22. Anent Art Production

Yesterday, at Bordighera, I strolled up the hills behind the town to
Sasso. It is a queer little cluster of gleaming white-washed houses that
top the crest of a steep ridge; and, like many other Italian villages,
it makes a brave show from a distance, though within it is full of evil
smells and all uncleanness. But I found it had a church--a picturesquely
ugly and dilapidated church; and without and within, this church was
decorated by inglorious hands with very naïve and rudimentary frescoes.
The Four Evangelists were there, in flowing blue robes; and the Four
Greater Prophets, with long white beards; and the Madonna, appearing in
most wooden clouds; and the Patron Saint tricked out for his Festa in
gorgeous holiday episcopal vestments. That was all--just the common
everyday Italian country church that everybody has seen turned out to
pattern with manufacturing regularity a hundred times over! Yet, as I
sat among the olive-terraces looking down the steep slope into the
Borghetto valley, and across the gorge to the green pines on the Cima,
it set me thinking. 'Tis a bad habit one falls into when one has nothing
better to turn one's mind to.

We English, coming to Italy with our ideas fully formed about everything
on heaven and earth, naturally say to ourselves, "Great heart alive,
what sadly degraded frescoes! To think the art of Raphael and Andrea del
Sarto should degenerate even here, in their own land, to such a childish
level!" But we are wrong, for all that. It is Raphael and Andrea who
rose, not my poor nameless Sasso artists who sank and degenerated. Italy
was capable of producing her great painters in her own great day, just
because in thousands of such Italian villages there were work-a-day
artisans in form and colour capable of turning out such ridiculous daubs
as those that decorate this tawdry church on the Ligurian hilltop.

We English, in short, think of it all the wrong way uppermost. We think
of it topsy-turvy, beginning at the end, while evolution invariably
begins at the beginning. The Raphaels and Andreas, to put it in brief,
were the final flower and fullest outcome of whole races of church
decorators in infantile fresco.

Everywhere you go in Italy, this truth is forced upon your attention
even to the present day. Art here is no exotic. It smacks of the soil;
it springs spontaneous, like a weed; it burgeons of itself out of the
heart of the people. Not high art, understand well; not the art of
Burne-Jones and Whistler and Puvis de Chavannes and Sar Peladan.
Commonplace everyday art, that is a trade and a handicraft, like the
joiner's or the shoemaker's. Look up at your ceiling; it's overrun with
festoons of crude red and blue flowers, or it's covered with cupids and