peninsula; and their
sobs will hardly ever allow them to get as far as Longhi, Piazetta, and
Tiepolo, those great masters of the eighteenth century.

But we know, painters certainly must know if they look at old masters at
all, that Tiepolo, if he was the last of the old masters, was also the
first of the moderns; it was his painting in Spain which influenced Goya,
and Goya is not only a deceased Spanish master, he is a European master
of to-day. You can trace his influence through all the great French
figure-painters of the nineteenth century down to those of the New
English Art Club, though they may not have actually known they were under
his influence. Painting commences with a childish naturalism, such as
you see on the walls of pre-historic caves; that is why savages always
prefer photographs to any work of art, and why photographers are always
so savage about works of art. Gradually this childish naturalism
develops into decoration; it becomes stylistic. The decoration becomes
perfected and sterile; then there arises a more sophisticated generation,
longing for naturalism, for pictorial _vraisemblance_, without the
childishness of the cave pictures. And their new art develops at the
expense of decoration; it becomes perfect and sterile. What is commonly
called decay is merely stylistic development. The exquisite art of
Byzantium was wrongly considered as the debasement of Greco-Roman art. It
was really the decorative expansion of it; the conventionalising of
exaggerated realism. The same might have happened in Europe after the
Baroque and Rococo fashions had their day; politics and commerce
interfered. The intensely artificial painting of France, to which
Diderot objected so much, had become perfect and sterile. Then (happily
or unhappily, in whichever direction your tastes lie) the French
Revolution, by a pathetic misunderstanding of classical ideals, paved the
way for the naturalism of the misnamed Romantic school. We were told, a
short time ago, that Sienese painting anticipated by a few years the
Florentine manifestations of Cimabue and Giotto, but Mr. Berenson has
pointed out that Sienese art is not the beginning but the end of an
exquisite convention, the quintessence of Byzantium. In the Roscoe
collection at Liverpool you have one of the most superb and precious
examples of this delicate, impeccable and decadent art: 'Christ found in
the Temple,' by Simone di Martini.

In Egyptian art, again,