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PA RT I SAN REVI EW
was taken out of the spiritual context for which it had been created
and juxtaposed with other works from dissimilar contexts:-the only
link between them being their common quality as art. Whether origin–
ally created to glorify God as part of a cathedral, or the power of a
ruling class as the portrait of a monarch, art before the nineteenth
century existed primarily by virtue of its extra-aesthetic function; and
the imaginary museum of pictorial reproductions, which has now be–
come the normal relation of modern man to art, shows how far this
loss of function has advanced. Yet at the same time, by placing modern
man in contact with the totality of artistic expression-something that
was possible only to a limited extent in the real museums of the past–
the true function of art as an autonomous human activity has been
brought into the foreground of aesthetic consciousness.
Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, this process took place
within the framework of a unified aesthetic tradition. Speaking broadly,
this tradition was based, like Greek art, on a reconciliation of man with
nature and with God.
It
was under the impulse of this reconciliation that
European art, beginning in the Renaissance, embarked on its quest to
master the forms of the natural world as they presented themselves to
common-sense perception. Art in the Renaissance, of course, remained
in the service of religion, as it had been in the Middle Ages; but the
Christianity of the Renaissance was no longer cleft by the tragic dualism
between the natural and the supernatural, between the sinful world
of the human and the awesome world of the divine, which had de–
termined the stylistic distortions of natural forms in Romanesque and
early Gothic art. "For the forms of a haunted world," Malraux writes,
"those of a purgatory were substituted; of that Christianity which had
shouldered so much anguish, soon nothing was to remain at Rome but
a promise of Paradise.... The day when Nicholas of Cusa wrote
'Christ is the perfect man,' a Christian cycle closed at the same time as
the Gates of. Hell; the forms of Raphael could be born." For Giotto, in
Malraux's view, painting a crucifix was an affirmation of the artist's
religious faith; while for Leonardo, painting
The Last Supper
was no
longer primarily an act of faith: it was the artistic embodiment of a
"sublime tale." The task of the artist thus became to represent-in
human terms, and in harmony with human vision-an ideal world of
fiction;-"less the painting of beautiful objects than that of imaginary
objects which, if they became real, would be beautiful."
For several centuries, then, Italian art of the Renaissance con–
tinued in this direction, concentrating its efforts on mastering the repre–
sentation of natural movement and using this mastery to express a
