o touch the heart. This
feeling, which in France turns toward sensationalism, in England toward
sentimentality, is something other than the interest which attaches to
historical painting as the record of facts--in itself not the highest
interest one can find in a work of art. If we think back for a moment, we
shall see how different from either of these moods was the mood in which
the great Italians painted. Some "subject" of course a painting must
have that is not a portrait, but these men chose instinctively--hardly,
it is to be supposed, theoretically--such subjects as were most familiar
to their public, and therefore least likely to engage attention
primarily, and to the exclusion of the absolute pictorial value of the
painting as such. We never find Titian telling anecdotes. His portraits
are quiescence itself--portraits of men and women standing in the
fulness of beauty and strength to be painted by Titian. We do not find
likenesses snatched in some occurrence of daily life or in some dramatic
action of historical or biographical importance. Even Raphael's great
frescoes are symbolical more truly than historical, expressing the
significance of a whole series of events rather than literally rendering
one single event. The first remark of many who, accustomed to the
literary interest of modern pictures, are for the first time making
acquaintance with the old masters, is, that the galleries are so
unexcitingly monotonous: the subjects are not interesting. Portraits,
scenes from sacred history or Greek mythology,--that is all among the
Italians. Desiring nothing but beauty of line and color, and
expressiveness provided it was beautiful, they sought a subject merely
as the _raison d'etre_ of beauty. Raphael could paint the Madonna and
Child a score of times, and Veronese his _Marriages of Cana_, and all of
them Magdalenes and St. Sebastians by the dozen, without thinking of
finding fresh subjects to excite fresh interest. Nor does this
restricted range of subjects imply, under the hand of a master,
monotony. There is more unlikeness in Raphael's Madonnas than in the
figures of any modern artist, whatever their variety of name and action.
Even a century later than Raphael, among the Flemings and Hollanders,
the best pictures are the simplest, the least dependent for their
interest upon anything dramatic or anecdotal in their subject. The
triumphs of the Dutch school are the portraits of the guilds. The
masterpieces of Ru