And the Italian painters,
the Angelos and Raphaels and Da Vincis and Titians, who were geniuses of
such universal power that they builded and carved and went on embassies and
worked in mathematics only with less splendid success than they
painted,--they painted because the age demanded it; they painted as the age
demanded; they were religious, yet sensuous, like their nation; they felt
the influence of the Italian sun and soil. Their faith and their history
were compressed into The Last Judgment and the Cartoons; their passion as
well as their power may be recognized in The Last Supper and The Venus of
the Bath.
There is always a necessity for this expression of the character of the
age. This spirit of our age, this mixed materialistic and imaginative
spirit,--this that abroad prompts Russian and Italian wars, and at home
discovers California mines,--that realizes gorgeous dreams of hidden gold,
and Napoleonic ideas of almost universal sway,--that bridges Niagara, and
under-lays the sea with wire, and, forgetful of the Titan fate, essays to
penetrate the clouds,--this spirit, so practical that those who choose to
look on one side only of the shield can see only perjured monarchs
trampling on deceived or decaying peoples, and backwoodsmen hewing forests,
and begrimed laborers setting up telegraph-poles or working at
printing-presses,--this spirit also so full of imagination,--which has
produced an outburst of music (that most intangible and subtile and
imaginative of arts) such as the earth never heard before,--which is
developing in the splendid, showy life, in the reviving taste for pageantry
that some supposed extinct, in the hurried, crowded incidents that will
fill up the historic page that treats of the nineteenth century,--this
spirit is sure to get expression in art.
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