Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c12.138

c12.138

Since the pernicious principles of the Italian Renaissance, the bigotry of Puritanism, and the pedantry of pseudo-classical education combined with modern commercialism to destroy the national art of Europe, the public has demanded from the artist not imagination and ideas, but facts—archæological, historical, biographical or otherwise, relevant or irrelevant—only facts which it can understand. When an imaginative artist appears he must now address an unimaginative public through a go-between, an art-critic, who explains as best he can in words what the artist intends to explain with his pencil, brush, or chisel, so that society, which does not like to confess itself Philistine, may talk glibly of what it does not know or feel.