A METAPHYSIC OF MODERN ART
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hannonious world of fiction conceived in ideal human tenns. But in
the sixteenth century, the technical problems involved in depicting
such a world had all been solved; and the result, as Malraux sees it,
was a split between art as an expression of values in plastic terms and
art as the representation of a particular subject matter-a split, in
short, between style and representation. Up to this time the two had run
parallel, for "every discovery in the expression of movements had been
the consequence of a discovery of style," that is, of an expression of
values through the plastic language of art. "Masaccio had not painted
more 'true to life' than Giotto because he cared more about illusion,
but because the place of man in the world that he knew how to incarnate
was not that of man in the world of Giotto; the profound reasons that
compelled him to liberate his people were the same as those which had
compelled Giotto to liberate his own both from the Gothic and from
Byzantium... . " Nonetheless, it became customary for the spectator
to confuse style with naturalistic illusion; and when the means of
creating such an illusion had been mastered, the values expressed by
art became a function of the subject matter of the picture rather than
the outgrowth of a stylistic conquest. "The parallelism between expres–
sion and representation-thus, the decisive action of the specific genius
of painters on the spectator-ceased when the means of representa–
tion had been conquered."
From this point on, the course of Western painting, with some
notable exceptions, ceased to be a development of plastic resources
and shifted, instead, to refining the expressiveness of the people repre–
sented;-art, in other words, became theater.
It
no longer spoke its own
language-the language of plastic fonns-but began to base its appeal on
the drama of gesticulation and the subtlety and complexity of the emo–
tions experienced by the characters in the picture. As Malraux observes,
the terms in which Stendhal praises Correggio could be applied, word
for word, to a great actress or to the plays of Racine. In this Baroque
art of the Counter-Reformation, consciously guided by the Jesuits to
make religion sensuously appealing, "painting wished to be a sublime
theater"; and while the great Baroque colorists, as "Malraux recognizes,
"recovered the lyric expression defunct with the stained-glass window,"
they nonetheless subordinated the specific values of painting to the
"rational" expression of sentiments in their personages. Rembrandt, who
refused to subordinate painting to people in the
Night Watch
and in
his later works, was, significantly, the first
"peintre maudit."
As a result, this divorce between the plastic language of art and its
ability to create the illusion of natural appearance became a fixed
