PROGRESSIVE ASPECT OF ARTS AND CRAFTS The Magic or primitive instincts of fine art can be taken as promotions of physical advantage, in han dling a weapon, say, or as required for the successful covering of a hut. Then secondly, as adding to these instinctive joys the design-value of taste. The imitative representation of deer and mammoth upon weapons, the modelling and painting of animals in cave interiors were purposed "power" in magic sense :—the aesthetic capacity was insurance to the "devotee" of success in the chase—or such a control over the quarry as would, by creating its image to the hunter's mind, bring it to his hand. The visioned reality was started in the sense of a religious exercise, as setting up profitable commerce with the unseen. Prehistoric art in Europe had millenniums of evolution, and in the height of its accom plishment toned form and colour into "images," that sophisti cated art calls primary elements of design. Then in later cave paintings graphic sense loses touch with reality,-passes into symbol and pattern, and so originates the alphabet—mind usurping the domain of craft.
The evolution, dispersion and decline of the Hellenic cult are a well-documented instance of a cycle with dominance for some centuries of culture. The essential national creation had been that of settlers in Greece, Dorian and Ionian stocks whose issue was expressed in the marble temple that had a human beauty enshrined in the material of its exercise. In humanity and sim plicity Hellenic culture had an outlook on life that freed religion from the monster-godships which Minoan, Assyrian and Egyp tian art had imaged. Greek sense dethroned the witch-doctor, and in the national piety of a citizen priesthood achieved its marble Parthenon. Hellenic sculpture was humanity in being, with the athlete as its model of manhood, and the maid as that of womanhood. The painting crafts resolved line and tone into an intellectual analysis of light, which in the Greek vase was shaped and figured as a ritual music. But the architect as chief craftsman, and the sculptor as priest of art came to be exploited abroad in literary translation of Hellenistic phrasing. Commercial associa tions of artists were engaged to found new cities and to set up Hellenistic types and standards of human beauty. In the group ing and arrangement of decorative themes the craftsman became a man of artistic choice : his dexterities were specialities in the sophisms of academic direction. The sculptor set portraiture of emotion and dress by the side of traditional representations of the gods and heroes. So the curve of Greek art passed on from Hellenic simplicity into Hellenistic elaboration and obtained the patronage of Roman culture ; illustrating how craft associations first image style and then find their energy sapped by the ex traneous association of learning. Hellenic art made its temple the crown and centre of a city's devotion; but the city of Athens lost its art when the idealisms of the Greek worship obtained cultured and political currency. Men and women had been deified in Greek sculpture—in Roman the imperial power was immortal, and for an emperor's divinity art formalized an imperial priest hood of fine art from Britain to Mesopotamia. Greece had been content with a simple constructive system of columns and hori zontal entablatures ; and in marble unity had invented and per fected her three successive modes, or orders of architecture— Doric, Ionic and Corinthian (qq.v.). But the genius of Rome found her imperial destiny in the dome and the triumphal arch. Her conglomerate creed covered Europe even as the Pantheon ceiled the lounge of her public bath. Her cosmos was graded as her amphitheatres were graded for her public shows. Indeed the triumphal arch, not the pediment, was symbol of her sovereignty : a vast constructiveness—temple, palace, bath, amphitheatre, forum and aqueduct, ordered and levelled her proletarian empire to be uniform in its imperial arts as in its legionary garrison. In the Roman house memorial sculpture was its ancestral cult, and filled the atrium with portrait statutes and busts, and dilettante scholarship had a corresponding piety to the past in copies or studies of the ancient masterpieces in wall paintings of classic subject and perspective fancy. In the crafts of ancient Rome was consummated a decorating capacity that passed on to Byzantium, in turn bequeathing its recipes to mediaeval church-building.
Mediaeval Aspects.—The break up of west European civiliza tion was completed in the barbarian over-runnings. For one year (A.D. 410) the great Rome is said to have been without a single inhabitant. Free painting and free sculpture ceased to exist and Italy lost or discontinued the crafts of building. For 500 years Christian churches took derelict columns and archi traves from Pagan pillar avenues, using for their halls of reli gious service, arcades and apses from the market places of de serted cities. It was for the Byzantinesque Christians to use the big square bays of the Roman bath, and with dome con struction to attach to its rubble surfaces mosaic pictures. But the free statue, in the religious cult of the East had come under inter dict, and for 600 years the sculptural arts were degraded to rudi mentary and subordinate uses, to a graphic pettiness of ivory carving and metal-chasing. Painting assumed a rigid hieratic imagery for the mosaic pictures of apses and vaults of churches, or was practiced in manuscripts and service-books according to the recipes of a cloistered monkish craft. The Carlovingian clergy of Gaul and Germany had service-books and ivories as school text-books; but specially in earliest advance were the English crafts of sculpture and painting, appearing foremost in recovery of a religious freedom.
In Celtic-Nordic genius there matured the new aspects of fine art, but for them Romanesque and Gothic had as trainers and instructors the monastic institutions, which in or about the year i000 under the patronage of the papal hierarchy were domi nating European culture. Under the Cluniac expansion of abbey building was propagated a gospel of craft practice for all the arts and sciences of life. As Dorian stock and Ionian schooling estab lished the marble accomplishment of Greece, so the fine art of stone found in the mixture of race and church culture the cradle of an era. Stone was the preciosity wrought, masoned, sculptured and lifted to the sky. The built church was the service-book of Christian civilization in which all the philosophy of four cen turies wrote itself as art. In Cluniac sculpture the figure grew out of the stone, and the statue out of the pillar; in the Cistercian abbey fine art was the mason's refinement of structural economy ; in the secular and episcopal schooling of religious pomp and circumstance came the towering majesty of the Gothic cathedral. In the i3th century the mason had taken fine art to the summit of craft execution. But in France before the end of it the vitality of cathedral structure was ceasing to animate masonry and the tool of the carver became specious for the accomplish ment of the ivory image or the enamelled casket. The master masonry of French architecture traversed Europe, but as in ventive of style there had succeeded the decorated creation of the English r4th century to which associations of chivalry lent an aesthetic life. This was especially distinguished in me morial tombs, and in the sculpture of recumbent effigies worked by the English masons. In mid-i4th century came the Black Death pestilences contributing such a set-back to the association of art and chivalry. There succeeded commerces of art furniture, and shop-use dictating the architectural enrichments of sculpture and painting. For two centuries Burgundian sculpture and Flemish painting acted as sponsors to a northern Renaissance, in which French Flamboyant with its veneers of decorative tracing made a last stand for continuance of Gothic style in architecture.
The phases of fine art practice ran their course with little dis tinctions of individuality in the artist. One mason or another made good in the quality of his work in association with the spirit of his time. Sculpture as imaging thought was still work of a coementarius or builder. After 13oo his capacity as king's mason, or goldsmith or as painter might take him into special appoint ment. But it was c. 1400 that the Sluters were sculptors, and the Van Eycks painters under the patronage of the dukes of Bur gundy in formulating a new accomplishment for personal artistry. In Italy Pisani, Siennese and Florentines, painters and sculptors, emerging from the body of church furnishers, claimed fine art consciousness among their fellow craftsmen, and established cities as centres of special craft. For Italy had never taken Gothic style to its heart as the economic realization of stone construction, with enthusiasm for covering the greatest area and lifting the highest vault. By i 40o there had come to Italian art another quest, that of regathering the threads of the Byzantine arts of form and colour, to reweave the tapestry of classic scholarship.
Following the migration westward of Greek scholars, the classic forms of architecture became the study of Roman architects such as Brunelleschi and Alberti. But a more subtle sense of renewal attended the achievements of sculpture and painting, as Donatello and Masaccio took study of nature as a joy of life. For this re naissance was the ascetic ideal giving place to the physical. In power, beauty and grace the personages of the Christian faith and story were put into visible kindred with the heroes of ancient paganism. Not as pedantry merely, but in the experiment of craft was fine art the heir of both antiquity and Christianity. The i5th century set Florence in the high place of art, in that she had become mistress of a culture at once scientific and religious, that had fine art and fine industry in united fellowship and competence to express the stirring life of republics, prince despots and church potentates, military captains and merchant princes vying with one another as patrons of the artist. There came a wealth of occasions for sculpturing and picturing, for monuments of civic and personal commemoration, for representations of pageantry and battle, for the allegoric conception of sacred and profane story. The Italian accomplishment of the cinquecento practised the heroic painting of fresco for the walls of council halls, for princes' palaces and popes' churches; classic loggias were furnished with marble and bronze statues; churches had pillared screens and monuments; while every city square showed its shrine or fountain; and every chapel its painted altar-piece. We may speak of this as a rebirth of artistic crafts but it was also the discovery of the artist as a man. A well patronized painter of illuminations, visiting Rome in i 536, has recorded himself as meeting Michelangelo and saying, "You Italians give the greatest honour, the greatest nobility and power to be more, to a man who is a splendid painter and sculptor, not as other nations do to generals and statesmen. With you as compared with great princes it is a painter alone that is called divine." In this golden age came the use by painters of oil prepared as a drying pigment. With brighter and more facile brush technique than tempera-decorations, or the plasterer's art of wet fresco, studio or work-shop pictures became portable chattels in detach ment from architectural structure. Thus were lost the intimate religious connections of fine art with altar use, as well as its broad treatments on chapel wall-surfaces. The brush attuned to new capacities of illustration and sensation, equipped the picture artist in Italy and northern Europe alike, for fresh fields of adventure, in which moral and aesthetic sensations had place. In a new capacity Italian purveyors of accomplished design were brought into the service of German emperors and French and English kings. The new art arrived for Europe in a succession of schools as Italian, Flemish, Dutch, Spanish, French and English "national" interpre tations ° of a faculty that enriched the special fineness of the painter's art. But when Leonardo da Vinci as the honoured artist passed into the service of the dukes of Milan, when Raphael at Rome was the accepted decorator of the papal court, the artist painter was no longer of one city, or of one ideal. Venetian colour had its commission as well as Florentine science and Titian was educated for a world-wide currency, as had been Michelangelo. They had become the representative European artists when sub ject-painting discovered that technical facility could replace religious idealization. With Raphael, Titian and Coreggio, art made terms with classic allegory, and, in the discovery of the palette sense, Titian and Rubens founded the dynasties of tem peramental artistry. They were painters, courtiers and diplomats, as purveyors of authorized masterpieces. Rubens with his pupils and assistants, Van Dyck, Snyders, Teniers, etc., at work on courtly portraiture, on fleshly allegory, on boars and tigers, on tavern scenes, landscapes and village fetes was in all just the Renaissance expert, commissioned to furnish art pieces for princely and private galleries and alike for church, palace or civic hall. His great work was a canvas fitted into the allotted space in wall surface; an exhibition entity in honour of the great art of painting.
Portraiture beyond the Alps, however, long kept to its mediae val economics, and serious workmanship. Painters and engravers such as Durer and Holbein were vowed to associations of design in craft essentially Gothic. The trades of the furniture arts in Brussels, Bruges or Antwerp, were scarcely touched by scholar ship. But by i600 the painter had been to Rome and Venice for his authorized education, and Rubens in the fire of his prodigious temperament, with true fusion of Flemish and Venetian qualities, in closing the Renaissance period was handing on an art nouveau. His Olympian creed, Catholic in its association with the Roman Church, and Classic in the doctrines of Roman virtuosity ruled taste for half the world. The gilded luxury of it became an accepted tradition for all the craft interests of civilization and, for some two hundred years, the fine arts in all European coun tries were accepting the Italian pedantries of design. The Palla dian orders, popularized as patterns, or examples of ancient scholarship, and their materializing in stone, were propaganda for that new vision of art which established correctness to pat tern that became the stock in trade of accomplished architec tures in France and the Low Countries, in mid Europe and Spain, and at last in England, each country conforming its style to its assimilation of book knowledge, but still by means of material needs, instincts and traditions, capable of giving to classic uni formity a national economy of style.
The 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries.—In Italy the outstand ing figure of the 17th century was that of the architect and sculp tor Bernini. In works of fountain and monument he visioned a new sensibility for masonry, that has acquired the name of Ba roque. The Palladian conventions were endowed with a specious virtuosity of curved and flowing rhythm that remained in the Latin countries for long the accepted trade-mark of classic decora tion. Its free modelling and clear colour scale was specially the birthright of Jesuit Rococo, which, born of the counter Reforma tion was carried round the world in the Catholic churches of the Spanish and Portuguese Indies. In Baroque and Rococo was the era of fine workmanship that for two centuries adorned Italian, Flemish and French styles. Art-workers grouped for the pro duction of what is useful and fine in its degree—who deserved the place and name that the ancient Greek gave them in the word Tkicov (artificers)—initiated a style of salon decoration and furniture, for which Louis XIV.'s minister Colbert organized a system of State factories and academies of art. The architectural stylist had at his beck figure sculptors, picture painters, potters, weavers, smiths, gold workers, glass and china makers. In forms of rococo artificiality every natural form was translated with no restraint of either structural or religious conscience. The variety and exuberance of craft device, with its perfect finish, made the Louis periods text-books for decorative magnificence in Europe.
Fashion and the grand sentiment of gala were ruling the tech nique of the art of painting, by the side of devotional and classical association. The sentiment of parlour and tavern was translated by Fleming and Hollander into picture truth. In the wide stretches of the Netherlands were shore and sea, and specially air vision indoor and outdoor. In portraiture and landscape the Flemish Dutch school of realists were painters of air from 1600 to 167o. The great magician was Rembrandt, able to conjure with the textures of light and darkness and to figure thereby not merely natural aspects but the problems of human individuality. The shadow mystery of his world was progenitor of much that in modern painter's art has become orthodoxy.
A painter too of air and light contemporary in the Spaniard Velazquez, whom the Renaissance had bred with the Flemish sense of adventure. Sensitive to the visual and subtle perspec tive of mutual values, he staged figures and objects in space— accepting the eye-focus as the interpreter of visible relations and reactions. Another outstanding master of the aerial scholarship was the French painter Claude Lorraine, who avowedly went to Rome to found his radiant vision on the landscape of the Roman campagna and the adjacent hills and coasts. The Poussin brothers beside him added to classical composition an impressionist figur ing of sacred and profane images. Such were new scholarships of art outside the Rococo currency of the Colbert workshops. Then came the art engraver of the latter part of the i8th cen tury with his golden age on the skirts of the traditions of the cinquecento. At first the great masters of Italian and then of Dutch painting were circulated in black and white in a way their original work had not contemplated. Soon in many industrious crafts, draughtsmen of the 17th and i8th centuries discovered tone qualities and rendered black and white in the full body of mezzotint or in refinements of line texture such as copper en graving achieves. The vast widening of the picture field for domestic walls or for illustrative connoisseurship made the dawn ing of the modern period; but there was a setting, too, of much of that sense of dedication that belonged to themes that had been those of religious and classic scholarship. It was symptomatic of the cycle of art, that in breaking through its banks the fine art of painting ran afield into shallows.
The i8th century era for English painting was to mature in the new horizons of pictorial adventure. The aristocratic por traitures of Reynolds and Gainsborough had been those of close allegiance to the tradition of the Fleming Van Dyck, who, the immediate pupil of Rubens, had himself drawn from the Vene tians. Gainsborough and Wilson, too, English pastoral land scapists, were of the Claude school. But Hogarth proclaimed him self a rebel spirit, with the petulant assertion that the English world was to his hand to give him picture sense uncommitted to classic prescriptions—with no Olympian serenity to gloss a "Cheapside" medley or a "Shrimp Girl's" portrait. Then, too, in humble guise the typographical illustrator, for the pride of country gentlemen's seats, drew and coloured landscape settings to archi tectural views. But from this low estate the English water col ourist was to rise to esteem; and though his place in the English academy was denied him, yet by the end of the i8th century great masters, like Crome and Constable, were oil and water painters both and it was water-colour artistry that carried Turner into acknowledged pre-eminence as a great modern master of fine art.
In Europe, eclectics of the 17th and i8th centuries had arisen outside the main Italian traditions ; Carpaccio, Tiepolo, Canale and Longhi, errant stars rising and setting in the twilight of the Venetian decadence ; Piranesi, a Roman etcher had a mystic sense of horror; his contemporary Blake in England toned visions of sanctified joy, toned to meek expressions of line and colour. In Spain the forerunner, initiate to the mystic significance of the modern cult was Goya, at once impressionist and hypnotic, "smear ing his canvas with paint as a mason plasters his wall," a com poser of the "Caprices" and "Miseres de la Guerre" with the protesting energy of a French Revolutionist.
The antique graces of the old tradition still haunted the shrine of art, and in the latest years of the century we see a symptomatic return to severer principles and purer lines of scholarship from the Baroque and the Rococo. The pure and rhythmic grace of the English Flaxman in its sense of classic design was scarcely sculpture. In Italy came the over-honeyed accomplishments of Canova and his school ; and with scarcely robuster fibre were the statue works of the Norwegian, Thorwaldsen, practising in Rome ; in France were graphic appreciations of classic virtue as read in Livy; in England the 19th century opened with a mild classicality and much pastoral and idyllic work of agreeable but shallow elegance ; and the Nazarene school of German painting expended itself in a religious expression of singular insipidity. For French painting, however, the classic movement with roots in the asso ciations of the French Revolution and attitudinizing as Roman virtue obtained a technical reality of picture force in David. There were, too, an accomplished purity and sweetness in Prud'hon's "nude" idylls. But the last and truest Classic of France, Ingres, who was at the same time in portraiture a modern realist, painted on into the romantic era. With Gericault and Delacroix, romance had its literary associations rampant for two generations ; but by side of them, French landscape painting had got inspiration from the English Constable. Thus in the second quarter of the 19th century the curtain was being lifted for the drama of creative progress that was to be staged for French and English art.
Still the French experimenters were shifting all the practical tenets that had been gospel for the painting arts. The craft vision of modern art-workers promulgated as science plays for the literary stage. Writing in the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britan nica, Sir Sidney Colvin said : "The movements of the Impression ists, the Luminists, the Neo-Impressionists, the Post Impression ists and Cubists, initiated in Paris, have been eagerly adopted and absorbed, or angrily controverted and denounced, or simply neg lected and ignored according to the literary equipment of groups of artists and fashions of 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 ages of posterity but at any rate there has not been stagnation." Written 25 years ago this should be supplemented by a further analysis of the 20th century aspects of art and craft. Much of the hope that Morris and his coadjutors introduced into craft has been drowned in the increasing industrial flood. Are we marking time for some new values of fine art to take their place in the social system? Perhaps so ! But the associations of education are at present confining capacity to commercial specialities of knowledge, and as they have done so vocation and profession have grown neglectful of the universal issues. Learning has become fitted into grooves, running in which, craft—whether as labour or commerce is regardless of common appreciations, and only half educated for the practical purposes of life. If in such words, also, we rank the present output of all the fine arts, we necessarily accept as sponsor for it the social revolution of the 20th century which is rapidly bringing the whole world into a single community, and making fine art an individual pursuit, ceasing with the artist. (See ART ; AESTHETICS ; ARCHITECTURE ; PAINT ING; SCULPTURE; and kindred articles.) In the writing of this article some use has been made of the article written by the late Sir Sidney Colvin for the i ith edition of the Encycloprdia Britannica. (E. S. P.)