CHAPTER XX
THE ÆSTHETIC SENTIMENT
The study of the art of an epoch remains incomplete unless we try to ascertain also how this art was appreciated by contemporaries: what they admired in it, and by what standards they gauged beauty. Now, there are few subjects about which tradition is so defective as the æsthetic sentiment of past ages. The faculty and the need of expressing in words the sentiment of beauty have only been developed in recent times. What sort of admiration for the art of their time was felt by the men of the fifteenth century? Speaking generally, we may assert that two things impressed them especially: first, the dignity and sanctity of the subject; next, the astonishing mastery, the perfectly natural rendering of all the details. Thus we find, on the one hand, an appreciation which is rather religious than artistic; on the other hand, a naïve wonder, hardly entitled to rank as artistic emotion. The first to leave us critical observations on the painting of the brothers Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden was a Genoese man of letters, of the middle of the fifteenth century, Bartolomeo Fazio. Most of the pictures he speaks of are lost. He praises the beautiful and chaste figure of a Virgin, the hair of the archangel Gabriel, “surpassing real hair,” the holy austerity expressed by the ascetic face of Saint John the Baptist, and a Saint Jerome who “seems to be alive.” He admires the perspective of the cell of Jerome, a ray of light falling through a fissure, drops of sweat on the body of a woman in a bath, an image reflected by a mirror, a burning lamp, a landscape with mountains, woods, villages, castles, human figures, the distant horizon, and, once again, the mirror. The terms he uses to vent his enthusiasm betray merely a naïve curiosity, losing itself in the unlimited wealth of details, without arriving at a judgment on the beauty of the whole. Such is the
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