PROBLEMS OF STUDY OF MODERN PAINTING 655 



of the battle. In proclaiming their thoughts of a new religious and 

 social progress, they sowed the seed which ripened at the end of the 

 century. In 1789 the die was cast, and the Revolution completed 

 what literature had begun. "Apres nous le deluge," so lightly ex- 

 pressed by the Marquise de Pompadour, became an awful truth. 



Naturally the events which at that time shattered the old world 

 into ruins also exercised a deep influence on art. Glancing for a mo- 

 ment at the days of the Renaissance, we find art supported in the 

 main by two powers, the church and royalty. Raphael and Michel- 

 angelo, Correggio and Titian, Velasquez and Rubens, they all 

 created. their most magnificent and monumental works either for 

 the church or for the princes of their country. With the close of the 

 eighteenth century these two powers ceased to be factors which 

 determined the character of art. In Germany Kant wrote his Kritik 

 der reinen Vernunft, showing that God, who, according to the teaching 

 of the Bible, had created man, was in the light of philosophy a mere 

 idea created by man. In France also the Almighty was dethroned, 

 and the Goddess of Reason was raised in his place. The church thus 

 lost the inspiring power which it formerly exercised upon art, and, 

 although during the nineteenth century religious pictures were still 

 painted, their very small number serves to show how far an age of 

 investigation in the natural sciences has deserted the cycle of ideas 

 in which human thought formerly moved. The close of the eighteenth 

 century was no less fatal to the kingly power which ruled by divine 

 right. A constitutional king no longer has the means to be a Maece- 

 nas in a grand style, as was Louis XIV, and even if he could command 

 them, his commissions could be of no avail to art, because they would 

 contradict the modern view of life. The painting of our own days can 

 no longer permit itself to be made a herald of royalistic ideas. 



Now it is a characteristic of art that it can only flourish upon the 

 basis of a quiet, clarified culture. But this clarified culture of the 

 past had been destroyed by the Revolution, and modern culture 

 \vas still in a state of formation, so incomplete and full of contra- 

 dictions that it could not yet serve as a basis of a new art. Only 

 when the spirit of an age has been clearly formed can art incorporate 

 it in tangible form. Such was not yet the case at the beginning of 

 the nineteenth century; and this explains what seems at first sight 

 the remarkable circumstance, that painting, which had previously 

 been an expression of its own epoch, now placed itself in opposition 

 to this epoch. The eye of artists was fixed not upon their own time, 

 but upon the past. They thought to produce better art by glorifying 

 the beautiful culture of former centuries. 



The painting of the first half of the nineteenth century was, 

 therefore, in the main retrospective. At first the subjects were 

 taken from the old Hellenic world, and later artists became absorbed 



