



Produced by Marc D'Hooghe




EUPHORION: BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIEVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE

BY

VERNON LEE

_Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro," etc._

_VOL. II._



TABLE OF CONTENTS.


THE PORTRAIT ART

THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO

MEDIAEVAL LOVE

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX


       *       *       *       *       *


THE PORTRAIT ART


I.

Real and Ideal--these are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving,
which criticism claps with random facility on to every imaginable
school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real--the
upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of
artists seeks after the ideal--the ideal which may mean sublimity or
platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a
realist or an idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or
idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of almost moral
importance. Now the fact of the case is that the question of realism and
idealism, which we calmly assume as already settled or easy to settle by
our own sense of right and wrong, is one of the tangled questions of
art-philosophy; and one, moreover, which no amount of theory, but only
historic fact, can ever set right. For, to begin with, we find realism
and idealism coming before us in different ways and with different
meaning and importance. All art which is not addressing (as decrepit art
is forced to do) faculties to which it does not spontaneously and
properly appeal--all art is decorative, ornamental, idealistic
therefore, since it consciously or unconsciously aims, not merely at
reproducing the already existing, but at producing something which shall
repay the looking at it, something which shall ornament, if not a place,
at least our lives; and such making of the ornamental, of the worth
looking at, necessarily implies selection and arrangement--that is to
say idealism. At the same time, while art aims definitely at being in
this sense decorative, art may very possibly aim more immediately at
merely reproducing, without, selection or arrangement, the actually
existing things of the world; and this in order to obtain the mere power
of representation. In short, art which is idealistic as a master will
yet be realistic as a scholar: it decorates when it achieves, it copies
when it studies. But this is only half the question. Certain whole
schools may be described as idealistic, others as realistic, in
tendency; and this, not in their study, but in their achievement. One
school will obviously be contented with forms the most unselected and
vulgar; others will go but little out of their way in search of
form-superiority; while yet others, and these we must emphatically call
idealistic, are squeamish to the last degree in the choice and
adaptation of form, anxious, to get the very best, and make the very
best of it. Yet, on thinking over it, we shall find that realistic and
idealistic schools are all, in their achievements, equally striving
after something which is not the mere reproduction of the already
existing as such--striving, in short, after decoration. The pupil of
Perugino will, indeed, wait patiently to begin his work until he can
find a model fit for a god or goddess; while the fellow-craftsman of
Rembrandt will be satisfied with the first dirty old Jew or besotten
barmaid that comes to hand. But the realistic Dutchman is not,
therefore, any the less smitten with beauty, any the less eager to be
ornamental, than the idealistic Italian: his man and woman he takes
indeed with off-hand indifference, but he places them in that of which
the Italian shall perhaps never have dreamed, in that on which he has
expended all his science, his skill, his fancy, in that which he gives
as his addition to the beautiful things of art--in atmosphere, in light,
which are to the everyday atmosphere and light what the patiently sought
for, carefully perfected god or goddess model of Raphael is to the
everyday Jew, to the everyday barmaid, of Rembrandt.

The ideal, for the man who is quite coarsely realistic in his figures,
exists in the air, light, colour; and in saying this I have, so to
speak, turned over the page too quickly, forestalled the expression of
what I can prove only later: the disconnection of such comparative
realism and idealism as this (the only kind of realism, let us remember,
which can exist in great art) with any personal bias of the artist, its
intimate dependence upon the constitution and tendency of art, upon its
preoccupations about form, or colour, or light, in a given country and
at a given moment. And now I should wish to resume the more orderly
treatment of the subject, which will lead us in time to the second half
of the question respecting realism and idealism. These considerations
have come to me in connection with the portrait art of the Renaissance;
and this very simply. For portrait is a curious bastard of art, sprung
on the one side from a desire which is not artistic, nay, if anything,
opposed to the whole nature and function of art: the desire for the mere
likeness of an individual. The union with this interloping tendency, so
foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has produced portrait;
and by the position of this hybrid, or at least far from regularly bred
creature; by the amount of the real artistic quality of beauty which it
is permitted to retain by the various schools of art, we can, even as by
the treatment of similar social interlopers we can estimate the
necessities and tendencies of various states of society, judge what are
the conditions in which the various schools of art struggle for the
object of their lives, which