FullReads

This is how Vasari has shown us Perugino. The unique painter of archangels and seraphs appears a base commercial speculator, a cynic, an atheist: the sort of man whom you could imagine transfigured into a shabby pettifogging Faustus, triumphing over the fiend by making over to him, in return for solid ducats, a bond mortgaging a soul which he knew himself never to have possessed. Some people may say, as learned folk are forever saying now-a-days, that all this is pure slander on the part of Vasari; and indeed, what satisfactory historical villain shall we soon possess, at the rate of present learned rehabilitations? Be this as it may, there remains for the present the typical contrast between this man and his works; and looking at it, other contrasts between noble art and grovelling artists vaguely occur to us, and we ask ourselves, Can it be? Can a pure and exquisite work be produced by a base nature? Can such anomaly exist–must the mental product not be stained by the vileness of the mind which has conceived it? Must we, together with a precious and noble gift taken from a hand we should shrink from touching, accept the disheartening, the debasing conclusion, that in art purity may spring from foulness, and the excellent be born of the base? It is a conclusion from which we instinctively shrink, feeling, rather than absolutely understanding, that it seems to strip the holiness from art, the worthiness, nay, almost the innocence, from our enjoyment. We feel towards any beautiful work of art something akin to love: a sort of desire to absorb it into our soul, to raise ourselves to it, to be with it in some manner united; and thus the mere thought that all this may be sprung from out of unworthiness, that this noble century-enduring work may be the sister of who knows how many long dead base thoughts and desires and resolves born together with it in the nature of its maker–this idea of contamination of origin, makes us shudder and suspect…. Alas, how many of us, of the better and nobler of us, have not often sickened for a moment as the thought quivered across their mind of the foulness out of which the noblest of our art has arisen. But instinctively we have struck down the half-formulated idea as we dash away any suspicion against that which we love, and which our love tells us must be good. And thus, as a rule, we have persuaded ourselves that, though by a horrible fatality our greatest art–in sculpture, and painting, and music, and poetry, has oftenest belonged not to a simple and austere state of society, to the strong manly days of Greece or Rome, to the first times of Christian abnegation and martyrdom, to the childlike angelic revival of mediaeval Christianity, to the solemn self-concentration of Huguenot France or Puritan England, that it has not sprung out of the straightforward purity of periods of moral regeneration, but rather from out of the ferment, nay, the putrescence, of many-sided, perplexed, anomalous times of social dissolution. That although our greatest art seems thus undeniably to have arisen in corrupt times, yet the individuals to whom we proximately owe have been the nobler and purer of their day. Nay, we almost persuade ourselves that in those dubious times of doubt and dissolution, the spotless, the unshaken were in a way divinely selected, like so many vestal virgins, to cherish in isolation the holy fire of art. And we call up to our minds men noble and pure, like Michael Angelo and Beethoven: we eagerly treasure up like relics anecdotes showing the gentleness and generosity of men like Lionardo and Mozart: trifling tales of caged-birds let loose, or of poor fellow-workers assisted, which, in our desire to trace art back to a noble origin, seem to shed so much light upon the production of a great picture or great symphony. And yet, even as the words leave our lips, words so sincerely consoling, we seem to catch in our voice an unintentional inflexion of deriding scepticism. So much light! these tales of mere ordinary goodness, such as we might hear (did we care) of so many a dull and blundering artisan, or vacant idler, these tales shed so much light upon the production of great works of art! A sort of reasoning devil seems to possess us, to twitch our little morsels of unreasoned consolation, of sanctifying, mystical half-reasoning away from our peace-hungry souls. And he says: “What of Perugino? What of so many undeniable realities which this Perugino of ours, even if the purest myth, so completely typifies? How did this cynic, this atheist, come to paint these saints? You say that he was no cynic, no atheist, that it is all vile slander.” Well, I won’t dispute that: perhaps he was a saint after all. I will even grant that he was. But in return for the concession, let us examine whether the saints could not have been equally well painted by the traditional, unrehabilitated Perugino, Vasari’s Perugino–not the real one, oh no, I will admit not the real one–by the typical Perugino; the man “of exceeding little religion, who could never be got to believe in the soul’s immortality; nay, with arguments suited to his porphyry intellect, obstinately refused all good paths; who placed all his hopes in the goods of fortune and for money would have consented to any evil compact.” Nay, even by a Perugino a good deal worse.