The New Art Criticism

IN discussing the recent developments of what is variously called the "new art criticism,” “ Morellianism,” and “ scientific connoisseurship,” I shall be obliged to limit myself to the criticism of Italian painting during the Renaissance, although it is of course evident that the principles which apply to the study of one branch of art apply in the main to all. What I have to say will be comprised in the answers to the following questions : What are the requisites of helpful art criticism ? Wherein has the old criticism failed, that a new should be necessary ? In what sense is the criticism we are to discuss new ? And to what does it lead ?

What are the requisites of helpful art criticism ? The two requisites — taking the power of expression for granted — are, obviously, that the critic should know his subject, and that he should feel it. First, as to knowing. There are two ways of approaching any art of the past: the one, the study of documents about it; the other, the study of the works of art themselves. A sound criticism would naturally combine the two, but, unfortunately, the writers on Renaissance art, who still exercise the greatest authority, emphasize only the first and less important, assuming that the essential thing to know is, not the picture, but the written or printed document concerning it ; which is as much to the point as saying that the essential thing about a dinner is the grocer’s and butcher’s bills for the raw materials. I am far from denying that these things have a value ; my contention is that for the person whose interest in Italian pictures is artistic, not merely archæological or technical, the work of art is the first and most necessary object of study. And when can the critic be said to be really proficient in his chosen line of work ? Not, I venture to say, until he is able to distinguish not only school from school, and master from master within the school, but master from pupil and imitator, and even imitator from imitator ; in short, until he can classify Italian paintings with the accuracy of a botanist in classifying plants.

Now, the point of having the critic know his subject to the minutest details is, not that he should drag the public after him into his laboratory, or compel them to gaze at every specimen in his herbarium. On the contrary. One great use of his knowledge is to warn the public away from what is insignificant and poor. There were quite as many had painters in the Renaissance as there are nowadays, and when the work they left is indiscriminately classed along with that of the great masters, as happens in most galleries, it is more than probable that before coming to a real masterpiece the æsthetic capacities of the sightseer have been exhausted in the endeavor to discover non - existent beauties in mere rubbish masquerading under famous names. How many tourists wear themselves out in vain endeavors to enjoy what their catalogues and Baedekers tell them are Leonardos or Giorgiones, but which really are the productions of tenthrate painters, like Marco d’Oggione or Girolamo Santa-Croce ! Modest but sincere people, in such cases, are puzzled, distressed, doubtful; they waste time trying to appreciate, give it up in despair, and then go browsing about on their own account, generally missing a great deal that is good, but at any rate enjoying honestly what they do enjoy. Humble but less analytical people deceive themselves into mechanical raptures at the sight of certain names. Impatient sightseers, after a few disappointments, give up the “ old masters ” as beyond them, the arrogant roundly declaring them humbugs. Mildly stupid people betake themselves to the literary interpretation of the pictures ; while the duller sort are content with identifying the different saints and the Biblical or allegorical episodes represented. The truly helpful art criticism would begin with classifying the pictures correctly, so that no one would any longer run the risk of wasting time and emotion in this manner. This classification, however, can be done only after a thorough acquaintance, not with the documents about the pictures, but with the pictures themselves. My own ideal of the genuine art critic is that he should have sufficient experience and memory to carry constantly and clearly in mind all the pictures in all the European collections (and especially all the pictures in the public and private galleries, and in the many thousands of churches in Italy itself), ranged not only under the names of their painters, but also under the precise epoch in the artist’s career when they were executed. A young Titian is almost as different from an old Titian, for example, as Giorgione from Tintoretto !

Complete and accurate knowledge, then, is one of the requisites of helpful art criticism. And now as to feeling. We already have critics of Renaissance art who have undoubtedly felt. I do not speak of the ordinary gushing writers, but of two, to mention only English, profound in feeling and supreme in expression, — Mr. Ruskin and the late Walter Pater. I have noticed that the first effect upon the student of a plunge into modern scientific connoisseurship is invariably to throw him into a rage when these names are brought up. “ Ruskin ! who cannot tell the difference between an original Giotto and an imitation! ” “Pater! who does not know a Giorgione from a Cariano, or a Botticelli from a Raffaellino del Garbo ! ” He is apt to think that the exposure of such glaring errors as these forever condemns the critics who are capable of committing them. But the longer one dwells in the arid deserts of mere connoisseurship, the more one longs for those oases of genuine feeling about the work of art — even misnamed ! — which are after all the solace of the journey. Both these writers felt the Renaissance. Mr. Ruskin, who was always protesting against it, felt it, so to speak, àrebours, for he is to be fully understood only in connection with the so-called Oxford movement, the revival of mediæval religion among cultivated people, which led them to Gothic art, and made them feel an instinctive antagonism toward the Renaissance, with its frank paganism and its avowed worship of reason and force. But the very violence of Mr. Ruskin’s invective proves his appreciation of the potency of the thing he inveighed against. And then, when he forgets his prejudices, how divinely he can write of Tintoretto and Giorgione (even though his artists be not identical with the Tintoretto and Giorgione of modern connoisseurship) ! Yet his books are safe reading only for the experienced critic, who, having traveled the long path for himself, is proof against even Raskin’s eloquence when lie is called on to admire second-rate Giottesque imitations as the flower of Florentine art.

With Pater the case is different. Far from being in a state of protest against the tendencies of the Renaissance, he was so thoroughly its child that he almost succeeded in creating it anew. Possessing the vital gift of the critic, the power of sympathetic emotional interpretation, he has wrapped that age in poetry and magic, and has made it glow again with life for us. But the ideal critic must add to innate capacities a store of accurate and personal knowledge, and Mr. Pater, one of the greatest of innate appreciators, often failed of his effect because he had not trained his eye to fine discriminations. One asks in front of some of his Giorgiones and Botticellis, “ Is it possible that a man who takes this daub for a supreme artistic expression of the Renaissance can have anything worth saying about the epoch ? ” And thus Pater’s Renaissance remains a book to read, not in Italy, but in England or America ; for it is after all only his idea of the period, a delightful subjective affair, not very close to the real Renaissance. It is great as a work of imagination, but less successful as a critical reconstruction of the art of another time : and it is of art criticism we are now speaking, not of works of imagination.

Enough has been said already to indicate the answer to our second question : Wherein has the old criticism failed, that a new should be necessary ? Its failure has been just that lack of discriminating knowledge which makes it impossible for the real appreciator, when he does come, whether as writer or as mere sightseer, to avoid wasting time and strength upon worthless things, and missing much that is valuable. For, revolutionary as the statement may sound, it is a fact that a large proportion of Italian pictures in public galleries — and still more in private collections — are misnamed. I may be pardoned for quoting in defense of my position Sir Henry Layard’s remarks in his preface to the English translation of Morelli’s book upon the Borghese and Doria galleries. Speaking of the ignorance and carelessness of twenty years ago, he says: “ It is difficult to conceive what this ignorance was, and in some instances still is. Spurious works and manifest copies were ascribed to the greatest masters. No distinction was made between the different schools of painting. Pictures whose authors would have been evident to the merest connoisseur were attributed to painters with whom, in manner, they had no connection whatever, and who belonged to entirely different schools. The student sought in vain for instruction, and the public were only misled. The directors of some of the galleries were shamed by Morelli’s exposures into making changes, and his remonstrances have led to improvement; but the confusion and ignorance which still prevail may be judged of by published catalogues, and by the manner in which the pictures are in some places exhibited ; as, for instance, in the Correr Museum at Venice, where highly interesting works of the old masters are jumbled up with productions of the last and present century of the vulgarest and most commonplace description, hung on a level with the eye, whilst those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are, in Academy phrase, ’skied ’ and beyond the reach of examination.” It is true, as the writer says, that during the last twenty years some little change for the better has been made. The pictures in the Brera at Milan, Morelli’s own town, are almost perfectly named, while the Dresden, Munich, Parma, and Vienna galleries follow not very far behind, and Berlin and the Borghese gallery in Rome betray at any rate a consciousness of the existence of modern scientific criticism. The National Gallery has adopted a British “ compromise ” between tradition and science, but the great galleries of Paris, Madrid, Florence, Venice, and Rome, and the smaller provincial galleries almost everywhere, still wallow in the mistakes of the old connoisseurship, when every fat woman or youth in romantic costume was a Giorgione, every gray-haired man a Tintoretto, every long-nosed, smiling lady a Leonardo, and every athlete a Michelangelo.

Turning from the galleries, let us trace briefly the outline of what has been written about Italian painting. Vasari, who, with his lively gossip about the artists, has been aptly called “ the last of the Italian novellieri,” still remains the most generally entertaining. But no one dreams of taking him as a serious or an accurate guide, nor is his work much of an aid to the understanding or enjoyment of Italian art. Even Milanesi’s edition, where an attempt has been made to correct the more glaring inaccuracies of Vasari’s al fresco journalism, does not help very much, for the editor is not himself a critic of anything but documents, an archivist. Three centuries passed before Renaissance art received a really serious treatment. Burckhardt’s Cicerone, first printed in the fifties, contains in germ most of the important leading ideas about the art of that epoch, and it is profoundly thoughtful and suggestive. But accurate scholarship was impossible, and was by Burckhardt himself scarcely attempted. The monumental work by Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, published some years later, was, it is true, undertaken in the more scientific spirit; but without photographs for comparison, and without the present but then nonexistent network of railways in Italy that enable the student to visit and revisit the spots where native art is best to be seen, precision was not to be looked for. As an àpeu près classification of Italian pictures there is little to say against their writings, except that they contain no cultural ideas.

It was inevitable that, with the improvement in such mechanical aids as photography and railways, the scientific methods which, in part unconsciously to these authors, underlay the whole of their work should in other hands become refined with practice. Knowledge cannot stop at the à peu près, and the criticism we are to discuss is “ new ” (to answer the third of our questions) in the sense of substituting the knowledge, growing move and more exact, of a developing science for the groping attempts of an immature one. The next important publications (for we speak only of original work, and not of compilations) were Morelli’s articles upon the Borghese gallery, which he printed in German, twenty years ago, under the assumed name of Lermolieff; following them up by treatises upon the Doria, Munich, Dresden, and Berlin galleries. Morelli, the pupil and companion of Agassiz, had the great advantage of careful training in the physical sciences, and the habits he thus acquired stood him in good stead when he turned to the study of art. He was the first to work out in any detail the laws that had been implicit in every classification of pictures. He has often been called the Darwin of art criticism, for he was the first to set himself resolutely against the haphazard or “ inspiration ” theory of genius, and to prove that art follows certain fixed laws of evolution, from which the individual artist can no more escape than the individual animal can escape from its genus and species. He traced with the minute care of a Darwin the derivation of one artist from another, the gradual modification of his forms, and the "survivals ” of inheritance. His method, however, although scientific, was purely empirical, and, so to say, unconscious. By dint of years of patient comparison he hit upon the fact that certain peculiarities, such as the shape of hand or ear, the way of drawing the hair, the system of drapery, the manner of constructing the human figure, details of the landscape, and so forth, tend to remain essentially the same throughout the artist’s entire career, and tend furthermore to be themselves but a development or modification of the forms and types handed down to him by his master. Tests of authorship such as these, which Morelli used empirically, without, seeking to explain them, enabled him to effect a revolution in the commonly accepted classifications. From famous painters he took away the mass of inferior imitations that had dimmed their glory, and gave to others the credit which was due to their real achievements. At the same time, he traced hitherto unguessed connections between artist and artist, assigning to each one his proper place in the history of the development of his school.

A great deal of ridicule has been cast upon Morelli and his method, the bitterest attacks coming, naturally, from the gallery directors whom he so severely criticised. It is hard, however, to understand why public opinion does not force the galleries to keep abreast of the latest information regarding the objects entrusted for common use to their care. Such galleries should, of course, be treated like natural history museums, as a branch of the national education, the department set apart for the enlightenment of public taste, and accuracy should be as strictly demanded in the one case as in the other. To pass off inferior trash as the work of great masters is not to elevate, but to coarsen the sensibilities of those who go to look. It may sometimes have a fatal influence even upon artists themselves, as may be seen in the case of the dominant school of French painters at the beginning of this century, who were led by the misattributions in the Louvre to model themselves upon Giulio Romano’s cold, coarse, and empty classicism, and his harsh scheme of color, under the impression that they were following Raphael. In the same way, the influence of the false Botticellis may be traced in a section of modern English painting led by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and brought up in the rear by Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. Perhaps the indifference of the public is due to the same thing which has caused “ Morellianism ” to he so ridiculed among non-professionals, namely, the prevalence of the theory that art is a miracle, and cannot be narrowed within the compass of scientific laws. People cling to this belief all the more tenaciously as their faith in other miracles disappears, and the critic who proposes to introduce science and law into this last haunt of superstition is regarded with contempt as a paradox-monger, or with suspicion and hatred as a perpetrator of sacrilege. “ If you cafe to be descended from a monkey, you may ! ” was the little boy’s protest against his playmate’s Darwinism, twenty years ago. “If you like to have your art an affair of hands and ears and draperies, you may ! ” the opponents of Darwinism in art say to us to-day. But the new science is winning its way in spite of opposition, and has already reached almost at a bound the honorable place which archæology has for many years enjoyed.

Morelli, however, laid himself open to attack not only by the scrappiness of his work, — for he never wrote a complete study of any one school, or even of any one artist, — but still more by making no attempt to explain the empirical method by means of which he attained bis results. But science can no more stand still at the purely empirical, if there is any hope of going deeper, than it can stand still at the à peu près. Morelli left to his disciples and followers the task of accounting for his empiricism. The explanation has been in part attempted by Mr. Bernhard Berenson, whose recent monograph upon the Venetian painter, Lorenzo Lotto, marks a distinct advance in criticism. I do not propose to summarize this work, which has already been reviewed in The Atlantic, but I shall endeavor to point out the general tendencies of the new art criticism, of which Mr. Berenson is the chief exponent, and to answer the last of the questions I asked at the beginning, To what does this criticism lead ?

Starting from Morelli’s empirical discovery that certain details tend to remain fixed throughout the artist’s work, and are therefore the best clue to the authorship of any given picture, the new criticism has asked itself the question, Why these details rather than any others ? The answer conducts directly to the laws which govern the development of an artist, the laws of habit and attention. The fact that the ultimate aim of the new criticism is the psychological reconstruction of the artistic personality of the artist by means of these laws leads me to characterize, as I have done elsewhere,¹ this form of criticism as the psychological criticism, in opposition to the old forms. It differs radically from the gossip of Vasari and all anecdotal writers ; from the document hunting of Vasari’s editor, Milanesi, and of nearly all German critics ; from the mere connoisseurship of Morelli and most of his followers; and, finally, from the subjective criticism of such authors as Michelet and Ruskin on the one hand, who make the work of art an excuse for brilliant writing of all sorts, or as Walter Pater on the other hand, who attempted to express in independent art forms the complex sensations which the work of art produced in himself.

The psychological criticism begins, then, where Morelli left off, with the much-ridiculed hands and ears and folds of drapery. It explains their remaining the same throughout the artist’s career by the fact that these details are less liable to attract the attention either of the artist or of his patron, and are thus more likely to be done by rote : in other words, that the habits a young painter acquires are likely to continue unchanged in all those points where no fresh effort of observation is needed. Such points would naturally be those of least importance to the expression of the picture. So little, indeed, does the shape of the ear matter to most people that it is rare to find even to-day one who is able to recall the ears of his own intimate friends. Obviously, there was, in the earlier time, small incentive to the painter to alter his habitual way of drawing this feature. The same probably held true in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in regard to the hands, although they now receive rather more attention. Folds of drapery, again, require so little fresh observation on the part of the artist that even now, in the Champ de Mars, it is possible to amuse one’s self by deserting the catalogue, and tracing out alone the work of a given artist and his pupils by the similarity in their treatment of drapery. The landscape background, likewise, particularly among Italian painters, who rarely treated landscape as anything but a subordinate accompaniment to their figures, tended to retain its fixed character. We all know, for example, Leonardo’s strange rocks, and Perugino’s soft valleys. I might thus go on to enumerate a score of details which tend to become fixed artistic habits, owing to the fact that no fresh effort of attention is required for their execution. Habits, indeed, incline to set themselves up even where we should naturally expect the artist to make in each case a fresh effort to observe : as in the shape of the head (compare Giorgione’s invariable domeshaped cranium) ; the type of the face, as in Francia or Rubens ; and even the expression of the countenance, which we find serene and glowing in almost all the portraits of Giorgione and the young Titian, mysteriously smiling in Leonardo and his followers, arrogant and overbearing in the Pollaiuoli, lumpish and unintelligent in Lorenzo di Credi and Licinio. But habits do not end at these external peculiarities. The truth is that every work of art is a compromise between the painter’s fresh observation and his already acquired habits of seeing and registering his vision, a struggle between objective reality and old habits of visualization and execution. No one can say that the world he sees is the mathematical resultant of the rays that strike on his retina. We see the world as we are taught to see it, and this is no less true of the artist. His master, besides giving him certain habits of execution, directs his attention to one set of facts, and trains him to visualize in one way rather than in another.

This law, which I have been obliged to explain very briefly, gives the new criticism the necessary method for its task of reconstructing the artistic personality of the painter. Before each successive work of an artist it asks two questions: What habits — and from whom acquired — does this picture betray ? and What power does it reveal on the part of the artist to react against habits, to observe for himself, interpret the world afresh, and express what has never found expression before ? The answer to the first question involves a knowledge of the painter’s predecessors, and enough acquaintance with history to determine the probability of likenesses being the result of mere coincidence or of actual contact. In estimating an artist, we must first know how much in his work is due to his antecedents and environment, and how much to his own genius. If he simply continues, even though he develops, the traditions of the man who first influenced him, — in other words, if his development is purely organic, — we cannot regard him as an innovator or a creator. If, on the contrary, he can react against his teachers, cast off their traditions and the habits they gave him, and can pick and choose from the whole of art those forms which best serve his purpose, he becomes one of two things, a great genius or an eclectic, a Michelangelo or a Burne-Jones, as the quality of his talent permits. Or he may be like Donatello, a man who has scarcely any morphological connection with the art which preceded him, himself a primary source of art forms. On the other hand, the artist may absorb into himself all the best elements of the art of his own immediate predecessors, and combine them into something new, as did Giorgione and Raphael. In any case, the first task of the new criticism is to make every effort to find out exactly what were the special artistic influences brought to bear upon an artist, so that it may see in what relation he stands toward these influences.

But this is not the only problem that presents itself. Before being able to appreciate the originality of the contribution made by any one artist, before his personality can be clearly defined, the whole matter of his relation to his environment remains to be considered. Much loose talk prevails on this subject; some denying altogether the influence of environment upon an artist, and others scarcely allowing for anything but environment in producing him. All this is due to a misunderstanding. The real issue is, whether the individual artist uses his environment as his subject, or whether his environment uses him as its mirror, mouthpiece, or echo. The greatest artist is the one who has his environment so completely under control that he can reveal its secrets, interpret its movements, and symbolize its dominant moods. Such artists are rare, and in Italy it would be hard to mention others than Donatello, Michelangelo, and Leonardo. After them come the more exterior artists, among whom Raphael and Giorgione hold the highest rank, who mirror rather than interpret their environment ; and these are divided into grades according as they mirror clearly or dimly, faithfully or with distortion. Finally come those artists who are mere echoes of their environment, who only mimic what greater men have done; and these are ranked according to the value of the artist they repeat and the quality of their imitation. Sometimes the echo is faint and indistinct, indeed, and it is when critics confound these faint echoes with really great art, as the pre-Morellian critics continually did, that our ideas of the epoch become hopelessly confused. Yet, relegated to their proper place, even these painters are not without interest to one who studies the work of art as a document in the history of civilization.

Having found out what the artist owed to his teachers, in what way he assimilated the past, and how he stood related to his environment, the ground is cleared for the analysis of his own personal share in the product, whether as creator, combiner, or mere follower, whether as interpreter, mirror, or humble echo. Yet even so intimate a knowledge of the artist leaves the important question of the meaning of his work unanswered. Here also, as in the matter of environment, opinion oscillates between two extremes. There are those who uphold the contention that every jot and tittle of a picture was intended by the artist to convey a statable idea. This is the great Ruskinian aberration, which has called forth the opposite extreme of denying to the artist all intention of conveying any direct and distinct meaning at all, or of having any other purpose than to create something “ beautiful.” Here, as before, no one law can be laid down to fit every artist. It is true that some had no intellectual intention of any sort, while others had very definite ones. Only a minute study of the individual painter’s works will reveal into which of these two general categories he falls. Even when it is once decided that an artist probably had some definite meaning, some intellectual or emotional purpose, criticism must allow for the inadequacy of his powers of expression, owing to those habits of visualization and execution already discussed, which prevent him from seeing clearly and reproducing faithfully. Yet here a further question remains to he settled, —whether the artist in his works gives a transcript of life, or expresses an ideal. To determine this, as thorough a knowledge as possible of the history of the time is requisite, for which the student must have recourse to contemporary political history, sociology, philosophy, and literature.

Having thus analyzed, one by one, the factors that go to make up the artistic personality of an artist, and his relation to his predecessors, his fellow-craftsmen, and his epoch, we are at last brought face to face with the great masters of a past time, freed from the confusions and misinterpretations of the old criticism. A great artist of any kind is nothing but a great personality using a given artistic medium to convey its impressions of the universe. But poets and musicians cannot impart to us, as painters can, the visible images of things as they appear to them, and we are therefore free to charge their poetry or their music with our own images and emotions to a degree not possible where, as in pictures, we have the artist’s ideas and feelings actually visualized before our eyes. This gives peculiar value to painting as a document in the autobiography of the race, and it is this which makes the new criticism, in its attempt to edit this important document correctly, of such immense service to general culture. We have no other source of information about the past which is so great an aid to the reconstruction of its mental life. Just as literature shows us the world of ideas in which an epoch was living, so painting actually transports us to the world of visual imagery which corresponded to these ideas. The effort of the new criticism, then, is to lead us to those works of art which are really significant, and to tell us whether they mirror or interpret the epoch, whether they express its actualities or portray its ideals, and thus to prepare us to get from them all the enjoyment and all the inspiration possible to our temperaments.

Mary Logan.