VOLUME X SLICE III Fenton, Edward to Finistere (continued 11)

Throughout the above account of the imitative and non-imitative groups of fine arts, we have so far followed Aristotle as to allow the name of imitation to all recognizable representation or evocation of realities,—using the word “realities” in no Things unknown shadowed forth by imitation of things known. metaphysical sense, but to signify the myriad phenomena of life and experience, whether as they actually and literally exist to-day, or as they may have existed in the past, or may be conceived to exist in some other world not too unlike our own for us to conceive and realize in thought. When we find among the ruins of a Greek temple the statue of a beautiful young man at rest, or above the altar of a Christian church the painting of one transfixed with arrows, we know that the statue is intended to bring to our minds no mortal youth, but the god Hermes or Apollo, the transfixed victim no simple captive, but Sebastian the holy saint. At the same time we none the less know that the figures in either case have been studied by the artist from living models before his eyes. In like manner, in all the representations alike of sculpture, painting and poetry the things and persons represented may bear symbolic meanings and imaginary names and characters; they may be set in a land of dreams, and grouped in relations and circumstances upon which the sun of this world never shone; in point of fact, through many ages of history they have been chiefly used to embody human ideas of supernatural powers; but it is from real things and persons that their lineaments and characters have been taken in the first instance, in order to be attributed by the imagination to another and more exalted order of existences.

The law which we have last laid down is a law defining the relations of sculpture, painting and poetry, considered simply as arts having their foundations at any rate in reality, and drawing from the imitation of reality their indispensable elements and Imitation by art necessarily an idealized imitation. materials. It is a law defining the range and character of those elements or materials in nature which each art is best fitted, by its special means and resources, to imitate. But we must remember that, even in this fundamental part of its operations, none of these arts proceeds by imitation or evocation pure and simple. None of them contents itself with seeking to represent realities, however literally taken, exactly as those realities are. A portrait in sculpture or painting, a landscape in painting, a passage of local description in poetry, may be representations of known things taken literally or for their own sakes, and not for the sake of carrying out thoughts to the unknown; but none of them ought to be, or indeed can possibly be, a representation of all the observed parts and details of such a reality on equal terms and without omissions. Such a representation, were it possible, would be a mechanical inventory and not a work of fine art.

Hence the value of a pictorial imitation is by no means necessarily in proportion to the number of facts which it records. Many accomplished pictures, in which all the resources of line, colour and light-and-shade have been used to the utmost of Completeness not the test of value in a pictorial imitation. the artist’s power for the imitation of all that he could see in nature, are dead and worthless in comparison with a few faintly touched outlines or lightly laid shadows or tints of another artist who could see nature more vitally and better. Unless the painter knows how to choose and combine the elements of his finished work so that it shall contain in every part suggestions and delights over and above the mere imitation, it will fall short, in that which is the essential charm of fine art, not only of any scrap of a great master’s handiwork, such as an outline sketch of a child by Raphael or a colour sketch of a boat or a mackerel by Turner, but even of any scrap of the merest journeyman’s handiwork produced by an artistic race, such as the first Japanese drawing in which a water-flag and kingfisher, or a spray of peach or almond blossom across the sky, is dashed in with a mere hint of colour, but a hint that tells a whole tale to the imagination. That only, we know, is fine art which affords keen and permanent delight to contemplation. Such delight the artist can never communicate by the display of a callous and pedantic impartiality in presence of the facts of life and nature. His representation of realities will only strike or impress others in so far as it concentrates their attention on things by which he has been struck and impressed himself. To arouse emotion, he must have felt emotion; and emotion is impossible without partiality. The artist is one who instinctively tends to modify and work upon every reality before him in conformity with some poignant and sensitive principle of preference or selection in his mind. He instinctively adds something to nature in one direction and takes away something in another, overlooking this kind of fact and insisting on that, suppressing many particulars which he holds irrelevant in order to insist on and bring into prominence others by which he is attracted and arrested.

The instinct by which an artist thus prefers, selects and brings into light one order of facts or aspects in the thing before him rather than the rest, is part of what is called the idealizing or ideal faculty. Interminable discussion has been spent on the Nature of the idealizing process. questions,—What is the ideal, and how do we idealize? The answer has been given in one form by those thinkers (e.g. Vischer and Lotze) who have pointed out that the process of aesthetic idealization carried on by the artist is only the higher development of a process carried on in an elementary fashion by all men, from the very nature of their constitution. The physical organs of sense themselves do not retain or put on record all the impressions made upon them. When the nerves of the eye receive a multitude of different stimulations at once from different points in space, the sense of eyesight, instead of being aware of all these stimulations singly, only abstracts and retains a total impression of them together. In like manner we are not made aware by the sense of hearing of all the several waves of sound that strike in a momentary succession upon the nerves of the ear; that sense only abstracts and retains a total impression from the combined effect of a number of such waves. And the office which each sense thus performs singly for its own impressions, the mind performs in a higher degree for the impressions of all the senses equally, and for all the other parts of our experience. We are always dismissing or neglecting a great part of our impressions, and abstracting and combining among those which we retain. The ordinary human consciousness works like an artist up to this point; and when we speak of the ordinary or inartistic man as being impartial in the retention or registry of his daily impressions, we mean, of course, in the retention or registry of his impressions as already thus far abstracted and assorted in consciousness. The artistic man, whose impressions affect him much more strongly, has the faculty of carrying much farther these same processes of abstraction, combination and selection among his impressions.

The possession of this faculty is the artist’s most essential gift. To attempt to carry farther the psychological analysis of the gift is outside our present object; but it is worth while to consider somewhat closely its modes of practical operation. Subjective and objective ideals. One mode is this: the artist grows up with certain innate or acquired predilections which become a part of his constitution whether he will or no,—predilections, say, if he is a dramatic poet, for certain types of plot, character and situation; if he is a sculptor, for certain proportions and a certain habitual carriage and disposition of the limbs; if he is a figure painter, for certain schemes of composition and moulds of figure and airs and expressions of countenance; if a landscape painter, for a certain class of local character, sentiment and pictorial effect in natural scenery. To such predilections he cannot choose but make his representations of reality in large measure conform. This is one part of the transmuting process which the data of life and experience have to undergo at the hands of artists, and may be called the subjective or purely personal mode of idealization. But there is another part of that work which springs from an impulse in the artistic constitution not less imperious than the last named, and in a certain sense contrary to it. As an imitator or evoker of the facts of life and nature, the artist must recognize and accept the character of those facts with which he has in any given case to deal. All facts cannot be of the cast he prefers, and in so far as he undertakes to deal with those of an opposite cast he must submit to them; he must study them as they actually are, must apprehend, enforce and bring into prominence their own dominant tendencies. If he cannot find in them what is most pleasing to himself, he will still be led by the abstracting and discriminating powers of his observation to discern what is most expressive and significant in them, he will emphasize and put on record this, idealizing the facts before him not in his direction but in their own. This is the second or objective half of the artist’s task of idealization. It is this half upon which Taine dwelt almost exclusively, and on the whole with a just insight into the principles of the operation, in his well-known treatise On the Ideal in Art. Both these modes of idealization are legitimate; that which springs from inborn and overmastering personal preference in the artist for particular aspects of life and nature, and that which springs from his insight into the dominant and significant character of the phenomena actually before him, and his desire to emphasize and disengage them. But there is a third mode of idealizing which is less vital and genuine than either of these, and therefore less legitimate, though unfortunately far more common. This mode consists in making things conform to a borrowed and conventional standard of beauty and taste, which corresponds neither to any strong inward predilection of the artist nor to any vital characteristic in the objects of his representation. Since the rediscovery of Greek and Roman sculpture in the Renaissance, a great part of the efforts of artists have been spent in falsifying their natural instincts and misrepresenting the facts of nature in pursuit of a conventional ideal of abstract and generalized beauty framed on a false conception and a shallow knowledge of the antique. School after school from the 16th century downwards has been confirmed in this practice by academic criticism and theory, with resulting insipidities and insincerities of performance which have commonly been acclaimed in their day, but from which later generations have sooner or later turned away with a wholesome reaction of distaste.

The two genuine modes of idealization, the subjective and the objective, are not always easy to be reconciled. The greatest artist is no doubt he who can combine the strongest personal instincts of preference with the keenest power of observing characteristics as Examples of the two modes and of their reconciliation. they are, yet in fact we find few in whom both these elements of the ideal faculty have been equally developed. To take an example among Florentine painters, Sandro Botticelli is usually thought of as one who could never escape from the dictation of his own personal ideals, in obedience to which he is supposed to have invested all the creations of his art with nearly the same conformation of brows, lips, cheeks and chin, nearly the same looks of wistful yearning and dejection. There is some truth in this impression, though it is largely based on the works not of the master himself, but of pupils who exaggerated his mannerisms. Leonardo da Vinci was strong in both directions; haunted in much of his work by a particular human ideal of intellectual sweetness and alluring mystery, he has yet left us a vast number of exercises which show him as an indefatigable student of objective characteristics and psychological expressions of an order the most opposed to this. And in this case again followers have over-emphasized the master’s predilections, Luini, Sodoma and the rest borrowing and repeating the mysterious smile of Leonardo till it becomes in their work an affectation cloying however lovely. Among latter-day painters, Burne-Jones will occur to every reader as the type of an artist always haunted and dominated by ideals of an intensely personal cast partly engendered in his imagination by sympathy with the early Florentines. If we seek for examples of the opposite principle, of that idealism which idealizes above all things objectively, and seeks to disengage the very inmost and individual characters of the thing or person before it, we think naturally of certain great masters of the northern schools, as Dürer, Holbein and Rembrandt. Dürer’s endeavour to express such characters by the most searching intensity of linear definition was, however, hampered and conditioned by his inherited national and Gothic predilection for the strained in gesture and the knotted and the gnarled in structure, against which his deliberate scholarly ambition to establish a canon of ideal proportion contended for the most part in vain. And Rembrandt’s profound spiritual insight into human character and personality did not prevent him from plunging his subjects, ever deeper and deeper as his life advanced, into a mysterious shadow-world of his own imagination, where all local colours were broken up and crumbled, and where amid the struggle of gloom and gleam he could make his intensely individualized men and women breathe more livingly than in plain human daylight.

It is by the second mode of operation chiefly, that is by imaginatively discerning, disengaging and forcing into prominence their inherent significance, that the idealizing faculty brings into the sphere of fine art deformities and degeneracies Caricature and the grotesque as modes of the ideal. to which the name beautiful or sublime can by no stretch of usage be applied. Hence arise creations like the Stryge of Notre-Dame and a thousand other grotesques of Gothic architectural carving. Hence, although on a lower plane and interpreted with a less transmuting intensity of insight and emphasis, the snarling or jovial grossness of the peasants of Adrian Brauwer and the best of his Dutch compeers. Hence Shakespeare’s Caliban and figures like those of Quilp and Quasimodo in the romances of Dickens and Hugo; hence the cynic grimness of Goya’s Caprices and the profound and bitter impressiveness of Daumier’s caricatures of Parisian bourgeois life; or again, in an angrier and more insulting and therefore less understanding temper, the brutal energy of the political drawings of Gilray.

Sculpture, painting and poetry, then, are among the greater fine arts those which express and arouse emotion by imitating or evoking real and known things, either for their own sakes literally, or for the sake of shadowing forth things not known but Unidealized imitation not fine art. imagined. In either case they represent their originals, not indiscriminately as they are, but sifted, simplified, enforced and enhanced to our apprehensions partly by the artist’s power of making things conform to his own instincts and preferences, partly by his other power of interpreting and emphasizing the significant characters of the facts before him. Any imitation that does not do one or other or both of these things in full measure fails in the quality of emotional expression and emotional appeal, and in so failing falls short, taken merely as imitation, of the standard of fine art.

But we must remember that idealized imitation, as such, is not the whole task of these arts nor their only means of appeal. There is another part of their task, logically though not practically independent of the relations borne by their imitations The appeal of the imitative arts depends partly on non-imitative elements. to the original phenomena of nature, and dependent on the appeal made through the eye and ear to our primal organic sensibilities by the properties of rhythm, pattern and regulated design in the arrangement of sounds, lines, masses, colours and light-and-shade. That appeal we noted as lying at the root of the art impulse in its most elementary stage. In its most developed stage every fine art is bound still to play upon the same sensibilities. In a work of sculpture the contours and interchanges of light and shadow are bound to be such as would please the eye, whether the statue or relief represented the figure of anything real in the world or not. The flow and balance of line, and the distribution of colours and light-and-shade, in a picture are bound to be such as would make an agreeable pattern although they bore no resemblance to natural fact (as, indeed, many subordinate applications of this art, in decorative painting and geometrical and other ornaments, do, we know, give pleasure though they represent nothing). The sound of a line or verse in poetry is bound to be such as would thrill the physical ear in hearing, or the mental ear in reading, with a delightful excitement even though the meaning went for nothing. If the imitative arts are to touch and elevate the emotions, if they are to afford permanent delight of the due pitch and volume, it is not a more essential law that their imitation, merely as such, should be of the order which we have defined as ideal, than that they should at the same time exhibit these independent effects which they share with the non-imitative group.

So far we have assumed, without asserting, the necessity that the artist in whatever kind should possess a power of execution, or technique as it is called in modern phrase, adequate to the task of embodying and giving shape to his ideals. Necessity of due balance between conception and technique: the non-imitative arts and their technique. In thought it is possible to separate the conception of a work of art from its execution; in practice it is not possible, and half the errors in criticism and speculation about the fine arts spring from failing to realize that an artistic conception can only be brought home to us through and by its appropriate embodiment. Whatever the artist’s cast of imagination or degree of sensibility may be in presence of the materials of life, it is essential that he should be able to express himself appropriately in the material of his particular art. To quote the writer (R.A.M. Stevenson) who has enforced this point most clearly and vividly, perhaps with some pardonable measure of over-statement: “It is a sensitiveness to the special qualities of some visible or audible medium of art which distinguishes the species artist from the genus man.” And again: “There are as many separate faculties of imagination as there are separate mediums in which to conceive an image—clay, words, paint, notes of music.” ... “Technique differs as the material of each art differs—differs as marble, pigments, musical notes and words differ.” The artist who does not enjoy and has not with delighted labour mastered the effects of his own chosen medium will never be a master; the hearer, reader or spectator who cannot appreciate the qualities of skill, vitality and charm in the handling of the given material, or who fails to feel their absence when they are lacking, or who looks in one material primarily for the qualities appropriate to another, will never make a critic. The technique of the space-arts differs radically from that of the time-arts. So again do those of the imitative and the non-imitative arts differ among themselves. The non-imitative arts of music and architecture are in a certain degree alike in this, that the artist is in neither case his own executant (this at least is true of music so far as concerns its modern concerted and orchestral developments); the musical composer and the architect each imagines and composes a design in the medium of his own art which it is left for others to carry out under his direction. The technique in each case consists not in mastery of an instrument (though the musical composer may be, and often is, a master of some one of the instruments whose effects he in his mind’s ear co-ordinates and combines); it lies in the power of knowing and conjuring up all the emotional resources and effects of the various materials at his command, and of conceiving and designing to their last detail vast and ordered structures, to be raised by subordinate executants from those materials, which shall adequately express his temperament and embody his ideals.

In the imitative arts, on the other hand, the sculptor, unless he is a fraud, must be wholly his own executant in the original task of modelling his design in the soft material of clay or wax, though he must accept the aid of assistants whether The imitative arts and their technique: painting and sculpture. in the casting of his work in bronze or in first roughing it out from the block in marble. Too many sculptors have been inclined further to trust to trained mechanical help in finishing their work with the chisel; with the result that the surface loses the touch which is the expression of personal temperament and personal feeling for the relations of his material to nature. The artist in love with the vital qualities of form, or those of his own handiwork in expressing such qualities in modelling-clay, will never stop until he learns how to translate them for himself in marble. Proceeding to that imitative art which leaves out the third dimension of nature, and by so doing enormously increases the range of objects and effects which come within its power—proceeding to the art of painting, the painter is in theory exclusively his own executant, and in practice mainly so, though in certain schools and periods the great artists have been accustomed to surround themselves with pupils to whom they have imparted their methods and who have helped them in the subordinate and preparatory parts of their work. But the painter fit to teach and lead can by no means escape the necessity of being himself a master of his material, and his handling of it must needs bear the immediate impress of his temperament. His emotional preferences among the visible facts of nature, his feeling for the relative importance and charm of line, colour, light and shade, used whether for the interpretation and heightening of natural fact or for producing a pattern in itself harmonious and suggestive to the eye, his sense of the special modes of handling most effective for communicating the impression he desires, all these together inevitably appear in, and constitute, his style and technique. If he is careless or inexpert or conventional, or cold or without delight, in technique, though he may be animated by the noblest purposes and the loftiest ideas, he is a failure as a painter. At certain periods in the history of painting, as in the 13th and 14th centuries in Italy, the technique seems indeed to modern eyes wholly immature; but that was because there were many aspects of visible things which the art had not yet attempted or desired to portray, not because it did not put forth with delight its best traditional or newly acquired skill in portraying the special aspects with which it had so far attempted to grapple. At certain other periods, as in the later 16th and 17th centuries in the same country, the elements of inherited technical facility and academic pride of skill outweigh the sincerity and freshness of interest taken in the aspects of things to be portrayed, and the true balance is lost. At other times, as in much of the work of the 19th century, especially in England, painters have been diverted from their true task, and lost hold of intelligent and living technique altogether, in trying to please a public blind to the special qualities of their art, and prone to seek in it the effects, frivolous or serious, which are appropriate not to paint and canvas but to literature.

Lastly, the poet and literary artist must obviously be the exclusive master of his own technique. No one can help him: all depends on the keenness of his double sensibility to the thrill of life and to that of words, and to his power of maintaining a Technique in poetry: the magic of words. just balance between the two. If he is truly and organically sensitive to words alone, and has learnt life only through their medium and not through the energies of his own imagination, nor through personal sensibility to the impact of things and thoughts and passions and experience, then his work may be a miracle of accomplished verbal music, and may entrance the ear for the moment, but will never live to illuminate and sustain and console. If, on the other hand, he has imagination and sensibility in full measure, and lacks the inborn love of and gift for words and their magic, he will be but a dumb or stammering poet all his days. There is no better witness on this point than Wordsworth. His own prolonged lapses from verbal felicity, and continual habit of solemn meditation on themes not always inspiring, might make us hesitate to choose him as an example of that particular love and gift. But Wordsworth could never have risen to his best and greatest self had he not truly possessed the sensibilities which he attributes to himself in the Prelude:

“Twice five years Or less I might have seen, when first my mind With conscious pleasure opened to the charm Of words in tuneful order, found them sweet For their own sakes, a passion, and a power; And phrases pleased me chosen for delight, For pomp, or love.”

And again, expressing better than any one else the relation which words in true poetry hold to things, he writes:

“Visionary power Attends the motions of the viewless winds, Embodied in the mystery of words; There darkness makes abode, and all the host Of shadowy things work endless changes,—there, As in a mansion like their proper home, Even forms and substances are circumfused By that transparent veil with light divine, And, through the turnings intricate of verse, Present themselves as objects recognized, In flashes, and with glory not their own.”

3. The Serviceable and the Non-Serviceable Arts.—It has been established from the outset that, though the essential distinction of fine art as such is to minister not to material necessity or practical use, but to delight, yet there are some among the Third classification: the serviceable and the non-serviceable arts. arts of men which do both these things at once and are arts of direct use and of beauty or emotional appeal together. Under this classification a survey of the field of art at different periods of history would yield different results. In ruder times, we have seen, the utilitarian aim was still the predominant aim of art, and most of what we now call fine arts served in the beginning to fulfil the practical needs of individual and social life; and this not only among primitive or savage races. In ancient Egypt and Assyria the primary purpose of the relief-sculptures on palace and temple walls was the practical one of historical record and commemoration. Even as late as the middle ages and early Renaissance the primary business of the painter was to give instruction to the unlearned in Bible history and in the lives of the saints, and to rouse him to moods of religious and ethical exaltation. The pleasures of fine art proper among the manual-imitative group—the pleasures, namely, of producing and contemplating certain arrangements rather than others of design, proportion, pattern, colour and light and shade, and of putting forth and appreciating certain qualities of skill, truth and significance in idealized imitation,—these were, historically speaking, by-products that arose gradually in the course of practice and development. As time went on, the conscious aim of ministering to such pleasures displaced and threw into the background the utilitarian ends for which the arts had originally been practised, and the pleasures became ends in themselves.

But even in advanced societies the double qualities of use and beauty still remain inseparable, among the five greater arts, in architecture. We build in the first instance for the sake of Among the greater arts, architecture alone exist primarily for service. necessary shelter and accommodation, or for the commemoration, propitiation or worship of spiritual powers on whom we believe our welfare to depend. By and by we find out that the aspect of our constructions is pleasurable or the reverse. Architecture is the art of building at once as we need and as we like, and a practical treatise on architecture must treat the beauty and the utility of buildings as bound up together. But for our present purpose it has been proper to take into account one half only of the vocation of architecture, the half by which it impresses, gives delight and belongs to that which is the subject of our study, to fine art; and to neglect the other half of its vocation, by which it belongs to what is not the subject of our study, to useful or mechanical art. It is plain, however, that the presence or absence of this foreign element, the element of practical utility, constitutes a fair ground for a new and separate classification of the fine arts. If we took the five greater arts as they exist in modern times by themselves, architecture would on this ground stand alone in one division, as the directly useful or serviceable fine art; with sculpture, painting, music and poetry together in the other division, as fine arts unassociated with such use or service. Not that the divisions would, even thus, be quite sharply and absolutely separated. Didactic poetry, we have already acknowledged, is a branch of the poetic art which aims at practice and utility. Again, the hortatory and patriotic kinds of lyric poetry, from the strains of Tyrtaeus to those of Arndt or Rouget de Lisle or Wordsworth’s sonnets written in war-time, may fairly be said to belong to a phase of fine art which aims directly at one of the highest utilities, the stimulation of patriotic feeling and self-devotion. So may the strains of music which accompany such poetry. The same practical character, as stimulating and attuning the mind to definite ends and actions, might indeed have been claimed for the greater part of the whole art of music as that art was practised in antiquity, when each of several prescribed and highly elaborated moods, or modes, of melody was supposed to have a known effect upon the courage and moral temper of the hearer. Compare Milton, when he tells of the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders which assuaged the sufferings and renewed the courage of Satan and his legions as they marched through hell. In modern music, of which the elements, much more complex in themselves than those of ancient music, have the effect of stirring our fibres to moods of rapturous contemplation rather than of action, military strains in march time are in truth the only purely instrumental variety of the art which may still be said to retain this character.

To reinforce, however, the serviceable or useful division of fine arts in our present classification, it is not among the greater arts that we must look. We must look among the lesser or auxiliary arts of the manual or shaping group. The Other and minor arts of service subordinate to architecture. weaver, the joiner, the potter, the smith, the goldsmith, the glass-maker, these and a hundred artificers who produce wares primarily for use, produce them in a form or with embellishments that have the secondary virtue of giving pleasure both to the producer and the user. Much ingenuity has been spent to little purpose in attempting to group and classify these lesser shaping arts under one or other of the greater shaping arts, according to the nature of the means employed in each. Thus the potter’s art has been classed under sculpture, because he moulds in solid form the shapes of his cups, plates and ewers; the art of the joiner under that of the architect, because his tables, seats and cupboards are fitted and framed together, like the houses they furnish, out of solid materials previously prepared and cut; and the weaver and embroiderer, from the point of view of the effects produced by their art, among painters. But the truth is, that each one of these auxiliary handicrafts has its own materials and technical procedure, which cannot, without forcing and confusion, be described by the name proper to the materials and technical procedure of any of the greater arts. The only satisfactory classification of these handicrafts is that now before us, according to which we think of them all together in the same group with architecture, not because any one or more of them may be technically allied to that art, but because, like it, they all yield products capable of being practically useful and beautiful at the same time. Architecture is the art which fits and frames together, of stone, brick, mortar, timber or iron, the abiding and assembling places of man, all his houses, palaces, temples, monuments, museums, workshops, roofed places of meeting and exchange, theatres for spectacle, fortresses of defence, bridges, aqueducts, and ships for seafaring. The wise architect having fashioned any one of these great constructions at once for service and beauty in the highest degree, the lesser or auxiliary manual arts (commonly called “industrial” or “applied” arts) come in to fill, furnish and adorn it with things of service and beauty in a lower degree, each according to its own technical laws and capabilities; some, like pottery, delighting the user at once by beauty of form, delicacy of substance, and pleasantness of imitative or non-imitative ornament; some, like embroidery, by richness of tissue, and by the same twofold pleasantness of ornament; some, like goldsmith’s work, by exquisiteness of fancy and workmanship proportionate to the exquisiteness of the material. To this vast group of workmen, whose work is at the same time useful and fine in its degree, the ancient Greek gave the place which is most just and convenient for thought, when he classed them all together under the name of τέκτονες, or artificers, and called the builder by the name of ἀρχιτέκτων, arch-artificer or artificer-in-chief. Modern usage has adopted the phrase “arts and crafts” as a convenient general name for their pursuits.

III. Of the History of the Fine Arts.

Students of human culture have concentrated a great deal of attentive thought upon the history of fine art, and have put forth various comprehensive generalizations intended at once to sum up and to account for the phases and Current generalizations on the history of fine art: Hegel. vicissitudes of that history. The most famous formulae are those of Hegel, who regarded particular arts as being characteristic of and appropriate to particular forms of civilization and particular ages of history. For him, architecture was the symbolic art appropriate to ages of obscure and struggling ideas, and characteristic of the Egyptian and the Asiatic races of old and of the medieval age in Europe. Sculpture was the classical art appropriate to ages of lucid and self-possessed ideas, and characteristic of the Greek and Roman period. Painting, music and poetry were the romantic arts, appropriate to the ages of complicated and overmastering ideas, and characteristic of modern humanity in general. In the working out of these generalizations Hegel brought together a mass of judicious and striking observations; and that they contain on the whole a preponderance of truth may be admitted. It has been objected against them, from the philosophical point of view, that they too much mix up the definition of what the several arts theoretically are with considerations of what in various historical circumstances they have practically been. From the historical point of view there can be taken what seems a more valid objection, that these formulae of Hegel tend too much to fix the attention of the student upon the one dominant art chosen as characteristic of any period, and to give him false ideas of the proportions and relations of the several arts at the same period—of the proportions and relations which poetry, say, really bore to sculpture among the Greeks and Romans, or sculpture to architecture among the Christian nations of the middle age. The truth is, that the historic survey gained over any field of human activity from the height of generalizations so vast in scope as these are must needs, in the complexity of earthly affairs, be a survey too distant to give much guidance until its omissions are filled up by a great deal of nearer study; and such nearer study is apt to compel the student in the long run to qualify the theories with which he has started until they are in danger of disappearing altogether.

Another systematic exponent of the universe, whose system is very different from that of Hegel, Herbert Spencer, brought the doctrine of evolution to bear, not without interesting results, upon the history of the fine arts and their Herbert Spencer and the evolution theory. development. Herbert Spencer set forth how the manual group of fine arts, architecture, sculpture and painting, were in their first rudiments bound up together, and how each of them in the course of history has liberated itself from the rest by a gradual process of separation. These arts did not at first exist in the distinct and developed forms in which we have above described them. There were no statues in the round, and no painted panels or canvases hung upon the wall. Only the rudiments of sculpture and painting existed, and that only as ornaments applied to architecture, in the shape of tiers of tinted reliefs, representing in a kind of picture-writing the exploits of kings upon the walls of their temple-palaces. Gradually sculpture took greater salience and roundness, and tended to disengage itself from the wall, while painting found out how to represent solidity by means of its own, and dispensed with the raised surface upon which it was first applied. But the old mixture and union of the three arts, with an undeveloped art of painting and an undeveloped art of sculpture still engaged in or applied to the works of architecture, continued on the whole to prevail through the long cycles of Egyptian and Assyrian history. In the Egyptian palace-temple we find a monument at once political and religious, upon the production of which were concentrated all the energies and faculties of all the artificers of the race. With its incised and pictured walls, its half-detached colossi, its open and its colonnaded chambers, the forms of the columns and their capitals recalling the stems and blossoms of the lotus and papyrus, with its architecture everywhere taking on the characters and covering itself with the adornments of immature sculpture and painting—this structure exhibits within its single fabric the origins of the whole subsequent group of shaping arts. From hence it is a long way to the innumerable artistic surroundings of later Greek and Roman life, the many temples with their detached and their engaged statues, the theatres, the porticoes, the baths, the training-schools, the stadiums, with free and separate statues both of gods and men adorning every building and public place, the frescoes upon the walls, the panel pictures hung in temples and public and private galleries. In the terms of the Spencerian theory of evolution, the advance from the early Egyptian to the later Greek stage is an advance from the one to the manifold, from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and affords a striking instance of that vast and ceaseless process of differentiation and integration which it is the law of all things to undergo. In the Christian monuments of the early middle age, again, the arts, owing to the political and social cataclysm in which Roman civilization went down, have gone back to the rudimentary stage, and are once more attached to and combined with each other. The single monument, the one great birth of art, in that age, is the Gothic church. In this we find the art of applied sculpture exercised in fashions infinitely rich and various, but entirely in the service and for the adornment of the architecture; we find painting exercised in fashions more rudimentary still, principally in the forms of translucent imagery in the chancel windows and tinted decorations on the walls and vaultings. From this stage again the process of the differentiation of the arts is repeated. It is by a new evolution or unfolding, and by one carried to much further and more complicated stages than the last had reached, that the arts since the middle age have come to the point where we find them to-day; when architecture is applied to a hundred secular and civil uses with not less magnificence, or at least not less desire of magnificence, than that with which it fulfilled its two only uses in the middle age, the uses of worship and of defence; when detached sculptures adorn, or are intended to adorn, all our streets and commemorate all our likenesses; when the subjects of painting have been extended from religion to all life and nature, until this one art has been divided into the dozen branches of history, landscape, still life, genre, anecdote and the rest. Such being in brief the successive stages, and such the reiterated processes, of evolution among the shaping or space arts, the action of the same law can be traced, it is urged, in the growth of the speaking or time arts also. Originally poetry and music, the two great speaking arts, were not separated from each other and from the art of bodily motion, dancing. The father of song, music and dancing, all three, was that primitive man of whom so much has already been said, he who first clapped hands and leapt and shouted in time at some festival of his tribe. From the clapping, or rudimentary rhythmical noise, has been evolved the whole art of instrumental music, down to the entrancing complexity of the modern symphony. From the shout, or rudimentary emotional utterance, has proceeded by a kindred evolution the whole art of vocal music down to the modern opera or oratorio. From the leap, or rudimentary expression of emotion by rhythmical movements of the body, has descended every variety of dancing, from the stately figures of the tragic chorus of the Greeks to the kordax of their comedy or the complexities of the modern ballet.

That the theory of evolution serves usefully to group and to interpret many facts in the history of art we shall not deny, though it would be easy to show that Herbert Spencer’s instances and applications are not sufficient to sustain all the conclusions Weak and strong points of Spencer’s generalization. that he seems to draw from them. Thus, it is perfectly true that the Egyptian or Assyrian palace wall is an instance of rudimentary painting and rudimentary sculpture in subservience to architecture. But it is not less true that races who had no architecture at all, but lived in caverns of the earth, exhibit, as we have already had occasion to notice, excellent rudiments of the other two shaping arts in a different form, in the carved or incised handles of their weapons. And it is almost certain that, among the nations of oriental antiquity themselves, the art of decorating solid walls so as to please the eye with patterns and presentations of natural objects was borrowed from the precedent of an older art which works in easier materials, namely, the art of the weaver. It would be in the perished textile fabrics of the earliest dwellers in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile that we should find, if anywhere, the origins of the systems of surface design, whether conventional or imitative, which those races afterwards applied to the decoration of their solid constructions. Not, therefore, in any one exclusive type of primitive artistic activity, but in a score of such types equally, varying according to race, region and circumstances, shall we find so many germs or nuclei from which whole families of fine arts have in the course of the world’s history differentiated and unfolded themselves. And more than once during that history, a cataclysm of political and social forces has not only checked the process of the evolution of the fine arts, but from an advanced stage of development has thrown them back again to a primitive stage. Recent research has shown how the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations in the Mediterranean basin, with their developed fine arts, must have perished and been effaced before the second growth of art from new rudiments took place in Greece. The great instance of the downfall of the Roman civilization need not be requoted. By Spencer’s application of the theory of evolution, not less than by Hegel’s theory of the historic periods, attention is called to the fact that Christian Europe, during several centuries of the middle age, presents to our study a civilization analogous to the civilization of the old oriental empires in this respect, that its ruling and characteristic manual art is architecture, to which sculpture and painting are, as in the oriental empires, once more subjugated and attached. It does not of course follow that such periods of fusion or mutual dependence among the arts are periods of bad art. On the contrary, each stage of the evolution of any art has its own characteristic excellence. The arts can be employed in combination, and yet be all severally excellent. When music, dancing, acting and singing were combined in the performance of the Greek chorus, the combination no doubt presented a relative perfection of each of the four elements analogous to the combined perfection, in the contemporary Doric temple, of pure architectural form, sculptured enrichment of spaces specially contrived for sculpture in the pediments and frieze, and coloured decoration over all. The extreme differentiation of any art from every other art, and of the several branches of one art among themselves, does not by any means tend to the perfection of that art. The process of evolution among the fine arts may go, and indeed in the course of history has gone, much too far for the health of the arts severally. Thus an artist of our own day is usually either a painter only or a sculptor only; but yet it is acknowledged that the painter who can model a statue, or the sculptor who can paint a picture, is likely to be the more efficient master of both arts; and in the best days of Florentine art the greatest men were generally painters, sculptors, architects and goldsmiths all at once. In like manner a landscape painter who paints landscape only is apt not to paint it so well as one who paints the figure too; and in recent times the craft of engraving had almost ceased to be an art from the habit of allotting one part of the work, as skies, to one hand, another part, as figures, to a second, and another part, as landscape, to a third. This kind of continually progressing subdivision of labour, which seems to be the necessary law of industrial processes, is fatal to any skill which demands, as skill in the fine arts, we have seen, demands, the free exercise and direction of a highly complex cluster both of faculties and sensibilities.

In the second half of the 19th century a reaction set in against such over-differentiation of the several manual arts and crafts. This reaction is chiefly identified in England with the name of William Morris, who insisted by precept and Reaction against over-evolution amongst the fine arts. example that one form of artistic activity was as worthy as another, and himself both practised and trained others in the practice of glass-painting, weaving, embroidery, furniture and wall-paper designing, and book decoration alike. His example has been to some extent followed in most European countries, and efforts have been made to reunite the functions of artist and craftsman, and to set a limit to the process of differentiation among the various manual arts. In the vocal or time arts also, a reformer of high genius and force of character, Richard Wagner, rose to contend that in music the process of evolution and differentiation had gone much too far. Music, he urged, as separated from words and actions, independent orchestral and instrumental music, had reached its utmost development, and its further advance could only be an advance into the inane; while operatic music had broken itself up into a number of set and separate forms, as aria, scena, recitative, which corresponded to no real varieties of instinctive emotional utterance, and in the aimless production of which the art was in danger of paralysing and stultifying itself. This process, he declared, must be checked; music and words must be brought back again into close connexion and mutual dependence; the artificial opera forms must be abolished, and a new and homogeneous music-drama be created, of which the author must combine in himself the functions of poet, composer, inventor, and director of scenery and stage appliances, so that the entire creation should bear the impress of a single mind; to the creation of such a music-drama he accordingly devoted all the energies of his being.

It is thus evident that the evolution theory, though it furnishes us with some instructive points of view for the history of the fine arts as for other things, is far from being the whole key to that history. Another key, employed with Taine’s philosophy or natural history of the fine arts. results perhaps less really luminous than they are certainly showy and attractive, is that supplied by Taine. Taine’s philosophy, which might perhaps be better called a natural history, of fine art consists in regarding the fine arts as the necessary result of the general conditions under which they are at any time produced—conditions of race and climate, of religion, civilization and manners. Acquaint yourself with these conditions as they existed in any given people at any given period, and you will be able to account for the characters assumed by the arts of that people at that period, and to reason from one to the other, as a botanist can account for the flora of any given locality, and can reason from its soil, exposure and temperature, to the orders of vegetation which it will produce. This method of treating the history of the fine arts, again, is one which can be pursued with profit in so far as it makes the student realize the connexion of fine arts with human culture in general, and teaches him how the arts of any age and country are not an independent or arbitrary phenomenon, but are essentially an outcome, or efflorescence, to use a phrase of Ruskin’s, of deep-seated elements in the civilization which produces them. But it is a method which, rashly used, is very apt to lead to a hasty and one-sided handling both of history and of art. It is easy to fasten on certain obvious relations of fine art to general civilization when you know a few of the facts of both, and to say, the cloudy skies and mongrel industrial population of Protestant Amsterdam at such and such a date had their inevitable reflection in the art of Rembrandt; the wealth and pomp of the full-fleshed burghers and burgesses of Catholic Antwerp had theirs in the art of Rubens. But to do this in the precise and conclusive manner of Taine’s treatises on the philosophy of art always means to ignore a large range of conditions or causes for which no corresponding effect is on the surface apparent, and generally also a large number of effects for which appropriate causes cannot easily be discovered at all.

These considerations have resulted in a reaction against Taine’s theories which goes probably too far. It is no complete confutation of his philosophy of art-history to contend, as has been done somewhat contemptuously by Criticisms and counter-criticisms on Taine’s methods. Professor Ernst Grosse and others, that the great artist, so far from representing the general tendencies of his time and environment, is commonly a solitary innovator and revolutionist, and has to educate and create his own public, often through years of obloquy or neglect. This is sometimes true when the traditions and ideals of art are undergoing revolution or swift experimental change, but hardly ever true in times of stable tradition and accepted ideals; and when true it only shows that the tendencies the innovating genius represents are tendencies which have till his time been working underground, and which he is born to bring into light and evidence. A new and revolutionary impulse in art, as in thought or politics, is like a yeast or ferment working at first secretly, affecting for a while only a few spirits, as a new epidemic may for a while only affect a few constitutions, and then gradually ripening and strengthening till it communicates itself to thousands. In its inception such a ferment is not, indeed, one of the obvious phenomena of the society in which it takes root, but it is none the less one of the most vital and significant phenomena. The truth is, that this particular efflorescence of human culture depends for its character at any given time upon combinations of causes which are by no means simple, but generally highly complex, obscure and nicely balanced. For instance, the student who should try to reason back from the holy and beatified character which prevails in much of the devotional painting of the Italian schools down to the Renaissance would be much mistaken were he to conclude, “like art, like life, thoughts and manners.” He would not understand the relation of the art to the general civilization of those days unless he were to remember that one of the chief functions of the imagination is to make up for the shortcomings of reality, and to supply to contemplation images of that which is most lacking in actual life; so that the visions at once peaceful and ardent embodied by the religious schools of art in the Italian cities are to be explained, not by the peace, but rather in great part by the dispeace, of contemporary existence, and by the longing of the human spirit to escape into happier and more calm conditions.

Any one of the three modes of generalization to which we have referred might no doubt yield, however, supposing in the student the due gifts of patience and of caution, a working clue to guide him through that immense region of Difficulty of combining the study of the manual with that of the vocal group of fine arts. research, the history of the fine arts. But it is hardly possible to pursue to any purpose the history of the two great groups, the shaping group and the speaking group, together. At some stages of the world’s history the manual and the monumental arts have flourished, as in Egypt and Assyria, when there was no fine art of words at all, and the only literature was that of records cut in hieroglyph or cuneiform on palace walls and temples, and on tablets, seals and cylinders. At other times and in other communities there has existed a great tradition and inheritance of poetry and song when the manual arts were only beginning to emerge again from the wreck of an old civilization, as in the Homeric age of Greece, or where they had never flourished at all except by imitation and importation, as in Palestine. In historic Greece all three divisions of the art of poetry, the epic, lyric and the dramatic, had been perfected, and two of them had again declined, before sculpture had reached maturity or painting had passed beyond the stage of its early severity. The European poetry of the middle ages, abundant and rich as it was alike in France and Provence, in Germany and Scandinavia, can yet not take rank, among the creations of human genius, beside the great masterpieces of Romanesque and Gothic architecture; it was in Italy only that Dante, before the end of that age, carried poetry to a place of equality if not of primacy among the arts. Taking the England of the Elizabethan age, we find the great outburst of our national genius in poetry contemporary with nothing more interesting in the manual arts than the gradual and only half-intelligent transformation of late Gothic architecture by the adoption of Italian Renaissance forms imported principally by way of Flanders or France, together with a fine native skill shown in the art of miniature portrait-painting, and none at all worth mentioning in other branches of painting or in sculpture. If the course of poetry and that of the manual arts have thus run independently throughout almost the whole field of history, those of music and the manual arts have been more widely separated still. In ancient Greece music and poetry were, we know, most intimately connected, but of the true nature of Greek music we know but little, of that of the earlier middle ages less still, and throughout the later middle ages and the earlier Renaissance the art remained undeveloped, whether in the service of the church or in secular and popular use, and in both cases in strict subservience to words. The growth of independent music is entirely the work of the modern world, and will probably rank in the esteem of posterity as its highest spiritual achievement and claim to gratitude, when the mechanical inventions and applications of applied science, which now occupy so disproportionate a part of the attention of humanity, have become a normal and unregarded part of its existence.

Moments in history there have no doubt been when literature and the manual arts, and even music, have been swept simultaneously along a single stream of ideas and feelings. Such a moment was experienced in France in 1830 and the following years, when (to choose only a few of the greatest names) Hugo in poetry, Delacroix in painting, and Berlioz in music were roused to a high pitch of consentaneous inspiration by the new ideas and feelings of romanticism. But such moments are rare and exceptional. On the other hand, it is very possible to take the whole of the shaping or manual group of fine arts together and to pursue their history connectedly throughout the course of civilization. By the history of art what is usually meant is indeed the history of these three arts with that of some of their subordinate and connected crafts. Leaving aside the arts of the races of the farther East, which, profoundly interesting as they are, have but gradually and late become known to us, and the relations of which with the arts of the nearer East and the Mediterranean are still quite obscure—leaving these aside, the history of the manual arts of architecture, painting and sculpture falls naturally into several great periods or divisions to some extent overlapping each other but in the main consecutive.

These periods are roughly as follows:—

1. The period of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile, beginning approximately about 5000 B.C. Main divisions of the history of art. and ending, roughly speaking (but some of them much earlier), with the spread of Greek power and Greek ideas under Alexander. On the main characteristics of the art of these empires we have already had occasion to touch.

2. The Minoan and Mycenaean period, partly contemporary with the above and dating probably from about 2500 to about 1000 B.C.; our knowledge of this is due entirely to quite recent researches, confined at present to certain points in Greece and Asia Minor, in Crete and other islands in the Mediterranean basin; enough has already been revealed to prove the existence of an original and highly developed palace-architecture and of forms of relief-painting and of all the minor and decorative arts more free and animated than anything known to Egypt or Assyria. (See Crete and Aegean Civilization.)

3. The Greek and Roman period, from about 700 B.C. to the final triumph of Christianity, say A.D. 400. During the first two or three centuries of this period the Hellenic race, beginning again after the cataclysm which had swallowed up the earlier Mediterranean civilizations, carried to perfection its most characteristic art, that of sculpture, in the endeavour to embody worthily its ideas of the supernatural powers governing the world. Putting aside the monstrous gods of Egypt and the East, it found its ideals in varieties of the human form as presented by the most harmoniously developed specimens of the race under conditions of the greatest health, activity and grace. In the figures of Greek sculpture, both decorative and independent, and no doubt in Greek painting also (but of that we can only judge from such specimens of the minor handicrafts, chiefly vase-paintings, as have come down to us)—in these were set for the whole Western world the types and standards of human beauty, and in their grouping and arrangement the types and standards of rhythmical composition and design. Gradually human portraiture and themes of everyday life took their place beside representations of the gods and heroes. New schools struck out new tendencies within certain limits. But in the general standards of form and design there was in the imitative arts relatively little change, though towards the end there was much failure of skill, throughout the whole period. The one great change was in architecture. Greece had been content with the constructive system of columns and horizontal entablature, and under that system had invented and perfected her three successive modes or orders of architecture—the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. The genius of Rome invented the round arch, and by help of that system erected throughout her subject world a thousand vast constructions—temple, palace, bath, amphitheatre, forum, aqueduct, triumphal gate and the rest—on a scale of monumental grandeur such as Greece had never known.

4. The Christian period, from about 400 to about 1400. The decay or petrifaction of the imitative arts which had set in during the latter days of Rome continued during all the earlier centuries of the Christian period, while the Western world was in process of remaking. Free painting and free sculpture practically ceased to exist. Roman architecture underwent modifications under the influence of the church and of the new conditions of life; the Byzantine form, touched at certain times and places with oriental influences, developed itself wherever the Eastern Empire still stood erect in decay; the Romanesque form, as it is called, in the barbarian-conquered regions of the west and north. Sculpture existed for centuries only in rudimentary and subordinate forms as applied to architecture; painting only in forms of rigid though sometimes impressive hieratic imagery, whether as mosaic in the apses and vaults of churches, as rude illumination in MSS. and service-books, or as still ruder altar-painting carried on according to a frozen mechanical tradition. As time went on and medieval institutions developed themselves, a gradual vitality dawned in all these arts. In architecture the introduction of the pointed or Gothic arch at the beginning of the 13th century led to almost as great a revolution as that brought about by the use of the round or vaulted arch among the Romans. The same vital impulse that informed the new Gothic architecture breathed into the still quite subordinate arts of sculpture and painting (the latter now including the craft of glass-painting for church windows) a new spirit whether of devotional intensity or sweetness, or of human pathos or rugged humour, with a new technical skill for its embodiment. We have not set down, as is usually done, a specifically Gothic period in art, for this reason. The characteristic of the whole Christian period is that its dominant art is architecture, chiefly employed in the service of the church, with painting and sculpture only subordinately introduced for its enrichment. It makes no essential difference that from the 5th to the 12th century the forms of this art were derived with various modifications from the round-arched architecture of the Empire, and that by the 13th century new forms both of construction and decoration, in which the round arch was replaced by the pointed, had been invented in France, and from thence spread abroad to Germany and Scandinavia, Great Britain, Spain, and last and most superficially to Italy. The essential difference only begins when the imitative arts, sculpture and painting, begin to emancipate and detach themselves, to exist and strive after perfection on their own account. This happened first and very partially in Italy with the artificers of the 13th and 14th centuries—with the sculptors Nicola, Giovanni, and Andrea Pisano; the Sienese group of painters, Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti; and the Florentine group, Cimabue (if Cimabue is not a myth), Giotto and the Giotteschi. The development of the rapid and flowing craft of fresco in place of the laborious and piecemeal craft of mosaic (henceforth for several centuries almost lost) was a great aid to this movement. After a period of something like stagnation, the movement received a vigorous fresh impulse soon after 1400, at about which date in Italy (not till near a century later in northern Europe) the beginning of the Renaissance is usually fixed.

5. The Renaissance period, from about 1400 to about 1600. The passion for classic literature, stimulated by the influence of Greek scholars into Italy after the fall of Constantinople; the enthusiastic revival of classic forms of architecture by architects like Brunelleschi and Alberti; the achievements in sculpture and painting of masters like Donatello and Masaccio, based on a new and impassioned study of nature and the antique together; these are the outstanding and universally known symptoms of the Italian Renaissance in the second and third quarters of the 15th century. Promptly and contemptuously in Italy, much more gradually and incompletely in the north, Gothic principles of construction and decoration were cast aside for classical principles, as reformulated by eager spirits from a combined study of Roman remains and of the text of Vitruvius. To the ideal types of devout and prayer-worn, ascetic and spiritualized humanity (tempered in certain subjects with elements of the homely and the grotesque), which the spirit of the middle ages had dictated to the sculptor and the painter, succeeded ideals of physical power, beauty and grace rivalling the Hellenic. The personages of the Christian faith and story were brought into visible kindred with those of ancient paganism. In the hands of certain artists a fortunate blending of the two ideals yielded results of a poignant and unique charm, which for us, who are the heirs both of antiquity and the middle ages, is far from being yet exhausted. At the same time, the love alike of republics, great princes, churchmen, nobles and merchants for works of art gave employment to sculptors and painters on themes other than ecclesiastical. The taste for civic or personal commemoration, for portraiture, for illustrations of allegory, romance and classic fable, covered with pictures the walls of council halls, of public and private palaces, and of villas. The invention of the oil medium by the painters of Flanders, and its gradual adoption by the Venetians and other schools of Italy for all purposes except the external decorations of buildings, added enormously to the resources of the art in rivalry with nature, and to the splendour of its results as objects of pride and luxury. The glories of matured Italian art reacted, not always favourably, on the north. The great days of Flemish painting had been from about 1430 to 1500, before any appreciable influence of the Renaissance had touched the schools of Brussels, of Bruges or of Antwerp. By about 1520 the artists of those schools had begun, except in portraiture, to lose their native vigour and originality by contact with the alien south. Among the great artists of Germany in the first half of the 16th century the work of one or two, like Burgkmair and Holbein, shows Italian influence reconciled not unsuccessfully with native instinct; but Dürer, the greatest of them, remained in all essentials Gothic and German to the end. During the last half of the century, the Netherlands and Germany alike yielded little but work of mongrel Teutonized Italian or Italianized Teutonic type, until towards its close Rubens accomplished, in the fire of his prodigious temperament, a true fusion of Flemish and Venetian qualities, at the same time closing gloriously the Renaissance period properly so called, and handing on an example which irresistibly affected a great part of modern painting.

6. Modern period, from about 1600 to the present time. During this period architecture remained in all European countries, until the 19th century, more or less completely under the influence of the Italian Renaissance. The principles of the classical revival had during a century or more of transition been gradually absorbed, first by France, then by Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain, and last by England, each country modifying the style according to its degree of knowledge or ignorance, its needs, instincts and traditions. Sculpture, which in the hands of the great masters of the earlier and later Renaissance in Italy had almost equalled its ancient glories, nay, in those of Michelangelo had actually surpassed them in the qualities at least of superhuman energy and intellectual expression—sculpture lost the sense of its true limitations, and entered, with the work of Bernini and even earlier, into an extravagant or “baroque” period of relaxed and bulging line, of exaggerated and ostentatious virtuosity. In this it followed the lead given by Italian architecture, by Jesuit church architecture especially, at and after the height of the Catholic reaction. From the monumental and memorial purposes which sculpture principally serves, it remained still, except in purely iconic uses, attached to or dependent on architecture. Not so painting, which asserted its independence more and more. In Protestant countries the old ecclesiastical patronage of the art had quite died out; in those that remained Catholic it continued, and even received a new stimulus from the anti-Protestant reaction. The demand for religious art was supplied with abundance of traditional facility, of technical accomplishment and devotional display, but with a loss of the old sincerity and inspiration. Almost all painting, even for the most extensive and monumental phases of decoration in church or palace or civic hall, was on canvas stretched over or fitted into its allotted space in the architecture, and the art of fresco, even in Venice, its last stronghold, was for a time neglected or forgotten. Portable paintings for princely or private galleries and cabinets became the chief and most characteristic products of the art. The subjects of painting multiplied themselves. All manner of new aspects of life and nature were brought within the technical compass of the painter. Besides devotional and classical subjects and portraiture, daily life in all its phases, down to the homeliest and grossest, the life of the parlour and the tavern, of field and shore and sea, with landscape in all its varieties, took their place as material for the painter. The truths of indoor and outdoor atmosphere were translated on canvas for the first time. The Dutchmen from about 1620 to 1670 were the most active innovators and path-breakers of modern art along all these lines. The greatest of them, Rembrandt, dealt, as has been said, like a master and a magician with the problems of human individuality as revealed in a mysterious colour and shadow world of his own invention. At the same time a painter of no less power in Spain, Velazquez, viewing the world in the natural light of every day, showed for the first time how vitally and subtly paint could render the relief and mutual values of figures and objects in space, the essential truth of their visible relations and reactions in the enveloping atmosphere. The achievement of these two victorious innovators has only come to be fully understood in our own day. The simultaneous conquest of Claude le Lorrain, on the other hand, over the atmospheric glow of summer and sunset on the Roman Campagna and the adjacent hills and coasts, found acceptance instantly, less perhaps for its own sake than because of the classical associations of the scenery which he depicted. The vast widening of the field of the painter’s art and multiplication of its subjects, which thus took place at the dawn of the modern period, were gains attended by one drawback, the loss, namely, of the sense of high seriousness and universal appeal which belonged to the art while its themes had been those of religion and classic story almost exclusively.

During the three hundred or so years of the modern period, academical schools attempting, more or less unsuccessfully, to carry on the great Italian and classical traditions of the Renaissance have not ceased to exist side by Classical and romantic revivals. side with those which have striven to express new ways of seeing and feeling. Sometimes, as in France first under Louis XIV., and again for forty years from the beginning of the Revolution to the dawn of romanticism, such schools have succeeded in crushing out and discrediting all efforts in other directions. Between these two epochs, say from 1710 to 1780, French 18th-century ideals of social elegance and brilliant frivolity expressed themselves in forms of great accomplishment and vivacity both in poetry and sculpture, from the days of Watteau to those of Fragonard and Clodion. At the same time England produced one of the finest and at the same time most national and downright masters of the brush in Hogarth; two of the greatest aristocratic portrait-painters of the world in Reynolds and Gainsborough, each of whom modified according to his own instincts the tradition imported in the previous century by Van Dyck, the greatest pupil of Rubens (Reynolds fusing with this influence those of Rembrandt and the Venetians in almost equal shares). Pastoral landscape in the hands of Gainsborough, classical, following Claude, in those of Wilson—these together with the humble but wholesome discipline of topographical illustration led on to the ambitious, wide-ranging and often inspired experiments of Turner, and to the narrower but more secure achievements of Constable in the same field, and made this country the acknowledged pioneer of modern landscape art. In the meantime the wave of classical enthusiasm which passed over Europe in the later years of the 18th century had produced in architecture generally a return to severer principles and purer lines, in reaction from the baroque and the rococo Renaissance styles of the preceding century and a half. In Italian sculpture, the same movement inspired during the Napoleonic period the over-honeyed accomplishment of Canova and his school; in northern sculpture, the more truly antique but almost wholly imitative work of Thorwaldsen, and the pure and rhythmic grace of the English Flaxman, a true master of design though scarcely of sculpture strictly so called. The same movement again was partly responsible in English painting and illustration from about 1770 to 1820 for much pastoral and idyllic work of agreeable but shallow elegance. In French painting the classic movement struck deeper. Along with much would-be Roman attitudinizing there was much real, if rigid, power in the work of David, much accomplished purity and sweetness in that of Prud’hon. The last and truest classic of France, and at the same time in portraiture the greatest realist, Ingres, held high the standard of his cause even through and past the great romantic revival which began with Géricault and culminated in Delacroix and the school of landscape painters who had received their inspiration from Constable. The main instincts embodied in the Romantic movement were the awakening of the human spirit to an eager retrospective love of the past, and especially of the medieval past, and simultaneously to a new passion for the beauties of nature, and especially of wild nature. Germany and England preceded France in this double awakening; in both countries the movement inspired a fine literature, but in neither did it express itself so fully and self-consciously through literature and the other arts together as it did in France when the hour struck. The revival of medieval sentiment in Germany had inspired comparatively early in the century the learned but somewhat aridly ascetic and essentially unpainterlike work of the group of artists who styled themselves Nazarener. In England the same revival expressed itself during a great part of the Victorian age in an enthusiastic return to the early Gothic ecclesiastical styles of architecture, a return unsuccessful upon the whole, because in pursuit of archaeological and grammatical detail the root qualities of right proportion and organic design were too often neglected.

Allied with this Gothic revival, and stimulated like it by the persuasive conviction and brilliant resource of Ruskin in criticism was the pre-Raphaelite movement in painting. Among the artists identified with this movement there was The pre-Raphaelites. little really in common except in impatience of the prevailing modes of empty academic convention or anecdotic frivolity. The name covered for a while the essentially divergent aims of a vigorous unintellectual craftsman like Millais, fired for a few years in youth by contact with more imaginative temperaments, of a strenuous imitator of unharmonized local colours and unsubordinated natural facts like Holman Hunt, and of born poets and impassioned medievalists like Rossetti and after him Burne-Jones. Meantime in France, putting aside the work of the great Delacroix, the impulse of 1830 expressed itself best and most lastingly in the monumental work of Daumier both in caricature and romance, the impressive and significant treatment of peasant life and labour by J.F. Millet, the vitally truthful pastoral and landscape work of Troyon, Corot, Daubigny and the rest.

Since the exhaustion of the Romantic movement, the other movements that have been taking place in European art have been too numerous and too rapid to be touched on here to any purpose. Both in sculpture and painting Contemporary tendencies. France has taken and held the lead. Mention has already been made of the special tendency in recent sculpture identified with the name and influence of Rodin. In painting there has been the fertilizing and transforming influence of Japan on the decorative ideals of the West; there have been successively the Realist movement, the movements of the Impressionists, the Luminists, the Neo-impressionists, the Independents, movements initiated almost always in Paris, and in other countries eagerly adopted and absorbed, or angrily controverted and denounced, or simply neglected and ignored according to the predilection of this or that group of artists and critics; there has been a vast amount of heterogeneous, hurried, confident and clamant innovating activity in this direction and in that, much of it perhaps doomed to futility in the eyes of posterity, but at any rate there has not been stagnation.

Bibliography.—To attempt in this place anything like a full bibliography covering so vast a field would be idle. Many of the books necessary to a first-hand study of the subject are cited in the article Aesthetics. The following are some of the most important writings actually referred to in the text, English translations being mentioned where they exist: Aristotle, Poetics, edited with critical notes and a translation by S.H. Butcher (1898); S.H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, with a critical text and a translation of the Poetics (1902); Plato, Republic, bk. x. 596 ff., 600 ff. (Grote, iii. 117 ff.; Jowett, iii. 489 ff.); B. Bosanquet, Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art (Ästhetik), translation with notes and prefatory essay (1896); The Philosophy of Art, an Introduction to the Science of Aesthetics, by Hegel and C.L. Michelet, trans. Hastie (1886); Schiller, Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (trans, by G.J. Weiss, with preface by J. Chapman, 1845; also in Bohn’s Standard Library, 1846); Herbert Spencer, First Principles, ch. xxii.; Gottfried Semper, Der Stil (1860-1863); Hippolyte Taine, De l’idéal dans l’art (1867), Philosophie de l’art en Grèce (1869), Philosophie de l’art en Italie, Philosophic de l’art dans les Pays-Bas (translations in 5 vols. by J. Durand, New York, 1889); Karl Groos, Die Spiele der Menschen (1899; trans, by E.L. Baldwin, 1901), and Die Spiele der Tiere (2nd ed., 1907; trans, by E.L. Baldwin, 1898); Ernst Grosse, Die Anfänge der Kunst (1894; trans, in the Anthropological Series, 1894); Yrjö Hirn, The Origins of Art (1900); G. Baldwin Brown, The Fine Arts (2nd ed., 1902); Felix Clay, The Origins of the Sense of Beauty (1908). For a general history of the manual or shaping group of arts, C.J.F. Schnasse, Geschichte der bildenden Künste (2nd ed., 1866-1879), though in parts obsolete, is still unsuperseded. A very summary general view is given in Salomon Reinach, The Story of Art through the Ages (trans. by Florence Simmonds, 1904); a general history of the same group was undertaken by Giulio Carotti (English translation by Alice Todd, 1909).

(S. C.)

FINGER, one of the five members with which the hand is terminated, a digit; sometimes the word is restricted to the four digits other than the thumb. The word is common to Teutonic languages, cf. Dutch vinger and Ger. Finger; probably the ultimate origin is to be found in the root of the words appearing in Greek πέντε, Lat. quinque, five. (See Skeleton: Appendicular.)

FINGER-AND-TOE, Club Root or Anbury, a destructive plant-disease known botanically as Plasmodiophora Brassicae, which attacks cabbages, turnips, radishes and other cultivated and wild members of the order Cruciferae. It is one of the so-called Slime-fungi or Myxogastres. The presence of the disease is indicated by nodules or warty outgrowths on the root, which sometimes becomes much swollen and ultimately rots, emitting an unpleasant smell. The disease is contracted from spores present in the soil, which enter the root. The parasite develops within the living cells of the plant, forming a glairy mass of protoplasm known as the plasmodium, the form of which alters from time to time. The cells which have been attacked increase enormously in size and the disease spreads from cell to cell. Ultimately the plasmodium becomes resolved into numerous minute round spores which, on the decay of the root, are set free in the soil. A preventive is quicklime, the application of which destroys the spores in the soil. It is important that diseased plants should be burned, also that cruciferous weeds, such as shepherd’s purse, charlock, &c., should not be allowed to grow in places where plants of the same order are in cultivation.

Finger-and-Toe (Plasmodiophora Brassicae).

1, Turnip attacked by the disease, reduced. 2, A cell of the tissue containing the plasmodium; the smaller cells at the sides are unaffected. 3, Infected cell, showing spore formation. 2, 3, highly magnified.

FINGER-PRINTS. The use of finger-prints as a system of identification (q.v.) is of very ancient origin, and was known from the earliest days in the East when the impression of his thumb was the monarch’s sign-manual. A relic of this practice is still preserved in the formal confirmation of a legal document by “delivering” it as one’s “act and deed.” The permanent character of the finger-print was first put forward scientifically in 1823 by J.E. Purkinje, an eminent professor of physiology, who read a paper before the university of Breslau, adducing nine standard types of impressions and advocating a system of classification which attracted no great attention. Bewick, the English draughtsman, struck with the delicate qualities of the lineation, made engravings of the impression of two of his finger-tips and used them as signatures for his work. Sir Francis Galton, who laboured to introduce finger-prints, points out that they were proposed for the identification of Chinese immigrants when registering their arrival in the United States. In India, Sir William Herschel desired to use finger-prints in the courts of the Hugli district to prevent false personation and fix the identity upon the executants of documents. The Bengal police under the wise administration of Sir E.R. Henry, afterwards chief commissioner of the London metropolitan police, usefully adopted finger-prints for the detection of crime, an example followed in many public departments in India. A transfer of property is attested by the thumb-mark, so are documents when registered, and advances made to opium-growers or to labourers on account of wages, or to contracts signed under the emigration law, or medical certificates to vouch for the persons examined, all tending to check the frauds and impostures constantly attempted.

The prints depend upon a peculiarity seen in the human hand and to some extent in the human foot. The skin is traversed in all directions by creases and ridges, which are ineradicable and show no change from childhood to extreme old age. The persistence of the markings of the finger-tips has been proved beyond all question, and this universally accepted quality has been the basis of the present system of identification. The impressions, when examined, show that the ridges appear in certain fixed patterns, from which an alphabet of signs or a system of notation has been arrived at for convenience of record. As the result of much experiment a fourfold scheme of classification has been evolved, and the various types employed are styled “arches,” “loops,” “whorls” and “composites.” There are seven subclasses, and all are perfectly distinguishable by an expert, who can describe each by its particular symbol in the code arranged, so that the whole “print” can be read as a distinct and separate expression. Very few, and the simplest, appliances are required for taking the print—a sheet of white paper, a tin slab, and some printer’s ink. Scars or malformations do not interfere with the result.

The unchanging character of the finger-prints has repeatedly helped in the detection of crime. We may quote the case of the thief who broke into a residence and among other things helped himself to a glass of wine, leaving two finger-prints upon the tumbler which were subsequently found to be identical with those of a notorious criminal who was arrested, pleaded guilty and was convicted. Another burglar effected entrance by removing a pane of glass from a basement window, but, unhappily for him, left his imprints, which were referred to the registry and found to agree exactly with those of a convict at large; his address was known, and when visited some of the stolen property was found in his possession. In India a murderer was identified by the brown mark of a blood-stained thumb he had left when rummaging amongst the papers of the deceased. This man was convicted of theft but not of the murder.

The keystone to the whole system is the central office where the register or index of all criminals is kept for ready reference. The operators need no special gifts or lengthy training; method and accuracy suffice, and abundant checks exist to obviate incorrect classification and reduce the liability to error.

Authorities.—F. Galton, Finger Prints (1892), Fingerprint Directories (1895); E.R. Henry, Classification and Uses of Finger Prints; A. Yvert, L’Identification par les empreintes digitales palmaires (1905); K. Windt, R.S. Kodicek, Daktyloskopie. Verwertung von Fingerabdrücken zu Identifizierungszwecken (Vienna, 1904); E. Loeard, La Dactyloscopie. Identification des récidivistes par les empreintes digitales (1904); H. Faulds, Guide to Finger-Print Identification (1905); H. Gross, Criminal Investigation (trans. J. and J.C. Adam, 1907).

(A. G.)

FINGO, or Fengu (Ama-Fengu, “wanderers”), a Bantu-Negro people, allied to the Zulu family, who have given their name to the district of Fingoland, the S.W. portion of the Transkei division of the Cape province. The Fingo tribes were formed from the nations broken up by Chaka and his Zulu; after some years of oppression by the Xosa they appealed to the Cape government in 1835, and were permitted by Sir Benjamin D’Urban to settle on the banks of the Great Fish river. They have been always loyal to the British, and have steadily advanced in social respects. They have largely adapted themselves to western culture, wearing European clothes, supporting their schools by voluntary contributions, editing newspapers, translating English poetry, and setting their national songs to correct music. The majority call themselves Christians and many of them have intermarried with Europeans. (See Kaffirs.)

FINIAL (a variant of “final”; Lat. finis, end), an architectural term for the termination of a pinnacle, gable end, buttress, or canopy, consisting of a bunch of foliage, which bears a close affinity to the crockets (q.v.) running up the gables, turrets or spires, and in some cases may be formed by uniting four or more crockets together. Sometimes the term is incorrectly applied to a small pinnacle of which it is only the termination (see Epi).

FINIGUERRA, MASO [i.e. Tommaso] (1426-1464), Florentine goldsmith, draughtsman, and engraver, whose name is distinguished in the history of art and craftsmanship for reasons which are partly mythical. Vasari represents him as having been the first inventor of the art of engraving (using that word in its popular sense of taking impressions on paper from designs engraved on metal plates), and Vasari’s account was universally accepted and repeated until recent research proved it erroneous. What we actually know from contemporary documents of Finiguerra, his origin, his life, and his work, is as follows. He was the son of Antonio, and grandson of Tommaso Finiguerra or Finiguerri, both goldsmiths of Florence, and was born in Sta Lucia d’Ognissanti in 1426. He was brought up to the hereditary profession of goldsmith and was early distinguished for his work in niello. In his twenty-third year (1449) we find note of a sulphur cast from a niello of his workmanship being handed over by the painter Alessio Baldovinetti to a customer in payment or exchange for a dagger received. In 1452 Maso delivered and was paid for a niellated silver pax commissioned for the baptistery of St John by the consuls of the gild of merchants or Calimara. By this time he seems to have left his father’s workshop: and we know that he was in partnership with Piero di Bartolommeo di Sali and the great Antonio Pollaiuolo in 1457, when the firm had an order for a pair of fine silver candlesticks for the church of San Jacopo at Pistoia. In 1459 we find Finiguerra noted in the house-book of Giovanni Rucellai as one of several distinguished artists with whose works the Casa Rucellai was adorned. In 1462 he is recorded as having supplied another wealthy Florentine, Cino di Filippo Rinuccini, with waist-buckles, and in the years next following with forks and spoons for christening presents. In 1463 he drew cartoons, the heads of which were coloured by Alessio Baldovinetti, for five or more figures for the sacristy of the duomo, which was being decorated in wood inlay by a group of artists with Giuliano da Maiano at their head. On the 14th of December 1464 Maso Finiguerra made his will, and died shortly afterwards.

These documentary facts are supplemented by several writers of the next generation with statements more or less authoritative. Thus Baccio Bandinelli says that Maso was among the young artists who worked under Ghiberti on the famous gates of the baptistery; Benvenuto Cellini that he was the finest master of his day in the art of niello engraving, and that his masterpiece was a pax of the Crucifixion in the baptistery of St John; that being no great draughtsman, he in most cases, including that of the above-mentioned pax, worked from drawings by Antonio Pollaiuolo. Vasari, on the other hand, allowing that Maso was a much inferior draughtsman to Pollaiuolo, mentions nevertheless a number of original drawings by him as existing in his own collection, “with figures both draped and nude, and histories drawn in water-colour.” Vasari’s account was confirmed and amplified in the next century by Baldinucci, who says that he has seen many drawings by Finiguerra much in the manner of Masaccio; adding that Maso was beaten by Pollaiuolo in competition for the reliefs of the great silver altar-table commission by the merchants’ gild for the baptistery of St John (this famous work is now preserved in the Opera del Duomo). But the paragraph of Vasari which has chiefly held the attention of posterity is that in which he gives this craftsman the credit of having been the first to print off impressions from niello plates on sulphur casts and afterwards on sheets of paper, and of having followed up this invention by engraving copper-plates for the express purpose of printing impressions from them, and thus became the inventor and father of the art of engraving in general. Finiguerra, adds Vasari, was succeeded in the practice of engraving at Florence by a goldsmith called Baccio Baldini, who, not having much invention of his own, borrowed his designs from other artists and especially from Botticelli. In the last years of the 18th century Vasari’s account of Finiguerra’s invention was held to have received a decisive and startling confirmation under the following circumstances. There was in the baptistery at Florence (now in the Bargello) a beautiful 15th-century niello pax of the Coronation of the Virgin. The Abate Gori, a savant and connoisseur of the mid-century, had claimed this conjecturally for the work of Finiguerra; a later and still more enthusiastic virtuoso, the Abate Zani, discovered first, in the collection of Count Seratti at Leghorn, a sulphur cast from the very same niello (this cast is now in the British Museum), and then, in the National library at Paris, a paper impression corresponding to both. Here, then, he proclaimed, was the actual material first-fruit of Finiguerra’s invention and proof positive of Vasari’s accuracy.

Zani’s famous discovery, though still accepted in popular art histories and museum guides, is now discredited among serious students. For one thing, it has been proved that the art of printing from engraved copper-plates had been known in Germany, and probably in Italy also, for years before the date of Finiguerra’s alleged invention. For another, Maso’s pax for the baptistery, if Cellini is to be trusted, represented not a Coronation of the Virgin but a Crucifixion. In the next place, its recorded weight does not at all agree with that of the pax claimed by Gori and Zani to be his. Again, and perhaps this is the strongest argument of any, all authentic records agree in representing Finiguerra as a close associate in art and business of Antonio Pollaiuolo. Now nothing is more marked than the special style of Pollaiuolo and his group; and nothing is more unlike it than the style of the Coronation pax, the designer of which must obviously have been trained in quite a different school, namely that of Filippo Lippi. So this seductive identification has to be abandoned, and we have to look elsewhere for traces of the real work of Finiguerra. The only fully authenticated specimens which exist are the above-mentioned tarsia figures, over half life-size, executed from his cartoons for the sacristy of the duomo. But his hand has lately been conjecturally recognized in a number of other things: first in a set of drawings of the school of Pollaiuolo at the Uffizi, some of which are actually inscribed “Maso Finiguerra” in a 17th-century writing, probably that of Baldinucci himself; and secondly in a very curious and important book of nearly a hundred drawings by the same hand, acquired in 1888 for the British Museum. The Florence series depicts for the most part figures of the studio and the street, to all appearance members of the artist’s own family and workshop, drawn direct from life. The museum volume, on the other hand, is a picture-chronicle, drawn from imagination, and representing parallel figures of sacred and profane history, in a chronological series from the Creation to Julius Caesar, dressed and accoutred with inordinate richness according to the quaint pictures which Tuscan popular fancy in the mid-15th century conjured up to itself of the ancient world. Except for the differences naturally resulting from the difference of subject, and that the one series are done from life and the other from imagination, the technical style and handling of the two are identical and betray unmistakably a common origin. Both can be dated with certainty, from their style, costumes, &c., within a few years of 1460. Both agree strictly with the accounts of Finiguerra’s drawings left us by Vasari and Baldinucci, and disagree in no respect with the character of the inlaid figures of the sacristy. That the draughtsman was a goldsmith is proved on every page of the picture-chronicle by his skill and extravagant delight in the ornamental parts of design—chased and jewelled cups, helmets, shields, breastplates, scabbards and the like,—as well as by the symmetrical metallic forms into which he instinctively conventionalizes plants and flowers. That he was probably also an engraver in niello appears from the fact that figures from the Uffizi series of drawings are repeated among the rare anonymous Florentine niello prints of the time (the chief collection of which, formerly belonging to the marquis of Salamanca, is now in the cabinet of M. Edmond de Rothschild in Paris). That he was furthermore an engraver on copper seems certain from the fact that the general style and many particular figures and features of the British Museum chronicle drawings are exactly repeated in some of those primitive 15th-century Florentine prints which used to be catalogued loosely under the names of Baldini or Botticelli, but have of late years been classed more cautiously as anonymous prints in the “fine manner” (in contradistinction to another contemporary group of prints in the “broad manner”). The fine-manner group of primitive Florentine engravings itself falls into two divisions, one more archaic, more vigorous and original than the other, and consisting for the most part of larger and more important prints. It is this division which the drawings of the Chronicle series most closely resemble; so closely as almost to compel the conclusion that drawings and engravings are by the same hand. The later division of fine-manner prints represent a certain degree of technical advance from the earlier, and are softer in style, with elements of more classic grace and playfulness; their motives moreover are seldom original, but are borrowed from various sources, some from German engravings, some from Botticelli or a designer closely akin to him, some from the pages of the British Museum Chronicle-book itself, with a certain softening and attenuating of their rugged spirit; as though the book, after the death of the original draughtsman-engraver, had remained in his workshop and continued to be used by his successors. We thus find ourselves in presence of a draughtsman of the school of Pollaiuolo, some of whose drawings bear an ancient attribution to Finiguerra, while all agree with what is otherwise known of him, and one or two are exactly repeated in extant works of niello, the craft which was peculiarly his own; others being intimately related to the earliest or all but the earliest works of Florentine engraving, the kindred craft which tradition avers him to have practised, and which Vasari erroneously believed him to have invented. Surely, it has been confidently argued, this draughtsman must be no other than the true Finiguerra himself. The argument has not yet been universally accepted, but neither has any competent criticism appeared to shake it; so that it may be regarded for the present as holding the field.