PAINTING AND SCULPTURE
67
within ·their own .limits. There are some paintings, for example,
that hold us off like a wall, others that we can get into just a little
way; there are sculptures, too, that lure us in as dramatically
as any painting. Perhaps the natural properties that we were
examining so carefully are capable of considerable latitude. And,
indeed, if that had been the limit of the subject we would hardly
find a recurrence in nearly every art-cycle of a perennial impulse
for fusing the two. In fact, only primitive or savage artists seem
to express themselves straightforwardly, without any attempt at
fusion at all; in sophisticated periods they are approached un–
consciously by artists who are relatively disconnected from the
complications of contemporary life (Brancusi, for instance, was
always an unhesitant sculptor, and the Douanier Rousseau simi–
larly direct as a painter). When the fusion becomes too oppres–
sive the trend among artists consciously veers back to a fresh
tightening of the limits of their respective art-forms, as evidenced
by the Fauve discovery of African sculpture; the refreshing
"unity" apparent in savage work* is traceable to an instinctive
feeling for the separate functions of painting and sculpture.
Whole periods can be cited when the expressive aim of the
dominant art-form was at variance with the natural properties of
the form itself. Romanesque and early Gothic art was primarily
"painting" in its address, habitually conceived within fixed limits
and against a background (sculpture that
fits
within a frame on
a
fa~de,
or a lunette over a doorway) to be observed from in
front like a picture. It may seem ironical that the sculpture, in
the northern countries at least, transcends the painting in quality.
The early Renaissance in Italy produced paintings that were freely
executed and very "brush-conscious." Then, in the fifteenth cen–
tury, Mantegna (through the school of Squarcione) "discovered"
Greek sculpture, and at once the change was complete, and re–
mained
so in regard to form-construction until broken up by the
effect-painting of the Impressionists. In certain paintings of Man–
tegna
the forms are so skillfully rendered in sculptural solidity
that
one is almost fooled into believing them tinted bas-reliefs.
From then until the Baroque the triumph of the sculptural tradi–
tion was complete, although paradoxically there were compara–
tively few great sculptors and such an array of major painters
*There is, of course, sophisticated as well as primitive savage sculpture; the
us
Bellin
bronzes begin to show markedly the properties of painting.
