In the rich Italian summer one sees the same thing. Men paint because they must--because put at anything else they come back to art as iron to the magnet. Not because art is lovely, nor because to be an artist is a desirable or a noble or a righteous thing, but because they are artists born, stamped, double-dyed, and, kick as they might, they could be nothing else--if not artists creative, yet artists critical and appreciative. Truly, they think and strive over their art, write treatises and dogmas and speculations, vie with and rival and outdo each other. But it is their _art_ they discuss, not themselves, not one another--technical methods, practical instruction, questions of pigment and model and touch, of perspective and chiaroscuro and varnish, not psychological æsthetics, biographical and psychical explanations as to facts of canvas and color. What is done is what is to be criticised. What can be done technically is what should be done theoretically, and what cannot be done with absolute and perfect technical success is out of the domain of art once and for ever. As the Greek did not try to carve marble eyelashes, so no Venetian tried to put his conscience on a panel. All Lionardo could see of Mona Lisa's soul he might paint, not all he could feel of Lionardo's. Mr. Ruskin himself quotes Dürer's note that Raphael sent him his drawings, not to show his soul nor his theories, but simply _seine Hand zu weisen_--to prove his touch. In Raphael's touch was implied Raphael's eye, and those two made the artist Raphael.
Nothing strikes one more in these men than the oblivion of self in their work. Only one of the first-rank men was self-conscious, and he, the most mighty as a man, is by no means the first as an artist. And even Michael Angelo had not the self-consciousness of to-day: it requires a clique of commentators and a brotherhood of artists equally infected to develop that. But just so far as he tried to put his mighty self into his work, just so far he failed of artistic perfection; and not every one is Michael Angelo to make even failure beautifully colossal. In architecture, which in his day was already a dead art to be galvanized, not alive and manly like the art of the painter, his self-consciousness shows most strongly and his failure is most conspicuous. Here he did not create, but avowedly composed--set himself deliberately to study the past and to decide what was best for the future. And upon none but him rests the blame of having driven out of the semi-unconscious, semi-original Renaissance style what elements of power it had, and sent it reeling down through two centuries crazed with conceit and distorted with self-inspection.