Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 10))

tell them apart; and to this day there are certain frescoes and panels which

Little by little the art grew; gradually it became less wooden and more
plastic; slowly atmosphere and naturalism took the place of immobility and
convention, each new generation of painters always continuing the thoughts
of the last just as if they were but its prolonged life; so, when the art arrived
at the day of the Renaissance (the period of the discovery of the lost Greek
art), we are not at all surprised to learn that the artists adhered to their
characteristic habit of imitation, and swallowed and assimilated the Greek art,
and added it to what they already had. It is this continuance of the
thoughts of one age through successive others that makes us feel that
Michael Angelo is merely Giotto of a supernaturally old mature age, and in
Raphael, in whom, according to some critics, all Italian art culminated, we
find a painter who had inherited most of the virtues and all of the vices of
this stupendous system of evolution, a man who never gave birth to an
original idea, whose sole talent lay in the wholesale plundering of the thoughts
and methods of others, not merely of his teachers—for he had several—and
of those who had preceded him, but also of his contemporaries, and this
plunder and spoil he combined according to the academic rules of compo-
sition of the day, the only difference being that he generally exaggerated the
conceptions of those he stole from. Yet, when Raphael was in his zenith,
Michael Angelo had to be content with a second place in the judgment of
the connoisseurs of the day.
execution that was copied, but the motif as well, and not merely the motif,
but each individual idiosyncrasy of the motif.
To go back to Giotto. If we grant,just for a moment, that he did not
plagiarize from Cimabue, that his work was all original, then what about those
convention, each new generation of painters always continuing the thoughts
of the last just as if they were but its prolonged life; so, when the art arrived
at the day of the Renaissance (the period of the discovery of the lost Greek
art), we are not at all surprised to learn that the artists adhered to their
characteristic habit of imitation, and swallowed and assimilated the Greek art,
and added it to what they already had. It is this continuance of the
thoughts of one age through successive others that makes us feel that
Michael Angelo is merely Giotto of a supernaturally old mature age, and in
Raphael, in whom, according to some critics, all Italian art culminated, we
find a painter who had inherited most of the virtues and all of the vices of
this stupendous system of evolution, a man who never gave birth to an
original idea, whose sole talent lay in the wholesale plundering of the thoughts
and methods of others, not merely of his teachers—for he had several—and
of those who had preceded him, but also of his contemporaries, and this
plunder and spoil he combined according to the academic rules of compo-
sition of the day, the only difference being that he generally exaggerated the
conceptions of those he stole from. Yet, when Raphael was in his zenith,
Michael Angelo had to be content with a second place in the judgment of
the connoisseurs of the day.
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plagiarize from Cimabue, that his work was all original, then what about those
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