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

shearing it of that which is peculiar to Shakespeare , then would he be a
plagiarist,for Shakespea , rehaving added his personality to a general type ,
specialized that general type and made something of his own.
In the department of painting the analysis is equally simple. Cimabue
and all the painters of his day had received from the Byzantine artists only
general types, for the very evident reason that for centuries preceding art
had been practically dead, and what artists there were painted nothing but
the Madonna and the Child, Heaven and Hell, etc., to the order of the
Church, and to satisfy many different kinds of minds; and thus the Ma-
donna and the Child had through the eliminating process of frequent repeti-
tion lost all that was special, and become a type. So Giotto was not a
plagiarist, nor were his pupils, nor theirs; the advance that these medieval
artists made was but slightly in the direction of specialization; they for a long
period worked in such communistic thought that it was the general type they
evolved and improved, and therefore, copy each other as they might, they
could not be plagiarists. Not until much later did the artists specialize,
although even then few of them stole that which other artists had made
peculiarly their own; only Raphael of the "swelled head" did, and he "did
it thoroughly.” There is one excuse to be made for Raphael: that is that he
probably did not understand what constituted the difference between special-
ization and generalization, and thought that in copying he was only doing
what his predecessors had done. But in the present age, when these princi-
ples should be understood, or at least felt; when we see paintings in
which specialized truths have been copied, as, for example, certain of the ultra-
modern German genre school who indulge in extensive appropriations from
Millet, it is quite impossible to find any excuse. However, though it was
Millet who discovered a new general type of material, namely, the French
peasant, yet all of us have a right to this material, that is, to the general
types of truth and beauty presented by the French peasant, or any other
peasant. We can, without plagiarism, paint their toil and sorrow and joy;
but when it comes to copying one of Millet’sspecialized versions, we call
it rank plagiarism. If some artist should discover that there existed a tribe
of American Indians whose personality and life presented general types of
artistic interest, although the credit of the discovery would always be his, yet
all of us would have an equal right to that general type, and the only danger
in painting or photographing it would be the unconscious imitation of the
specializations of the discoverer. The streets of New York possibly present
general types of beauty as yet unexploited, but whoever may be the dis-
coverer, and whatever credit may accrue to him, the truths will always remain
the property of all.
To sum up in a few words the conclusions that we have come to: In
painting or photographing we have a right to appropriate and give out as our
own all general types of truth and beauty. These types are of two orders:
The first order consists of those types which have been evolved by painters,
as those of the Byzantine school; or some of the modern conceptions about
peasants; or certain classes of general compositions like those of Corot-

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