Masterpieces/A Fable of Modern Art:

...Medieval guilds demanded a demonstration of excellence as proof that a young aspirant might enter their ranks, and as insurance that these ranks should not become overcrowded: let a would-be master sculptor make one of these: " 'a Jesus Christ in stone, entirely naked, showing his wounds, wearing a little loincloth, with wounds appearing on his hands, side and feet, a crown of thorns on his head, and with a good and pitiful countenance, the entire work measuring five and one-half feet in height...

...However, she misses the real point: in the world of the guilds, of Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, God existed, and men proceeded from the assumption that He did...

...When at last he discloses it to younger colleagues, they find it a meaningless jumble of lines amid which they can make out a single perfectly painted foot...

...Where can the artist turn now...

...In creating man," Cahn paraphrases the painter and historian Vasari,' 'God established the perfect model from which painting and sculpture derive...

...But who could have told him, who in the unfeeling frenzy of the modern world...

...But how could a masterpiece be recognized for sure...

...they aimed beyond this world, and simply did not want to communicate offhandedly with an audience unwilling to sweat...

...The first use discovered by Cahn of "masterpiece" as a term of praise for high human artistry, not just guild-joining proficiency, dates from 1481...

...Later, Renaissance thinkers considered "God as the supreme artist and man as His supreme creation...

...It's a word something like that we should be able to use, but people would take it the wrong way...

...They have hands, muscles, eyes-have not we all?-but with those hands, muscles, eyes they capture the sights, sensations, feelings that wash over us and everlastingly wash away...

...Balzac's short story "The Unknown Masterpiece" dominates the close of Cahn's book and the start of Ashton's...

...Then he had to trust to his own vision, and his own appraisal of that vision, and he had to bear the persistent pain of doubt...

...Why had he not known-known what...

...Too difficult for an ordinary person, for you and me, but not for the specially gifted, the lightning-anointed: we call them Lou Gehrig, or Bjorn Borg, or Gaugin or van Gogh...

...Yet the rising number of artists, and the growing size of audiences, caused such assurance to crumble...

...Modern art demands risk-taking on the grandest scale imaginable...

...That he was not fashioning a masterpiece...

...Many artists have felt the power of Balzac's tale, and Ashton, who is Professor of Art History at Cooper Union, seems to have wanted to unite essays on important creative figures by linking them to this story...

...If he rejects these strategies, he can only depend on himself, and such reliance must lead him precisely to the situation of Balzac's painter...

...ends his book with list after list of masterpieces thought up by writers on art in the nineteenth century, and with Zola's fascinated attention, not for aesthetic consideration or matters of skill, but for the likes and dislikes of the audience at an exhibition...

...Art now meant risk, the risk of everything, even of life itself, as well as the promise and the solidarity of real achievement...

...The sandlot craftsman was changing into Willie Stargell, someone who did not flashily begin his working life by hitting a few homers, but who managed season after season to demonstrate supreme power and control...

...This era also made certain artists, and especially Raphael, into embodiments of what an artist should be, a consistent producer of hits...

...When God became a practitioner, he turned ar-tisanry into artistry...

...A FABLE Of NODEBM ABT MASTERPIECES Richard L. Schoenwald "ANYTHING that is too difficult for a n person to dof" so a dictionary published in London in the 1750's defined "masterpiece...

...He turns to watch the crowd, as Zola did, or he hastens to keep up with his peers...

...The masterpieces of the past spoke clearly and roused many to acclaim them, as Cahn shows: why then must modern art prove so difficult, even unintelligible...

...A painter labors for years on a single picture that he has shown to no one...

...She glimpses but does not really deal with the central problem of modern art, one that Balzac caught sight of, one that certainly drew people like Cezanne to identify themselves with Balzac's painter...

...Picasso said it all, as quoted in an anthology edited by Professor Ashton: "Something holy, that's it...

...The painter burns his work and dies...

...or other good images of Saint Barbara, Saint Margaret or Saint Catherine...

...You ought to be able to say that a painting is as it is, with its capacity to move us, because it is as though it were touched by God...

...But people would think it a sham...

...Ashton does suggest that at least the figures whom she treats-Cezanne, Rilke, Picasso, Schoenberg-saw their goal as spiritual...

...In the world of the impressionists and all their successors, right down to this moment, God has turned into a possibility, a question, or an impossibility...

...or an image of Our Lady holding her Child in her arms, the same height as the above, handsome in appearance and dress...

...Many in the crowds who now throng museums sense that modern art results from this epic struggle, and value it as testimony that the realm of the spirit has not yet been annihilated...

...The mob, the crowd, the masses, the bourgeoisie: confronting them, many artists withdrew and sought inside themselves a criterion by which to know whether they had created a masterpiece...

...The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries scrutinized the past and picked certain overwhelming works, such as the Laocoon, the Last Supper, Michelangelo's Last Judgment...

...To live always with doubt, with the terror that a meaningless jumble may result: what courage, how much of Hemingway's "grace under pressure" it takes...

...And yet that is what's nearest the truth...

...The idea of the masterpiece emerged slowly in the West, according to Walter Cahn, who is Professor of the History of Art at Yale...

...Art was tightly linked to spirit, and so it mattered to most people because they were believers in spirit...

...been annihilated...

...Artists in the sixteenth century, especially under the patronage of Margaret of Austria, fused the old idea of creating an outstanding object with a newer ambition, that such an object must rival the best achieved in the past...

...The medieval test-piece, accomplished early, changed into a masterpiece, one of a series of works of ever increasing skill and impact...

...Even the nineteenth century treasured the comforting certainty that real value could be detected unfailingly...