298
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
was about the same time that I read in a newspaper a review
of an exhibition of the work of Lorenzo Lotto that had been held
in Venice the previous summer. In this review was the sentence: "The
works of the last decades strike one as being unsure, in the same
marked way as one notices it in the German artists Baldung and
Cranach." So these great masters became unsure of themselves in
their last period of creative productivity. While I was pondering on
this,
I came across the following dictum by Edward Burne-Jones in
a work on the history of art: "Our first fifty years are squandered
on committing great errors; then we grow timid and scarcely dare
to set our right foot before the left any longer, so well are we aware
of our own weakness. Then there follow twenty years of toil, and
only now do we
begin
to understand what we are capable of and
what we have to leave undone. And then there comes a ray of hope
and a trumpet-call, and away we must go from the earth." Here then
is
the opposite of Lotto's case; here it is youth that is uncertain, and
certainty comes with old age, when it is too late. This is reminiscent
of the scene from "Titian's Death" by the twenty-year-old Hof–
mannsthal, where Titian lies on his death-bed, but still goes on paint–
ing-I think the picture was the
Danae- and
suddenly he starts up
and asks for his earlier pictures to be brought before
him.
He says that he must see them.
Those old, and wretched, pale ones,
must now compare them with the new ones he is painting;
for now, he says, things very hard to grasp are clear to him,
he understands, as earlier he never dreamt he could,
that up to now he was a feeble blunderer.
So here too we have it, seen through the artist's own eyes: only in
his ninety-ninth year does he cease to be a feeble blunderer.
To my surprise, I found similar trends of thought in the East.
Hokusai (1760-1849) says: "I have been mad about drawing since
I was
six
years old. By the time I was fifty I had given the public
a vast number of drawings, but nothing of what I did before my
seventy-third year
is
worth mentioning. At about the age of seventy–
three I had come to understand something of the true nature of ani–
mals, plants, fishes, and insects. It follows that by the age of eighty I
shall have made further progress, by the age of ninety I shall see into
