XI
ARTISTS
The great painters and sculptors seem to have been strangely healthy and normal. I say that they seem to have been so, because of the extreme difficulty of getting any accurate information on the subject. It sounds incredible, but I read a long life of Petrarch in which everything was mentioned but his health and only discovered quite accidentally that he had been an epileptic.
I am, therefore, convinced that there are many examples I might cite if I could only unearth the truth, yet even so, I have been able to ferret out four artists who were physically handicapped. Navarette, called the Spanish Titian and celebrated under the name of “El Mudo,” was dumb. They say that Guercino squinted so badly that he could focus only one eye.
Antoine Watteau suffered all his life from tuberculosis, which no doubt accounts for a certain “wistful gaiety” which characterizes his work. Watteau’s position in French art is of unique importance. He became the founder—as the culmination—of a new school which marked a revolt against the pompous classicism of the preceding period. “The vitality of his art was due to the rare combination of a poet’s imagination with a power of seizing reality. In his treatment of landscape background and the atmospheric conditions surrounding his figures we find the germ of Impressionism.” From the middle of the Eighteenth Century until about 1875 Watteau’s work fell into disrepute. It was chiefly owing to the efforts of the brothers de Goncourt that a reaction set in which has slowly carried Watteau to the summit of fame. He died in his thirty-seventh year.
Aubrey Beardsley flashed into fame with black and white drawings of extraordinary originality and beauty. His peculiar technique has been widely imitated but never approached. After twenty years his reputation has not yet reached its zenith. Aubrey Beardsley during the whole of his meteoric career suffered from consumption. He died at the age of twenty-six.