Genuineness, as I have said, always triumphs in the long run. That it is difficult to tell the genuine from the sham is proved by the fact that enormous numbers of people have made mistakes and continue to make them. Sometimes the charlatan is also a first-rate man of genius and then you have such strange artists as Wagner and Bernini, who can turn what is false and theatrical into something almost sublime. For one can be an artistic swindler without meaning to cheat and in the teeth of the most ardent desire to be honest. Their counterparts are busily earning praise and money at the present day. Still, a dim rumour that Ossian once was read, that Bulwer was thought a great novelist and “Festus” Bailey a mighty poet still faintly reverberates. The very names of most of them are now forgotten. In the history of the arts we find innumerable shams of this kind, once taken as genuine, now seen to be false. Fashion changes, the public learns to look with a different focus and, where a little while ago it saw an admirable work which actually moved its emotions, it now sees a sham. In the end, however, lies are always found out. Very often the lie is so well told that almost every one is taken in by it - for a time. Bad art is of two sorts: that which is merely dull, stupid and incompetent, the negatively bad and the positively bad, which is a lie and a sham. That virtue is the virtue of integrity, of honesty towards oneself. But one can be dishonourable towards one's publishers and yet preserve the kind of virtue that is necessary to a good artist. Longfellow was a bad poet, while Beethoven's dealings with his publishers were frankly dishonourable. Not that all virtuous men are good artists, nor all artists conventionally virtuous. Whether a work of art is good or bad depends entirely on the quality of the character which expresses itself in the work. And it is a standard which is in the last resort a moral one. But there does exist, none the less, an absolute - 2 - standard of artistic merit. Is Fra Angelico a better artist than Rubens? Such questions, you insist, are meaningless. Nothing is so futile because there are a great many kinds of merit and an infinite variety of human beings. Nothing is more futile than the occupation of those connoisseurs who spend their time compiling first and second elevens of the world's best painters, eights and fours of musicians, fifteens of poets, all-star troupes of architects and so on. We need no imagination to help us figure forth its beauty it stands there before us in entire and actual splendour, the greatest picture in the world. Damp has blotted out nothing of the design, nor dirt obscured it. Its clear, yet subtly sober colours shine out from the wall with scarcely impaired freshness. Thanks to the vandals, the visitor who now enters the Palazzo dei Conservatori at Borgo San Sepolcro finds the stupendous Resurrection almost as Piero della Francesca left it. Some unwittingly beneficent vandal had it covered, some time after it was painted, with a thick layer of plaster, under which it lay hidden for a century or two, to be revealed at last in a state of preservation remarkably perfect for a fresco of its date. The best picture in the world is painted in fresco on the wall of a room in the town hall. Our omnibus groaned and rattled slowly up a bleak northern slope, among bald rocks, withered grass and still unbudded trees, it crossed the col and suddenly, as though by a miracle, the ground was yellow with innumerable primroses, each flower a little emblem of the sun that had called it into being.Īnd when at last one has arrived at San Sepolcro, what is there to be seen? A little town surrounded by walls, set in a broad flat valley between hills some fine Renaissance palaces with pretty balconies of wrought iron a not very interesting church, and finally, the best picture in the world. It was in the early spring that we crossed it. But it is worth doing, though preferably in some other vehicle than the 'bus, for the sake of the Bocca Trabaria, that most beautiful of Apennine passes, between the Tiber valley and the upper valley of the Metauro. No joke, that journey, as I know by experience. Or, if you happen to be at Urbino, there is a motor 'bus which takes you to San Sepolcro, up and down through the Apennines, in something over seven hours. Or you can approach it up the Tiber valley from Perugia. There is a small lowcomedy railway across the hills from Arezzo. THE BEST PICTURE ALDOUS HUXLEY (1925) BORGO SAN SEPOLCRO IS NOT VERY EASY TO GET AT.
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