as an explanation of the characteristics, no longer of a single
work of art, but of a school or group of kindred works. Greek art
henceforth was the serene outcome of a serene civilisation of athletes,
poets, and philosophers, living with untroubled consciences in a good
climate, with slaves and helots to char for them while they ran races,
discussed elevated topics, and took part in Panathenaic processions,
riding half naked on prancing horses, or carrying olive branches and
sacrificial vases in honour of a divine patron, in whom they believed
only as much as they liked. And the art of the Middle Ages was the
fantastic, far-fetched, and often morbid production of nations of
crusaders and theologians, burning heretics, worshipping ladies, seeing
visions, and periodically joining hands in a vertiginous death-reel,
whose figures were danced from country to country. This new explanation,
while undoubtedly less misleading than the other one, had the disadvantage
of straining the characteristics of a civilisation or of an art in order
to tally with its product or producer; it forgot that Antiquity was not
wholly represented by the frieze of the Parthenon, and that the Gothic
cathedrals and the frescoes of Giotto had characteristics more
conspicuous than morbidness and insanity.

Moreover, in the same way that the old personal criticism was unable to
account for the resemblance between the works of different individuals
of the same school, so the theory of the environment fails to explain
certain qualities possessed in common by various schools of art and various
arts which have arisen under the pressure of different civilisations;
and it is obliged to slur over the fact that the sculpture of the time
of Pericles and Alexander, the painting of the early sixteenth century,
and the music of the age of Handel, Haydn, and Mozart are all very much
more like one another in their serene beauty than they are any of them
like the other productions, artistic or human, of their environment.
Behind this explanation there must therefore be another, not controverting
the portion of truth it contains, but completing it by the recognition
of a relation more intimate than that of the work of art with its
environment: the relation of form and material. The perceptions of the
artist, what he sees and how he sees it, can be transmitted to others
only through processes as various as themselves: hair seen as colour
is best imitated with paint, hair