Part 3

You will not often have to paint pictures of the ancient Etruscans. I need not therefore say much about their rich and varied dresses. I may, however, mention that their wardrobe bore about the same relation to the Roman costume that the Asia Minor dresses did to the Greek. There was an Oriental and sometimes an Egyptian tendency about the cut and ornamentation of their garments. Instead of the classical sandal of the Romans they wore shoes, and even boots, made of some soft material. In short, they were more effeminate in their tastes. The more wealthy an Etruscan was, the richer would be his garments. He resembled in this respect many modern Orientals, whereas his neighbor of ancient Rome would (at least in the Augustan age) affect the greatest simplicity.

A Roman patrician would as soon think of decking himself out in an embroidered and spangle tunic, as an English gentleman would of assuming the plush and gorgeous livery of a Belgravian footman.

Luxury and effeminacy of dress began to creep into fashion in Rome as early as the time of Tiberius, who (probably because he did not wish to have any imitation of the finery of his own court) promulgated very strict sumptuary laws as to dress.

These laws were enforced and even made more stringent by some of his successors, but fashion was too strong even for Roman emperors; and under such sovereigns as Heliogabalus, but little was left of the ancient Roman simplicity. In one particular alone did the Romans of the Decadence contrast favorably with their neighbors the Etruscans--I mean in the matter of jewelry. The Roman noble, even of the most degraded period, never decked himself out with necklaces, armlets, and breast ornaments of gold like the Etruscan. The only jewelry he wore was a signet ring.

The Roman ladies were less sparing of ornament, but even they did not load themselves with gold trinkets of every description after the Oriental and Etruscan fashion. Much of this Roman jewelry was of very beautiful design, and has been most conscientiously imitated by Castellani.

With regard to the fashion of wearing the hair and beard, it is certain that up to the third century B.C., the Romans wore their hair long and did not shave.

If, therefore, you have to paint any subject of the time of the kings, it would be incorrect to represent your personages with cropped hair and clean shaven, as though they were Romans of the later Consulate and Augustan age.

Some Sicilian barbers, who came over to Rome about the beginning of the third century B.C., introduced the custom of shaving and having the hair cut short, and this custom continued without intermission until the time of Hadrian or Trajan, when beards came into fashion again. The Sybarites, of a later period than this, used to oil their hair and sprinkle it with gold-dust. Wigs were also worn, by men as well as by women. If the emperor of the time happened to have a crop of thick curly hair, it was astonishing what a number of curly crops of hair suddenly appeared in Rome. Perhaps we need not go as far back as ancient Rome for phenomena of this kind. It is needless for me to describe the stiff, tasteless style of hair-dressing which prevailed amongst the ladies of the later Empire. It was their uncouth artificial coiffures which were imitated in France and England about the beginning of the century. It was this pseudo-classical style both of hair-dressing and apparel which made our grandmothers and great-grandmothers such unlovable objects.

A real classical revival after the puff and powder of the preceding generation, a return to the best Greek and Roman fashions, would have been a great blessing both to society in general and to the arts especially; but such classicism as prevailed under the first Napoleon was hardly an improvement on the perruques and pig-tails that preceded it.

The Roman military dress is so well known from the bas-reliefs of the times of Trajan, Hadrian, and Vespasian, that I need not go into any details respecting it. The only remark I would make is, that the linen drawers we see indicated in the sculptures, were not worn in the army before the wars of Gaul and Germany.

The dresses of the time of Constantine and his successors are very little known.

To some artists this is rather an attraction, as affording an opportunity of invention in costume, which is denied to them in a better known period; and it must be admitted that, provided they keep to what was likely to have been worn, no one can prove them to be wrong.

There are a few coins and medals in existence which give some idea of the appearance of an emperor or great personage, but of the dress of the common people we know nothing for certain.

In conclusion, I would remark that correctness in the matter of costume is far more necessary to an artist now than it was formerly. In this age of archæology and research we find, even on the stage, the most scrupulous fidelity observed, and it behooves us, as artists, not to lag behind.

You will find, both in the Academy library and at South Kensington, many excellent works on costume, and with such a mass of information within your reach it will be unpardonable if you fall into the anachronisms and absurdities of our ancestors.

LECTURE II.

BYZANTINE AND ROMANESQUE ART.

In the lectures I am about to deliver on Early Italian Art, I shall not enter into minute detail, nor shall I attempt a history of _all_ the painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who deserve mention. All I can hope to give you is a sort of bird’s-eye view of the various phases through which the Art of Painting passed from its lowest ebb to its highest development.

I feel as if you were a party of excursionists about to be personally conducted across a great art continent, and as if it behooved me, as your conductor, to perform my duty with judgment and discretion.

We shall have a vast desert to cross, where nothing is found to break the dull and ugly monotony of the scene. We cannot do better than take the express train for this part of our journey, and get over the ground as quickly as possible.

Substituting miles for years, we shall, when we have accomplished something like a thousand miles, begin to notice signs of a more fertile soil. These indications will be very faint at first, but after a time the objects of interest will become more frequent, and we shall leave our train and take to riding or driving so as to get a better view of what we are passing. After a drive of a hundred miles the country will become so interesting that we shall buckle on our knapsacks and perform the rest of the journey on foot.

To continue the parallel, I would remind you that you are only excursionists, and not leisurely travellers desirous of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the products of the country they are about to traverse.

To acquire a thorough knowledge of the decay and revival of art, it would be necessary to consult the numerous and learned treatises on the subject, and to study the political and social state of Italy during the Middle Ages.

Such a study, though doubtless very instructive, would be rather a dry subject for a lecture, even if I were equal to the task. I shall, therefore, attempt nothing of the kind, and having always had a tender feeling for those whose attendance here is compulsory, and admiration for those who come of their own free will, I shall endeavor to be as little tedious as possible, whilst imparting to you a sort of _résumé_ of mediæval painting and the early Italian schools.

The designs and paintings which have been discovered in the catacombs are commonly held to be the earliest specimens we possess of Christian art; and if by Christian art we mean the representation of Biblical and New Testament subjects, they undoubtedly _are_ the earliest. If, however, by Christian art we mean the peculiar style which grew up and was fostered by the early Church, we must look elsewhere, for these paintings are essentially pagan in style.

In common with the paintings of the Constantine baths, and with the numerous decorative designs discovered in the pagan catacombs of the period, they are clearly derived direct from classical sources.

They vary in merit according to the skill of the artist who executed them, and also according to the epoch of their production, those of the second century being infinitely superior to those of the third and fourth. In the earliest of these paintings, the Good Shepherd replaces Orpheus, Elias replaces Apollo, and so on, but the style is in no way distinguishable from contemporary Roman wall-paintings. The arabesque ornamentation of the panels is exactly similar, and although the subjects are such as Moses striking the rock, Jonah swallowed by the whale, Daniel in the lions’ den, and various Christian miracles, these interesting works cannot be considered in any other light than specimens of late Roman art adapted to the illustration of Scriptural subjects.

These catacomb paintings look to me more like copies of better things than original paintings. They appear to have been done by decorative artists, who would naturally be more at home with the ornamental borders and arabesques than with the figures. We may often notice this kind of inequality of work in modern houses.

The skilled workmen employed by the professional decorator will execute with consummate neatness all the ornamental parts, but if any figure is introduced into the panels it will be a coarse replica of some Pompeii muse, nymph, or cupid, possibly quite good enough for the purpose, but hardly indicative of the state of art of the period.

In the paintings of the third and fourth centuries there is a very noticeable decline in the drawing and execution, but there is still a reminiscence of a classical style. The draperies are still disposed with something like taste, and the heads, though very rude and clumsy, have not the barbaric hideousness of a later period. The last flicker of the antique lamp is to be found in those catacomb paintings of the fourth and fifth centuries.

When I say that they are not Christian in style, I mean that they are not ecclesiastical. Speaking strictly, from a common-sense rather than from an art point of view, it appears to me that the simple garments and the un-nimbi’d heads of the personages are more in keeping with the spirit of the New Testament than the gold and the gorgeous ornamentation of a later period. However that may be, viewed simply as works of art, they are the natural sequence to Pompeii and the later forms of Roman mural painting.

The case is very different with the large Roman and Ravenna mosaics of the fourth and fifth centuries, but before proceeding to criticise these productions, I should wish to say a few words about antique mosaic work.

The art of depicting objects by means of small cubes of marble, stone, or terra-cotta was invented about 300 years before the Christian era.

From a very simple beginning it gradually developed itself, until under the first emperors we find the most complicated ornaments, and even large historical compositions, executed in mosaic. The use of mosaic for the floors of temples and dwelling-houses was universal wherever the Romans spread. It was not confined to Imperial Rome or to luxurious Pompeii, but is invariably found wherever a wealthy Roman planted his villa, whether in the vicinity of the great Sahara Desert, or in the less savage neighborhood of the Isle of Wight. As your average modern Briton cannot do without his carpets, so the ancient Roman could not be happy without his tessellated pavement. In spite, however, of this widespread fashion, we do not find mosaic used as a means of wall decoration; it was almost exclusively employed for floors and tables. Some of these small cabinet pieces are beautifully inlaid, and, as works of art, are by no means contemptible. In a very few which have been preserved to us, we find specimens of the “opus sectile” of the Romans. This differed from ordinary mosaic by the tesseræ being cut into the form of the object to be depicted, and then accurately put together like a puzzle map. The well-known four pigeons perched on a tazza, discovered at Tivoli, is, I believe, the most beautiful specimen extant of the ordinary Roman cabinet mosaic.

The examples of Roman tessellated work applied to perpendicular surfaces are so rare and so unimportant that we cannot consider them as prototypes of the subsequent gigantic mosaic wall-pictures. The intermediate links are at any rate wanting. There is one, and only one, mosaic, that of St. Costanza, near Rome, which might be viewed as the missing link. It is supposed to have been executed toward the end of the fourth century, and belongs essentially to the decorative school of ancient pagan art. Indeed, so numerous are the little cupids and genii, and so prodigal has the artist been of vine tendrils, that the building containing it was formerly supposed to have been a temple of Bacchus. It is now, however, known that this, the earliest specimen of wall mosaic, was executed not in honor of Bacchus, but as a monument to the Christian Emperor Constantine’s two daughters.

Not until the fifth century do we get to those colossal figures, those blue and gold backgrounds, those richly ornamented draperies, which constitute the true starting-point of ecclesiastical art. We often hear that Cimabue is the father of modern art, but the only reason for making him a kind of art Adam is because his name has been handed down to us. The real fathers of modern Christian art are the nameless authors of these gorgeous though somewhat grim mosaics.

Most art historians have included these splendid works in the later Roman period. They cannot certainly be called truly Byzantine, although they have a decided Byzantine flavor about them, and it is probable that many of them were executed by Greek or Byzantine artists; but, on the other hand, they are so strikingly dissimilar to late Roman work that they ought to be classed in a school by themselves. The forms of the figures are of course stiff and lifeless, if compared to the antique or to sixteenth-century art; but they are quite graceful and animated when compared with the dead ugliness of the real Byzantine work. There is a certain grandeur, _sui generis_, about them (particularly in the Justinian and Theodora mosaics of Ravenna) quite independent of their size and gorgeous ornamentation, which we never find in later Byzantine work.

The mosaics of the sixth century are in no way different in style from those of the fifth. The finest specimens of this period are the well-known mosaics of SS. Cosmo and Damiano in Rome. The head and figure of the gigantic Christ, which forms the centre, has been much eulogized by critics; but I confess I was disappointed when I last saw this mosaic. Size, and perhaps antiquity, have a good deal to do with the awe-inspiring qualities attributed to this work.

If the art displayed in this figure were really of a high quality, some of its beauty would be retained in a reproduction on a small scale. However much the panels of the Sistine Chapel may be reduced, they always retain their original grandeur, whereas this over-praised figure appears to me to lose all its imposing appearance when copied or engraved on a small scale.

Of historical or Biblical compositions, properly so-called, there are none extant of this period. The cause of this is partly no doubt owing to the nature of the materials then in use. Mosaic is certainly not suitable for figures in action, nor for complicated compositions; but there is also another reason for the absence of subject-pictures during the whole of the long interval between the early Roman emperors and Giotto, and that is, they were not wanted.

There were no wealthy patricians in those dark ages who required their villas decorated, no Mæcenas to give a helping hand to struggling genius. The Church was the only patron the poor artists of the period had, and a very hard and narrow-minded patron she was, reducing men who (for aught we know) may have had some talent, to the level of mere workmen and artificers, strictly limiting the range of their subjects and fettering them with traditional rules.

We are now fast approaching the true Byzantine period of art. Historians tell us that Byzantine or Greek Christian art was the offspring of the Eastern Church, influenced originally by ancient Greek art. It seems hard to believe that these hideous deformities should have descended from ancient Greek sculpture. It is a kind of Darwinian theory turned upside down, but still it may be true.

Ancient Greek does not necessarily mean the art of Phidias and Praxiteles. It may mean the barbaric sculpture which preceded the advent of these great masters, and I confess there is something in the odious grimace and the stiff draperies of Byzantine figures which reminds me of certain very early Greek work.

The introduction of the Byzantine style into Italy seems to have been very gradual. The school existed at Constantinople certainly in the fifth century, and possibly much earlier.

Its influence may be traced in the large Italian mosaics of the sixth century, but it was not till near the year 700, when Constantinople was fairly established as the capital of the world, that it became in all its ugliness the dominant school in Italy.

The Church of the fifth and sixth centuries, with all its narrow-mindedness in the choice of subjects, gave the artist a certain amount of liberty in his drawing and flesh-painting, but about the year 700 even this liberty was denied him.

Certain types were invented by monkish painters, that is, by men who were violently opposed to every thing that made life agreeable. These men, it is needless to say, were quite untrained artists, but in their uncouth way they endeavored to substitute their own ideal of humanity for the real thing, and they succeeded only too well. The ghastly type being once firmly established, all subsequent artists of this school were obliged to conform to it. In the second Nicene Council, A.D. 787, it was decreed that:

“It is not the invention of the painter which creates the picture, but an inviolable law, a tradition of the Church. It is not the painters, but the holy fathers, who have to invent and to dictate.

“To them manifestly belongs the composition, to the painter only the execution.”

As I have already stated, there is good reason for believing that the holy fathers not only dictated the composition, but interfered pretty considerably with the execution, insisting as they did on ascetic, cadaverous heads and an indiscriminate use of gold.

There may have been another cause besides morbid asceticism which in the ninth century caused the Church to adopt such an unearthly type of humanity; namely, the fear of the Jews and Mahometans, who were very numerous at Constantinople.

It was natural that the growing sanctity of the grim mosaics should be associated in the minds both of Jew and Mahometan with idol-worship, and accordingly we find that the Emperor Leo the Isaurian wished to conciliate his non-Christian subjects by the prohibition of all representation of the human form.

This, however, did not suit the monks. A synod was called, and ultimately it was agreed that sculpture alone should be interdicted; but may we not suppose that a kind of compromise was made about painting, and that it was settled that any near approach to the human form should be tabooed, that art in short was to be of the nature of that which graced the Auld Brig of Ayr?--

“Forms like some bedlam statuary’s dream, The crazed creations of misguided whim, Forms might be worshipped on the bended knee, And still the second dread command be free, Their likeness is not found on earth, in air, or sea.”

Kugler’s description of these Byzantine heads is so good that I cannot refrain from giving it. He says:

“The large ill-shaped eyes stare straight forward; a deep unhappy line, in which ill-humor seems to have taken up its permanent abode, extends from brow to brow beneath the bald and heavily-wrinkled forehead. The nose has the broad ridge of the antique still left above, but is narrow and pinched below, the anxious nostrils corresponding with the deep lines on each side of them.

“The mouth is small, but the somewhat protruding lower lip is in character with the melancholy of the whole picture. As long as such representations are confined to gray-headed saints and ecclesiastics they may be tolerated, but when the introduction of a kind of smirk is intended to convey the idea of a youthful countenance this type becomes intolerable. Even the Madonna, to whose countenance the meagreness of asceticism was hardly applicable, here assumes a thoroughly peevish expression, and was certainly never represented under so unattractive an aspect.”

I have given you this quotation from Kugler, in order to show you the opinion of a learned and liberal-minded writer, who certainly cannot be called a severe critic.

He goes on to compare Byzantine with Chinese art, which is, I think, rather hard upon the poor Celestials.

Both styles of figure-painting are equally conventional, and equally untrue to nature, but Chinese figures are far more cheerful and decorative than the unhappy Byzantine.

A room decorated by a Chinese artist would be a pleasant place to live in; but who except a long-distance walker, a forty days’ faster, or one of our modern votaries of self-inflicted martyrdom, would care about inhabiting a house hung with Byzantine pictures?

In these pictures the draperies gradually became more and more wooden, until at last they got to be thoroughly in keeping with the heads. There was a traditional arrangement of folds derived from the late Roman works, but this arrangement, though originally founded on sound principles, became in the hands of Byzantine artificers most untrue and stupid. The folds used to be indicated by a number of unmeaning straight lines, regardless of the form underneath.

The one redeeming feature in the art of Byzantium was the treatment of ornament. Founded partly on the late Roman as existing in numerous temples of Asia Minor during the reign of the Cæsars, and partly on the Persian style as seen at Persepolis, Palmyra, and elsewhere, Byzantine ornamentation is both rich and graceful. The Arabs and Moors carried the intricacies of Byzantine tracery still further, until the _ne plus ultra_ was reached at the Alhambra; but to my taste the original Byzantine style of ornamentation is bolder and more effective than the elaborate Mauresque.

There is no want of taste or invention betrayed here. Indeed there is far more variety than in the somewhat overloaded Roman style of ornamentation, as may be seen at once by comparing Byzantine capitals with the debased Corinthian of the Romans. This excellence (not only in architectural detail but in every department of ornamental art) shows clearly that when the artists had free play they where not deficient in taste, and that we must ascribe the utter badness of Byzantine figure-painting to the proper cause; namely, to the veto the Church seems to have set on the study of the human form.

The principal difference between the Byzantine and Romanesque ornamentation is the more frequent occurrence in the latter of geometrical patterns, formed principally by squares and equilateral triangles intersecting each other. The walls and pavements of the Romanesque churches of Italy abound with examples of this geometric decoration. In Romanesque ornament again, gold and mosaic are not so universally used as in Byzantine; but the transition between the two styles was so gradual, and they were so closely connected, that it is almost impossible to draw the line between them.