Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/19



If we follow, in the history of painting, the attitude of artists of different epochs and nations toward their art, if we consider what is to them more essential: painting itself or the ideas painting conveys, we notice two fundamental currents in artistic activity. One has sprung from an exclusive quest for beauty, the source of the other is the desire to impress, by means of painting, something amusing, or instructive, or denunciatory. Some artists gave expression in their works to their sentiment of beauty without any doctrinaire motive whatsoever; others used painting as a mere auxiliary for the purpose of expressing ideas of a completely non-artistic order. In the latter case painting was domineered by literature, philosophy, and religion; it played a subsidiary rôle.

Sometimes, however, these currents flowed together. In times of intense religious fervour, or in the art of isolated religious individuals the quest for beauty in painting mingled inseparably with the expression of their religious and philosophical views. It is in such epochs and by such men that there were created the