Chapter XX: Part 20

But even in advanced societies the double qualities of use and beauty
still remain inseparable, among the five greater arts, in
architecture. We build in the first instance for the sake of necessary
shelter and accommodation, or for the commemoration, propitiation or
worship of spiritual powers on whom we believe our welfare to depend.
By and by we find out that the aspect of our constructions is
pleasurable or the reverse. Architecture is the art of building at
once as we need and as we like, and a practical treatise on
architecture must treat the beauty and the utility of buildings as
bound up together. But for our present purpose it has been proper to
take into account one half only of the vocation of architecture, the
half by which it impresses, gives delight and belongs to that which is
the subject of our study, to fine art; and to neglect the other half
of its vocation, by which it belongs to what is not the subject of our
study, to useful or mechanical art. It is plain, however, that the
presence or absence of this foreign element, the element of practical
utility, constitutes a fair ground for a new and separate
classification of the fine arts. If we took the five greater arts as
they exist in modern times by themselves, architecture would on this
ground stand alone in one division, as the directly useful or
serviceable fine art; with sculpture, painting, music and poetry
together in the other division, as fine arts unassociated with such
use or service. Not that the divisions would, even thus, be quite
sharply and absolutely separated. Didactic poetry, we have already
acknowledged, is a branch of the poetic art which aims at practice and
utility. Again, the hortatory and patriotic kinds of lyric poetry,
from the strains of Tyrtaeus to those of Arndt or Rouget de Lisle or
Wordsworth's sonnets written in war-time, may fairly be said to belong
to a phase of fine art which aims directly at one of the highest
utilities, the stimulation of patriotic feeling and self-devotion. So
may the strains of music which accompany such poetry. The same
practical character, as stimulating and attuning the mind to definite
ends and actions, might indeed have been claimed for the greater part
of the whole art of music as that art was practised in antiquity, when
each of several prescribed and highly elaborated moods, or modes, of
melody was supposed to have a known effect upon the courage and moral
temper of the hearer. Compare Milton, when he tells of the Dorian mood
of flutes and soft recorders which assuaged the sufferings and renewed
the courage of Satan and his legions as they marched through hell. In
modern music, of which the elements, much more complex in themselves
than those of ancient music, have the effect of stirring our fibres to
moods of rapturous contemplation rather than of action, military
strains in march time are in truth the only purely instrumental
variety of the art which may still be said to retain this character.

Other and minor arts of service subordinate to architecture.

To reinforce, however, the serviceable or useful division of fine arts
in our present classification, it is not among the greater arts that
we must look. We must look among the lesser or auxiliary arts of the
manual or shaping group. The weaver, the joiner, the potter, the
smith, the goldsmith, the glass-maker, these and a hundred artificers
who produce wares primarily for use, produce them in a form or with
embellishments that have the secondary virtue of giving pleasure both
to the producer and the user. Much ingenuity has been spent to little
purpose in attempting to group and classify these lesser shaping arts
under one or other of the greater shaping arts, according to the
nature of the means employed in each. Thus the potter's art has been
classed under sculpture, because he moulds in solid form the shapes of
his cups, plates and ewers; the art of the joiner under that of the
architect, because his tables, seats and cupboards are fitted and
framed together, like the houses they furnish, out of solid materials
previously prepared and cut; and the weaver and embroiderer, from the
point of view of the effects produced by their art, among painters.
But the truth is, that each one of these auxiliary handicrafts has its
own materials and technical procedure, which cannot, without forcing
and confusion, be described by the name proper to the materials and
technical procedure of any of the greater arts. The only satisfactory
classification of these handicrafts is that now before us, according
to which we think of them all together in the same group with
architecture, not because any one or more of them may be technically
allied to that art, but because, like it, they all yield products
capable of being practically useful and beautiful at the same time.
Architecture is the art which fits and frames together, of stone,
brick, mortar, timber or iron, the abiding and assembling places of
man, all his houses, palaces, temples, monuments, museums, workshops,
roofed places of meeting and exchange, theatres for spectacle,
fortresses of defence, bridges, aqueducts, and ships for seafaring.
The wise architect having fashioned any one of these great
constructions at once for service and beauty in the highest degree,
the lesser or auxiliary manual arts (commonly called "industrial" or
"applied" arts) come in to fill, furnish and adorn it with things of
service and beauty in a lower degree, each according to its own
technical laws and capabilities; some, like pottery, delighting the
user at once by beauty of form, delicacy of substance, and
pleasantness of imitative or non-imitative ornament; some, like
embroidery, by richness of tissue, and by the same twofold
pleasantness of ornament; some, like goldsmith's work, by
exquisiteness of fancy and workmanship proportionate to the
exquisiteness of the material. To this vast group of workmen, whose
work is at the same time useful and fine in its degree, the ancient
Greek gave the place which is most just and convenient for thought,
when he classed them all together under the name of [Greek: tektones],
or artificers, and called the builder by the name of [Greek:
architekton], arch-artificer or artificer-in-chief. Modern usage has
adopted the phrase "arts and crafts" as a convenient general name for
their pursuits.

III. _Of the History of the Fine Arts._

Current generalizations on the history of fine art: Hegel.

Students of human culture have concentrated a great deal of attentive thought upon the history of fine art, and have put forth various comprehensive generalizations intended at once to sum up and to account for the phases and vicissitudes of that history. The most famous formulae are those of Hegel, who regarded particular arts as being characteristic of and appropriate to particular forms of civilization and particular ages of history. For him, architecture was the symbolic art appropriate to ages of obscure and struggling ideas, and characteristic of the Egyptian and the Asiatic races of old and of the medieval age in Europe. Sculpture was the classical art appropriate to ages of lucid and self-possessed ideas, and characteristic of the Greek and Roman period. Painting, music and poetry were the romantic arts, appropriate to the ages of complicated and overmastering ideas, and characteristic of modern humanity in general. In the working out of these generalizations Hegel brought together a mass of judicious and striking observations; and that they contain on the whole a preponderance of truth may be admitted. It has been objected against them, from the philosophical point of view, that they too much mix up the definition of what the several arts theoretically are with considerations of what in various historical circumstances they have practically been. From the historical point of view there can be taken what seems a more valid objection, that these formulae of Hegel tend too much to fix the attention of the student upon the one dominant art chosen as characteristic of any period, and to give him false ideas of the proportions and relations of the several arts at the same period--of the proportions and relations which poetry, say, really bore to sculpture among the Greeks and Romans, or sculpture to architecture among the Christian nations of the middle age. The truth is, that the historic survey gained over any field of human activity from the height of generalizations so vast in scope as these are must needs, in the complexity of earthly affairs, be a survey too distant to give much guidance until its omissions are filled up by a great deal of nearer study; and such nearer study is apt to compel the student in the long run to qualify the theories with which he has started until they are in danger of disappearing altogether.

Herbert Spencer and the evolution theory.

Another systematic exponent of the universe, whose system is very different from that of Hegel, Herbert Spencer, brought the doctrine of evolution to bear, not without interesting results, upon the history of the fine arts and their development. Herbert Spencer set forth how the manual group of fine arts, architecture, sculpture and painting, were in their first rudiments bound up together, and how each of them in the course of history has liberated itself from the rest by a gradual process of separation. These arts did not at first exist in the distinct and developed forms in which we have above described them. There were no statues in the round, and no painted panels or canvases hung upon the wall. Only the rudiments of sculpture and painting existed, and that only as ornaments applied to architecture, in the shape of tiers of tinted reliefs, representing in a kind of picture-writing the exploits of kings upon the walls of their temple-palaces. Gradually sculpture took greater salience and roundness, and tended to disengage itself from the wall, while painting found out how to represent solidity by means of its own, and dispensed with the raised surface upon which it was first applied. But the old mixture and union of the three arts, with an undeveloped art of painting and an undeveloped art of sculpture still engaged in or applied to the works of architecture, continued on the whole to prevail through the long cycles of Egyptian and Assyrian history. In the Egyptian palace-temple we find a monument at once political and religious, upon the production of which were concentrated all the energies and faculties of all the artificers of the race. With its incised and pictured walls, its half-detached colossi, its open and its colonnaded chambers, the forms of the columns and their capitals recalling the stems and blossoms of the lotus and papyrus, with its architecture everywhere taking on the characters and covering itself with the adornments of immature sculpture and painting--this structure exhibits within its single fabric the origins of the whole subsequent group of shaping arts. From hence it is a long way to the innumerable artistic surroundings of later Greek and Roman life, the many temples with their detached and their engaged statues, the theatres, the porticoes, the baths, the training-schools, the stadiums, with free and separate statues both of gods and men adorning every building and public place, the frescoes upon the walls, the panel pictures hung in temples and public and private galleries. In the terms of the Spencerian theory of evolution, the advance from the early Egyptian to the later Greek stage is an advance from the one to the manifold, from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and affords a striking instance of that vast and ceaseless process of differentiation and integration which it is the law of all things to undergo. In the Christian monuments of the early middle age, again, the arts, owing to the political and social cataclysm in which Roman civilization went down, have gone back to the rudimentary stage, and are once more attached to and combined with each other. The single monument, the one great birth of art, in that age, is the Gothic church. In this we find the art of applied sculpture exercised in fashions infinitely rich and various, but entirely in the service and for the adornment of the architecture; we find painting exercised in fashions more rudimentary still, principally in the forms of translucent imagery in the chancel windows and tinted decorations on the walls and vaultings. From this stage again the process of the differentiation of the arts is repeated. It is by a new evolution or unfolding, and by one carried to much further and more complicated stages than the last had reached, that the arts since the middle age have come to the point where we find them to-day; when architecture is applied to a hundred secular and civil uses with not less magnificence, or at least not less desire of magnificence, than that with which it fulfilled its two only uses in the middle age, the uses of worship and of defence; when detached sculptures adorn, or are intended to adorn, all our streets and commemorate all our likenesses; when the subjects of painting have been extended from religion to all life and nature, until this one art has been divided into the dozen branches of history, landscape, still life, genre, anecdote and the rest. Such being in brief the successive stages, and such the reiterated processes, of evolution among the shaping or space arts, the action of the same law can be traced, it is urged, in the growth of the speaking or time arts also. Originally poetry and music, the two great speaking arts, were not separated from each other and from the art of bodily motion, dancing. The father of song, music and dancing, all three, was that primitive man of whom so much has already been said, he who first clapped hands and leapt and shouted in time at some festival of his tribe. From the clapping, or rudimentary rhythmical noise, has been evolved the whole art of instrumental music, down to the entrancing complexity of the modern symphony. From the shout, or rudimentary emotional utterance, has proceeded by a kindred evolution the whole art of vocal music down to the modern opera or oratorio. From the leap, or rudimentary expression of emotion by rhythmical movements of the body, has descended every variety of dancing, from the stately figures of the tragic chorus of the Greeks to the _kordax_ of their comedy or the complexities of the modern ballet.

Weak and strong points of Spencer's generalization.

That the theory of evolution serves usefully to group and to interpret many facts in the history of art we shall not deny, though it would be easy to show that Herbert Spencer's instances and applications are not sufficient to sustain all the conclusions that he seems to draw from them. Thus, it is perfectly true that the Egyptian or Assyrian palace wall is an instance of rudimentary painting and rudimentary sculpture in subservience to architecture. But it is not less true that races who had no architecture at all, but lived in caverns of the earth, exhibit, as we have already had occasion to notice, excellent rudiments of the other two shaping arts in a different form, in the carved or incised handles of their weapons. And it is almost certain that, among the nations of oriental antiquity themselves, the art of decorating solid walls so as to please the eye with patterns and presentations of natural objects was borrowed from the precedent of an older art which works in easier materials, namely, the art of the weaver. It would be in the perished textile fabrics of the earliest dwellers in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile that we should find, if anywhere, the origins of the systems of surface design, whether conventional or imitative, which those races afterwards applied to the decoration of their solid constructions. Not, therefore, in any one exclusive type of primitive artistic activity, but in a score of such types equally, varying according to race, region and circumstances, shall we find so many germs or nuclei from which whole families of fine arts have in the course of the world's history differentiated and unfolded themselves. And more than once during that history, a cataclysm of political and social forces has not only checked the process of the evolution of the fine arts, but from an advanced stage of development has thrown them back again to a primitive stage. Recent research has shown how the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations in the Mediterranean basin, with their developed fine arts, must have perished and been effaced before the second growth of art from new rudiments took place in Greece. The great instance of the downfall of the Roman civilization need not be requoted. By Spencer's application of the theory of evolution, not less than by Hegel's theory of the historic periods, attention is called to the fact that Christian Europe, during several centuries of the middle age, presents to our study a civilization analogous to the civilization of the old oriental empires in this respect, that its ruling and characteristic manual art is architecture, to which sculpture and painting are, as in the oriental empires, once more subjugated and attached. It does not of course follow that such periods of fusion or mutual dependence among the arts are periods of bad art. On the contrary, each stage of the evolution of any art has its own characteristic excellence. The arts can be employed in combination, and yet be all severally excellent. When music, dancing, acting and singing were combined in the performance of the Greek chorus, the combination no doubt presented a relative perfection of each of the four elements analogous to the combined perfection, in the contemporary Doric temple, of pure architectural form, sculptured enrichment of spaces specially contrived for sculpture in the pediments and frieze, and coloured decoration over all. The extreme differentiation of any art from every other art, and of the several branches of one art among themselves, does not by any means tend to the perfection of that art. The process of evolution among the fine arts may go, and indeed in the course of history has gone, much too far for the health of the arts severally. Thus an artist of our own day is usually either a painter only or a sculptor only; but yet it is acknowledged that the painter who can model a statue, or the sculptor who can paint a picture, is likely to be the more efficient master of both arts; and in the best days of Florentine art the greatest men were generally painters, sculptors, architects and goldsmiths all at once. In like manner a landscape painter who paints landscape only is apt not to paint it so well as one who paints the figure too; and in recent times the craft of engraving had almost ceased to be an art from the habit of allotting one part of the work, as skies, to one hand, another part, as figures, to a second, and another part, as landscape, to a third. This kind of continually progressing subdivision of labour, which seems to be the necessary law of industrial processes, is fatal to any skill which demands, as skill in the fine arts, we have seen, demands, the free exercise and direction of a highly complex cluster both of faculties and sensibilities.

Reaction against over-evolution amongst the fine arts.

In the second half of the 19th century a reaction set in against such over-differentiation of the several manual arts and crafts. This reaction is chiefly identified in England with the name of William Morris, who insisted by precept and example that one form of artistic activity was as worthy as another, and himself both practised and trained others in the practice of glass-painting, weaving, embroidery, furniture and wall-paper designing, and book decoration alike. His example has been to some extent followed in most European countries, and efforts have been made to reunite the functions of artist and craftsman, and to set a limit to the process of differentiation among the various manual arts. In the vocal or time arts also, a reformer of high genius and force of character, Richard Wagner, rose to contend that in music the process of evolution and differentiation had gone much too far. Music, he urged, as separated from words and actions, independent orchestral and instrumental music, had reached its utmost development, and its further advance could only be an advance into the inane; while operatic music had broken itself up into a number of set and separate forms, as aria, scena, recitative, which corresponded to no real varieties of instinctive emotional utterance, and in the aimless production of which the art was in danger of paralysing and stultifying itself. This process, he declared, must be checked; music and words must be brought back again into close connexion and mutual dependence; the artificial opera forms must be abolished, and a new and homogeneous music-drama be created, of which the author must combine in himself the functions of poet, composer, inventor, and director of scenery and stage appliances, so that the entire creation should bear the impress of a single mind; to the creation of such a music-drama he accordingly devoted all the energies of his being.

Taine's philosophy or natural history of the fine arts.

It is thus evident that the evolution theory, though it furnishes us with some instructive points of view for the history of the fine arts as for other things, is far from being the whole key to that history. Another key, employed with results perhaps less really luminous than they are certainly showy and attractive, is that supplied by Taine. Taine's philosophy, which might perhaps be better called a natural history, of fine art consists in regarding the fine arts as the necessary result of the general conditions under which they are at any time produced--conditions of race and climate, of religion, civilization and manners. Acquaint yourself with these conditions as they existed in any given people at any given period, and you will be able to account for the characters assumed by the arts of that people at that period, and to reason from one to the other, as a botanist can account for the flora of any given locality, and can reason from its soil, exposure and temperature, to the orders of vegetation which it will produce. This method of treating the history of the fine arts, again, is one which can be pursued with profit in so far as it makes the student realize the connexion of fine arts with human culture in general, and teaches him how the arts of any age and country are not an independent or arbitrary phenomenon, but are essentially an outcome, or efflorescence, to use a phrase of Ruskin's, of deep-seated elements in the civilization which produces them. But it is a method which, rashly used, is very apt to lead to a hasty and one-sided handling both of history and of art. It is easy to fasten on certain obvious relations of fine art to general civilization when you know a few of the facts of both, and to say, the cloudy skies and mongrel industrial population of Protestant Amsterdam at such and such a date had their inevitable reflection in the art of Rembrandt; the wealth and pomp of the full-fleshed burghers and burgesses of Catholic Antwerp had theirs in the art of Rubens. But to do this in the precise and conclusive manner of Taine's treatises on the philosophy of art always means to ignore a large range of conditions or causes for which no corresponding effect is on the surface apparent, and generally also a large number of effects for which appropriate causes cannot easily be discovered at all.

Criticisms and counter-criticisms on Taine's methods.

These considerations have resulted in a reaction against Taine's theories which goes probably too far. It is no complete confutation of his philosophy of art-history to contend, as has been done somewhat contemptuously by Professor Ernst Grosse and others, that the great artist, so far from representing the general tendencies of his time and environment, is commonly a solitary innovator and revolutionist, and has to educate and create his own public, often through years of obloquy or neglect. This is sometimes true when the traditions and ideals of art are undergoing revolution or swift experimental change, but hardly ever true in times of stable tradition and accepted ideals; and when true it only shows that the tendencies the innovating genius represents are tendencies which have till his time been working underground, and which he is born to bring into light and evidence. A new and revolutionary impulse in art, as in thought or politics, is like a yeast or ferment working at first secretly, affecting for a while only a few spirits, as a new epidemic may for a while only affect a few constitutions, and then gradually ripening and strengthening till it communicates itself to thousands. In its inception such a ferment is not, indeed, one of the obvious phenomena of the society in which it takes root, but it is none the less one of the most vital and significant phenomena. The truth is, that this particular efflorescence of human culture depends for its character at any given time upon combinations of causes which are by no means simple, but generally highly complex, obscure and nicely balanced. For instance, the student who should try to reason back from the holy and beatified character which prevails in much of the devotional painting of the Italian schools down to the Renaissance would be much mistaken were he to conclude, "like art, like life, thoughts and manners." He would not understand the relation of the art to the general civilization of those days unless he were to remember that one of the chief functions of the imagination is to make up for the shortcomings of reality, and to supply to contemplation images of that which is most lacking in actual life; so that the visions at once peaceful and ardent embodied by the religious schools of art in the Italian cities are to be explained, not by the peace, but rather in great part by the dispeace, of contemporary existence, and by the longing of the human spirit to escape into happier and more calm conditions.

Difficulty of combining the study of the manual with that of the vocal
group of fine arts.

Any one of the three modes of generalization to which we have referred might no doubt yield, however, supposing in the student the due gifts of patience and of caution, a working clue to guide him through that immense region of research, the history of the fine arts. But it is hardly possible to pursue to any purpose the history of the two great groups, the shaping group and the speaking group, together. At some stages of the world's history the manual and the monumental arts have flourished, as in Egypt and Assyria, when there was no fine art of words at all, and the only literature was that of records cut in hieroglyph or cuneiform on palace walls and temples, and on tablets, seals and cylinders. At other times and in other communities there has existed a great tradition and inheritance of poetry and song when the manual arts were only beginning to emerge again from the wreck of an old civilization, as in the Homeric age of Greece, or where they had never flourished at all except by imitation and importation, as in Palestine. In historic Greece all three divisions of the art of poetry, the epic, lyric and the dramatic, had been perfected, and two of them had again declined, before sculpture had reached maturity or painting had passed beyond the stage of its early severity. The European poetry of the middle ages, abundant and rich as it was alike in France and Provence, in Germany and Scandinavia, can yet not take rank, among the creations of human genius, beside the great masterpieces of Romanesque and Gothic architecture; it was in Italy only that Dante, before the end of that age, carried poetry to a place of equality if not of primacy among the arts. Taking the England of the Elizabethan age, we find the great outburst of our national genius in poetry contemporary with nothing more interesting in the manual arts than the gradual and only half-intelligent transformation of late Gothic architecture by the adoption of Italian Renaissance forms imported principally by way of Flanders or France, together with a fine native skill shown in the art of miniature portrait-painting, and none at all worth mentioning in other branches of painting or in sculpture. If the course of poetry and that of the manual arts have thus run independently throughout almost the whole field of history, those of music and the manual arts have been more widely separated still. In ancient Greece music and poetry were, we know, most intimately connected, but of the true nature of Greek music we know but little, of that of the earlier middle ages less still, and throughout the later middle ages and the earlier Renaissance the art remained undeveloped, whether in the service of the church or in secular and popular use, and in both cases in strict subservience to words. The growth of independent music is entirely the work of the modern world, and will probably rank in the esteem of posterity as its highest spiritual achievement and claim to gratitude, when the mechanical inventions and applications of applied science, which now occupy so disproportionate a part of the attention of humanity, have become a normal and unregarded part of its existence.

Moments in history there have no doubt been when literature and the manual arts, and even music, have been swept simultaneously along a single stream of ideas and feelings. Such a moment was experienced in France in 1830 and the following years, when (to choose only a few of the greatest names) Hugo in poetry, Delacroix in painting, and Berlioz in music were roused to a high pitch of consentaneous inspiration by the new ideas and feelings of romanticism. But such moments are rare and exceptional. On the other hand, it is very possible to take the whole of the shaping or manual group of fine arts together and to pursue their history connectedly throughout the course of civilization. By the history of art what is usually meant is indeed the history of these three arts with that of some of their subordinate and connected crafts. Leaving aside the arts of the races of the farther East, which, profoundly interesting as they are, have but gradually and late become known to us, and the relations of which with the arts of the nearer East and the Mediterranean are still quite obscure--leaving these aside, the history of the manual arts of architecture, painting and sculpture falls naturally into several great periods or divisions to some extent overlapping each other but in the main consecutive.

Main divisions of the history of art.

These periods are roughly as follows:--

1. The period of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile, beginning approximately about 5000 B.C. and ending, roughly speaking (but some of them much earlier), with the spread of Greek power and Greek ideas under Alexander. On the main characteristics of the art of these empires we have already had occasion to touch.

2. The Minoan and Mycenaean period, partly contemporary with the above and dating probably from about 2500 to about 1000 B.C.; our knowledge of this is due entirely to quite recent researches, confined at present to certain points in Greece and Asia Minor, in Crete and other islands in the Mediterranean basin; enough has already been revealed to prove the existence of an original and highly developed palace-architecture and of forms of relief-painting and of all the minor and decorative arts more free and animated than anything known to Egypt or Assyria. (See CRETE and AEGEAN CIVILIZATION.)

3. The Greek and Roman period, from about 700 B.C. to the final triumph of Christianity, say A.D. 400. During the first two or three centuries of this period the Hellenic race, beginning again after the cataclysm which had swallowed up the earlier Mediterranean civilizations, carried to perfection its most characteristic art, that of sculpture, in the endeavour to embody worthily its ideas of the supernatural powers governing the world. Putting aside the monstrous gods of Egypt and the East, it found its ideals in varieties of the human form as presented by the most harmoniously developed specimens of the race under conditions of the greatest health, activity and grace. In the figures of Greek sculpture, both decorative and independent, and no doubt in Greek painting also (but of that we can only judge from such specimens of the minor handicrafts, chiefly vase-paintings, as have come down to us)--in these were set for the whole Western world the types and standards of human beauty, and in their grouping and arrangement the types and standards of rhythmical composition and design. Gradually human portraiture and themes of everyday life took their place beside representations of the gods and heroes. New schools struck out new tendencies within certain limits. But in the general standards of form and design there was in the imitative arts relatively little change, though towards the end there was much failure of skill, throughout the whole period. The one great change was in architecture. Greece had been content with the constructive system of columns and horizontal entablature, and under that system had invented and perfected her three successive modes or orders of architecture--the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. The genius of Rome invented the round arch, and by help of that system erected throughout her subject world a thousand vast constructions--temple, palace, bath, amphitheatre, forum, aqueduct, triumphal gate and the rest--on a scale of monumental grandeur such as Greece had never known.

4. The Christian period, from about 400 to about 1400. The decay or petrifaction of the imitative arts which had set in during the latter days of Rome continued during all the earlier centuries of the Christian period, while the Western world was in process of remaking. Free painting and free sculpture practically ceased to exist. Roman architecture underwent modifications under the influence of the church and of the new conditions of life; the Byzantine form, touched at certain times and places with oriental influences, developed itself wherever the Eastern Empire still stood erect in decay; the Romanesque form, as it is called, in the barbarian-conquered regions of the west and north. Sculpture existed for centuries only in rudimentary and subordinate forms as applied to architecture; painting only in forms of rigid though sometimes impressive hieratic imagery, whether as mosaic in the apses and vaults of churches, as rude illumination in MSS. and service-books, or as still ruder altar-painting carried on according to a frozen mechanical tradition. As time went on and medieval institutions developed themselves, a gradual vitality dawned in all these arts. In architecture the introduction of the pointed or Gothic arch at the beginning of the 13th century led to almost as great a revolution as that brought about by the use of the round or vaulted arch among the Romans. The same vital impulse that informed the new Gothic architecture breathed into the still quite subordinate arts of sculpture and painting (the latter now including the craft of glass-painting for church windows) a new spirit whether of devotional intensity or sweetness, or of human pathos or rugged humour, with a new technical skill for its embodiment. We have not set down, as is usually done, a specifically Gothic period in art, for this reason. The characteristic of the whole Christian period is that its dominant art is architecture, chiefly employed in the service of the church, with painting and sculpture only subordinately introduced for its enrichment. It makes no essential difference that from the 5th to the 12th century the forms of this art were derived with various modifications from the round-arched architecture of the Empire, and that by the 13th century new forms both of construction and decoration, in which the round arch was replaced by the pointed, had been invented in France, and from thence spread abroad to Germany and Scandinavia, Great Britain, Spain, and last and most superficially to Italy. The essential difference only begins when the imitative arts, sculpture and painting, begin to emancipate and detach themselves, to exist and strive after perfection on their own account. This happened first and very partially in Italy with the artificers of the 13th and 14th centuries--with the sculptors Nicola, Giovanni, and Andrea Pisano; the Sienese group of painters, Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti; and the Florentine group, Cimabue (if Cimabue is not a myth), Giotto and the Giotteschi. The development of the rapid and flowing craft of fresco in place of the laborious and piecemeal craft of mosaic (henceforth for several centuries almost lost) was a great aid to this movement. After a period of something like stagnation, the movement received a vigorous fresh impulse soon after 1400, at about which date in Italy (not till near a century later in northern Europe) the beginning of the Renaissance is usually fixed.

5. The Renaissance period, from about 1400 to about 1600. The passion for classic literature, stimulated by the influence of Greek scholars into Italy after the fall of Constantinople; the enthusiastic revival of classic forms of architecture by architects like Brunelleschi and Alberti; the achievements in sculpture and painting of masters like Donatello and Masaccio, based on a new and impassioned study of nature and the antique together; these are the outstanding and universally known symptoms of the Italian Renaissance in the second and third quarters of the 15th century. Promptly and contemptuously in Italy, much more gradually and incompletely in the north, Gothic principles of construction and decoration were cast aside for classical principles, as reformulated by eager spirits from a combined study of Roman remains and of the text of Vitruvius. To the ideal types of devout and prayer-worn, ascetic and spiritualized humanity (tempered in certain subjects with elements of the homely and the grotesque), which the spirit of the middle ages had dictated to the sculptor and the painter, succeeded ideals of physical power, beauty and grace rivalling the Hellenic. The personages of the Christian faith and story were brought into visible kindred with those of ancient paganism. In the hands of certain artists a fortunate blending of the two ideals yielded results of a poignant and unique charm, which for us, who are the heirs both of antiquity and the middle ages, is far from being yet exhausted. At the same time, the love alike of republics, great princes, churchmen, nobles and merchants for works of art gave employment to sculptors and painters on themes other than ecclesiastical. The taste for civic or personal commemoration, for portraiture, for illustrations of allegory, romance and classic fable, covered with pictures the walls of council halls, of public and private palaces, and of villas. The invention of the oil medium by the painters of Flanders, and its gradual adoption by the Venetians and other schools of Italy for all purposes except the external decorations of buildings, added enormously to the resources of the art in rivalry with nature, and to the splendour of its results as objects of pride and luxury. The glories of matured Italian art reacted, not always favourably, on the north. The great days of Flemish painting had been from about 1430 to 1500, before any appreciable influence of the Renaissance had touched the schools of Brussels, of Bruges or of Antwerp. By about 1520 the artists of those schools had begun, except in portraiture, to lose their native vigour and originality by contact with the alien south. Among the great artists of Germany in the first half of the 16th century the work of one or two, like Burgkmair and Holbein, shows Italian influence reconciled not unsuccessfully with native instinct; but Durer, the greatest of them, remained in all essentials Gothic and German to the end. During the last half of the century, the Netherlands and Germany alike yielded little but work of mongrel Teutonized Italian or Italianized Teutonic type, until towards its close Rubens accomplished, in the fire of his prodigious temperament, a true fusion of Flemish and Venetian qualities, at the same time closing gloriously the Renaissance period properly so called, and handing on an example which irresistibly affected a great part of modern painting.

6. Modern period, from about 1600 to the present time. During this period architecture remained in all European countries, until the 19th century, more or less completely under the influence of the Italian Renaissance. The principles of the classical revival had during a century or more of transition been gradually absorbed, first by France, then by Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain, and last by England, each country modifying the style according to its degree of knowledge or ignorance, its needs, instincts and traditions. Sculpture, which in the hands of the great masters of the earlier and later Renaissance in Italy had almost equalled its ancient glories, nay, in those of Michelangelo had actually surpassed them in the qualities at least of superhuman energy and intellectual expression--sculpture lost the sense of its true limitations, and entered, with the work of Bernini and even earlier, into an extravagant or "baroque" period of relaxed and bulging line, of exaggerated and ostentatious virtuosity. In this it followed the lead given by Italian architecture, by Jesuit church architecture especially, at and after the height of the Catholic reaction. From the monumental and memorial purposes which sculpture principally serves, it remained still, except in purely iconic uses, attached to or dependent on architecture. Not so painting, which asserted its independence more and more. In Protestant countries the old ecclesiastical patronage of the art had quite died out; in those that remained Catholic it continued, and even received a new stimulus from the anti-Protestant reaction. The demand for religious art was supplied with abundance of traditional facility, of technical accomplishment and devotional display, but with a loss of the old sincerity and inspiration. Almost all painting, even for the most extensive and monumental phases of decoration in church or palace or civic hall, was on canvas stretched over or fitted into its allotted space in the architecture, and the art of fresco, even in Venice, its last stronghold, was for a time neglected or forgotten. Portable paintings for princely or private galleries and cabinets became the chief and most characteristic products of the art. The subjects of painting multiplied themselves. All manner of new aspects of life and nature were brought within the technical compass of the painter. Besides devotional and classical subjects and portraiture, daily life in all its phases, down to the homeliest and grossest, the life of the parlour and the tavern, of field and shore and sea, with landscape in all its varieties, took their place as material for the painter. The truths of indoor and outdoor atmosphere were translated on canvas for the first time. The Dutchmen from about 1620 to 1670 were the most active innovators and path-breakers of modern art along all these lines. The greatest of them, Rembrandt, dealt, as has been said, like a master and a magician with the problems of human individuality as revealed in a mysterious colour and shadow world of his own invention. At the same time a painter of no less power in Spain, Velazquez, viewing the world in the natural light of every day, showed for the first time how vitally and subtly paint could render the relief and mutual values of figures and objects in space, the essential truth of their visible relations and reactions in the enveloping atmosphere. The achievement of these two victorious innovators has only come to be fully understood in our own day. The simultaneous conquest of Claude le Lorrain, on the other hand, over the atmospheric glow of summer and sunset on the Roman Campagna and the adjacent hills and coasts, found acceptance instantly, less perhaps for its own sake than because of the classical associations of the scenery which he depicted. The vast widening of the field of the painter's art and multiplication of its subjects, which thus took place at the dawn of the modern period, were gains attended by one drawback, the loss, namely, of the sense of high seriousness and universal appeal which belonged to the art while its themes had been those of religion and classic story almost exclusively.

Classical and romantic revivals.

During the three hundred or so years of the modern period, academical schools attempting, more or less unsuccessfully, to carry on the great Italian and classical traditions of the Renaissance have not ceased to exist side by side with those which have striven to express new ways of seeing and feeling. Sometimes, as in France first under Louis XIV., and again for forty years from the beginning of the Revolution to the dawn of romanticism, such schools have succeeded in crushing out and discrediting all efforts in other directions. Between these two epochs, say from 1710 to 1780, French 18th-century ideals of social elegance and brilliant frivolity expressed themselves in forms of great accomplishment and vivacity both in poetry and sculpture, from the days of Watteau to those of Fragonard and Clodion. At the same time England produced one of the finest and at the same time most national and downright masters of the brush in Hogarth; two of the greatest aristocratic portrait-painters of the world in Reynolds and Gainsborough, each of whom modified according to his own instincts the tradition imported in the previous century by Van Dyck, the greatest pupil of Rubens (Reynolds fusing with this influence those of Rembrandt and the Venetians in almost equal shares). Pastoral landscape in the hands of Gainsborough, classical, following Claude, in those of Wilson--these together with the humble but wholesome discipline of topographical illustration led on to the ambitious, wide-ranging and often inspired experiments of Turner, and to the narrower but more secure achievements of Constable in the same field, and made this country the acknowledged pioneer of modern landscape art. In the meantime the wave of classical enthusiasm which passed over Europe in the later years of the 18th century had produced in architecture generally a return to severer principles and purer lines, in reaction from the baroque and the rococo Renaissance styles of the preceding century and a half. In Italian sculpture, the same movement inspired during the Napoleonic period the over-honeyed accomplishment of Canova and his school; in northern sculpture, the more truly antique but almost wholly imitative work of Thorwaldsen, and the pure and rhythmic grace of the English Flaxman, a true master of design though scarcely of sculpture strictly so called. The same movement again was partly responsible in English painting and illustration from about 1770 to 1820 for much pastoral and idyllic work of agreeable but shallow elegance. In French painting the classic movement struck deeper. Along with much would-be Roman attitudinizing there was much real, if rigid, power in the work of David, much accomplished purity and sweetness in that of Prud'hon. The last and truest classic of France, and at the same time in portraiture the greatest realist, Ingres, held high the standard of his cause even through and past the great romantic revival which began with Gericault and culminated in Delacroix and the school of landscape painters who had received their inspiration from Constable. The main instincts embodied in the Romantic movement were the awakening of the human spirit to an eager retrospective love of the past, and especially of the medieval past, and simultaneously to a new passion for the beauties of nature, and especially of wild nature. Germany and England preceded France in this double awakening; in both countries the movement inspired a fine literature, but in neither did it express itself so fully and self-consciously through literature and the other arts together as it did in France when the hour struck. The revival of medieval sentiment in Germany had inspired comparatively early in the century the learned but somewhat aridly ascetic and essentially unpainterlike work of the group of artists who styled themselves _Nazarener_. In England the same revival expressed itself during a great part of the Victorian age in an enthusiastic return to the early Gothic ecclesiastical styles of architecture, a return unsuccessful upon the whole, because in pursuit of archaeological and grammatical detail the root qualities of right proportion and organic design were too often neglected.

The pre-Raphaelites.

Allied with this Gothic revival, and stimulated like it by the persuasive conviction and brilliant resource of Ruskin in criticism was the pre-Raphaelite movement in painting. Among the artists identified with this movement there was little really in common except in impatience of the prevailing modes of empty academic convention or anecdotic frivolity. The name covered for a while the essentially divergent aims of a vigorous unintellectual craftsman like Millais, fired for a few years in youth by contact with more imaginative temperaments, of a strenuous imitator of unharmonized local colours and unsubordinated natural facts like Holman Hunt, and of born poets and impassioned medievalists like Rossetti and after him Burne-Jones. Meantime in France, putting aside the work of the great Delacroix, the impulse of 1830 expressed itself best and most lastingly in the monumental work of Daumier both in caricature and romance, the impressive and significant treatment of peasant life and labour by J.F. Millet, the vitally truthful pastoral and landscape work of Troyon, Corot, Daubigny and the rest.

Contemporary tendencies.

Since the exhaustion of the Romantic movement, the other movements that have been taking place in European art have been too numerous and too rapid to be touched on here to any purpose. Both in sculpture and painting France has taken and held the lead. Mention has already been made of the special tendency in recent sculpture identified with the name and influence of Rodin. In painting there has been the fertilizing and transforming influence of Japan on the decorative ideals of the West; there have been successively the Realist movement, the movements of the Impressionists, the Luminists, the Neo-impressionists, the Independents, movements initiated almost always in Paris, and in other countries eagerly adopted and absorbed, or angrily controverted and denounced, or simply neglected and ignored according to the predilection of this or that group of artists and critics; there has been a vast amount of heterogeneous, hurried, confident and clamant innovating activity in this direction and in that, much of it perhaps doomed to futility in the eyes of posterity, but at any rate there has not been stagnation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--To attempt in this place anything like a full
bibliography covering so vast a field would be idle. Many of the books
necessary to a first-hand study of the subject are cited in the
article AESTHETICS. The following are some of the most important
writings actually referred to in the text, English translations being
mentioned where they exist: Aristotle, _Poetics_, edited with critical
notes and a translation by S.H. Butcher (1898); S.H. Butcher,
_Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, with a critical text and
a translation of the _Poetics_ (1902); Plato, _Republic_, bk. x. 596
ff., 600 ff. (Grote, iii. 117 ff.; Jowett, iii. 489 ff.); B.
Bosanquet, _Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art_
(_Asthetik_), translation with notes and prefatory essay (1896); _The
Philosophy of Art, an Introduction to the Science of Aesthetics_, by
Hegel and C.L. Michelet, trans. Hastie (1886); Schiller, _Briefe uber
die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen_ (trans, by G.J. Weiss, with
preface by J. Chapman, 1845; also in Bohn's Standard Library, 1846);
Herbert Spencer, _First Principles_, ch. xxii.; Gottfried Semper, _Der
Stil_ (1860-1863); Hippolyte Taine, _De l'ideal dans l'art_ (1867),
_Philosophie de l'art en Grece_ (1869), _Philosophie de l'art en
Italie_, _Philosophic de l'art dans les Pays-Bas_ (translations in 5
vols. by J. Durand, New York, 1889); Karl Groos, _Die Spiele der
Menschen_ (1899; trans, by E.L. Baldwin, 1901), and _Die Spiele der
Tiere_ (2nd ed., 1907; trans, by E.L. Baldwin, 1898); Ernst Grosse,
_Die Anfange der Kunst_ (1894; trans, in the Anthropological Series,
1894); Yrjo Hirn, _The Origins of Art_ (1900); G. Baldwin Brown, _The
Fine Arts_ (2nd ed., 1902); Felix Clay, _The Origins of the Sense of
Beauty_ (1908). For a general history of the manual or shaping group
of arts, C.J.F. Schnasse, _Geschichte der bildenden Kunste_ (2nd ed.,
1866-1879), though in parts obsolete, is still unsuperseded. A very
summary general view is given in Salomon Reinach, _The Story of Art
through the Ages_ (trans. by Florence Simmonds, 1904); a general
history of the same group was undertaken by Giulio Carotti (English
translation by Alice Todd, 1909). (S. C.)

FINGER, one of the five members with which the hand is terminated, a digit; sometimes the word is restricted to the four digits other than the thumb. The word is common to Teutonic languages, cf. Dutch _vinger_ and Ger. _Finger_; probably the ultimate origin is to be found in the root of the words appearing in Greek [Greek: pente], Lat. quinque, _five_. (See SKELETON: _Appendicular_.)