MEDIEVAL ART SCHOOLS.*

IN his preface to this short history, Mr. Ruskin remarks that his editorship is no mere compliment to the author, and says " I hold myself entirely responsible in main points for the accuracy of the views advanced, and I wish the work to be received by those who have confidence in my former teaching as an extension and appli- cation of the parts of it which I have felt to be incomplete." We must, therefore, attach importance to the Art views put forward in an otherwise not very remarkable little book, which claims to set before those who have not time for deeper studies a short history of the Art Schools of Christendom, from the earliest days of the Church down to the time of Titian and Tintoret. Commencing with the carvings and paintings in the Catacombs, we trace from them to the early basilicas and churches, the growth of sacred symbols, and con- * The An Scheele of Mediaval Christendom. By A.. C. Owen. Edited by J. Buskin. London : Mozley and Smith. wentional representations of religious and mystical subjects, growing into Byzantine art and architecture. We then come to the Lombard carvers, who infused a new life of Northern gro- tesque into the dead, conventional grace of Byzantine decoration, and laid the foundation of Gothic architecture. In the next chapter, we arrive at the real awakening of art, with the Pisan .sculptors and architects, Niccola and Giovanni Pisano, and Arnolfo del Cambio (1205). And now painting itself springs into life, with the Tuscan schools of Siena and Florence, the former including Simone Memmi and others (1285), the latter Giotto, Cimabue, and the Gaddi (1240). Then comes (according to Miss Owen) the dawn of the Renaissance with Orcagna (1329), Ghiberti Massaccio, and others ; followed in the next chapter, by the Florentine monks, Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo .Lippi, with their followers, Benozzo Gozzoli and Sandro Botticelli"Two antagonistic schools of art were thus founded in Florence in the fifteenth century," says Miss Owen ; " out of one, sensuous in its moral tendency, pagan in intellectual sym- pathies, growing Renaissance art,—and out of the spirituality and -quiet imagination of the other, the Umbrian schooL" From this point Miss Owen divides the sheep from the goats, condemning more or less heavily all those artists whom she considers "pagan in intellectual sympathies," &c., not merely as moralists, which we should not mind, but as artists also. This we know to be sissentially Mr. Ruskin's point of view, and from this we must venture to differ, even with so great a teacher as Mr. Ruskin, though we do so with the less diffidence, that the question has been fully considered from our -point of view by an authority equal to Mr. Ruskin himself ; we mean by Mr. Poynter, the London Slade Professor, in his lecture on " Old Art and New," at the Royal Institution, in May, 1872.

Leaving this question for the present, to return to Miss Owen, we are taken to Germany and the school of the Van Eycks, where the tendency to "realism" and " materialism " again crops out, to reach its worst point in poor Holbein, who is almost entirely reprobated for the Protestant feeling and consequent "irreligion" of his works. Albert Diirer and the Nurnberg sculptors are fortunately on the right side. We return to Italy in the days of Savonarola, and the men over whom he exercised great influence, including Luca della Robbia, Perngino, and Fra Bartolomeo. Michel Angelo might also come amongst these, but he has two chapters to himself, pre- ceded by one devoted to Raffaelle, and followed by one on Venice, with which the book closes. On Raffaelle and Michel Angelo at last and not least rests the burden of leading art to ruin ; on Michel Angelo most, for leading Raffaelle to stray _further from the old path of religious art than himself. What we understand Miss Owen to say, is, that the only true art was pro- duced by the men who received in simple faith what the Church taught them,and represented that all the better for not being able to join the " spiritual " to an intrinsically beautiful " visible ; " and that when by the discovery of Greek art the idea of beauty in the human form for its own sake began to be prevalent, together with wider views in philosophy and religion, the power of repre- senting the physical "crushed the spiritual sense" in Michel Angelo. Now we believe that, right and noble as was the work and the faith of the early Masters, it was only so for them, and that it was impossible (even if it would have been beneficial) for those who came after to remain on the same ground. To Michel Angelo was opened a far wider field of knowledge and thought than to Giotto, and it could not but appear in his work. He was the _culminating point of the past epoch, and it was not his fault if the artists who came after failed, because they tried to imitate his manner without the inspiration of ideas like his.

What we have most to complain of in Miss Owen's book is the narrowness of her doctrine that Art was good as long as it ex- pressed one theological faith, but that it was immediately the worse for expressing other beliefs, however genuine. Thus, ()magus's " Last Judgment " is praised for representing truly, according to the doctrines of the Church, that " awful event," which Michel Angelo is condemned for representing " with vio- lence and extravagance of gesture." Holbein, again, is rebuked for shrinking from the representation of the terrors of Judgment,which Michel Angelo is rebuked for representing with too great power. It comes, therefore, to this,—" Your art is good, if I agree with the theological ideas you express by it." It is hardly needful to say that all paintings not illustrative of Scriptural subjects are utterly ignored, or merely mentioned as signs of degeneracy in the artists who made them. Holbein is considered to have lowered art, because he bad more feeling for the human than for the supernatural, and also because he was an enemy of the Church of

Rome. His "Dance of Death" expresses only " morbid satisfac- tion in the equality of death, and its triumph over the tyranny of the strong." Holbein's engravings may express those ideas, but

certainlynot those only. Even while admitting the corruption of the Church of Rome, Miss Owen condemns Protestantism for rejecting

and wishing to destroy religious art, not seeming to see that it was impossible for the Reformers, in the midst of the struggle with the tyranny and wickedness of the Church, to appreciate the good that there was in the Art which was bound up with them. Greek art is not forgiven to this day (by Miss Owen and others) for being imbued with the evils of Paganism, against which Christianity had to battle for its life, and therefore no art was possible to Christianity till it was firmly enough established in the world to create its own. In like manner, Protestantism could not accept the art of the enemy it was contending with, nor could it create a new one, till it had made sure of its own exist- ence. Now that the struggle of Protestantism has established a wider and more liberal feeling in matters of religion, may not the time have come for it also to develop a new art, which shall in- clude the best elements of the earlier Art ? As Michel Angelo united the Greek and the Mediaeval, cannot we, "the heirs of all the ages," following in the steps of that master, express the faith that is in us,—the faith, that is, that true art is for all humanity, regardless of minor details of sectarian dogma ? As the old painters represented the lives of the saints and martyrs of one Church, may not we represent the lives or embody the teaching of the saints and martyrs of all Churches, all who have in any way contributed to the progress of the race ? All these could group themselves round the one teacher whose life and

doctrine are to us the highest, and who taught that to his fol- lowers nothing should be "common or unclean." If this is true, we need not be afraid, like Miss Owen, of the school of art thus quaintly described by Mr. Browning, in his Old Pictures in Florence :— " When Greek Art ran and reached the goal, Thus much had the world to boast in fructu,—

The truth of man as by God first spoken, Which the actual generations garble, Was renttered, and Soul (which Limbs betoken) And Limbs (Soul informs) made new in marble ;"

or confine our attention, as she would have us, to the other,-

" On which, I conclude that the early painters,

To cries of Greek Art, and what more wish you?'

Replied, To become new self-acquainters, And paint man, man, whatever the issue; Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, New fears aggrandise the rags and tatters ; To bring the invisible full into play, Let the visible go to the dogs,—what matters?'"

It was because Michel Angelo gave the " visible " equal im- portance with the "invisible," thus, to our mind, increasing ten- fold the power of the latter, that Miss Owen (and Mr. Ruskin)

cannot forgive him.

We wish we had space to meet Miss Owen's attacks on Raffaelle's Cartoons, especially where she complains of " Paul preaching at Athens," for not expressing the fact that the Resur-

rection is the subject of his discourse, which could hardly be shown without putting the words in writing, coming out of his mouth. We must dismiss the book with a caution to the young people for whom it is intended not to be carried away by its sentiments, but to study, if possible, the works of the Masters, in order to try and form for themselves a just estimate of the ideas they intended to express, and of the justice or injustice of Miss Owen's criticism.