A Student's Library of Art

READERS of English or German handbooks of art may wonder, on reading the prospectus of M. Quantin’s new Bibliothèque,¹ that he professes to be entering an unoccupied field. But French literature is less supplied with such books than English or German, and the French standard, being less popular, is more exacting. The French public has not learned to call, as we have, for amateur manuals, and has too great faith in special training to much approve them, not being so far gone in intellectual democracy as to believe that all subjects are open to all writers. M. Quantin is justified when he quotes Charles Blanc’s remark, made twenty years ago in his Grammaire des Arts de Dessin, that public teaching is silent on questions of art, and complains of the continued lack of fit text-books for pupils or amateurs in all departments of art.

In English literature, comparatively well supplied as it is, there is the difficulty that too much of the supply is the work of book-makers writing without special knowledge, and has at best the qualities of magazine writing. Index learning makes the art of instructing the world easy. With the aid of cyclopædias and books of reference, reinforced by moderate cramming, the clever bookmaker does his work with a readiness and neatness that commends him to the publisher, and suits a not over-exacting public. But it has become proverbial that to shape a good text-book or a good abstract needs the hand of a master. Or if we cannot always find the master ready for popular instruction, we can at least have the advanced pupil working under the teaching of the master, perhaps with his coöperation.

The first requisite, then, for a satisfactory collection of treatises on the arts and their history is that it should be throughout the work of writers who are of authority on their subjects. This is not more important in the technical treatises, where it goes without saving, than in the historical ones, of which there will be many in Mr. Quantin’s series. So far as we can see by the prospectus, this has been provided for. We recognize the names of several writers whose authority is well known : for instance, MM. Paul Mantz, of the Ministry of the Fine Arts, Guillaume and Delaborde of the Institute, Muntz, the scholarly librarian of the School of Fine Arts, MM. Chipiez, Havard, Collignon ; and we may infer from the official positions of those whose names are less familiar that they have special qualifications for their task. The " Library ” is to include a hundred volumes, duodecimo, of moderate size, — three hundred pages or so, — separate treatises, historical, technical, and critical, in the various arts. Four volumes are already received, — on Dutch Painting, Greek Archæology, Mosaics, and Artistic Anatomy. No full list of titles or authors is given in the prospectus, but we are promised within the year, besides an introductory compendium of the history of art, by M. Guillaume, the six general treatises, or volumes de tête; that on Sculpture, by M. Ronchaud ; Painting, by M. Mantz; Engraving, by the Viscount Delaborde ; Architecture, by M. Chipiez ; Ornamentation, by M. Burtz ; and Music, by Professor BourgaultDucoudray. Special treatises, nearly a score of them, are also promised during 1882 : on French Painting, Italian Painting, Spanish Painting, English Painting, Modern French Painting, Ceramics, Italian Sculpture, French Sculpture, the Artistic Inventory of France, Mythology, Etruscan and Roman Archæology, Byzantine Art, Oriental Archæology, Tapestry, the French Styles, Gothic Architecture, the Processes of Engraving. We are told that volumes will follow on ancient architecture, on the later architecture of Italy and the North, on wooden sculpture, on gems and medals, construction, jewelry and goldsmith’s work, glass, textiles, ivories, bronzes, costume, and the like.

This collection is intended, we are told, as text-books for the pupils of advanced public schools, “ la jeunesse de nos lycées, qui consacre dix ans aux humanités,” for those in special schools of art, and for amateurs generally. We suspect that the person for whom they will be most in requisition will be the intelligent amateur, unless he be the high-school pupil in whose curriculum they are required. Not that such books are not of value to the pupils of tech nical schools ; on the contrary, it is desirable to insist on the use of them; and if these are as good as they promise to be, we may hope that the supply will create the demand, which, so far as our observation goes, is not as great as it might be. It is a characteristic experience in teaching the arts that pupils are not students. They give themselves up, if they are zealous, to the work of execution, and neglect book-study altogether. The preference is natural and reasonable, but goes too far. In the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in our schools of art at home, and, we suspect, in others, the lectures are looked on by the students as mainly perfunctory, and, except so far as they are required, are but little attended, while the reading of technical books is almost unknown. As M. Duval complains, in the treatise of anatomy which is before us, young painters study the plates in their books, copy the figures, but never read the text. This is the tendency in every vocation for which one gets, or may get, his training in the midst of actual work, and is peculiarly tempting in all kinds of artistic work. Painters and architects look over their illustrated books and professional journals with a quick eye for the prints in them, but are apt to pay little heed to the letterpress, no matter how valuable. This is true not only of those who are mature, and busy in the full course of active production, but even more, probably, of those who are in the stage of leisure and study. This neglect is answerable for much narrowness and want of grasp in the minds of artists, to say nothing of gaps and discontinuity in their knowledge and ideas. Mr. Hamerton has given us a clever discourse on the text that certain artists should write about art; there is room for the preacher who shall insist that all young artists should read about art.

The plan of this series of books is simple, orderly, and natural. Perhaps no very different one is practicable for a set of hand-books by different authors, in which each is to be complete and independent. It has also this advantage for the popular market, and in its kind for educational use : that the reader will find the whole discussion of a particular subject compacted in a separate volume. It has this necessary disadvantage : that it tends to sink the interdependence of the arts, their mutual influences, common progress, and, in a word, solidarity. The influence of nation upon nation, the way in which all the arts have at every epoch moved hand in hand, their parallel progress, their family likeness in each place and period, the intimate connection of all in the study of history, — these, with the position of art in general history, are the phenomena (notably illustrated in Semper’s great unfinished work, Der Stil) which modern study of the progress of art brings out most strikingly. The illustration of them, which is cardinal to instruction in this branch of education, will doubtless be provided for in the volumes de tête we have mentioned, and we may expect to see them borne in mind by the writers of special treatises; yet it is difficult to keep them clearly in view where each art and country is discussed by itself, or to illustrate them adequately in the compass of a general volume. The necessity of adjusting every treatise to the Procrustean standard of uniform volumes is itself a disadvantage, to which readers of such an educational series have to submit, but one which probably is not unprofitable to the publishers.

The make-up of the books is attractive. At the low price put upon them (three francs and a half per volume) they must be economically manufactured, and the slightly brownish paper on which they are printed will look familiar to persons who are used to French school-books. But it is not disagreeable to the eye, is firm, and takes the ink well. The type is clear, the press-work good, and the illustrations are more than fairly printed — uncommonly well, we should be likely to say if the books were American. Of these illustrations part, no doubt, are made specially for the books, but many also are evidently culled un peu partout. They seem well chosen, however, are genuine illustrations, not ornamental pictures, clear, and usually well drawn, as might be expected. Some persons would have preferred the ordinary French paper cover and uncut leaves to the much decorated cloth binding ; but many will think differently, and the covers doubtless make the volumes more serviceable as the text-books for which the publisher recommends them.

M. Havard, in his volume on Dutch Painting,² covers no new ground, but his heart is evidently with his subject, and his work is fresh and interesting. The book comes as near as its purpose will allow to being an essay rather than a historical summary, and thereby gains much in attractiveness. The narrow chronological range of painting in Holland permits the writer to group his painters more by subjects and classes than by years. His introductory account of their art and the chapters on its various phases are clear, spirited, and seem to us judicious. His loyalty to the Dutch painters, their country and their art, makes him a sympathetic and inspiring guide, and his enthusiasm will offend no one. He takes issue with the critics who, in pity of the continual moist gloom which they ascribe to the Low Countries, have attributed the lowland painters’ fondness for color to a reaction against their surroundings, He maintains, to the contrary, that, so far from being dull, the scenery of Holland is, by virtue of its broken mists, exceptionally full of luminous effect and passages of telling color, — a claim that need not rouse the jealousy of dwellers in mountainous countries, remembering the glories which wayward mist and cloud add to highland landscape. Painters, indeed, know that luminous effect, particularly such as the Dutch painters aim at, is better got by leading up to light through a breadth of half-tint than by pouring in a full glow of sunlight, broken only by positive shadow; and also that color is better seen in half tint than either in sun or in shadow. M. Havard traces cleverly the development of painting in Holland ; its debts to the early Flemish painters, to those Dutch painters who traveled and worked in Italy, and to the temper and habits of the Dutch people ; with ready acknowledgment to Dr. Waagen and other writers, whose researches have lately helped to clear up their history. He might well, if he had not held to a historical treatment, have given still more prominence to genre, which is Holland’s most characteristic contribution to the world’s art, and that which has most influenced the painting of other countries. The Dutch, in truth, being thoroughly democratic, with no privileged and cultivated class to fix the fashion of art, being altogether practical and given to homely indulgences, were not the people to foster heroic art, but turned more naturally, as such communities always will, to genre or to portraiture, in one form or another. M. Havard sketches the salient points of their art well, and sums up neatly by saying, “ Nature took care to make them clever colorists, and the band of learned Italianists trained them pitilessly in drawing, while the influences about them held them fast to naturalism. These three elements, equally blended, gave their art its novelty, its force, its importance, its character, its grandeur.”

The accounts of individual artists are to the point, not overburdened with technicalities, compact, but generally adequate, for M. Havard has the French art of being brief without seeming hurried. We may say, in passing, that he has a respect for the spelling of foreign proper names that Frenchmen do not always show. Other connoisseurs may disagree with him on points of criticism, and to some his praise of Rembrandt and Ruysdael may sound a little gushing ; but usually his judgment is sober, and his position on points of controversy is guarded. The illustrations in this volume are less uniformly successful than in the others, from being more ambitious. They are evidently mostly borrowed, and of unequal merit. The temptation to photographic reproduction of etchings is obvious in the case of Rembrandt and Van Ostade, but the result is not always rewarding, especially in the print labeled fac-simile from Rembrandt’s Raising of Lazarus. One cannot have everything for three francs and a half, and many of the less ambitious illustrations are as good in their way as could be asked. There is an apparently full index of artists’ names, a very necessary thing in such a book.

One turns with interest to the volume on Greek Archæology,³ by M. Collignon ; for the subject is fresh and unexhausted, essentially a study of our own time, one which a good part of the literary world is busily following up at this moment. A manual of archæology must needs always be a little behind the time, for discovery goes on so continuously that no general treatise can fully keep pace with it. But M. Collignon keeps his work well up with what has been published; he not only notices Schliemann’s, Di Cesnola’s, and Wood’s explorations, the later excavations at Olympia and Pergamos, the Hermes of Praxiteles and the Gigantomachia, but also mentions the curious statuette of Athene found at Athens not long ago, in which archæologists see a copy in parvo of the famous chryselephantine Athene Parthenos of Phidias. The work is scholarly and well digested. It gives as good an idea of its whole subject as could well be presented in a duodecimo of three hundred and sixty pages. The subject is in truth rather large and crowded with detail to be well presented in the compass of such a volume, — though the purpose of the series would hardly admit of more, — and the author has been obliged to pass over ornamental and conventional forms, which more than anything else illustrate the Oriental affinities and origin of Greek art. Its plastic and graphic side is the one which M. Collignon has in mind, and except for fifty pages given to architecture the volume is devoted to the arts which represent the human figure, — sculpture, vase painting, and glyptics. This is indeed the most characteristic side of Greek art, and is enough for one such volume.

The chapter on architecture sounds a little perfunctory, and as if its topics lay just outside the writer’s domain. It gives a very good outline of the history of the orders and a fair account of the chief forms of Greek architecture, but is not quite irreproachable when it ventures into detail. There is among the frequent illustrations no view of a Greek temple, though there is a plan of the Parthenon ; some restorations are given without caution, which are at least questionable ; and though the Erechtheum is mentioned two or three times, the cuts of its details which are shown in illustration of the Ionic order are not credited to it, and the only mention of its caryatid portico is made a hundred pages farther on, under the head of sculpture. It would have done little harm if the discussion of architecture, which, though intelligent seems not entirely adequate nor quite at home in the book, had been remanded altogether to another volume. The book, which, except for this, is altogether homogeneous, would have gained in unity, at no great sacrifice.

In his other archæological studies M. Collignon is on his own ground, and his work is excellent, so far as we can see. His use of authorities is wide, and by no means confined to his own countrymen, as has often been the case with French writers, to their injury ; his material is well arranged and well handled. A manual of archæology, trustworthy and of convenient size, is a thing the general student may be thankful for, and readers who have pastured on such books as Westropp’s Handbook of Archæology may be thankful for the change which this will give them. An excellent feature is the short bibliography given at the head of each chapter, and the references to authorities in the foot-notes. These show the catholicity of the author’s reading, and include most of the known writers on the subject of the book, French, German and English, though some writers are unmentioned whom one would expect to see in so large a company, — Bötticher and Reber, for instance. The first forty pages give a rapid sketch of the origin and affinities of Greek art. The reader naturally looks to see what is said of Dr. Schliemann’s discoveries, and finds them unhesitatingly accepted as the earliest specimens of prehomeric art, with no reference indeed to the opinions which ascribe them to its decline or to Northern invaders. On controverted questions, however, M. Collignon’s usual attitude is cautiously neutral. The chapters on sculpture, terra cotta, and vases are clear, and give the general reader an excellent résumé of their subjects. Those on coins, gems, bronzes, and jewels are very condensed, but tell the main facts. The sequence of styles is well shown, and the important point of the relation of the lesser and till lately unregarded forms of art to the greater is well brought out.

The illustrations are liberal and to the point, better drawn than we are apt to find them in books of like aim, though, like those in the other volumes, they vary in style and excellence. Some which are subscribed by the author show that he can draw as well as write. A second edition will give an opportunity to correct a considerable number of wrong references and other typographical errors, especially in Greek quotations ; and also to supply the indexes which such a book ought to have.

Mosaic decoration, being a subject of narrower range, can be more amply treated in a small volume. M. Gerspach’s work ⁴ is well done. It is a historic account of mosaic decoration in its monumental forms from its beginnings until now. The history of mosaics is taken up century by century, and well illustrated, from the earliest classic period, and brought down through Roman, Byzantine, mediæval, Renaissance, and modern work to that of our own day. Much of the story must be succinctly told, but the most important periods and examples are well displayed, in some cases from the author’s own observation ; while foot-notes give a good range of authorities, old and new, to which the reader who wishes to follow out a particular branch of the subject may refer. The reader could bear a fuller characterization of the different schools and periods ; he is left to do most of his generalizing for himself. M. Gerspach has, however, a clear eye for differences of style or of school, and convictions of his own. He shows due appreciation of the classic and early Christian work, and of the Byzantine examples which have made Ravenna famous; but his enthusiasm seems most moved by the Italian mosaics of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the earliest of which, not now sufficiently valued, as he thinks, “ prepared the way for the first Renaissance.” He adds that “ a hundred years before Niccolo Pisano, longer still before Cimabue and Giotto, the mosaicists produced better drawn figures, greater and more generous compositions, than the first Tuscan masters.” He exalts far above contemporary Byzantine work the purely Italian school, which, he says, was horn self-poised and independent when Innocent II. re vived the neglected mosaic for the decoration of Sta. Maria in Trastevere. But “ with the dawn of the Renaissance,” he adds, “ began the dying agony of mosaic,” when those who practiced it undertook the imitation of oilpainting. The illustrations, which are very good, set forth more or less amply most of the noted examples up to the end of the mediæval period, with some later ones, and give a good many others that are less known, but interesting and significant. Lists of the mosaics in St. Marc’s and St. Peter’s are given, and some account of the work in our day in Italy, Russia, Germany, and France. There is a good description of the technical processes of mosaic-working in the last chapter but one. The last offers some very judicious remarks on the artistic treatment of mosaics : it might be wished that everybody would read them who would, in this age of revivals, provide mosaic decoration. The reader will be glad to find indexes both of artists and of places.

The only one of the series yet published which is not historical is M. Duval’s Anatomy for Artists.⁵ The author’s position and reputation as professor of anatomy at the Ecole des Beaux Arts are sufficient surety of its technical merit. It is not a book to which the draughtsman new to the figure may turn for general directions concerning proportions, attitudes, action, and modeling ; but is meant, says M. Duval, in his preface, to give to artists who have already, from observation, some knowledge of the form and movements of the figure a scientific idea of them. “ Therefore,” he says, “ it is not so much the modeling of this or that region as the anatomical explanation of that modeling that is kept in view.” Structure rather than form is uppermost in the book, but only those parts of the body, the bones and muscles, which concern the figure-draughtsman are treated, and there is always an eye to their outward shape and action. The general proportions of the figure, the canons that have been proposed for them, the relations and measures of its parts, — these are discussed, but secondarily and briefly. No account is made of attitude, and but little of modeling. The mechanism of the bony and muscular system is the subject of the book, and is set forth with a clearness and directness that give more interest than the untechnical reader might expect. The book betrays the professor: it is divided into lessons, and is a model of orderly statement and precision. The artist’s criticism is likely to be that it has the defects of its qualities ; that out of deference to system and symmetry too many details are introduced that are not of use to him, attention claimed by minutiæ of structure which are hidden and do not tell at all on outside form ; that things are separated in explanation which must he taken together both in conception and representation. There is a considerable amount of matter in the nomenclature of unimportant bones or muscles, or of details of structure hidden from everybody but the anatomist, which to the artistic reader is irrelevant; and to instance a result of its arrangement, if he wishes to study the conformation of the knee, he must look for its anterior and lateral aspect on page 144, where the bones of the knee are described, but for its posterior aspect he must turn to page 261, in the lesson on its muscles. In like manner, he will find the flexure of the fore-arm described in one chapter, and its rotation in another.

In the plan of the book the skeleton is made the point of departure. The author begins with it, explains it most at length, giving it three fifths of his space, and refers everything to it, instead of studying the figure from without and working inward to the skeleton, as is common. The final chapter, on the muscles of expression, has necessarily more regard than the rest to the artist’s point of view. One is surprised at first at the subordinate position to which M. Duval relegates the muscles, which to the artist’s eye make up the whole figure. Nevertheless, we may not forget that the skeleton determines the attitudes and proportions of the figure, if not its modeling, and that it is the portion of the structure which must be studied apart, since it is not visible in the model. The illustrations in this volume are uncommonly good ; very clear both in drawing and in arrangement. Here, too, one may complain a little of a rigorous subdivision, for there are no plates which show an ensemble. There is no general view of the skeleton, and no assemblages of its parts, not even a cut which shows the femur attached to the pelvis, or the scapula and clavicle to the thorax, the bones of the hand to the arm, or the foot to the leg. The drawings of muscles show the trunk and limbs as wholes, but the position of the bones is not marked in them. This, however, is consistent with the plan of the book, which may well have a volume on the exterior aspect of the body to supplement it. Its symmetry of arrangement, it should be said, makes the book easy of reference, and an index helps.

Here, then, are four excellent handbooks, general and special, historical and technical, which give, as we may assume, a fair criterion of the quality of those that are to follow. We might wish, for the interest of the general reader, that the form of the historical treatises had been something less categorical ; that the books had been rather more like essays, and rather less like manuals. But the form of the manual is that which is consecrated to the uses of instruction, for which these books are intended. It is of no use to quarrel with a hand-book because it is not an essay; what is lost as a discussion is gained as a book of reference. The volumes are worth buying and reading to whoever is interested in their subjects unless he be already learned. If he would like a more philosophical arrangement of matter, he may still acknowledge the truth there is in a shrewd remark with which the late Dr. Walker, of Harvard, used to instruct his students : that it is not the logical, but the chronological, arrangement which reaches most minds.