WOMAN IN ART
loss." His art flowed from the point of his pen into the lines wherein we find his appreciation of her spirit-value to his life work:
"Her soul that fashioned mine has sought the skies;
Therefore unfinished I must meet my end,
If God, the great Artificer, denies
That aid which was unique on earth before."
Can we now ask "what is beauty?" Does it not speak for itself in our poverty of words?—"I am Spirit."
Gentile Bellini, Carlo Maratta, Lorenzo Lotto, and Carlo Dolci and a number of others must have found lovely types for portraits or else painted their own ideals of sweet, high-minded maids and matrons.
So far something is missing in our art examples, something emphatically characteristic of womanhood; something beside regular features, spirituality, saintly poise, and beatific thoughtfulness.
The Renaissance was a world-awakening. It was spring-time for the civilized world, a new life put forth in response to a universal urge. Mentality and activity bestirred as with new blood; new veins of research and uplift began to be worked; thought began to assert itself in science, religion, literature, adventure, no less than in art.
The flora of nature is variously beautiful: cyclamen, roses, heliotrope, and violets luxuriate en masse in Italy. Lilies-of-the-valley, huge pansies, and forget-me-nots lavish their dainty color and sweetness in the moist valleys of the Ural Mountains and of Switzerland; and the mountain rose fears not the snows. The Cherokee Rose revivifies the nude skeleton trees of our southland, but cannot survive in Canadian forests.
From this we realize: One may choose according to his taste for a transplanting, but for a glorious ensemble, view the flowers in their native clime. Hence, we venture north beyond the Alps in search of what we did not find in Italian art.
There was art in Flanders at this same period. Innate characteristics of national differences develop principally because of environment and religion.
From earliest times Holland has had to fight to keep her land from going out to sea, or from Spanish greed, jealous of her commerce and industries. Perforce, her people, battling the scourge of the sea and rigors of keen winters on limited land, were a hardy race and big hearted, because hardships, sorrows, and trials are bonds of sympathy to our human nature. In their art we see a
36
