THE PLACE OF CRAFTSMANSHIP The degree of expressional power acquired by the mastery of craftsmanship, the greater or lesser intensity of the emotional urge, and the varying skill in adjusting the rhythmic relations of lines, colours, forms, sounds or words, distinguish the masterpiece from the inferior artistic production. It is for this reason that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Rembrandt stand for all time as supreme masters, whilst their imitators, notwithstand ing all their executive skill, are relegated to a comparatively in significant position in the hierarchy of art. The mysterious smile of the Mona Lisa becomes a meaningless smirk when perpetuated in innumerable versions by apt pupils of the stamp of Gianpietrino. The muscular accentuation and amplification of Michelangelo's heroic sculpture assume an almost ludicrous aspect in Bandinelli and other Italian sculptors of the mid-16th century, because the generation that stood under the spell of the master's genius annexed—and often distorted to the verge of caricature—his forms without having experienced the emotional impulse to which these forms owed their existence. Their relation to Michelangelo finds a counterpart in the attitude of the early 19th century pseudo-classic sculptors to Pheidias and Praxiteles.
Craftsmanship is the handmaiden of art, but is, in the popular mind, often confused with art. Innumerable pictures are produced, year by year, by painters who are endowed with a certain amount of technical skill, but who lack the power of expression because they have nothing to express—copies of nature, painstaking or careless, as the case may be, but devoid of the three elements of art : emotion, expression and rhythm. Such pictures are no more entitled to be reckoned as works of art than the rows of featureless, ill-proportioned brick houses in the working quarters of a modern manufacturing town can claim to be regarded as examples of architectural art.
The function of art is almost as difficult to define as the mean ing of art. The main purpose of art is to give pleasure; and for this reason art is held by many to be a useless luxury for the idle. From a materialistic point of view art certainly is use less, in so far as it produces nothing of a strictly utilitarian char acter.
Yet art is, and has always been, an indispensable need of humanity. It is implanted in the soul of the child, as in that of primitive man. It is as necessary as articulate speech. It is indispensable to civilization. It is the art of each race that gives its civilization its distinct character and rhythm. It reflects, if it does not actually condition, the whole manner of life of a nation or period. Life and art are closely, inseparably interwoven, but life passes—the life of individuals and the life of nations—and art remains. It is the only thing that is permanent ; and our knowl edge of the past, of civilizations that have flourished and dis appeared, is derived almost entirely from the fragmentary relics of their art. It is not from printed books that we visualize and form our estimate of the life, culture and character of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece or Rome, but from the ruined buildings, carved stones, half-decayed bronzes, fragments of pottery, fres coed walls, personal adornments and household objects dug out of the ground by the excavator's spade, which are of far greater and more lasting significance than the transitory effects of great wars and revolutionary political changes. History becomes a living reality to us through art. Without it, it would be a dead letter. Above all, art brings pure pleasure into the humblest life. It is a source of exaltation that raises us above the sordid realities of everyday existence. Without art, life would be intolerable, inconceivable. The human imagination requires food as im periously as the human body, and art is the inexhaustible spring from which our imagination draws sustenance.