Not until the end of the twelfth century did the
West rediscover its original bent of the Greeks striving to depict
the real world. It was then that a trend toward the reconquest of
reality began—a trend which asserted itself in Gothic art,
and which, with the Renaissance, re- established its connection
with the tradition of antiquity, and was taken over by the
Platonists.
Realism experienced a brief period of triumph
between the moment when it overcame medieval spirituality on the
one hand and when it was subordinated to the quest for ideal
beauty, on the other. It recovered its force when the concept of
nature came back into its own, and when natural appearance was once
again valued for its own sake, for then the artist was tempted,
once more, to try to reproduce that appearance.
The revival of Aristotelian philosophy by Arab
commentators paved the way for this reversal. There was a
reawakening of the belief that the only reality accessible to us is
the one revealed to us by our senses, "the extensive and sensory
forms," which we can touch and see. This belief accounted for the
popularity of nominalism, a philosophy which regarded general ideas
or abstractions as mere artifices of the mind, denoting nothing
more solid than the words in which they are expressed, or the sound
made by these words : flatus vocis.
The turn toward realism was irresistible; even
the most unflinching opponents of Aristotelianism, the Franciscans,
in effect contributed to the triumph of the movement. St. Francis,
to be sure, teaches only love of God, but we are to love Him in His
creatures, and His world: "Praise to Thee, 0 Lord, for sister
Earth, our mother, who ... produces various fruits and coloured
flowers and the grass!" The Franciscans of Oxford sought to base
knowledge in experience, sensory experience. Only then, says the
greatest of them, Roger Bacon, "is the mind convinced, and at rest
in the presence of truth." Except for divine revelation, no
proposition can be regarded as certain (nullus serum potent
certificare), "unless it derives from experience."
In the field of art, this was the period in which
the Gothic sculptor renounced the radical stylizations of his
Romanesque predecessors, and shook off Eastern influences. He
carved in stone accurate likenesses of divine or sacred figures,
reproducing folds in the drapery and ringlets in the beards. He
studied plants in order to be able to render exactly a strawberry
leaf or the tendril of a vine; these plant motifs, shown in a
natural-seeming disorder, alternate with figures of animals and
birds, also represented naturalistically, which replace the
terrifying imaginary monsters inherited from far-off Asia.
Painting, too, set for itself the goal of being
the "mirror of the world," speculum munch, the title used,
significantly, by Vincent de Beauvais in the same century. This was
the major concern of the illumination done in the north, which
advanced with great strides toward fifteenth-century naturalism; it
was also the concern of Italian painting. The latter, which stayed
closer to classical sources, paved the way for a new rapprochement
between the senses and the intellect; reflecting the positivist
spirit of the rising middle class, it submitted more readily to the
fascinations of visual appearance.
The Italian eye repossessed the visual world. The
painters learned from antique examples the transcriptive
possibilities. Beginning its reconquest of reality,
Italian art rediscovered line, and they soon equalled the the
importance of contours and lines.
Continuing their reconquest of reality, the
Italian painters coped next with the problem of volume. Once again
modelling produced the illusion of solidity for the eye and even
for the sense of touch: Berenson speaks of "tactile values." Giotto
and Masaccio mark the victorious stages of this effort.
The Italians did not confine themselves to
producing forms that stood out in relief; they created a space in
depth. Their solution was perspective, a network of imaginary lines
converging at a vanishing point. Perspective was one of the most
amazing achievements of the Mediterranean mind in its attempts to
bring about a union between the senses and reason. It is based on
both the sensory illusion and on intellectual laws, logical and
calculable, which impose upon space, by nature diffuse, a central
and unifying point. It is not surprising that for the Italians
perspective was more than a technical device—it was a noble
science which afforded the mind the perfect pleasures of a superior
sort of game.
Reproduction of visible reality, whether we are
viewing it at its origins or tracing its evolution in Western
painting, is never the actual goal of art. It can be a
prerequisite, but only as a means to an end which transcends
realism. Apart from the extra-artistic functions assigned to it by
magic and religion, realism has always been justified only by the
emotion to which it gave expression. Left to its own resources, to
being a discipline for its own sake, it collapses.
Occasionally realism was inspired by a wish to
preserve an emotional state by recording the spectacle that had
nourished it; occasionally, by a need to give an apparent external
validity to confused feelings seeking to understand themselves. But
in every case realism was no more than a support for art.
Man has often used realism as a method of
securing mastery over the external world. It is the intensity or
the quality of this ambition toward mastery that measures the value
of realistic painting; the moment the ambition is absent, the
moment realism becomes merely a technique of painting, it is
indefensible and outside the domain of art.
Wolfflin observed "It would be foolish to suppose
that an artist has ever been able to confront nature without
preconceived ideas. His conception ... is far more important than
anything he may owe to direct observation.... The idea of observing
nature is vain unless we know under what forms nature is to be
observed." To the forms, we may add the feelings, the state of
mind.
In short, it is not realism itself that has
validity, but the human concern it expresses and projects onto the
environment. Indeed, the artist soon realizes that in order to
gratify his passion to reproduce what he sees, he must make it his
own, assimilate it, bring it into conformity with his
expectation. In doing so he adds, changes, interprets, ceases
to be a realist. He discovers that what interested and attracted
him was less the object that he thought he was reproducing than the
image he was going to give of it. After that he cannot help asking
what distinguishes this image from its model, what makes it more
satisfactory than the model. Even if the image does come finally to
resemble the model, it will nevertheless be made up of elements
that differ greatly from it—of lines, colours,
textures—but which are made to serve that resemblance. It is
these elements of human value that the object takes on.