realism and idealism as this (the only kind of realism, let us remember,
which can exist in great art) with any personal bias of the artist, its
intimate dependence upon the constitution and tendency of art, upon its
preoccupations about form, or colour, or light, in a given country and
at a given moment. And now I should wish to resume the more orderly
treatment of the subject, which will lead us in time to the second half
of the question respecting realism and idealism. These considerations
have come to me in connection with the portrait art of the Renaissance;
and this very simply. For portrait is a curious bastard of art, sprung
on the one side from a desire which is not artistic, nay, if anything,
opposed to the whole nature and function of art: the desire for the mere
likeness of an individual. The union with this interloping tendency, so
foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has produced portrait;
and by the position of this hybrid, or at least far from regularly bred
creature; by the amount of the real artistic quality of beauty which it
is permitted to retain by the various schools of art, we can, even as by
the treatment of similar social interlopers we can estimate the
necessities and tendencies of various states of society, judge what are
the conditions in which the various schools of art struggle for the
object of their lives, which is the beautiful.

I have said that art is realistic in its periods or moments of study;
and this is essentially the case even with the school which in many
respects was the most unmistakably decorative and idealistic in
intention: the school of Giotto. The Giottesques are more than
decorative artists, they are decorators in the most literal sense.
Painting with them is merely one of the several arts and crafts enslaved
by mediaeval architecture and subservient to architectural effects. Their
art is the only one which is really and successfully architecturally
decorative; and to appreciate this we must contrast their fresco-work
with that of the fifteenth century and all subsequent times. Masaccio,
Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, turn the wall into a mere badly made frame; a
gigantic piece of cardboard would do as well, and better; the colours
melt into one another, the figures detach themselves at various degrees
of relief; those upon the ceiling and pendentives are frequently upside
down; yet these figures, which are so difficult to see, are worth seeing
only in themselve