The Meaning of Pictures by John C. Van Dyke

THOSE people who go out into the highways of art crying, Haro! Haro! in the name of realism, would certainly gain their cause could numbers give them a verdict. They have always been in evidence; they have always made themselves heard. There never was a time when the mob was not hungry for realities, when artists were not harping upon "truth to nature," when critics were not concerned about "the realistic tendencies of the age. " The interest in things as things and the art that hinges upon facts as facts were from the beginning. For did not Apelles paint horses so realistically that other horses neighed at the sight of the picture? And did not Zeuxis deceive the birds with his painted grapes, and was not he himself deceived in turn by the painted curtain of Parrhasios? Admitting the stories to be greatly exaggerated, does not their very existence prove the liking for the realistic motive?

Indeed, the Greeks were accounted very good realists in the days of their late power. The Pergamon frieze, the "Samothracian Victory," the "Dying Gaul" give the proof. And in earlier times they modelled and chiselled the Parthenon marbles so true to life that William Hazlitt based a theory of art upon them, maintaining that the aim of art was the imitation of nature and the finest art was simply the imitation of the finest nature. It was the realistic Roman marbles, founded upon those of Greece, that gave the first breath of inspiration to the painters of Italy. The Renaissance nature-study that went hand in hand with the study of the Greek was largely to enable the painters to reveal the model more completely, to draw a leg or arm or face more exactly, to place figures in an atmospheric envelope, to reproduce a likeness of the landscape background. If we examine the works of Fra Filippo, Botticelli, or Mantegna, we shall find that there was more of the earthly in their painting than the mystic face of the Madonna or the religious pathos of saints would disclose. They were intent upon the reality before them and evidently for the reality's sake. They delighted in drawing a foot and placing it firmly upon the ground, in giving bulk, body, and weight to the figure, in painting flowers, leaves, and fruits with precision, in adjusting the exact relations of light-and-shade, in catching the right tone of color. It was all a close following of the model-a representation of nature itself or as near to it as they could attain.