol of Death. In it dwells the hostile principle that his daemonic nature is always striving to overpower, whether he is cutting statues or piling great buildings out of it.^[357] He is the one sculptor of his age who dealt only with marble. Bronze, as cast, allows the modeller to compromise with pictorial tendencies, and it appealed therefore to other Renaissance artists and to the softer Greeks. The Giant stood aloof from it.

The instantaneous bodily posture was what the Classical sculptor created, and of this Faustian man was incapable. It is here just as it is in the matter of love, in which Faustian man discovers, not primarily the act of union between man and woman, but the great love of Dante and beyond that the caring Mother. Michelangelo’s erotic—which is that of Beethoven also—is as un-Classical as it is possible to be. It stands sub specie æternitatis and not under that of sense and the moment. He produced acts—a sacrifice to the Hellenic idol—but the soul in them denies or overmasters the visible form. He wills infinity as the Greek willed proportion and rule, he embraces past and future as the Greek embraced present. The Classical eye absorbs plastic form into itself, but Michelangelo saw with the spiritual eye and broke through the foreground-language of immediate sensuousness. And inevitably, in the long run, he destroyed the conditions for this art. Marble became too trivial for his will-to-form. He ceased to be sculptor and turned architect. In full old age, when he was producing only wild fragments like the Rondanini Madonna and hardly cutting his figures out of the rough at all, the musical tendency of his artistry broke through. In the end the impulse towards contrapuntal form was no longer to be repressed and, dissatisfied through and through with the art upon which he had spent his life, yet dominated still by the unquenchable will to self-expression, he shatteredshattered the canon of Renaissance architecture and created the Roman Baroque. For relations of material and form he substituted the contest of force and mass. He grouped the columns in sheaves or else pushed them away into niches. He broke up the storeys with huge pilasters and gave the façade a sort of surging and thrusting quality. Measure yielded to melody, the static to the dynamic. And thus Faustian music enlisted in its service the chief of all the other arts.

With Michelangelo the history of Western sculpture is at an end. What of it there was after him was mere misunderstandings or reminiscences. His real heir was Palestrina.

Leonardo speaks another language. In essentials his spirit reached forward into the following century, and he was in nowise bound, as Michelangelo was bound by every tie of heart, to the Tuscan ideal. He alone had neither the ambition to be sculptor nor the ambition to be architect. It was a strange illusion of the Renaissance that the Hellenic feeling and the Hellenic cult of the exterior structure could be got at by way of anatomical studies. But when Leonardo studied anatomy it was not, as in Michelangelo’s case, foreground anatomy, the topography of human surfaces, studied for the sake of plastic, but physiology studied for the inward secrets. While Michelangelo tried to force the whole meaning of human existence into the language of the living body, Leonardo’s studies show the exact opposite. His much-admired sfumato is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal bounds, in the name of space, and as such it is the starting-point of Impressionism. Leonardo begins with the inside, the spiritual space within us, and not with the considered definition-line, and when he ends (that is, if he ends at all and does not leave the picture unfinished), the substance of colour lies like a mere breathing over the real structure of the picture, which is something incorporeal and indescribable. Raphael’s paintings fall into planes in which he disposes his well-ordered groups, and he closes off the whole with a well-proportioned background. But Leonardo knows only one space, wide and eternal, and his figures, as it were, float therein. The one puts inside a frame a sum of individual near things, the other a portion cut out of the infinite.

Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood. It was no Renaissance spirit that brought him to that—on the contrary, the whole course of his thought took him right outside the conceptions of his age. Neither Michelangelo nor Raphael could have done it, for their painter’s anatomy looks only at the form and position, not the function, of the parts. In mathematical language, it is stereometry as against analysis. Did not the Renaissance find it quite sufficient preparation for great painted scenes to study corpses, suppressing the becoming in favour of the become and calling on the dead to make Classical ἀταραξία accessible to Northern creative energy? But Leonardo investigated the life in the body as Rubens did, and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did. His discovery was contemporary with that of Columbus, and the two have a deep affinity, for they signify the victory of the infinite over the material limitedness of the tangibly present. Would a Greek ever have concerned himself with questions like theirs? The Greeks inquired as little into the interior of their own organization as they sought for the sources of the Nile; these were problems that might have jeopardized the Euclidean constitution of their being. The Baroque, on the other hand, is truly the period of the great discoveries. The very word “discovery” has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything cosmic, but to do just this is the most characteristic impulse of a Faustian nature. The discoveries of the New World, the circulation of the blood, and the Copernican universe were achieved almost simultaneously and, at bottom, are completely equivalent; and the discovery of gunpowder (that is, the long-range weapon^[358]) and of printing (the long-range script) were little earlier.

Leonardo was a discoverer through-and-through, and discovery was the sum in one word of his whole nature. Brush, chisel, dissecting-knife, pencil for calculating and compasses for drawing—all were for him of equal importance. They were for him what the Mariner’s Compass was for Columbus. When Raphael completes with colour the sharp-drawn outline he asserts the corporeal phenomenon in every brush-stroke, but Leonardo, in his red-chalk sketches and his backgrounds reveals aerial secrets with every line. He was the first, too, who set his mind to work on aviation. To fly, to free one’s self from earth, to lose one’s self in the expanse of the universe—is not this ambition Faustian in the highest degree? Is it not in fact the fulfilment of our dreams? Has it never been observed how the Christian legend became in Western painting a glorious transfiguration of this motive? All the pictured ascents into heaven and falls into hell, the divine figures floating above the clouds, the blissful detachment of angels and saints, the insistent emphasis upon freedom from earth’s heaviness, are emblems of soul-flight, peculiar to the art of the Faustian, utterly remote from that of the Byzantine.

V

The transformation of Renaissance fresco-painting into Venetian oil-painting is a matter of spiritual history. We have to appreciate very delicate and subtle traits to discern the process of change. In almost every picture from Masaccio’s “Peter and the Tribute Money” in the Brancacci Chapel, through the soaring background that Piero della Francesca gave to the figures of Federigo and Battista of Urbino,^[359] to Perugino’s “Christ Giving the Keys,”^[360] the fresco manner is contending with the invasive new form, though Raphael’s artistic development in the course of his work on the Vatican “stanze” is almost the only case in which we can see comprehensively the change that is going on. The Florentine fresco aims at actuality in individual things and produces a sum of such things in an architectonic setting. Oil-painting, on the other hand, sees and handles with ever-growing sureness extension as a whole, and treats all objects only as representatives thereof. The Faustian world-feeling created the new technique that it wanted. It rejected the drawing style, as, from Oresme’s time, co-ordinate geometry rejected it. It transformed the linear perspective associated with the architectural motive into a purely aerial perspective rendered by imponderable gradations of tone. But the condition of Renaissance art generally—its inability either to understand its own deeper tendencies or to make good its anti-Gothic principle—made the transition an obscure and difficult process. Each artist followed the trend in a way of his own. One painted in oils on the bare wall, and thereby condemned his work to perish (Leonardo’s “Last Supper”). Another painted pictures as if they were wall-frescoes (Michelangelo). Some ventured, some guessed, some fell by the way, some shied. It was, as always, the struggle between hand and soul, between eye and instrument, between the form willed by the artist and the form willed by time—the struggle between Plastic and Music.

In the light of this, we can at last understand that gigantic effort of Leonardo, the cartoon of the “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi. It is the grandest piece of artistic daring in the Renaissance. Nothing like it was even imagined till Rembrandt. Transcending all optical measures, everything then called drawing, outline, composition and grouping, he pushes fearlessly on to challenge eternal space; everything bodily floats like the planets in the Copernican system and the tones of a Bach organ-fugue in the dimness of old churches. In the technical possibilities of the time, so dynamic an image of distance could only remain a torso.

In the Sistine Madonna, which is the very summation of the Renaissance, Raphael causes the outline to draw into itself the entire content of the work. It is the last grand line of Western art. Already (and it is this that makes Raphael the least intelligible of Renaissance artists) convention is strained almost to breaking-point by the intensity of inward feeling. He did not indeed wrestle with problems. He had not even an inkling of them. But he brought art to the brink where it could no longer shirk the plunge, and he lived to achieve the utmost possibilities within its form-world. The ordinary person who thinks him flat simply fails to realize what is going on in his scheme. Look again, reader, at the hackneyed Madonna. Have you ever noticed the little dawn-cloudlets, transforming themselves into baby heads, that surround the soaring central figure?—these are the multitudes of the unborn that the Madonna is drawing into Life. We meet these light clouds again, with the same meaning, in the wondrous finale of Faust II.^[361] It is just that which does not charm in Raphael, his sublime unpopularity, that betrays the inner victory over the Renaissance-feeling in him. We do understand Perugino at a glance, we merely think we understand Raphael. His very line—that drawing-character that at first sight seems so Classical—is something that floats in space, supernal, Beethoven-like. In this work Raphael is the least obvious of all artists, less obvious even than Michelangelo, whose intention is manifest through all the fragmentariness of his works. In Fra Bartolommeo the material bounding-line is still entirely dominant. It is all foreground, and the whole sense of the work is exhaustively rendered by the definition of bodies. But in Raphael line has become silent, expectant, veiled, waiting in an extremity of tension for dissolution into the infinite, into space and music.

Leonardo is already over the frontier. The Adoration of the Magi is already music. It is not a casual but a deeply significant circumstance that in this work, as also in his St. Jerome,^[362] he did not go beyond the brown underpainting, the “Rembrandt” stage, the atmospheric brown of the following century. For him, entire fullness and clearness of intention was attained with the work in that state, and one step into the domain of colour (for that domain was still under the metaphysical limitations of the fresco style) would have destroyed the soul of what he had created. Feeling, in all its depth, the symbolism of which oil-painting was later to be the vehicle, he was afraid of the fresco “slickness” (Fertigkeit) that must have ruined his idea. His studies for this painting show how close was his relation to the Rembrandt etching—an art whose home was also that of the art (unknown to Florence) of counterpoint. Only it was reserved for the Venetians, who stood outside the Florentine conventions, to achieve what he strove for here, to fashion a colour-world subserving space instead of things.

For this reason, too, Leonardo (after innumerable attempts) decided to leave the Christ-head in the “Last Supper” unfinished. The men of his time were not even ripe for portraiture as Rembrandt understood the word, the magistral building-up of a soul-history out of dynamic brush-strokes and lights and tones. But only Leonardo was great enough to experience this limitation as a Destiny. Others merely set themselves to paint heads (in the modes prescribed by their respective schools) but Leonardo—the first, here, to make the hands also speak, and that with a physiognomic maestria—had an infinitely wider purpose. His soul was lost afar in the future, though his mortal part, his eye and hand, obeyed the spirit of the age. Assuredly he was the freest of the three great ones. From much of that which Michelangelo’s powerful nature vainly wrestled with, he was already remote. Problems of chemistry, geometrical analysis, physiology (Goethe’s “living Nature” was also Leonardo’s), the technique of fire-arms—all were familiar to him. Deeper than Dürer, bolder than Titian, more comprehensive than any single man of his time, he was essentially the artist of torsos.^[363] Michelangelo the belated sculptor was so, too, but in another sense, while in Goethe’s day that which had been unattainable for the painter of the Last Supper had already been reached and overpassed. Michelangelo strove to force life once more into a dead form-world, Leonardo felt a new form-world in the future, Goethe divined that there could be no new form-worlds more. Between the first and the last of these men lie the ripe centuries of the Faustian Culture.

VI

It remains now to deal with the major characters of Western art during the phase of accomplishment. In this we may observe the deep necessity of all history at work. We have learned to understand arts as prime phenomena. We no longer look to the operations of cause and effect to give unity to the story of development. Instead, we have set up the idea of the Destiny of an art, and admitted arts to be organisms of the Culture, organisms which are born, ripen, age and for ever die.

When the Renaissance—its last illusion—closes, the Western soul has come to the ripe consciousness of its own strength and possibilities. It has chosen its arts. As a “late” period, the Baroque knows, just as the Ionic had known, what the form-language of its arts has to mean. From being a philosophical religion, art has to be a religious philosophy. Great masters come forward in the place of anonymous schools. At the culmination of every Culture we have the spectacle of a splendid group of great arts, well-ordered and linked as a unit by the unity of the prime symbol underlying them all. The Apollinian group, to which belong vase-painting, fresco relief, the architecture of ranked columns, the Attic drama and the dance, centres upon the naked statue. The Faustian group forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity and its centre of gravity is instrumental music. From this centre, fine threads radiate out into all spiritual form-languages and weave our infinitesimal mathematic, our dynamic physics, the propaganda of Jesuits and the power of our famous slogan of “progress,” the modern machine-technique, credit economics and the dynastic-diplomatic State—all into one immense totality of spiritual expression. Beginning with the inward rhythm of the cathedral and ending with Wagner’s “Tristan” and “Parsifal,” the artistic conquest of endless space deploys its full forces from about 1550. Plastic is dying with Michelangelo in Rome just when planimetry, dominant hitherto, is becoming the least important branch of our mathematic. At the same time, Venice is producing Zarlino’s theories of harmony and counterpoint (1558) and the practical method of the basso continuo—a perspective and an analysis of the world of sound—and this music’s sister, the Northern mathematic of the Calculus, is beginning to mount.

Oil-painting and instrumental music, the arts of space, are now entering into their kingdom. So also—consequently, we say—the two essentially material and Euclidean arts of the Classical Culture, viz., the all-round statue and the strictly planar fresco, attain to their primacy at the corresponding date of c. 600 B.C. And further, in the one and in the other case, it is the painting that ripens first. For in either kind painting on the plane is a less ambitious and more accessible art than modelling in solid or composing in immaterial extension. The period 1550-1650 belongs as completely to oil-painting as fresco and vase-painting belong to the 6th Century B.C. The symbolism of space and of body, expressed in the one case by perspective and in the other by proportion, are only indicated and not immediately displayed by pictorial arts. These arts, which can only in each case produce their respective prime-symbols (i.e., their possibilities in the extended) as illusions on a painted surface, are capable indeed of denoting and evoking the ideal—Classical or Western, as the case may be—but they are not capable of fulfilling it; they appear therefore in the path of the “late” Culture as the ledges before the last summit. The nearer the grand style comes to its point of fulfilment, the more decisive the tendency to an ornamental language of inexorable clarity of symbolism. The group of great arts is further simplified. About 1670, just when Newton and Leibniz were discovering the Differential Calculus, oil-painting had reached the limit of its possibilities. Its last great masters were dead or dying—Velasquez 1660, Poussin 1665, Franz Hals 1666, Rembrandt 1669, Vermeer 1675, Murillo, Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain 1682—and one has only to name the few successors of any importance (Watteau, Hogarth, Tiepolo) to feel at once the descent, the end, of an art. In this time also, the great forms of pictorial music expired. Heinrich Schütz died in 1672, Carissimi in 1674, and Purcell in 1695—the last great masters of the Cantata, who had played around image-themes with infinite variety of vocal and instrumental colour and had painted veritable pictures of fine landscape and grand legend-scene. With Lully (1687) the heart of the heroic Baroque opera of Monteverde ceased to beat. It was the same with the old “classical” sonata for orchestra, organ and string trio, which was a development of image-themes in the fugal style. Thereafter, the forms become those of final maturity, the concerto grosso, the suite, and the three-part sonata for solo instruments. Music frees itself from the relics of bodiliness inherent in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image but a pregnant function, existent only in and by its own evolution, for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration. The victory of pure music over painting stands recorded in the Passions which Heinrich Schütz composed in his old age—the visible dawn of the new form-language—in the sonatas of Dall’Abaco and Corelli, the oratorios of Händel and the Baroque polyphony of Bach. Henceforth this music is the Faustian art, and Watteau may fairly be described as a painter-Couperin, Tiepolo as a painter-Händel.