Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/200

184 heavens and new earths of artistic sensibility. But we may equally well detest the whole mushroom growth of those academicians of the extravagant who attempt to mask the incurable poverty and emptiness of their tiny souls through the repetition of facile semblances. And in the presence of this cheap pretentiousness those who cling to the truth feel the need of drawing close to something more vital. Soffici goes back to the art of the folk; Carrà, through Giotto and Paolo Uccello, resumes the tradition of precise volume and refined color; De Chirico discovers in the architecture of old Italian piazze and in the solid masses of life a field for painting in the grand style of the seventeenth century.

Spadini has had no such experience. He has not felt the need of returning to the true Italian tradition—he had never left it. He has never had the craving for perilous adventure, has never been attracted by the cerebral ingenuity of those theorists whose work has so often turned out to be an object of ephemeral curiosity, undeserving of the name of painting. He has never left reality, nor the Italian method of representing reality. No startling discoveries, but no betrayals and no weaknesses. He has never played the cubist nor the futurist; neither has he let himself be led aside, like so many of his contemporaries, by the preceding fashions, by the imitation (often fruitful, to be sure) of a Stuck or