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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 Saskia By Rembrandt.

When Rembrandt painted his bride Saskia,[28] for instance, the

extent to which he exercised his simplifying and transfiguring power
is amazing, and precludes all possibility of our classing this work
among the portraits which should be condemned. He knew perfectly
well that poor Saskia was not beautiful—what beautiful girl would
have condescended to look at Rembrandt?—so what did he do? He
cast all the upper and right side of her face in shadow, and
deliberately concentrated all his attention, and consequently the
attention of the beholder as well, upon three or four square inches
of nice round muscle in the lower part of Saskia's young cheek and
neck. But how many plain daughters of rich bourgeois would allow
three or four square inches of their cheek and neck to be exalted in
this way, at the cost of their eyes and their nose and their brow? The
same remarks also apply to Rembrandt's "Jewish Rabbi" in the
National Gallery. There he had to deal with an emaciated, careworn
old Jew. How did he overcome the difficulty? All of you who know
this picture will be able to answer this question for yourselves, and I
need not, therefore, go into the matter.
This, then, is not the class of portrait work which need necessarily
deteriorate the power of art. What does deteriorate this power, is
that other and more common class of portrait painting which began
in Holland in the seventeenth century, and in which each sitter
insisted upon discovering all his little characteristics and individual
peculiarities; in which, as Muther says, each sitter wished to find "a
counterfeit of his personality," and in which "no artistic effect, but
resemblance alone was the object desired."[29]
It was the insistence upon this kind of portrait work by the wealthy
bourgeoisie of England, which well-nigh drove Whistler, with his ruler
spirit, out of his mind, and it is precisely this portrait work which is
dominant to-day. In order to be pleasing and satisfactory to the
people who demand it, this class of painting presupposes the
suppression of all those first principles upon which Ruler-Art relies in
order to flourish and to soar; and where it is seriously and earnestly
pursued, art is bound to suffer.
This was recognized three hundred years ago by the Spanish
theoretician Vincenti Carducho, and his judgment still remains the
wisest that has ever been written on the subject. In formulating the
credo of the sixteenth century, he wrote as follows—
"No great and extraordinary painter was ever a portraitist, for such
an artist is enabled by judgment and acquired habit to improve upon
nature. In portraiture, however, he must confine himself to the
model, whether it be good or bad, with sacrifice of his observation
and selection; which no one would like to do who has accustomed
his mind and his eye to good forms and proportions."[30]
Our art at the present day is, unfortunately, very largely the
development and natural outcome of the two influences I have just
described, and that accounts for a good deal for which I have failed
to account hitherto.
Art no longer gives: it takes. It no longer reflects beauty on reality: it
seeks its beauty in reality. And that is why it falls to pieces judged by
the standard of Ruler-Art. It cannot bear the fierce light of an art
that is intimate with Life and inseparable from Life. In its death-
throes it has decked itself with all kinds of metaphysical plumes, in
order that it may thus, perhaps, live after death. But these plumes
have been used before by dying gods and have proved of no avail.
"Virtue for virtue's sake," was the cry of a dying religion. "Art for
art's sake," is now the cry of an expiring godlike human function.
But unless this cry be altered very quickly into a cry of art for the
sake of Life, there will be no chance of saving it. Before this art for
Life's sake can be discovered, however; before the purpose after
which it will strive can be determined and established, the first thing
to which we shall have to lend our attention is not art, but mankind.
The purpose of man is a thousand times more important than the
purpose of art. The one determines the other. And as a proof of how
intimately the two are connected, see how much doubt there is as to
the purpose of art, precisely at a moment when men also, owing to
the terrible civil war which is raging among their values, are
beginning to doubt the real purpose of human existence.
It would be useless to indulge in a detailed criticism of individual
artists. To all those who have followed my arguments closely, no
such clumsy holding up of particular modern artists to ridicule will
seem necessary. In some of your minds these men are idols still, and
it pleases only the envious and the unsuccessful to see niche-statues
stoned.
The great artist, as I have shown you, is the synthetic and
superhuman spirit that apotheosizes the type of a people and
thereby stimulates them to a higher mode of life. But where should
we go to-day, if we wished to look for a type or for a desirable code
of values which that type would exemplify?
We know that we can go nowhere; for such things do not exist.
They are utterly and hopelessly extinct.
Our first duty, then, is not to mend the arts—you cannot mend a
cripple. But it is rather to mend the parents who bring forth this
cripple—to mend Life itself, and above all Man.
"Away from God and Gods did my will allure me," says Zarathustra;
"what would there be to create if there were Gods!
"But to man doth it ever drive me anew, my burning will; thus doth
it drive the hammer unto the stone.
"Alas, ye fellow-men, within the stone slumbereth an image for me,
the image of all my visions! Alas that it should perforce slumber in
ugliest stone!
"Now rageth my hammer, ruthlessly against its prison. From the
stone fly the fragments: what's that to me?
"I shall end the work: for a shadow came unto me—the stillest and
lightest of all things once came unto me.
"The beauty of the Superman came unto me as a shadow. Alas my
brethren, what are the gods to me now!"[31]

[28] Dresden Royal Picture Gallery.

[29] History of Painting (Eng. Trans.), Vol. II, pp. 572, 576.
[30] Muther, History of Painting (English Translation), Vol. II, p.
481.
[31] Z., II, XXIV.

Lecture III[1]

Nietzsche's Art Principles in the History of Art

Part I
 Christianity and the Renaissance

"For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die: but if ye through the
Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."—Romans
viii. 13.

I shall now endeavour to show you when and where Nietzsche's Art
doctrine, or part of it, has raised its head in the past, and to touch
lightly upon the conditions which led to its observance.
In doing this I shall travel backwards, zigzag fashion, from Rome, viâ
Greece to Egypt, and beginning with Christianity, I shall show how
the Holy Catholic Church succeeded in establishing one of the
conditions necessary to all great Art, which, as I have said, is unity
and solidarity lasting over a long period of time, and forming men
according to a definite and severe scheme of values.
[1] Delivered at University College on Dec. 15th, 1910.

1. Rome and the Christian Ideal.

The compass of these lectures does not allow me to say anything

concerning the Art of Rome. There are many aspects of this Art
which are both interesting and important from the historical
standpoint; but, from the particular point of view which I am now
representing, temporal Rome does not concern me nearly as much
as sacred Rome and its provincial Government.
For the first act of the Christian power was not to volatilize the stone
bulwarks of the monuments of antiquity, neither was it to spiritualize
the citizen of the Roman Empire; but it was to convert Rome the
secular administration into Rome the Eternal City.
Long before the exterior of the Græco-Roman column was divided
up and sub-divided, until, despite its volume, it seemed to have no
solidity whatever; and long before men's eyes and bodies were
transformed from broad, spacious wells of life into narrow, tenuous
cylinders of fire, a teaching was spread broadcast over the Roman
Empire, the devouring power of which was astounding, and the like
of whose digestion has not been paralleled in history.
The Romans in their latter days had degenerated through the
decline among them of that very principle which is the basis of all
great art—restraint. Always utilitarians, in the end they had become
materialists, and finally their will power had disintegrated.
Then, suddenly—perhaps through the very fact that their will power
had declined, and through a preponderance among them of a class
of people who were unfit to allow themselves any material
enjoyment, and who were conscious of this shortcoming—the
pendulum of Life swung back with a force so great to the opposite
extreme, that the Pagan world was shaken to its foundations, and in
its death-agony stretched out its arms and embraced the foreign
creed which said—
"Flesh is death; Spirit is life and peace. The body is dead because of
sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If ye live after the
flesh ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of
the body, ye shall live."[2]
Here was a fundamentally new valuation, a totally novel outlook
upon the world of man. Some extraordinarily magnetic creator of
values had spread his will over an empire, and stamped his hand
upon a corner of the globe, and "the blessedness to write upon the
will of millenniums as upon brass,"[3] promised to be his.
Here was a principle which obviously must have found its origin in a
class of mind which, in order to overcome the flesh at all, knew of
no better means thereto than to cut it right away and for ever. It
was not a matter of contriving some sort of desirable inner harmony;
the will of the people in whom this creed took its roots was
incapable of such an achievement. The order went: "If thy right eye
offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee ... if thy right hand
offend thee, cut it off!" Whenever the Spirit was mentioned it was
spelt in capital letters and uttered in exalted tones; while the body,
on the other hand, as the great obstacle to salvation, was written
small. States of the soul became surer indices to the qualities
"good," "beautiful," and "virtuous," than states of the body, and the
paradox that Life was the denial of Life, was honestly believed to be
an attainable ideal. In Lübke's words: "Christianity disturbed the
harmony between man and nature, and introduced a sense of
discordance by proclaiming to man a higher spiritual law, in the light
of which his inborn nature became a sinful thing which he was to
overcome."[4]
The people who acclaimed this teaching by instinct ultimately
organized themselves, conquered the Pagan world, enlisted Pagan
elements into their organization—Pagan spirit and Pagan order—and
gradually accomplished a task which no other European values seem
to have been able to do. They established one idea, one thought,
one hope, in the breasts of almost all great Western peoples, from
Ireland to Constantinople, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.
The power of their creation—the Church—was such that it co-
ordinated the most heterogeneous elements, the most conflicting
factors, and the most absurd contrasts. And, however much one
may deprecate the nature of the type they advocated, and the
ignoble valuation of humanity upon which their religion was based,
as a Nietzschean, one can but acknowledge the power they wielded,
the might with which they made one ideal prevail, and the art with
which for a while they united and harmonized such discordant voices
as those of the people of Europe.
One can admire all this, I say, even though it is but a spiritual
reflection of Rome's former power, her former victories, and her
former law and order.[5]
For, soon, however un-Pagan the ideal may have been which the
Church made to prevail, the methods it employed were purely Pagan
methods.
Fearing nothing, respecting nothing that was opposed to it, and not
losing heart before the difficulty of vanquishing even the most
formidable enemies of the expiring Empire—the Teutons away in the
North—spiritual Rome thus set about its task of appropriating
humanity; and all the art of the organizer, of the orator, of the
painter, sculptor and architect, was speedily ordered into its service.
If the type to which its ideal aspired were not already a general fact,
then it must be made a general fact. It must be reared, cultivated
and maintained.
Strangely enough, the feat of vanquishing the German nation proved
a thousand times easier to Rome the Eternal City, than it had done
to Rome the Metropolis of the Greatest Empire of antiquity. The
ancient Germans, with their strong tendency to subjectivity, to
fantastic brooding and to cobweb spinning, and with their coarse,
brutal natures unused either to restraint or to the culture that arises
from it, fell easy victims to this burning teaching of the spirit, of
faith, and of sentiment;[6] and it was in their susceptible and
untutored breasts that Christianity laid its firmest foundation.
In its work of appropriation and consumption, as I say, the Church
halted at nothing.

[2] Romans viii. 6, 10, 13.

[3] Z., III, LVI.
[4] Outlines of the History of Art, Vol. I, p. 445.
[5] See H. H. Milman, D.D., History of Latin Christianity (Ed.
1864), Vol. I, p. 10. Speaking of Catholicism, he says: "It was the
Roman Empire, again extended over Europe by a universal code,
and a provincial government; by a hierarchy of religious prætors
or proconsuls, and a host of inferior officers, each in strict
subordination to those immediately above them, and gradually
descending to the very lowest ranks of society, the whole with a
certain degree of freedom of action, but a restrained and limited
freedom, and with an appeal to the spiritual Cæsar in the last
resort."
 [6] See J. B. Bury, A History of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, p. 17:
"It has been said that the function of the German nations was to
be the bearers of Christianity. The growth of the new religion was
indeed contemporary with the spread of the new races in the
Empire, but at this time in the external events of history, so far
from being closely attached to the Germans, Christianity is
identified with the Roman Empire. It is long afterwards that we
see the mission fulfilled. The connection lies on a psychological
basis: the German character was essentially subjective. The
Teutons were gifted with that susceptibility which we call heart,
and it was to the needs of the heart that Christianity possessed
endless potentialities of adaptation.... Christianity and Teutonism
were both solvents of the ancient world, and as the German
nations became afterwards entirely Christian, we see that they
were historically adapted to one another."

2. The Pagan Type appropriated and transformed by

Christian Art.

Just as St. Paul had not refrained from taking possession of the
Unknown God whom the Athenians ignorantly worshipped, by
declaring
Him to be precisely the God whom he had come among them to
proclaim, so Christianity did not refrain from incorporating all the
suitable features of the Pagan faith into its own creed.
The Pagan type was thus the first thing to be assimilated and
absorbed, and in the early Christian paintings of the catacombs you
must not be surprised to find the Saviour depicted with all the
beauties and charms of the classical god or hero. Here he appears
as a Hermes, there as an Apollo, and yonder as an Orpheus.[7]
Beardless, young, and strong, Christ stalks towards you. His gait is
free his carriage majestic. Across his shoulders you will sometimes
see, as in the catacombs of the Via Appia in Rome, that he bears a
sheep, and he looks for all the world like a young Hermes, who, as
you know, was the Greek god of flocks.
Elsewhere he looks like a Roman senator, as in the catacomb of St.
Callixtus, for instance; his mother Mary looks like a Roman matron,
praying with uplifted hands, and the apostles Peter and Paul,
together with the prophets, appear as peripatetic philosophers,
grasping learned-looking scrolls of manuscript, while Daniel is
presented as a Hercules.[8]
Even the famous bronze statue of St. Peter in his great church at
Rome is in fact an antique statue of a consul which has been
transformed into a Peter, and the original of this monument was
probably quite innocent of the sanctity which has caused the foot of
his effigy to be worn away by the kisses of the faithful.[9]
This bold manner of appropriating the Pagan ideal in Art was but the
symbol of what was actually occurring in the outside world; for the
object was not to glorify the Pagan type, but to overthrow it, to
transform it by degrees into the type which was compatible with
Christian values, and thus to obliterate it.
We can watch this process. We can see the classic features and form
of body surely and permanently vanishing from the wall decorations
of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the Christian type
asserting itself with ever greater assurance. Already in San Paolo
fuori-le-mura in Rome, which had been decorated about the middle
of the fifth century,[10] Christ appears bearded,[11] ugly and gloomy,
and his apostles reflect his appearance and mood. In the Church of
San Vitale in Ravenna, of the sixth century, the spirit of the antique
had almost passed away;[12] in the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori-le-
mura the bearded Christ is no longer sublime and dignified, but wan
and emaciated;[13] while in the Church of SS. Nazarus and Celsus at
Ravenna, there is a mosaic of the fifth century in which even the
sheep are beginning to look with gloomy and dissatisfied eyes upon
the world about them.
Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely to prove how slow
but sure was this gradual self-assertion of the type that was
compatible with Christian values, and the early period of mediæval
art is well described by Woltmann and Woermann as one in which
the classical cast of figure and features gets swallowed up in
ugliness.[14]
Finally, in the seventh century, the most daring and most
extraordinary artistic feat of all was accomplished. The greatest
paradox the world had ever seen—a god on a cross—was portrayed
for men's eyes to behold. The Crucifixion became one of the loftiest
subjects of Christian art, and the god of the Christians was painted
in his death agony.
I will not dwell upon the manifold influences exercised by this class
of picture; I simply record the fact, in order to show with what
steadily increasing audacity the Church ultimately realized and
exhibited its type.
For, the fact that Christian Art was didactic, as all art is which is
associated with the will and idea of a fighting cause, and which is
born on a soil of clashing values, nobody seems to deny.[15] Paulinus
of Nola, Gregory the Great, Bishop Germanus, Gregory the Second,
[16] John of Damascus and Basil the Great were all agreed as to the
incalculable worth of images in the propagation of the Christian
doctrine, and their attitude, subsequently adopted by the
Franciscans and Dominicans, lasted, according to Milman, until very
late in the Middle Ages. When it is remembered, moreover, that
illuminated manuscripts, which were destined to remain in the hands
of single individuals, retained the classical mould of body and
features much later than did the work for church decoration, it is not
difficult to discover the strong motive which lay behind the
production of public art.[17]
With Roman culture and art, the western and northern provinces of
Gaul, Spain, Germany and Britain thus received their religion and
their ideal type; and if to-day, in our ball-rooms and drawing-rooms
we are often confronted with tenuous, flamelike, swan-necked
creatures, that recall Burne-Jones, Botticelli, Duccio and Segna to
our minds, we know to which values these people owe their slender,
heaven-aspiring stature, and their long, sensitive fingers.
For the attitude of the Christian ideal to Life, to the body, and to the
world was an entirely negative one. The command from on high
was, that the deeds of the body should be mortified through the
Spirit. All beauty, all voluptuousness, smoothness and charm were
very naturally regarded with suspicion by the promoters of such an
ideal; for beauty, voluptuousness and shapeliness lure back to Life,
lure back to the flesh, and ultimately back to the body.
What else, then, could possibly have been expected from such an
ideal than the ultimate decline and uglification of the body? To what
else did such an ideal actually aspire? For was not ugliness the
strongest obstacle in the way of the loving one, in the way of him
who wished only to affirm and to promote life?
When the student of mediæval miniatures, wall-paintings and
stained-glass windows finds bodily charm almost completely
eliminated, when he sees ugliness prevailing, and even made
seductive by a host of the most subtle art-forms, by a gorgeous
wealth of ornament and repetitive design; and when he perceives a
certain guilty self-consciousness in regard to the attributes of sex
revealing itself in such paintings as that on the ceiling of the Church
of St. Michael at Hildesheim, where Adam and Eve are represented
as naked human monstrosities, exactly alike in frame and limbs, and
with all indications as to sex, save Eve's long tresses and Adam's
beard, carefully suppressed,[18] what can be concluded from all this
irrefutable and unimpeachable evidence?
When he finds the Gothic type of figure growing ever more tenuous,
ever more emaciated and more sickly as the centuries roll on; when
he hears of a Byzantine canon of the eleventh century in which the
human body is actually declared to be a monstrosity measuring nine
heads; when he finds strength and manhood gradually departing
from the faces and the limbs of the men, and an expression of
tender sentiment, culminating in puling sentimentality becoming the
rule; finally, when he stands opposite Segna's appalling picture of
"Christ on the Cross" at the National Gallery; what, under these
circumstances, is he to say, save that he is here concerned with an
art which is antagonistic and hostile to beauty, to Life and the world?
For the qualities of this art, qua art, although they never once attain
to the excellence of Ruler-Art, are sometimes exceedingly great.
With Meier Graefe I should be willing to agree that there has been
no real style since the Gothic,[19] or certainly not one that can claim
anything like such general distribution. And, if it had not been for the
fact that the more the paradox at the root of Christian doctrine was
realized, the more paradoxical it appeared—a fact which called forth
the energies of scores of apologists, commentators, and
dialecticians, and which made pictures retain to the very end a
rhetorical, persuasive, and therefore more or less realistic manner,
sometimes assisted (more especially towards the close of the Middle
Ages) by almost lyrical ornament and charm; there is no saying to
what simple power Christian art might not have attained. For behind
it were all the conditions which go to produce the greatest artistic
achievements.
As a style, apart from its subject—or content beauty; as the
manifestation of a mighty will—who can help admiring this art of
Christianity? If only its ideal had been a possible one, and one which
would have required no rhetoric, seduction, or emotional oratory,
accompanied by the ringing of all the precious metals, to support it
until the end; it might have ascended to the highest pinnacle of art
in simplicity, restraint and order. Into simplicity, however, it was
never able to develop, while its constant need of explaining made it
to the very last retain more or less realism in the presentation of its
ideal type.

[7] On this point see Kraus, Geschichte der christlichen Kunst, Vol.
I, pp. 41, 46 et seq. Muther, Geschichte der Malerei, Vol. I, p. 13.
Woltmann and Woermann, History of Painting, Vol. I. pp. 151-
156. Paul Lacroix, Les Arts au Moyen Age et à l'Epoque de la
Renaissance (Ed. 1877, Paris), p. 254.
[8] See J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, The History of Painting
in Italy (Ed. 1903), Vol. I, p. 4. Woltmann and Woermann, op.
cit., Vol. I, p. 156.
[9] Woltmann and Woermann, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 156.
[10] J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, op. cit., pp. 14, 15.
[11] For a discussion of the material causes of the change of
type, see Milman, op. cit.. Vol. IX, p. 324.
[12] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 24, 25.
[13] Woltmann and Woermann, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 185.
[14] Woltmann and Woermann, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 230.
[15] See an interesting discussion on the early Christian attitude
towards art in Kraus, Geschichte der christlichen Kunst, Vol. I, pp.
58 et seq. See also Milman's conclusions on the subject, History
of Latin Christianity, Vol. II, pp. 345, 346.
[16] See his letter to Leo the Isaurian, quoted by Milman, op. cit.,
Vol. II, pp. 358-361. See also the Rev. J. S. Black's article on
"Images" in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Edition).
[17] The Rev. J. S. Black says, in his article on "Images," above
referred to, that even as early as the fourth or fifth centuries
there is evidence of the tendency to enlist art in the service of the
Church, while Woltmann and Woermann (op. cit., Vol. I, p. 167)
quote the following instance: "When St. Nilus (A.D. 450) was
consulted about the decoration of a church, he rejected as
childish and unworthy the intended design of plants, birds,
animals, and a number of crosses, and desired the interior to be
adorned with pictures from the Old and New Testaments, with the
same motive that Gregory II expressed afterwards...."
[18] Kraus seems to be of the opinion that this suppression of
primary sexual characteristics in paintings was not at all
uncommon in the Middle Ages. See Geschichte der christlichen
Kunst, Vol. II, p. 280.
[19] Modern Art, Vol. I, p. 24.
 3. The Gothic Building and Sentiment.

But the hierarchy of the Church, although it left no doubt in the

minds of its followers as to the genuine type which was the
apotheosis of Christian values, was nevertheless unable completely
to impose its culture upon the barbarians under its sway. And soon,
somewhere towards the end of the twelfth century, there began to
appear in Europe, in things that did not seem to matter from the
moral or didactic standpoint, a certain uncouth and uncultured spirit,
which showed to what extent the despotic rule of Rome was
beginning to be flouted.
In architecture, which, like music, has for some reason or other
always seemed to Europeans to be less intimately connected with
the thought and will of man than the graphic arts, an un-Catholic
spirit was preparing its road to triumph. When I say un-Catholic, I
mean emancipated from the law and order of the Universal Church.
[20] And in the Gothic edifice, from its early stages to its
development into the flamboyant style, all the impossibilities, all the
terrible self-immolations imposed by the Christian ideal upon man,
begin to make themselves openly felt.
Now churches begin to tower aloft into heights undreamt of
heretofore. Huge columns spring heavenwards, bearing up a roof
that seems almost ethereal because it is so high. Spires are thrust
right into the very breasts of clouds, and acres are covered by
constructions which, mechanically speaking, are alive. Kicks from the
vaulted arches against the hollowed-out walls below, necessitate
counter-kicks; buttresses and flying buttresses strive and struggle
against the crushing pressure of the stone or brick skies of these
fantastic architectural feats. All the parts of this mass of stone on
baked clay are at loggerheads and at variance with each other, and
their strife never ceases.
Typical of the contest going on within the body of the mediæval
Christian, and the vain aspirations of his soul, the lofty buildings are
also symbolic of the discord and lack of equilibrium which, as Lübke
says, Christianity introduced into man's relations to Nature and to
himself. And when we find the columns of these buildings carved
and moulded to look like groups of pillars embracing each other to
gain strength, the salient parts of the construction grooved and
striped, and the extremities of the clustered pillars spreading after
the manner of a fan, over our heads; we are amazed at the manner
in which mass and volume have been volatilized, spiritualized, and
apparently dissipated.
Elsewhere, too, there is variegated glass, gigantic filigree work,
festive decoration, as elaborated as that of a queen or a bride;
infinite grandeur and infinite littleness.[21] The ornament is nervous
and excited, festoons, trefoils, gables, gargoyles and niches, all
thrust themselves at you; all strive for individual effect, individual
attention, and individual value, with a restlessness and an
importunacy which knows no limits; until your eyes, bewildered and
dazzled by the jutting, projecting and budding details, and out-
startled by surprise, instinctively drop at last, and perhaps close in a
paroxysm of despair, before the High Altar.[22]
This was the germ of Protestantism in stone. Long before Martin
Luther burned the Papal Bull in the market-place of Wittenberg, the
elements of Protestantism had already found expression in Gothic
architecture. True the Pagan and Catholic spirit was still sufficiently
master to dominate them, just as it did the heretics, by a
tremendous force of style; but they are nevertheless present, and it
is in this architecture, if we choose to seek it, that we shall find, at
once, all the beauty, all the ugliness, and all the incompatible
elements of the Christian ideal.
Its beauty and the fact for which we ought to be grateful to it, is,
that by its one-sided and earnest advocacy of the spiritual in man, it
extended the domain of his spirit over an area so much greater than
that which had been covered theretofore, that only now can it be
said that he knows exactly where he stands and who he is. Its
ugliness lies in its contempt of the body and of Life; and its
incompatible elements are its negation of Life and the necessary
attitude of affirmation towards Life which all living creatures are
bound to assume.
If, however, the above description of the Gothic may seem unfair,
hear what one of the greatest friends of the Gothic has said on the
subject!
John Ruskin, in the early days of the last half of the nineteenth
century, wrote as follows—
"I believe that the characteristic or moral elements of the Gothic are
the following, placed in order of their importance: (1) Savageness,
(2) Changefulness, (3) Naturalism, (4) Grotesqueness, (5) Rigidity,
(6) Redundance."[23]
He speaks of it as being "instinct with work of an imagination as wild
and wayward as the Northern Sea";[24] lays stress upon its
rudeness,[25] and declares that it is that strange disquietude of the
Gothic spirit— that is its greatness,"that restlessness of the dreaming
mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers
feverishly around, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied."[26]
In fact, in no instance could the saying, "preserve me from my own
friends," be more aptly applied than in Ruskin's defence of the
Gothic. For Ruskin was a conscientious student, and things which
even enemies of his subject would be likely to overlook, he brings
forward proudly and ingenuously, like a truculent mother presenting
an ugly child to a friend, and with a broad smile in his forcible prose
which sometimes throws even the experienced reader quite off his
guard.
Hippolyte Taine speaks of the people of the Middle Ages as being
possessed of delicate and over-excited imaginations, of morbid fancy
unto whom vivid sensation—manifold, changing, bizarre and
extreme —are necessary. In referring to their taste in ornament, he
says, "It is the adornment of a nervous, over-excited woman, similar
to the extravagant costumes of the day, whose delicate and morbid
poesy denotes by its excess the singular sentiments, the feverish,
violent, and impotent aspiration peculiar to an age of knights and
monks."[27]

The Canon of Polycleitus (Rome)

And if you think of the physical and spiritual operations they had
been made to undergo, you will not feel very much inclined to
question these conclusions. It must not be supposed that the canon
of Polycletus, measuring seven heads, was transformed into the
Byzantine canon, measuring nine heads, without some one's
suffering—even though it took centuries to effect the change. It
must not be believed that the calm Pagan idea of death was
converted into the Christian terror of death without the sacrifice of
something; nor must these emaciated, careworn, and neurotic faces
in Mediæval paintings be conceived as mere inventions of morbid
phantasy. The deeds of the body are not mortified through the Spirit
with impunity. Such brilliant achievements have their accounts to
pay, and the Church never once deceived itself or its followers as to
what was paying, what was suffering, or where the amputations and
vivisections were taking place.
Look at the type of which the monks approved! Examine it in
Cimabue's, Duccio's, Segna's and the Cologne painters' pictures.
Examine it in the tapestry of Berne, known as the "Adoration of the
Kings"; look at it in countless stained glass windows, and see its
repetition in hundreds of illuminated manuscripts, some of which,
like the Latin missal of the Church of St. Bavon at Ghent, and the
Lives of the Saints by Simeon Metaphrasi, have found their way into
the British Museum.
Then ask yourself whether or not humanity was suffering in
conforming itself to this holy creed. "Like those mothers," says
Lecky, "who govern their children by persuading them that the dark
is crowded with spectres that' will seize the disobedient, and who
often succeed in creating an association of ideas which the adult
man is unable altogether to dissolve, the Catholic priests, by making
the terrors of death for centuries the nightmare of the imagination,
resolved to base their power upon the nerves."[28]
And, now that all this is known and realized, what is the meaning of
the Renaissance, what is its explanation?
[20] Speaking of Gothic buildings in general, Fergusson, in A
History of Architecture, Vol. I, p. 41, says: "It is in Nature's
highest works that we find the symmetry of proportion most
prominent. When we descend to the lower types of animals we
find we lose it to a great extent, and among trees and vegetables
generally find it only in a far less degree, and sometimes miss it
altogether. In the mineral kingdom among rocks and stones it is
altogether absent. So universal is this principle in Nature that we
may safely apply it to our criticism on art, and say that a building
is perfect as a whole in proportion to its motived regularity, and
departs from the highest type in the ratio in which symmetrical
arrangement is neglected. It may, however, be incorrect to say
that an oak-tree is a less perfect work of creation than a human
body, but it is certain that a picturesque group of Gothic buildings
may be as perfect as the stately regularity of an Egyptian or
classic temple; but if it is so, it is equally certain that it belongs to
a lower and inferior class of design." Page 34: "The revival of the
rites and ceremonies of the Mediæval Church, our reverent love of
our own national antiquities, and our admiration of the rude but
vigorous manhood of the Middle Ages, all have combined to
repress the classical element, both in our literature and in our art,
and to exalt in their place Gothic feelings and Gothic art to an
extent which cannot be justified on any grounds of reasonable
criticism."

[21] See Hippolyte Taine, On the Nature of the Work of Art

(translated by John Durand), pp. 130, 131, 132, 133, 134.
[22] Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 14, 15, says, speaking
of the Gothic: "What a contrast to the quiet, sober masses of the
Romanesque style ...! Here, on the other hand, everything thrusts
itself into prominence, everything strives for outward effect,
everything endeavours to work out its individuality with spirit and
energy. ... At the choir ... a positive sense of disquiet and
confusion is produced, which may indeed excite the fancy, but
cannot satisfy the sense of beauty."
[23] On the Nature of Gothic Architecture (1854), p. 4.
[24] On the Nature of Gothic Architecture, p. 6.
[25] Ibid., p. 11.
[26] Ibid., p. 19.
[27] On the Nature of the Work of Art, pp. 131-33, 134.
[28] History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne,
Vol. I, p. 211.
 4. The Renaissance.

The Renaissance, in its early stages, at least, was a period neither of

pure realism nor of classicalism; it was neither a revival of learning
nor a revival of antiquity. These words are mere euphemisms, mere
drawing-room phrases. For, at its inception, the Renaissance was
nothing more nor less than man's convalescence, after an illness
that had lasted centuries. It was his first walk into the open, after
leaving his bed and his sick-room.
According to the Nietzschean doctrine of art, this realism of Van
Eyck, of Van der Weyden, Quintin Massys, Donatello, Pisanello,
Masolino, Ucello and others ought to disgust you. It is not art, or if it
is, its rank is inferior. Why, then, does it claim attention? Why is it far
superior to the realism of the present day, despite some appallingly
ugly features?[29]
It is superior only in this sense, that it is the work of convalescents.
After they had been laid on the rack in the attempt to stretch their
limbs and bodies to infinity, you must not be surprised that these
men could only limp along. How could they be expected to walk
majestically and with grace? That they could stand at all was a
mercy. That they were able to hobble along as they did was a
triumph.
To expect these recovering invalids to impart something of
themselves to Life, to enrich her and to transfigure her, would be to
expect the impossible. But if you applaud them at all, applaud them
for their recovery, for the fact that it is well that they can give us
even drabby reality as it is. Do not congratulate them yet on their
health. For their realism, as realism, is as hopeless, as uninteresting
and as unelevating as any realism ever was and ever will be.
It is deceptive, too, for what seem to be beauties in their pictures
are borrowed from such of their predecessors of the late Gothic
period as were already overloading their pictures with ornamental
art forms, in order to disguise the ugliness of the type they
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