no purely spiritual Beyond, but one actually present, so that we can behold Love itself in its object. The highest and most unique form of such a Love is that of the Virgin Mother for her Christ child, the love of the one mother who has brought forth the Saviour of the world and carries Him in her arms. This is the content of most loveliness to which we may say Christian art generally and pre-eminently the painter's art in the religious sphere has been exalted.
The love of God, and more expressly[258] that of which Christ is the object, is of an entirely spiritual type. Its object is only visible to the eyes of the soul, so that in these cases we do not in the strict sense get the reciprocity which is bound with the notion of Love, and moreover there is no natural tie which secures the lovers and from its origin binds them to each other. Every other type of love, to put the matter conversely, remains in some measure accidental in its incidence, and in another aspect of it the lovers possess, as, for instance, sisters, or the father's love for his children, yet further relations outside this particular one, which assert an essential claim upon them. A father or brothers are compelled to direct their attention to the world, the State, affairs or war, in one word universal ends; the sister becomes wife, mother, and so forth. In the case of a mother's love of her child, on the contrary, the love is from its very nature neither something that is contingent, nor is it merely a single phase[259]. It is its highest earthly type, in which its natural character and its most sacred function immediately coalesce. From the point of view, however, in which as a rule in maternal love the mother sees and feels at the same time her husband in her child, we may observe that this aspect, too, in the Virgin Mary's case disappears.
Her feeling has nothing in common with a wife's love for her wedded husband; on the contrary her relation to Joseph is rather that of a sister, and on the side of Joseph a feeling of respectful reverence for the Child that is God's and Mary's. We therefore find that religious love is set forth in its fullest and most ideal[260] human form, not in that for Christ amid His sufferings, nor in His resurrection, nor as He delays His departure among His friends, but in the emotional nature of a woman, in Mary. Her entire soul and life is human love for the Child, which she calls her own, and along with it adoration, and love of God with whom she feels herself thus united[261]. She is humble before God, and yet is steeped in the infinite exaltation that she is the single one among maidens who is above all blessed. Not alone and apart, but only in her Child is she made perfect in God, but in that, whether it be by the cradle or as queen of heaven, she is entirely content and blessed, without passion and yearning, with no other want, with no other aim to have or possess anything but that which she possesses.
The manifestation of this love under the aspect of its religious content expands in many directions, such as the annunciation, the visitation, the birth, the flight into Egypt, and other such incidents. We may also associate with it, during the later course of the Christ-life, the disciples and women, who follow Him, and in whom the love of God is more or less a personal relation of their love to the living, present Saviour, Who, as actual man, pursues His course among them, and in like manner also the love of those angels who, on the occasion of His birth and at other times, hover around in grave adoration or simple joy. In treating all such figures the art of painting in particular discloses the complete peace and content of such a love.
But this peace, furthermore, is dissolved in the most heartfelt anguish. Mary the mother beholds Christ carrying the cross. She sees Him suffer on the cross and die; she sees Him taken from the cross and buried, and no grief is more poignant than her own. And yet we may observe that it is neither the irreparableness[262] of such a grief, or rather of such a loss, nor the weight of the calamity, nor the lament over the injustice of destiny, which constitutes the real content in such anguish, so that a contrast between it and the sorrow of Niobe is particularly instructive. Niobe, too, has lost all her children, and is set before us in severe loftiness and unperturbed beauty. The main content here is the aspect of the natural life of this ill-starred sufferer, the beauty in which Nature has robed her and which embraces the entire presentment of her actual existence. She, this actual personality, is beauty personified, and therein she persists. But her soul-life, her heart, has lost the entire content of its love, its soul, and her individuality and beauty can only turn into stone. The grief of Mary is of a wholly different type. She feels intimately the dagger which cuts through her soul's very centre, her heart breaks, but she does not become stone. She did not merely possess love, but her soul-life throughout is nothing but love, that is, free and concrete ideality, which retains the absolute content of that which it loses, and in the loss itself of the beloved persists in the peace of love.
Her heart indeed breaks, but the substantive principle of her heart, the content of its life[263], which is disclosed through her anguish of soul with a vital strength that can never be lost, is something infinitely more exalted, namely, the living beauty of the human soul, as contrasted with its abstract substance, whose ideal existence as presented in _bodily shape_, when it is lost remains indeed indestructible, but is turned to stone.
There is one further subject for painting in connection with Mary the mother of Jesus, and that is her death and assumption. Schoreel has with exceptional beauty depicted a death of Mary in which we find the charm of her youth once more restored[264]. This master has united in his picture the expression of somnambulism, presence of death, rigidity, and blindness towards the exterior world with one which seems to suggest that the spirit, which seems somehow to penetrate through their general aspect, has found a home elsewhere and is blessed therein.
(_γγ_)_Thirdly_, we must include within the sphere of the actual presence of God in the life, sufferings, and glorification of Himself, _mankind at large_[265], that is to say the consciousness of _individual human life_, which God, or more accurately the events of His history, constitutes as itself an object of His love, communicating to it a content which is not merely finite but absolute in its significance. Here, too, we may emphasize the three aspects of tranquil _devotion_, _repentance_, and _conversion_, which both from the point of view of the soul and that of external condition the history of the Divine Passion repeats to mankind, no less than the ideal _consummation_ in glory and the blessedness of pure attainment.
In respect to the _first_ of these, namely, devotion, we have here what is primarily the content of _prayer._ This relation is in one aspect of it a humbling, surrender of the self, the seeking of peace in another; from another point of view it is not a _petition_ but rather a _prayer_[266]. Petition and prayer are no doubt closely connected in so far, that is, as a prayer can be a petition. And yet the genuine petition seeks after something _for itself._ It importunes the man who possesses something of importance to myself, that he may feel inclined to do me a favour in virtue of the request, that his heart may yield, or his love may be roused toward me, in one word that his feeling of identity with myself may be awakened. What I, however, feel in making a petition is the desire for something, which the other person must lose if I am to secure it. The other person is to love me in order that my self-love may be satisfied, and my weal and necessity be promoted. I on the contrary give nothing further in the transaction unless it be contained in an admission that the person thus opportuned may ask for similar favours from myself. Prayer is not a petition of this type. It is an exaltation of the heart to the Absolute, which is assumed to be essentially Love, and as such possesses nothing independently[267]. The devotion itself is the gift, the petition itself is the blessedness. For although prayer may contain a petition for some particular thing, yet it is not this particular thing which is the true purport of the prayer; rather the essential truth of it is the conviction that the petition will be heard, and not heard in its relation to the particular request so much as to the absolute trust that God will apportion that which is best for me to receive. And thus even in such a connection prayer is itself its own satisfaction, the enjoyment, the express feeling and consciousness of eternal Love, which not only with its ray of illumination shines through the object[268] of prayer and its situation, but in fact constitutes the situation and what is there actually or is thereby manifested. It is this type of supplication which we find exemplified by Pope Sixtus in the picture of Raphael already mentioned[269], no less than by Santa Barbara in the same picture, and by many other representations of the prayers of apostles and saints, of Saint Francis[270] and the like at the foot of the Cross, where we find in the place of the suffering of Christ, or the dismay, doubt, and despair of the disciples the love and adoration of God, and the prayer that loses itself in Him is selected as the significant content. We find such rendered with particular force for the most part on the countenances of aged men marked strongly with the sufferings and experience of life in the earlier period of painting, faces that appear to be portraits, souls permeated with devotional feeling to such an extent that this attitude of prayer does not merely appear to be experienced at this particular moment, but rather they are presented us as pious and saintlike persons whose entire life, thought, instinct, and volition is one prayer, and whose expression despite of all the truth of their portraiture may be summed up wholly in this assurance and peace of Love. It is otherwise, however, among many of the earlier German and Flemish masters. The subject of the altar picture in Cologne Cathedral is the adoring kings and patrons of Cologne. We find this subject too frequently selected by the school of Van Eyck. In such examples the persons who adore are frequently famous individuals, princes, as, for instance, in a well-known adoration picture, which has been taken for the work of Van Eyck, critics have identified two of the kings with portraits of Philip of Burgundy and Charles the Bold. In the case of personages of this type we see that they are something more than saints, have affairs in the world, and only go to mass on Sunday or in the early morning, but during the rest of the week or for the rest of the day have other business to look after. And more particularly in our Flemish or German pictures the patrons are pious knights, God-fearing housewives with their sons and daughters. They resemble Martha who fares hither and thither and is concerned with matters of external or mundane significance, rather than Mary who has selected once and for all the best part. Their piety is not deficient, it is true, in intensity and soul; but we do not find here the song of Love which is at once the beginning and end of it, and which is perforce not merely an exaltation, a prayer, or thanks for a gift received, but is as much its unique life as that of the nightingale.
We may summarize the distinction which can be drawn generally in pictures of this kind between saints and worshippers on the one hand, and pious members of the Christian community as they actually appeared on the other, in the statement that the worshippers, more especially in Italian pictures, disclose in the expression of their piety a complete harmony of external and spiritual condition. It is their very soul which we find written for the most part on their countenances, which are not permitted to express anything opposed to the emotions of their heart. In the actual conditions of life this is not always the case. An infant, for example, when it weeps, more particularly when beginning to do so, quite apart from the fact that we know its grief is not worth the trouble of crying over, often makes us smile with its ugly faces.
And in the same way old folk pucker up their face when they laugh, because the lines of their features are too pronounced, cold, and stiff to accommodate themselves readily to an unreserved and natural laugh or a friendly smile. The art of painting should endeavour to avoid this incompatibility between the emotions of piety expressed and the sensuous forms which have to express them, and, so far as possible, produce a harmony between the soul and its external mode of expression.
And this in the highest degree was effected by the Italians; the Germans and Flemish were less successful, because the main object in their work was living portraiture.
I will add one further remark, that this devotion of the soul ought not to reach the point of the actual cry of anxiety, that cry of tribulation and desire, such as the Psalms and many Lutheran hymns express, and we may illustrate it with the old words: "As the hart crieth for the water-brooks, so crieth my soul for Thee." We may rather indicate it as a gradual melting away, not to that attenuation of sweetness perhaps we associate with the nun, but at any rate a surrender of the soul, and an enjoyment and satisfaction in such surrender. For that travail of faith, that anxious troubling of soul, that doubt and desperation which persists in disunion, such a type of hypochondriacal piety which never is certain whether it is still sin, whether there has been repentance and pardon is complete, a surrender, in which the soul can never advance a step, and is always betraying the fact by his anxiety, such a state is not compatible with the beauty of the romantic Ideal. We much prefer that the eye of devotion should raise its look of yearning heavenwards, although it is both more artistic and gives us yet more satisfaction when it is centred on some present object of adoration, whether it be the Virgin Mother, Christ, or saint. It is a facile thing, only too facile, to attach to a picture a spiritual interest, by making its central figure gaze heavenwards, anywhere beyond the world, just as we find that nowadays people are only too ready to make use of an equally facile way of proving God and religion to be the foundation of society by quoting texts of the Bible rather than establishing such a basis on the reason of actual reality. Such a gaze of countenance upwards becomes in the pictures of Guido Reni[271], for example, a pure mannerism. The Assumption of the Virgin, too, which we find at Munich, has been much eulogized by its admirers and critics, and we may admit that the exalted character of its transfiguration, the absorption and surrender of the soul in the heavenly vision, and indeed the entire pose of the ascending figure, to say nothing of the brilliance and beauty of the colouring, is most impressive. But for myself I find such representations which depict the Virgin Mother in her own daydream of love and blessedness with her glance centred on her babe still more appropriate to her truth. The other type of yearning and strain, with its upward gaze heavenwards, is somewhat too near to our modern sentimentalism.
A _further_ aspect of importance is concerned with the entrance of the principle of negation into the spiritual devotion of Love. The disciples, saints, and martyrs, have to pass through, in some measure as an experience of their souls, and in part, too, as one of their external life, that way of suffering along which the Christ in the history of His Passion passed before them.
This suffering lies to some extent on the confines of art. Painting can very easily overstep this boundary, in so far, that is, as it accepts for its subject-matter the horrors and terrors of the _bodily_ torture, whether it be in flaying, or burning, or crucifixion, and its pains.
This it is not permitted to do, if it is not to forsake the spiritual Ideal. This is not solely due to the fact that to present martyrs under such conditions to our sight is not beautiful to the sense, nor because our nerves nowadays are too keenly strung, but on the better ground that this material aspect is not the really important one.
The true content we have to follow with sympathy and which should be depicted is the _spiritual_ experience, the soul in all that it suffers through Love, and not the direct bodily pain of a certain individual, the grief for the sufferings of another, or the anguish felt personally for personal demerit. The endurance of martyrs in physical tortures is an endurance which carries with it merely physical pain: what the spiritual Ideal looks for is the trial of the soul in its own domain, its own peculiar suffering, the wounds of its love, the repentance, mourning, anguish, and penance of its heart.
But we must add that in depicting this pain of soul the _positive_ aspect must not wholly be absent. The soul must be assured of the actual and essentially consummated reconciliation between mankind and God, and only experience anxiety that this eternal salvation be realized as a truth in itself. In this connection we not unfrequently meet with repentant people, martyrs, and monks, who, despite of their assuredness of an objective atonement, partly are overwhelmed with sorrow for a heart whose entire surrender they deem to be right, and partly have already made such complete surrender, and yet are always for realizing such reconciliation anew, and consequently for ever imposing on themselves the burden of penances. And we find, therefore, in the artistic treatment of such situations a twofold point of departure. In other words, the artist may, to start with, presuppose in his subject an open disposition, freedom, cheerfulness, and decision of spirit, such as carries with ease life and the yoke of the actual world and knows how to readily deal with the same, then he may fitly associate with such painful experiences a native nobility, grace, freshness, freedom, and beauty of form. When, on the contrary, his work is based upon a natural sense that is more refractory, defiant, savage, and limited, the conflict of the spirit in overcoming the flesh and the world, and securing to itself the religion of salvation will necessarily imply more severe travail. In cases of such obstinacy of soul, therefore, the harsher reflections of force and stability are more apparent, the scars of the wounds which have been inflicted on an obstinacy of this type are more visible and enduring, and the beauty of the physical result tends to vanish[272].
_Thirdly_, that positive aspect of atonement, the _transfigurement_ that results from grief's travail, the blessedness that comes of repentance may be independently accepted as the subject of artistic presentment though it may readily pass into false conceptions.
Such, then, are the main distinguishing characteristics of the absolute spiritual Ideal regarded as the essential content of romantic painting.
It forms the material of its most successful and solemn creations, works that are immortal by virtue of the depth of their contemplation; and when the representation of essential truth is thereby expressed they are nothing less than the most exalted expansion of the soul to its heaven of bliss, the most intimate and complete revelation of ideal life that an artist can bring before our vision.
Following this pre-eminently religious sphere of artistic production we have still to investigate two further fields of its activity.
(_β_) In direct contrast to the province of religion we have that which, if we consider it in its isolated abstraction, is equally destitute of the life of soul and God, Nature in its simplest terms, and regarded more definitely in its connection with painting, Nature's _landscape._ We have stated the character of the object of religion to be such that in it the _substantive_ ideality of the soul expresses therein the indwelling sense of Love as united to the Absolute[273].
This inward ideality has, however, a further content. It is able to discover in that which is wholly external an accord with soul-life, and can recognize in the objective world as such traits which have an affinity with what is spiritual. Regarded in their immediacy, no doubt, hills, mountains, woods, valleys, streams, meadows, sunlight, moon, and the starry heavens, are simply perceived to be the natural objects they are. But, in the _first_ place, these objects have to start with an _independent_ interest, in so far as it is the free life of Nature, which appears in them, and produces a sense of fellow feeling in the individual as one who shares that life himself; and, _secondly_, the particular changes of Nature's moods bring about states in the soul which correspond to such moods. It is possible for man to follow with his own life this animation of Nature and partake in this harmony of soul with its environment, and feel thereby at home in Nature. Just as the Arcadians spoke of a Pan, who made them shudder and frightened in the gloaming of the forest, in the same way the varied conditions of Nature's landscape in its gentle blithesomeness, its balmy repose, its spring-freshness, its wintry chill, its morning awakening and evening rest find their counterfeits in states of the soul. The tranquil depth of the ocean, the possibility that its depths may break forth with infinite power is akin to soul movements, just as conversely the roaring, upwelling, foaming, and break of storm-tossed waves stir the soul with concordant music. It is an ideal significance of this kind that the art of painting accepts as its object. And for this reason it is not natural objects merely as such in their external form and association which ought to constitute its true content, so that painting is nothing more than a mere imitation, but rather the animation of Nature's life, which interfuses it throughout and which is able to bring into prominence and assert with more vividness in the scenes of Nature reproduced the characteristic affinity of specific conditions of this life with particular spiritual states--it is a vital participation in Nature of this kind which gives us the meeting-point, steeped as it is in the soul-life and temperament of the artist, by means of which Nature may become the content of painting not merely as environment, but as possessing a distinct individuality[274].
(_γ_) There is yet further a _third_ type of idealization which we find partly in the case where objects wholly insignificant are detached from the position they occupy in the landscape, and, partly, in scenes of human life, which may appear to us not merely as wholly accidental as thus selected, but even of a kind that is both mean and commonplace.
I have already found an opportunity for an attempt to justify the artistic selection of such subjects[275]. I will in connection with painting merely add the following remarks to our former discussion.
The art of painting is not merely concerned with the inward life of the soul, but with that ideal element that is essentially _particularized_[276]. This latter type of ideality for the reason that particularity is its principle is not content to rest satisfied with the absolute object of religion, and as little will merely accept from the external world Nature's vitality and its defined character as landscape; rather it insists on partaking of everything, in which man as an isolated individual soul can take a rational interest and find pleasure. Even in the case of its representations of religious material art, in proportion as it develops, it attaches such more closely to terrestrial conditions and the objects of actual vision, giving to its content the complete presence of natural existence, so that we ultimately find that the aspect of sensuous existence is most important and the interest of devotional life only so in a subordinate degree. For here, too, art receives the task to work out the Ideal in its fullest realization, in other words, to present to our senses that which is originally detached from them, to carry over objects taken from the remoteness of past life into present life and unite them with that present human life.
At our present stage of human evolution it is the ideality which we find in actual life as it faces us, in the circumstances of daily experience, the most common and the most trivial, which is the actual content.
(_αα_) If we inquire, then, what it is that makes a content of this kind, otherwise so poverty-stricken and indifferent, compatible with the claims of art, we must reply that it is the substantive core that is contained and made valid therein, in general terms the vitality and delight of self-subsistent existence, exemplified in the greatest variety of its aims and interests. The life of mankind is always in the immediate Present. What a man may do in each moment thereof is something specific, and its justification consists in the fact that he carries through all his engagements, the least no less than the greatest, with heart and soul. In this way he is united with each particular incident, and, by infusing into each the entire force of his individuality, appears to identify his whole existence with such.
This coalescence[277] produces that harmony of the individual with the specific character of his immediate activity in the circumstances that are nearest him, which is itself a mode of ideality, and which communicates in such a case to the subsistency of an existence, which is an exclusive and perfected whole, its attractive character. The interest, therefore, that we derive from representations of this kind is not to be attributed to the subject-matter, but rather to this animating soul, which by itself, and independently of that wherein it is disclosed as vital, finds an echo in every uncorrupted nature, in every free spirit, and is for the same an object of sympathy and delight. We must not, therefore, impair our enjoyment on the ground that the demand is made of us to admire such works of art under the aspect of their _likeness_ to _Nature_ so-called and such illusive imitation[278]. This demand, which works of this kind appear at first blush to support, is itself merely a deception which fails to hit the real point. For an admiration of this type is solely deducible from the wholly external comparison of a work of art and a work of Nature, and is only associated with the similarity of the counterfeit with an object or fact presented us, whereas the real content here and the artistic quality in the composition and execution is the coalescence of the matter portrayed _with its own substance_, which is the reality as independently depicted in its vital characterization. According to the principle of illusion, for instance, the portraits of Denner are entitled to our praise, which are, no doubt, imitations of Nature, but for the most part fail entirely to present us that vital animation on which we lay the main stress in these cases, and are mainly concerned with depicting hair, wrinkles, and generally every kind of trait which, without exactly being indicative of a corpse, are equally remote from the human physiognomy depicted as alive.
Moreover, if we permit ourselves to level down our enjoyment through superficial thoughts of the above fashionable kind, believing subjects of this type to be mean and unworthy of our contemplation, we accept the content by doing so in a form other than that in which art offers them us. In other words we merely associate with them the relation in which we stand to them according to our personal needs, pleasure, such education as we otherwise possess and other objects we have before us, that is to say we merely conceive them in respect to their _external purport_, throughout which it is our own requirements which are the vital thing we aim at for ourselves, and the matter of all importance. The life of the subject-matter itself, however, is thereby destroyed, in so far, that is, as the sole object of its existence appears to be that of a means simply, or lapses into a thing of no moment at all, just because we personally have no need for it. A gleam of sunlight, for example, which falls upon a room we enter through an open door, a part of the country we travel through, a sempstress, a maid we happen to see busily engaged, one and all we may regard with indifference, because we suffer them to pass by remote from the thoughts and interests which are bound up with them, and consequently in our soliloquy, or conversation with another will not suffer the situations which actually lie before us to speak a word in the current of our own thoughts and speech; or we cast what is merely a passing glance at them, the summary of which does not amount to more than the remark, "how pleasant, fine, or ugly they are." Thus we are charmed with the joviality of dance of peasants, while we merely glance at it superficially, or turn away from it with contempt, because we are hostile to "every sort of barbarism." We treat in a similar way the human countenances we come across in our daily life, or which we happen to chance upon. Our own personal point of view, and the various matters which engage us are for ever being interposed. _We_ are forced to address this or that person in a certain way, we have affairs to despatch, we have certain things to consider, thoughts that affect our relation to such a person; we observe him under the particular circumstances of our knowledge; we regulate our conversation relatively to that, or we are silent upon it, if he may be likely to resent it--in short we have always in our minds the man's business, station, and status, and our attitude to and business with him, remaining in a wholly practical relation, or in a position of indifference and preoccupied inattention. Art, however, when it depicts such real life, wholly changes our attitude to it; it cuts away once and for all all practical deviations[279], such as we are wont to associate with such material; it places us simply in the attitude of abstract contemplation to it; and in the like degree it does away with its indifference, and directs our otherwise preoccupied attention wholly to the situation portrayed; upon which we must collect and concentrate all our faculties, if we are to enjoy it. Sculpture, in particular, by virtue of its ideal mode of production from the first strikes off all practical relation to the object to the extent that its product at once betrays the fact that it does not belong to this reality. Painting, on the contrary, carries us wholly into the presence of the daily life with which we are in immediate contact, but it furthermore destroys all the threads of practical necessity, attraction, inclination, or disinclination, which draw us to such a Present, or the reverse, and forces us to approach those objects more intimately as ends to themselves in their own particular phase or mode of life. What we meet with here is just the opposite to that which Herr von Schlegel, for example, in the tale of Pygmalion, expresses so very prosily as the return of the completed work of art to common life, that is to a relation of a man's own inclinations and an actual enjoyment, a return which is the very opposite of that alienation, in which the work of art places the objects delineated in their relation to our practical necessities, and, precisely by doing so, sets forth before us their own independent life and appearance.
(_ββ_) Just as, then, art, in this particular sphere, re-establishes the forfeited independence of a content, which we otherwise failed to preserve in its unique characteristics, in the same way, _secondly_, it is able to secure in stability such objects as may happen to appear in actual existence in a form we are not accustomed to respect simply as such. The higher Nature stretches in its organization and shifting appearance the more it resembles the actor who only serves the present need. In this connection I have already emphasized the fact as a triumph of art over reality, namely, that it is able to fix that which is most evanescent. This power of art in attaching permanence to _momentary_ things applies not only to the sudden flash of life we find concentrated in certain situations, but also to the magical effect of its external presentment in the rapid changes of its colour.
A troop of horsemen, for example, may alter every moment in the mode of its grouping, and the mutual relation of each rider within it. If we were one of such we should have something else to do than consider the lively effect of such changes. We should have to mount, dismount, make up our haversack, eat, drink, rest, groom, drink and feed our horses: or, if we looked on as ordinary folk, we should look at such with wholly different interests. We should want to know what they are there for, what nationality they are, for what reason they have left their barracks, and so forth. The painter, on the contrary, smuggles off the most volatile of the movements, the most evanescent expressions of countenance, the most momentary gleams of colour apparent in such motion, and places such before us solely in virtue of its interest in the animation of such phenomena which without it would vanish.
For especially it is the play of the colouring, not treated merely as flat tint, but in its lights and shadows, and in the prominence or subordination of the objects painted which is the reason that the representation appears lifelike, a fact which we are accustomed to observe in works of art less than such an aspect deserves, bringing as it does art first clearly to our minds. And, moreover, the artist preferably accepts in depicting these natural relations the effort of following the least detail, and making his work concrete, definite and stamped with individuality, endeavouring as he does to secure for his subject-matter the individuality which phenomenal life itself supplies in its most momentary flashes; and yet withal does not so much seek for such a detail merely as imitated closely to strike our senses with its directness, but rather to furnish a definite image to the imagination in which at the same time the ideality of the entire composition remains active.
(_γγ_) The more insignificant the objects are, in comparison with the material of religion, which this particular phase of painting accepts for its content, to that very extent it is just this quality of _artistic_ creation, the manner of observation, conception, elaboration, the vitality communicated by the artist to his work by all his individual faculties, in short the soul and living enthusiasm of his execution, which constitute a prominent aspect of its interest, and are part of its content. That which the subject treated is under his workmanship must, however, substantially remain what it is in