NATURE AND CONDITIONS OF ART 83 



produce them, Taine had sought to understand The Philosophy of 

 Art in Italy, that is, the fundamental causes of the production of 

 the masterpieces of the Venetian school. But, further, he believed 

 he had also arrived at a universal law: ^All art which represents 

 the forms of the body depends on this cluster of conditions. '"^^ 



Thus, the same essential method, applied to the Philosophy of 

 Art in the Netherlands and in Greece, enabled him to analyze 

 analogous phenomena and arrive at similar judgments. The 

 Flemish and the Dutch were treated as typical of the Germanic 

 nations, and in each case the 'seed' of race was shown to have 

 developed into the 'plant' of national character, which produced 

 the 'flower' of art: Rubens is great in a special way which shows 

 him to have been a product of the conditions of life in seventeenth- 

 century Flanders; and Rembrandt, of life in Holland ('Part I — 

 Permanent Causes'). Further, analysis of the history of art in those 

 countries reveals a close correspondence between the character 

 of the art in each of its four large epochs and the social and intel- 

 lectual milieu of each period: Rubens and Rembrandt appear 

 when their countries are flourishing, and art begins to decline 

 with the invasion of Holland by France in 1672 and the war of the 

 Spanish succession. 



The closest analogies with art in Renaissance Italy, however, 

 are found in the art of ancient Greece, whose classic sculptures, 

 also devoted primarily to representing the human form, were 

 produced under conditions approximating those of Italy, thus 

 further corroborating Taine's general law. Though akin to the 

 Latin, Greek character was cast in its own mould by special cir- 

 cumstances of climate and geography — mountains, peninsulas, 

 islands, the sea, and so forth — and the mode of living which 

 resulted. As in the unsettled and challenging Italy of the fifteenth 

 century, so in Greece, the people had not become victims of the 

 over-elaborations and complications which characterize modern 

 civilizations. Both their psychological traits ('delicacy of percep- 

 tion ... a feeling for proportion, dislike of the vague and the 

 abstract . . . the sentiment of human energy', "^^ '. . . no break 

 . . . between the language of concrete facts and that of abstract 

 reasoning' ^'0) and their way of life (which was 'natural and 

 healthy', 51 embodied in their natural religion and their institu- 

 tions of the orchestra and the gymnasium) remind us of the condi- 

 tions earlier established as having been necessary for the 'high art' 

 of the Renaissance. 



