The Artistic Masterpieces Dearest to Me

A hundred years ago people appraised the age of art falsely, believing it to be of recent date, no more than a few centuries old — just as they believed that the age of creation did not exceed a few thousand years, following the assertion of the divines that Adam was created in the year 4004 and that his birth fell on the twenty-eighth day of October.

But after Winckelmann wrote his book on the history of art, and after Lessing and Goethe followed him with their writings on the same subject, it was confirmed by shining proofs that art preceded ancient Greek civilization by a long age. And thereupon prehistoric man was raised from his grave, that the whole world might bear witness for him that he was an artist — and an artist of the first rank in glow of imagination, fineness of sense, and precision of observation — as gathered from the antiquities deciphered and the relics displayed.

The first four centuries of our era passed with art confined to the making of icons, until the Italian Giotto arose and dared to depict people: he proposed to his friends of the fraternity of art that they paint crowds of onlookers into a series of pictures representing the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. This drew the painters, little by little, to depicting life and household goods, slave girls, fruit, vegetables, vessels of silver and porcelain, rabbits, fish, dead roosters, and wives in their kitchens; and some of them made the background of these paintings out of pictures of hills, orchards, and fields. The Church, however, stood in the way, threatening the painters with excommunication and the charge of unbelief, until at last it proved powerless to turn them from what they sought — the depiction of people and of life.

In the Middle Ages people scrambled to buy pictures with an immense eagerness. Paintings then held among them the place the cinema holds among us today. Art for them was a diversion which they made and flocked to; and the scarcity of books, and the paucity of means of travel and of touring, made them flock to it all the more.

People's absorbing occupation was talk of the painters; they knew everything about their lives — as we today know the world's cinema stars — the points of their excellence and their moments of triumph.

Throughout the fifteenth century the Italians remained in their infatuation with painting, never tiring of talking of pictures, thinking upon them, and searching for ways to fix colors, until Palestrina, the great composer, appeared and turned them from painting to music. And when in his wake came Dante and Boccaccio and other great men of letters, their brilliance summoned people to the reading of literature and directed them to it. But music and literature did not occupy people as much as painting had; for after the death of those men of letters, and the appearance of painters who mastered the art with a mastery without parallel — the likes of Raphael and Michelangelo — they returned to their pursuit of painting. In that age the city of Venice became, like the city of Paris today, a place of pilgrimage for people and a haunt of the devotees of art, amusement, and song, visited by everyone who possessed some money and an inclination to enjoyment — not to mention the sculptors, painters, and opera singers who streamed to it from every side.

And now to the pictures I love — to the paintings in which I believe the painter attained his aim, after Rembrandt's saying: "A work of art is finished only when the artist has hit his mark in it."

The Picture of the Virgin — by Raphael. John the Baptist — by Raphael. The Knight's Dream — by Raphael. Saint Peter — by Caravaggio. The Head of Christ — by Velázquez. The Raising of Lazarus — by Sebastiano del Piombo. Paris and Mercury, Rubens — by Giovanni Bellini. The Woodcutters — by Giovanni Bellini. The Hunt in the Village — by Teniers the Younger. Ginevra de' Benci — by Leonardo da Vinci. The Nymph — by Leonardo da Vinci. Florence and Rome — by Leonardo da Vinci, both unfinished. Mona Lisa, and Saint Anne — by Leonardo da Vinci. The Dancing Muses — by Zoan Andrea. Justice and Vengeance Pursuing Crime — by Prud'hon. The Abduction of Psyche — by Prud'hon. The Virgin and the Saints — by Carracci. The Dancing Nymphs — by Corot. The Sacred Grove — by Chavannes. The Apotheosis of Homer — by Ingres. The Shepherdess, and The Angelus — by Millet. The Boys with the Grapes — by Murillo.

All these paintings, and others which space does not allow me to mention, are preserved in the museums of the West. Reproductions have been taken of them, gathered into books and selected for sale to lovers of art, and the fair reader can obtain many of them; all of them stir deep feelings and inspire fineness of sense, filling the soul with reverence, majesty, and delight.

And the dearest of these masterpieces to me is "Justice and Vengeance Pursuing Crime" — seeing how sorely we stand in need of justice..!!