Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/436

412 functorily upon its decorative jewelled marvels, its pictorial reliefs, wrought after the plague of 1348 from the pious legacies of the dead or the thank-offerings of the survivors. The marble gleams in the immortal inactive beauty that is its own end—but where are the hope and the faith, the mourning and the anguish upon which it was launched? Ebbed to the eternal silence, like that great wave of popular rejoicing on which Cimabue's Madonna was carried to S. Maria Novella, or a picture of Duccio's to its due church in Siena. Can it be that Art, launched always upon a sea of emotion, is only its true self when stranded high and dry upon the beach?

Cimabue's Madonna, which caused the Florentine quarter to be rechristened Allegro Borgo, now takes its place coldly in the history of painting as the link between the Byzantine and the Tuscan, and the art-critic analyzes its types and composition. But the citizen of the Joyous Quarter had the true flavor of the thing.

If one were to regard the naïveté and forget the sweet simplicity, there is much in the mediaeval world that one would relegate to the merely absurd. The masterpieces of Art have been sufficiently described. What a book remains to be written upon its grotesques.

The word is said to derive from the arabesques found in grottos; those fantastic combinations of the vegetable and animal worlds by which the art of Islam avoided the representation of the real. But by the art of Christendom the grotesque was achieved with no such conscientious search after the unreal. Nor have I in mind its first fumblings, its crudities of the catacombs, its naivetes of the missal and the music-book, its Byzantine paintings with their wooden figures and gold embroidery. I am not even thinking of those early masters, whose defects of draughtsmanship were balanced by a delicious primitive poetry, which makes a Sienese Madonna almost preferable to a Raphael. The early mosaics of St. Mark's are more desirable than the sixteenth-century work that has replaced them. The grotesque lies deeper than unscientific drawing; it mingles even with the work of the most scholarly Masters, and springs from the absence of a sense of history or a sense of humor. That the gospel incidents should be depicted in Italian landscape and with Italian costumes was perhaps not unnatural, since every nation remakes the Christ in its own image,—psychologically when not physically; but how is it possible to tolerate proud Venetian Senators at "The Ascension of Christ"? It is true, sacred subjects had become a mere background for lay portraits, but what absence of perspective!

It would be an interesting excursion to trace the steps by which the objective conception of a picture—true to its own time and place—was reached, or the evolution by which singleness of subject was substituted for exuberance of episodes and ideas.

There is a kind of symbolism which may be called the shorthand of primitive art, and which may be studied in the archaic mosaics of St. Mark's. Egypt dwindles to a gate (as though it and not Turkey were the Porte), Alexandria is expressed by its Pharos. Trees stand for the Mount of Olives. There is much of the rebus in these primitive representations. The Byzantine symbolism of St. Mark's reaches its most curious climax in the representation of the four rivers that watered the Biblical Garden of Eden by classical River Gods. The palm-branch as the shorthand for martyrdom is a more congruous convention. In a Venetian painting ascribed to Carpaccio, Bethlehem is spelt by palm-trees and a queer beast tied to one—probably meant for a camel.

The advent of the camel, indeed, marks the faint beginnings of an historic and geographic sense, and stands for all the fantastic wonder-world of the East. Strange that the Crusades should not have earlier awakened the comparative consciousness. But the East, with its quaintness and its barbaric color, broke very slowly upon the culture of Europe—Victor Hugo had to rediscover it even for modern France. The camel of Italian art represents the first strivings for local color, and a fearsome monster it is. But suggestion, not draughtsmanship, was the painter's aim, and a people without circuses was not keenly aware of the anatomical details of this exotic beast, grotesque enough at his truest. The