strength, and altogether without the sign-manual of godhead or
victory. Despite shortcomings, Donatello seldom made the mistake of
merging the subject in the artist's model: he did not forget that the
subject of his statue had a biography. He had no such canon. Italian
painting had been under the sway of Margaritone until Giotto destroyed
the traditional system. Early Italian coins show how convention breeds
a canon--they were often depraved survivals of imperial coins, copied
and recopied by successive generations until the original meaning had
completely vanished, while the semblance remained in debased outline.
Nothing can be more fatal than to make a canon of art, to render
precise and exact the laws of æsthetics. Great men, it is true, made
the attempt. Leonardo, for instance, gives the recipe for drawing
anger and despair. His "Trattato della Pintura"[19] describes the
gestures appropriate for an orator addressing a multitude, and he
gives rules for making a tempest or a deluge. He had a scientific law
for putting a battle on to canvas, one condition of which was that
"there must not be a level spot which is not trampled with gore." But
Leonardo da Vinci did no harm; his canon was based on literary rather
than artistic interests, and he was too wise to pay much attention to
his own rules. Another man who tried to systematise art was Leon
Battista Alberti, who gave the exact measurements of ideal beauty,
length and circumference of limbs, &c., thus approaching a physical
canon. The absurdity of these theories is well shown in the "Rules of
Drawing Caricatures," illustrated by "mathematical diagrams."[20]
Development and animation are impossible wherever an art is governed
by this sterile and deadening code of law. The religious art of the
Eastern Church has been stationary for centuries, confined within the
narrow limits of hieratic conventions. Mount Athos has the pathetic
interest of showing the dark ages surviving down to our own day in the
vigour of unabated decadence. Though not subjected to any serious