The English were never so radical. The English are never as narrow-minded and dogmatic as the French. They are freer and more open, more intuitive and broad-minded. The rationalist French often rub against real facts that can’t be dodged and have to reach slippery, tacky compromises.
Curiously enough, however, the painters of the Tuscan school that English travelers have most helped to popularize were precisely those that appealed least to us. The Etruscan element that Ruskin observed in their painting, about which he writes at length in his book Mornings in Florence, an element we considered perhaps rather too subjectively as some scholar’s antiquarian afterthought, distanced us rather from Fra Filippo Lippi the son of Fra Filippino, also a remarkable artist, and from part of the work of Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli. In a way, Botticelli is the high point in this painting tradition, just as Raphael is both the general conclusion and beginning of a fatal decline.
When we noted an exaggerated penchant for decorative detail, for the coldly rhetorical, for overwrought arabesques, products of an effort of will rather than spontaneous wit, we imagined an oriental influence must be present. Oriental divans didn’t stop us from sleeping, and we weren’t of the opinion that Goethe’s poems written in that spirit had increased in charm. We liked them, but preferred the local beds, even though they were rather hard and perhaps too high. Goethe — if I’m allowed this parenthesis — only stayed in Florence for one night on his two-year tour of Italy. A fact one finds impossible to explain today. Botticelli has something that evokes the English liking for decoration, a liking that seems to refer back constantly to Botticelli.
“Nevertheless,” we asked ourselves, “does a mythological-literary mentality necessarily help enrich an artistic tradition?” We thought not, despite the book by Bernard Berenson, who was living at the time on the outskirts of Florence and was then considered to be the most intelligent connoisseur, the high priest of these shifts in ancient Italian painting. Berenson was mentioned in intellectual circles in Florence as a man with a legendary halo. He had, I suspect, more defenders than detractors and was seen as a man who had re-valued Italian art that nationalists opposed to the increasingly decisive influence of Paris in such crucial matters. Berenson had introduced the notion of “tactile values” into the history of art — values that stimulate the imagination and encourage it to feel the volume of objects, to weigh them up and measure distances. Berenson was a contemporary of pragmatists Bergson and William James, who asserted that the discovery of nature is a practical operation performed by our minds. The artist reproduces the external world by giving shape to forms that are above all tactile values and which ideate imaginary sensations. In addition to these tactile values, movement is the essential element in a work of art. However, movement within a work of art doesn’t entail the reproduction of the movement of an object from one place to another, but the energy giving life to an arabesque, to the drawing of every detail and the whole, the overall dynamic; in a word, the creation of a style. One should add proportion, spatial composition, and spiritual meaning to these impulses within a work.
This is how Berenson provisionally separates the decorative from what he calls the illustrative. The decorative includes all of those first elements. Its purpose is not to represent but to present, it is indifferent to content, it strives to eliminate what is ugly, grotesque, incongruous, and distorting … On the other hand, the illustrative is representation. “As independent and autonomous art, illustration expresses in terms of a visual nature, the aspirations, ecstasies, dreams from the heart, that become poetry if one translates them into musical words, if they are expressed in a melody of rhythmic sounds.” This “illustration” shouldn’t be confused with literary explanations or the artist. The art historian distrusts all commentaries as the artist’s intentions. The artist, as a creator, thinks only of his craft, of procedures and proportions.
A work of art is important inasmuch as it contains the decorative and the illustrative in parallel. Moreover, it must continue a spiritual meaning; otherwise, a work of art is a mere object. A decorator, in any case, can never outrival the illustrator. There exists a hierarchy of genres. It is that very spiritual meaning that gives a work of art its greatness allowing it to be released from matter and transformed into an exaltation of life.
In reality, decoration and illustration are words the historian uses to explain himself. That is, they are critical fictions. Form and color are inseparable, but very few are able to conceive of this unity. The public is mostly interested in the anecdotal, or else form, and form as such, has fewer admirers and generally leaves people cold. Total art is humanist art, the one that nurtures our every faculty.
These ideas of Bernard Berenson were being debated in intellectual circles in Florence in that year of 1921. My impression is that they influenced the so-called avant-garde art of the moment — with the exception, of course, of Marinetti and the futurists who only thought of taking Paris by storm and acted like a kind of demented, lunatic French mob. Berenson’s analysis had an undeniable impact on serious avant-garde artists like Chirico and Soffici and helped these artists to remain within a primitive, vulgar volumetric structuralism that was, in any case, incompatible with the unavoidable, deliquescent sirens of French art.
I also read Berenson’s books at the time, but as I was very slow on the uptake in my youthful years — always supposing other factors didn’t intervene — I didn’t understand a word. My reading of Berenson perhaps even deepened my state of confusion. Berenson’s lexis was so new and grating — decorators, illustrators … — that it was hard to digest. This short summary of the ideas of this historian is one I have made now; it would have been beyond me at the time. The truth is we never probed beneath the surface of such speculations, despite the fascination existing in the general milieu in Florence for a legendary figure, involved in the biggest deals of the time in terms of old works of art. The Italian art market was still focused on the great art collections owned by multi-millionaires in the United States. These deals were orchestrated by an extraordinary Englishman, the biggest contemporary art dealer, ennobled by MacDonald as Lord Duveen. Berenson was the undoubted connoisseur.
When all was said and done, we stayed faithful to our painters, no doubt as a result of some mysterious, longstanding affection. We stayed with those we considered to be the emblematic painters of the Tuscan schooclass="underline" Paolo Uccello and Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Benozzo Gozzoli.
Llimona and I always professed undying admiration for the schools of Umbria and Florence. Cimabue, Giotto, and Simone Martini are the grandfathers of European painting. In the course of this last millennium Uccello is the continent’s first painter to paint movement. Massaccio and Piero della Francesca are two fierce, direct, unmediated, gory realists. Whether in San Gimignano or the Palazzo Ricardo, in Florence, Gozzoli is a spring without literary pretensions, a delightful, fresh, free breeze. When we thoughtfully argued these preferences, people were shocked. The Mexican had fits of uncontrollable anger. We tried to understand what we felt was positive and negative in the work of these painters.