Page:Woman in Art.djvu/83

WOMAN IN ART "I have not given up art," she said, "but am modeling a perfectly good husband, and moulding two dear little daughters and a son to help in the uplift of their generation." Her art, too, is developing.

Here we have responsibility converted into privilege, and the future will reap a harvest because of her love and her art.

The critic above quoted concerning good and bad art concluded with the following: "Woman, as she values her own soul, should never debase herself to even semi-uncover herself in public, because it lessens her power—her spirit-power over man, and the man (and no less the child) who does not appreciate the modesty of womanhood is unworthy the name ."

We need to remember that the perfection of the physical beauty of a work of art is always in proportion to its moral beauty.

Titian painted a picture that seems to be an allegory of this very theme. He called it "Sacred and Profane Love," but has left it for everyone to decide according to his notion. Critics have read it forward and backward, but always with difficulty of interpretation. There is no hesitancy concerning its value as a work of art; that is $200,000. If you care for a personal reading, I should say: Titian, the master of color, has depicted the influence of the two loves that knock at the human heart. To which does the child Innocence belong?

Thus far saints, sinners, sibyls, and angels have appeared draped. The law of the church forbade the exposing of the person in ecclesiastical paintings, but with more of allegory and personifying of the subjective the unseen, the imaginary, the nude was more often seen, and the subjects named were most fittingly expressed by the delicacy of tint, vanishing shadows, curves and lines of the human form. It is the ethereal that inhabits "this all too solid flesh" that the artist feels and endeavors to catch; but spirit is ephemeral.

A few illustrations in contrast will illumine what has already been said. It is doubtful if any young person has stepped into the Rubens Gallery in Paris without an instinctive shrinking at finding himself or herself in the presence of partly nude women. The Medician Queen of France was the voluptuous type of woman that could pose for all phases of her royal existence in jewels and gems, with a mere suggestion of costly fabric somewhere in proximity—it mattered little if it had any use beyond costliness and color.

Peter Paul Rubens, accustomed to the well-clothed, substantial type of the women of Flanders, visited Italy, especially Venice, where he became enamored of light and color, sunshine and pigment, and the flesh tones from such past masters as Gentile Bellini, Luini, Guido Reni, and Titian; returning to his cloudy 61