Josep Pla - Life Embitters

Rome, that is, the superficial but oppressive Rome that hits you in a first impression, panicked us. We became immensely nostalgic for Florence. Of course, there was much to see in Rome, but where would we find Florence’s crystalline purity? When you are slightly familiar with Florence, that urban mass is what the spirit will always long for. So our first stay in Rome was short-lived: we fled to Naples, not for any intrinsically Neapolitan reason, but with the Greek museum in Naples in mind. We were fortunate: when you are familiar with Verrochio and Donatello, the Greeks and Greek sculpture dazzle most. Freed from the intolerable burden of Rome’s baroque, we felt a delicious lightness of being in the Greek rooms in the Naples museum — though the wind in southern Italy creates an oppressive, obsessive melancholy with a pathetic pornographic flavor.

In the course of our first trip to Italy, the focus of which was Florence, we thus tried to concentrate on the primitives in Umbria and the school of Tuscany. We were especially interested in the artists we called the most western, the least troubled by the influence of the Etruscans, to follow Ruskin’s terminology in this regard. Llimona was very fond of Ruskin’s essays on Italy. Ràfol was too. I wasn’t so keen. I found him too much of an aesthete, too prone to explain things by their exterior, always trying to emphasize intentions that only existed in the subjective mind of the observer and that might be brilliant but were invented rather than based on reality. Such things deserve an explanation — if I could only find one.

We brought the usual mental baggage to Italy: I mean we had digested the limited number of ideas written in the European languages used to popularize the country. The bibliography on Italy in French, English, and German is quite remarkable.

The French have never felt been at all drawn to what they called in blanket fashion the Tuscan school. President de Brosses describes it as dry, worn out, and leathery, and all his sentiments are drawn towards the ample bosoms and hips of the Bologna school. Fair enough, there’s no shortage of them! Stendhal follows faithfully in the footsteps of the distinguished magistrate. Stendhal scorned “the modern burghers of Florence” and regretted that Florentines lacked passion. “They believe,” he wrote, “that passion is a failing.” They have always had the same criteria in the Villa Medicis in Rome: painting begins with Raphael. Before Raphael, painting is archaeological, naturally, not excluding the existence of sporadic works, like the Uccellos and Ghirlandaios in the Louvre!

The English were never so radical. The English are never as narrow-minded and dogmatic as the French. They are freer and more open, more intuitive and broad-minded. The rationalist French often rub against real facts that can’t be dodged and have to reach slippery, tacky compromises.

Curiously enough, however, the painters of the Tuscan school that English travelers have most helped to popularize were precisely those that appealed least to us. The Etruscan element that Ruskin observed in their painting, about which he writes at length in his book Mornings in Florence , an element we considered perhaps rather too subjectively as some scholar’s antiquarian afterthought, distanced us rather from Fra Filippo Lippi the son of Fra Filippino, also a remarkable artist, and from part of the work of Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli. In a way, Botticelli is the high point in this painting tradition, just as Raphael is both the general conclusion and beginning of a fatal decline.

When we noted an exaggerated penchant for decorative detail, for the coldly rhetorical, for overwrought arabesques, products of an effort of will rather than spontaneous wit, we imagined an oriental influence must be present. Oriental divans didn’t stop us from sleeping, and we weren’t of the opinion that Goethe’s poems written in that spirit had increased in charm. We liked them, but preferred the local beds, even though they were rather hard and perhaps too high. Goethe — if I’m allowed this parenthesis — only stayed in Florence for one night on his two-year tour of Italy. A fact one finds impossible to explain today. Botticelli has something that evokes the English liking for decoration, a liking that seems to refer back constantly to Botticelli.

“Nevertheless,” we asked ourselves, “does a mythological-literary mentality necessarily help enrich an artistic tradition?” We thought not, despite the book by Bernard Berenson, who was living at the time on the outskirts of Florence and was then considered to be the most intelligent connoisseur, the high priest of these shifts in ancient Italian painting. Berenson was mentioned in intellectual circles in Florence as a man with a legendary halo. He had, I suspect, more defenders than detractors and was seen as a man who had re-valued Italian art that nationalists opposed to the increasingly decisive influence of Paris in such crucial matters. Berenson had introduced the notion of “tactile values” into the history of art — values that stimulate the imagination and encourage it to feel the volume of objects, to weigh them up and measure distances. Berenson was a contemporary of pragmatists Bergson and William James, who asserted that the discovery of nature is a practical operation performed by our minds. The artist reproduces the external world by giving shape to forms that are above all tactile values and which ideate imaginary sensations. In addition to these tactile values, movement is the essential element in a work of art. However, movement within a work of art doesn’t entail the reproduction of the movement of an object from one place to another, but the energy giving life to an arabesque, to the drawing of every detail and the whole, the overall dynamic; in a word, the creation of a style. One should add proportion, spatial composition, and spiritual meaning to these impulses within a work.

This is how Berenson provisionally separates the decorative from what he calls the illustrative. The decorative includes all of those first elements. Its purpose is not to represent but to present, it is indifferent to content, it strives to eliminate what is ugly, grotesque, incongruous, and distorting … On the other hand, the illustrative is representation. “As independent and autonomous art, illustration expresses in terms of a visual nature, the aspirations, ecstasies, dreams from the heart, that become poetry if one translates them into musical words, if they are expressed in a melody of rhythmic sounds.” This “illustration” shouldn’t be confused with literary explanations or the artist. The art historian distrusts all commentaries as the artist’s intentions. The artist, as a creator, thinks only of his craft, of procedures and proportions.

A work of art is important inasmuch as it contains the decorative and the illustrative in parallel. Moreover, it must continue a spiritual meaning; otherwise, a work of art is a mere object. A decorator, in any case, can never outrival the illustrator. There exists a hierarchy of genres. It is that very spiritual meaning that gives a work of art its greatness allowing it to be released from matter and transformed into an exaltation of life.

In reality, decoration and illustration are words the historian uses to explain himself. That is, they are critical fictions. Form and color are inseparable, but very few are able to conceive of this unity. The public is mostly interested in the anecdotal, or else form, and form as such, has fewer admirers and generally leaves people cold. Total art is humanist art, the one that nurtures our every faculty.

These ideas of Bernard Berenson were being debated in intellectual circles in Florence in that year of 1921. My impression is that they influenced the so-called avant-garde art of the moment — with the exception, of course, of Marinetti and the futurists who only thought of taking Paris by storm and acted like a kind of demented, lunatic French mob. Berenson’s analysis had an undeniable impact on serious avant-garde artists like Chirico and Soffici and helped these artists to remain within a primitive, vulgar volumetric structuralism that was, in any case, incompatible with the unavoidable, deliquescent sirens of French art.