Chapter V: The Decorative Quality.—Disagreement 114

between the painter and the public—The “average
person” in the gallery—The painter in the
gallery—Art as representation _vs._ art as
decoration—The artist devoted to the
decorative—Art has always been decorative—Origin
of painting—In the Stone Age—Primitive man as
artist—The artist in Egypt—In Assyria and
Greece—Filling of space on Greek coins—The
Gothic Age and decoration—Giotto,
Masaccio—Line-composition with Raphael and
Michael Angelo—Light-and-shade composition with
Leonardo, Correggio, Giorgione—Color-composition
with Titian and Paolo Veronese—Art history
explained on purely technical grounds—Titian and
his ideas in art—The Decadence and why it
came—Lack of technical skill—Why art flourished
in the Seventeenth Century with Rembrandt,
Rubens, and Velasquez—The decorative in modern
art—Revision of technical methods by Millet,
Manet, and Monet—Advance of painting with new
discoveries—The spontaneity of art—Materials and
the craftsman in literary art—Absence of the
decorative in Walt Whitman and Holman Hunt—The
lasting value of the decorative—The “Venus of
Milo” and Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love”—And
Shakespeare again