of the Italian Renaissance period that the painters
arose in Spain and the Netherlands who were able to treat their subjects
with the uncompromising decorative realism of Desiderio or Rosellino or
Benedetto da Maiano. For the purely imitative realism of the painters of
the early Renaissance was succeeded in Italy by idealism, which matured
in the great art of intrinsically beautiful linear form of Michael
Angelo and Raphael, and the great art of intrinsically beautiful colour
form of Giorgione and Titian. These two schools were bound to be, each
in its degree, idealistic. Complete power of mere representation in
tint and colour having been obtained through the realistic drudgery of
the early Renaissance, selection in the objects thus to be represented
had naturally arisen; and the study of the antique had further hastened
and directed this movement of art no longer to study but to achieve, to
be decorative once more, decorative no longer in subservience to
architecture, but as the separate and self-sufficing art of painting.
Selection, therefore, which is the only practical kind of idealism, had
begun as soon as painting was possessed of the power of representing
objects in their relations of line and colour, with that amount of light
and shadow requisite to the just appreciation of the relations of form
and the just relations of colour. Now art which stops short at this
point of representation must inevitably be, if decorative at all,
idealistically decorative; it must be squeamish respecting the objects
represented, respecting their real structure, colour, position, and
grouping. For, of the visible impressions received from an object, some
are far more intrinsic than others. Suppose we see a woman, beautiful in
the structure of her body, and beautiful in the colour of her person and
her draperies, standing under a light which is such as we should call
beautiful and interesting: of these three qualities one will be
intrinsic in the woman, the second very considerably so, the third not
at all. For, let us call that woman away and replace her immediately by
another woman chosen at random. We shall immediately perceive that we
have lost one pleasurable impression, that of beautiful bodily
structure: the woman has taken away her well-shapen body. Next we shall
perceive a notable diminution in the second pleasurable impression: the
woman has taken with her, not indeed her well-tinted garments, which we
may have bestowed on h