PART II

METHODS OF THE MASTERS

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CHAPTER I

METHODS OF THE MASTERS

THERE is no study more stimulating, more steadying, or more profitable to the practising student than a close and intelligent examination of the works of the masters, of the expanding of their individual powers, and the influence of each school of artistic thought on those that follow it.

Many learned and exhaustive treatises have been written, dealing mainly with art in its historic and philosophic aspects, and a few by craftsmen for craftsmen, with some of which all serious painters should be acquainted ; but they are so encyclopædic, and often so diffuse, that the average student cannot find the necessary leisure to do more than consult them as books of reference.

There are, however, works of the nature of Mr. Hamerton's " Graphic Arts," Eastlake's "Materials," and Mrs. Merrifield's "Ancient Practice of Painting," to which I have reason to refer, and which are indispensable to a knowledge of the developments of the Arts ; for they contain much trustworthy information on all questions relating to the materials and the methods of men whose [124] works it shall be, I hope, our pleasant duty in the course of these few pages to discuss.

I propose that my reader, with this manual in hand, accompany me in imagination on a visit to the National Gallery.

Technical remarks and criticisms, to have any practical value, must be made "warm" with the picture or fragment of a work under one's eye. So I may be pardoned for choosing a gallery to which repeated visits are possible to me, thus placing me in a position to select just those intimate passages of the particular works which are best calculated to illustrate the technical points to which attention is here called.

The ingenious student to whom this metropolis is but a name should have little difficulty in applying the observations made before works of any given artist to the examples of such masters accessible to him-observations which I trust will be sufficiently characteristic and representative as to be so applicable.

There are some pictures in the galleries which I should advise my students to copy, and the instructions given as to the method to be pursued embody some of the traditions which are preserved to us, and the result of a minute examination of the pictures themselves and the processes that appear, at least to me, to have been followed in their execution. One cannot, of course, dogmatise about methods of which the painter himself might not always in the heat of production have [125] been conscious ; but I shall give my reasons for the conclusions at which I arrive, which I trust may aid you in researches that should always be made before you attempt to copy any works of the kind.

Some years ago a literary friend who was about to write a story, the hero of which was to be a painter, proposed such a visit with me to the galleries.

It was no easy matter to discuss technical excellences with a writer who had but a layman's knowledge of the pictorial ; for the essential virtues of a work of art with a big " A " are just those which have no counterpart in any other medium of thought. Line, colour, technique, chiaroscuro have neither their exact literary nor musical parallels, and though in describing them we seek the aid of terms that more properly appertain to these other arts, the specific significance of such terms is adequately followed only by those conversant with the painter's craft. The cultivated observer may be moved to admiration by a well-balanced composition, a fine flow of lines, without possessing the power to probe the secret of their appeal. A happy colour scheme is enjoyed by many, but the why and the wherefore are perceived by him alone who has attempted such harmonies ; and so it is with the subtleties of tone, colour-modelling, freedom of handling, learned draughtsmanship, and with all the aesthetic accomplishments, in which the conceptions of the masters are clothed. You, my reader, will have [126] some idea of these purely æsthetic qualities, gained by the practice of your craft; and by seeking models in which are revealed the highest expressions of which the simple materials are capable, in the hands of your great predecessors, you will increase your resources and augment the critical faculty inseparable from serious achievement.

The earliest and Gothic pictures are so far removed from modern practice that it will be advisable to concentrate our attention on the more developed forms ; for, with the exception of a few obvious differences, the practice of the earlier oil-painters in Italy and elsewhere is borrowed from Flemish crafts, to the main principles of which allusion is made.

ANGELO BRONZINO