British Painting [antikvár]

BRITISH PAINTING i. BRITISH PAINTING BEFORE HOGARTH Mediaeval Europe has handed down to posterity a vast and extraordinary record of its ideals, its aspirations, its complex attitudes of mind. Some of the loveliest and strangest buildings ever conceived, some of the most precious illuminated books, some of the most painstaking manifestations of craftsmanship in the world were produced during the vaguely defined period which we call mediaeval. What is remarkable is that the whole of Europe seems to have been almost equally productive. True, in Central Europe the artistic heritage is not as rich as elsewhere, but Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, France and England were all equally responsive to the inner spirit that produced the cathedrals of Durham and Canterbury, Chartres and Amiens, the churches of S. Trophime in Aries, of San Zeno in Verona, of Monreale in Sicily. If, today, one tried to match this list with a list of modern structures, one would have to name the Woolworth building, the Rockefeller Centre in New York, and their kind; or in the eighteenth century the great palaces of Versailles or Blenheim. The outpouring, the creative energy has never ceased, but it has changed its nature. Once it had a single root—the Church ; later it had a hundred, and they have the names of kings or noblemen ; today they commemorate the names of millionaires. It is that gathering of all human creative energy round the central pillar of the Church that gives the Middle Ages so definite and so universal a flavour. Whatever political significance national boundaries may have had, culturally they were negligible. Therefore a history of British art, however brief, is bound to begin with an acknowledgment that British art, indeed, National art, as such, did not begin to exist until Ecclesiastical art had begun to decline. Certainly there was plenty of art in Britain in the Middle Ages, and certainly it had its own character. There is nothing in Europe to match Durham Cathedral: there is no embroidery quite so fine as the Syon cope, but both are, so to speak, artistically in the suburbs of the Vatican, whereas a picture by Hogarth is, artistically, in the heart of London. None the less, if this book were concerned with British architecture, the great cathedrals of England would require a long and very serious chapter to themselves. As it is concerned with British painting and the genesis of the British tradition of painting, I can afford to be brief. For although painters in mediaeval England were no less busy and no less talented than elsewhere in Europe, what remains of mediaeval English 7