ABSTRACT
Despite the exhaustive literature evoked by them, two problems, still unsolved, continue to obscure the general history of European painting. The first is to discover the exact cultural and intellectual impulse which produced the early Sienese and Florentine artists, as exemplified in Duccio and Giotto. The second, which has already been mentioned, is the origin of El Greco, and, through him, of the whole Spanish school. It has hitherto been customary to link both with the Renascence; to call the first the parent of it, and the second a legacy, shaped by the counter-reformation. In reality, both were the outcome of a single mode of religious thought, and one which, moreover, was actively opposed to the scientific and rational heroics of revived Antiquity. This mode originated in the Greek lands, and there kept Latin materialism at bay, till its last and greatest exponent was gone to Spain, and its culture was extinguished. The circumstances by which the Hellenistic artifice of reproduction was originally displaced, in the eighth and ninth centuries, by the art of interpretation, have been examined in the last chapter. It now remains to observe, first the form in which that art was moulded within the sphere of Constantinople, and secondly the course of its translation to the West. To the process of this occidentation the monuments of Athos and Mistra alone provide the historical clue.
