Page:Woman in Art.djvu/71

 CHAPTER VIII

Decoration In Painting. Sibyls, Muses, and Virtues. Roman Ideas Absorbed from the Greek. Concerning the Birth of Genius. Frescoes by Raphael. Ideal Woman In Modern Decoration.

To whatever age, tribe, or country we look for the beginnings of art, we find symbolic decorations. It has been practiced by all peoples in response to universal instinct. Decoration needs a motif, a subject or figure singly or in repetition, be it to grace the family soup bowl of the aborigine, or to add a fearsome and compelling expression to his copper countenance. Or it may be six or eight wave lines around his sun-baked clay jug or bowl to indicate its use for water; or it may be the egg and dart, egg and dart motif used by the early Greeks and by Americans of today.

During the Middle Ages, when Greek art lay buried in Roman graves and forgetfulness, many a monk or hermit spent his time and eyesight drawing and painting borders and capital letters of hand-written vellum books.

The period of the Renaissance represents a seed-sowing that, ripening, had like flowers of forest and field scattered the vital seed broadcast with compelling innate force. So was Europe seeded for art and a broader civilization.

Objective decorations signify observation, a mental development, as the form of hut or tent, lion or hawk, of lotus or lizard. Subjective decoration implies thought—a higher mentality. Hence the master painters (and not a few would-be masters) have enriched the world with Sibyls, Muses, Virtues, and hours of the day and night in forms of female loveliness. Wisdom has been represented by a strong-featured woman of sincere countenance acquiring more wisdom from scroll or open book. Faith with uplifted eyes has clasped the cross to her heart, as Christianity has threaded its troubled way through the developing era of faith. Charity has been nursing babes through various centuries and schools of art to this twentieth century. Music with lute and lyre would seem to turn the dissonant into concord. Love continues to be the mischievous Cupid (or stupid) with bow and quiver lurking somewhere, aiming, or letting the arrow fly at random, watching as womanhood plucks his dart from her wounded heart. Such symbols have given the world exquisite art. Such, too, have shown the appreciation or desire for perfection in woman, so that man has anticipated the future of the race and made his idealism bud and bloom in angel form, humans with the ethereal element suggested by wing 51