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

paintings by Cimabue, of which Giotto painted a large part? Were they
Cimabue’s work, or in part Giotto’s? To whom should be accredited those
pictures by Giotto in which the underpaintings were laid in by his pupils,
but which were finished by himself? When Raphael made designs in black
and white and gave them into the hands of others to be enlarged and colored,
who executed the work? Raphael said he did, but what he literally did do
was to appropriate the technique of others and give it out as his own. When
Titian in his old age received a commission and, perhaps feeling a little tired,
ordered pupils, whom he had for years carefully trained, to paint the whole,
and when the patrons who had ordered the picture refused to pay for it on
the ground that it was not the work of Titian, and when Titian in indigna-
tion painted in bold letters on the canvas "Titian made this,” do we side
with Titian or the patrons? Or, to suddenly transplant ourselves to another
land of art, namely, Holland, I will ask you if Rembrandt is the true author
of many of his etchings, or not? For it was his habit to place in the hands of
pupils some of his original sketches and designs, and from these they made
etchings, and whenever one of those etchings happened to turn out par-
ticularly well, Rembrandt would affix his own signature to the plate (some-
times even to plates the students had made from their own designs) and sell
the prints as original Rembrandts. Who plagiarized in this case?
Whatever our answer to these questions may be, we can not but feel
that we are dealing with an age and a mode of thought totally different from
ours, and the marvelous results this manner of thought and work produced
must convince us that they saw reasons and were in the possession of a
philosophy which is now lost to us. A partial explanation of their ethics
appears to me to lie in the fact that from the very beginnings of their art they
recognized that it was an absolute impossibility for one man, no matter how
talented, to create more than a very little, even in a long life; but at the same
time with that intuition so characteristic to the southern races, they saw the
colossal possibilities that might result from a communism in art-thought, and
it is this communism in art that more than anything else places the old
masters and ourselves on an entirely different footing. I, however, do not
go so far as to say that there was any deliberate attempt on the part of the
Italians to be communistic, for this communism in thought was merely the
unconscious, even if logical, sequence of the ethical attitude of the day; and
what materially assisted this coöperation was that the painters looked upon
their profession as a trade, and practiced it as such, their stock in trade being
beauty, which commodity they turned out to order. And as “society” and
the art-patrons (the Church, in the earlier days) classed them with the apoth-
ecaries, goldsmiths, etc., who held about the same social position as the
lithographers do to-day, it never occurred to them to assume the initiative;
they never attempted to lead the thought as did the writers. They remained
content in plying their vocation of painting the Madonna and the Child, the
Saints, and Heaven and Hell, according to the rules laid down; and as there
was a demand for these goods, and, consequently, competition, each artist
did the very best he could, and made such additions and variations and