A Thorn in Our FleshSource: The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 46, No. 264 (Mar., 1925), pp. 107-108Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/862459 .

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EDITORIAL: A thorn in our desh HE Germans are outdoing us in the matter of art publications; there are practically no young English art scholars nowadays; the most recent acquisitions in our public galleries

are the dullest and least important; the provin- cial galleries and museums are in bad hands and have gone to the dogs; prices are so high that only millionaires can now form decent col- lections; America is buying us out, lock, stock and barrel; the dealers are sorry rogues; the attributions of our pictures are a, disgrace to us; English newspaper criticism is degenerate; no- body looks any more at works of art simply for their artistic value; the public are set against the best modern art; our war memorials are disgusting, and our other public sculptures just as bad; St. Paul's will fall down to-morrow at nine o'clock, and this is not an artistic age.

How terribly familiar such plaints have be- come, and how seldom we now hear, as of old, expressions of satisfaction with the state of Venice, every reader, be he scholar, critic, col- lector or dealer, surely knows. The question is whether such allegations ought to be taken, as they are certainly frequently taken, seriously. If they are true, do they represent a lethal disease or merely a superficial group of uncon- nected symptoms? Are they due to anything more alarming than a particularly persistent group mood? Allowing for the human habit of exaggerating the importance of a new idea, it seems only too certain that some of them have a certain basis of truth, and it may be worth considering whether there is any known or discoverable treatment--clearly there can be no panacea-for such a varied assortment of headaches and backaches and stomachaches. Neither a reliable diagnosis nor a cure can be arrived at over an editor's table. Only a person who had acted as a cog in every one of the groaning machines affected could be q'ualified to deal with the case. No one has done so; and that leads us directly to at least one important cause of our troubles.

In the years that stretch back into the memory beyond the war and disappear into what now seems a paradise of profitable ease, the art world was a different phenomenon, and perhaps the chief difference was that the scholar, the critic, the collector, and the dealer communicated freely with one another in a common language. Their interests were never the same, but were sufficiently involved with each other to create a certain bond and to promote continual inter- course.

All this has now been altered, chiefly, as we

submit, on account of the great reduction in the number of well-informed collectors. For the most part the great collections of the nineteenth century were formed by wealthy men who made a serious, sometimes a profound, study of art. Their acquisitions represented know- ledge and love, though no doubt a certain social or intellectual prestige was acquired as well. This understanding of the subject on the part of collectors acted as a very salutary check, both on dealer and critic. No dealer who wished to save himself from ruination could attempt in ignorance to lay down the law about attributions and such matters. He simply had to understand his own wares, because his customers understood them, and attributions were generally arrived at by a process of comparison and discussion. Critics, in the same way, could not rush into print with- out taking proper trouble to make sure of their facts and of the best available opinions.

Now, more especially since the war, this type of collector has ceased to be nearly so active, and many collections have been broken up and sold because of the redistribution of wealth that came about as a result of international affairs. All sorts of people, who have neither the time, the training, nor the taste to take their places as collectors in the old sense, have found it pos- sible to pay the huge prices demanded for old masters, and a new sort of picture-owner has come into existence. The dealer has no longer the scholarly support of those who once fre- quented his premises, and consequently mis- takes become more frequent and matter less; and there is more opportunity for deception on the part of the wretched minority of dishonest dealers. In this atmosphere the foreign " expert adviser," the go-between, the quassi- dealer, has come into his own. Dr. Jekyll dines with my lord and notices a certain gap on my lord's wall which can be perfectly and profitably filled by Mr. Hyde. This ubiquitous double figure has sometimes acted quite openly, to dealer on one side and to collector on the other. He has taken his percentage either from the dealer or from the collector, not from both, and if he has had a profit from the dealer he has confessed it to the collector, large sums of money having been acquired in this way without the laying out of any capital. But more frequently the agent lets not his left hand know what his right hand doeth. The dealer knows his friend to be a dealer, but the collector does not.

The consequence of this is that buying and selling pictures have become a business that must be carried on in secret. Old master exhibi-

G 107 THE BURLINGTON MAGAZEN.E, NO. 264, Vol. XLVI, March, 1925.

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tions cease to fulfil any profitable purpose. On the contrary, they do harm. Further, this secrecy is liked by a certain new type of col- lector, who does not want Tom, Dick, and Harry to have seen his pictures in Bond Street, to know their market value and attributions. He prefers to give the impression that he has "picked them up" astutely in some quiet corner-for none is so proud of his taste and skill as the man who has neither.

Now how has the art scholar adjusted him- self to this environment. He has heard many unpleasant stories about the sort of thing that has been going on, and this has given him a distaste for the idea of dealing in works of art. In that mood a good many scholars have tended to " cold-shoulder" the open dealer, but have compromised by fraternizing with the secret agent. This has undoubtedly done harm. We do not suggest that it is the cause of all the ills we have mentioned, but we think it contributes

to them, and that it can be removed, If we may suggest it, especially to some of our museum friends, there is not quite so good a case for strengthening the barrier between museum and shop, already so strong in Eng- land, as may appear. The open dealers are carrying on a legitimate, ancient, respectable, and inevitable business. Let us help those of them who wish to make it more so. Among dealers, as among scholars, there are all kinds of men. Let the best men, in spite of their respective callings, come together a little more. If the scholar would do so he would be shown far more of the important and curious works of art that at present change hands behind closed doors; the dealer would improve his knowledge and raise the standard of his goods; the collector would be given greater confidence; public inter- est would be stimulated by a return to the excel- lent system of old master exhibitions, and the critic would return to criticism and stop writing advertisements.

CHINESE ART.-A special number of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, in the form of a substan- tially bound and lavishly illustrated

.book, will be published on MARCH 12. The book is entirely

devoted to Chinese Art. Some of our most distinguished contributors have co-operated to produce a general account of the subject, embracing Painting, Sculpture, Bronzes, Ceramics, Textiles, Jades, etc. (For fuller particulars see p. xxxiv in our advertisement section.)

A NEWLY DISCOVERED BAS-RELIEF BY DONATELLO BY WILHELM VON BODE

URING 1924 I became acquainted with an unusual number of most interesting and hitherto unknown works by Donatello, which I either saw in private collections or when

they were submitted to me for examination in Berlin. I desire to direct attention to at least one of them before it disappears into some Transatlantic collection. The finest piece of all-although the most modest in point of size -is entirely from the artist's own chisel and is remarkable also for its unique subject. As may be seen from the illustration on our Frontis- piece, it is a marble in low relief, probably intended for a lunette to be placed above the door of a large tabernacle. The length is hardly twenty-six inches. The subject is a representa- tion of Christ in Glory in the clouds surrounded by angels, and of a young man and his wife in adoration whose heads appear below, just over the horizontal edge of the lunette.

The very unusual representation of the Redeemer as a nude figure, draped merely around the loins, accompanied by an angel gathering the blood from the Lord's wounds in a chalice, appears in an early painting by Giovanni Bellini in the National Gallery, and also in a smaller panel very much like it in the

Louvre, both showing the Redeemer standing on a terrace before a wide landscape. Then there is a relief by one of Donatello's pupils in the Academy at Mantua representing Christ in a similar attitude, letting the blood flow from the wound in his hand into the chalice; on either side there is an angel holding the cross and the spear.

Donatello's own more imaginative version of the subject is that of a vision appearing in the clouds to the two devotees looking up in prayer. The clouds are arranged in a naive manner, just as they would appear seen from the earth, and look somewhat like layers of slaty rock amongst which, however, the angels surround- ing and worshipping the Lord float about freely as though in the ether. Whilst one angel on the left gathers the blood from the wound in Christ's right hand into the chalice, several others hovering around Him, hold the conch. shaped niche which the artist seems to have conceived as formed by clouds gathered together, according to his idea of cloud forma- tion. So, at least, we may infer from the similar appearance of the niche to be found in the relief representing the Assumption of the Virgin [PLATE II, cj on the Brancacci tomb in S. Angelo a Nilo in Naples. Whilst the three

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