The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  Cennino Cennini (born about 1370, near Florence) wrote The Craftsman’s Handbook, which mentions some of the practices of a painter’s guild studio. Cennini was a direct artistic descendent of Giotto via the guild system, across four generations, and the inheritor of the fourteenth century Italian art workshop traditions. Here is an excerpt from the text:

  “Here begins the craftsman’s handbook, made and composed by Cennino Cennini of Colle, in the reverence of God, and of the Virgin Mary, and of Saint Eustace, and of Saint Francis, and of Saint John the Baptist, and of Saint Anthony of Padua, and, in general of all the Saints of God; and in the reverence of Giotto, of Taddeo, and of Agnolo, Cennino’s master; and for the use and good profit of anyone who wants to enter this profession.

  “Offering to these theories whatever little understanding God has granted me, as an unimportant practicing member of the profession of painting: I, Cennino, the son of Andrea Cennini of Colle di Val d’Elsa, — [I was trained in this profession for twelve years by my master, Agnolo di Taddeo of Florence; he learned this profession from Taddeo, his father; and his father was christened under Giotto, and was his follower for four-and-twenty years; and that Giotto changed the profession of painting from Greek back into Latin, and brought it up to date; and he had more finished craftsmanship than anyone has had since], — to minister to all those who wish to enter the profession, I will make note of what was taught me by the aforesaid Agnolo, my master, and of what I have tried out with my own hand:

  “It is not without the impulse of a lofty spirit that some are moved to enter this profession, attractive to them through natural enthusiasm. Their intellect will take delight in drawing, provided their nature attracts them to it of themselves, without any master’s guidance, out of loftiness of spirit. And then, through this delight, they come to want to find a master; and they bind themselves to him with respect for authority, undergoing an apprenticeship in order to achieve perfection in all this. There are those who pursue it, because of poverty and domestic need, for profit and enthusiasm for the profession too; but above all these are to be extolled the ones who enter the profession through a sense of enthusiasm and exaltation.

  “You, therefore, who with lofty spirit are fired with this ambition, and are about to enter the profession, begin by decking yourselves with this attire: Enthusiasm, Reverence, Obedience, and Constancy. And begin to submit yourself to the direction of a master of instruction as early as you can; and do not leave the master until you have to.

  “The basis of the profession, the very beginning of all these manual operations, is drawing and painting. These two sections call for a knowledge of the following: how to work up or grind, how to apply size, to put on cloth, to gesso, to scrape the gessos and smooth them down, to model with gesso, to lay bole, to gild, to burnish; to temper, to lay in: to pounce, to scrape through, to stamp or punch; to mark out, to paint, to embellish, and to varnish, on panel or ancona. To work on a wall you have to wet down, to plaster, to true up, to smooth off, to draw, to paint in fresco...the next thing is to draw. You should adopt this method.

  “Having first practised drawing for a while as I have taught you above, that is, on a little panel, take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters. And if you are in a place where many good masters have been, so much the better for you. But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation. And, as you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and of his spirit. For if you undertake to copy after one master today and after another tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of either one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style will be distracting your mind. You will try to work in this man’s way today, and the other’s tomorrow, and so you will not get either of them right. If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted you any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gather flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns.

  “Mind you, the most perfect steersman that you can have, and the best helm, lie in the triumphal gateway of copying from nature. And this outdoes all other models; and always rely on this with a stout heart, especially as you begin to gain some judgment in draughtsmanship. Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is it will be well worth while, and will do you a world of good.’

  So, here we have an excellent insight into the guild craft world and that feeling of permanence, of working towards an end your ancestors have prepared for you. Nothing is clouded, there is no hubris or doubt as to how to go about achieving master painting. The methods are tried and true, there is only the level of labour and innate talent. The guilds were protectors of method and standard – they were the formalized gatekeepers of culture itself. And the art they were responsible for was not stolid, drab or unimaginative, as a brainwashed Modernist would claim to defend his paintings of straight lines and installations of TV screens.

  Many current historical tracts attempt to explain why guilds fell out of favour, generally with the usual trite hindsight revisionism that it was merely an inevitability of progress. They claim the guild system became a target for ‘hindering free trade’ and business development. This is obviously the boastful interpretation of the victorious merchant class, twisting history to make the vanquished good the arbiter of their own fate, when hindering free trade means little more than hindering the parasitical middleman. No less a notoriously bloodthirsty mob than the French Revolutionaries saw guilds as a last remnant of feudalism and in 1791 abolished the guilds in France. The guilds came under attack from Adam Smith (1723-1790), known as the ‘father of free market economy’ — a person for whom economy and materialism were paramount. He was joined by no less than Karl Marx, who criticized craft guilds for ‘rigidity of social rank’, relating it (as usual) to oppressor and oppressed, the usual verbal manipulation. It is a badge of eternal approval to have been criticized by Marx.

  “Throughout the nineteenth century the guild system was disbanded and replaced by free trade laws. By that time, many former handicraft workers had been forced to seek employment in the emerging manufacturing industries, using not closely guarded techniques but standardized methods controlled by corporations.”

  This quick quote from the Wikipedia site’s craft guilds write-up unironically assumes corporate interest is a good thing. Industrialization and the rise of the merchant class killed off our historic and sacred guild fraternities, forcing skilled workers into the now nefarious mindless hamster-wheel of corporate slave labour and arresting a centuries-long evolution of traditional high art in the process. Guild master painters and sculptors were taken from studios to work the assembly line.

  It seems clear their loss, a loss to all of us, is among the greatest tragedies of the victory of the business class and mercantile values over tradition and integrity.

  For moderns to best understand the guild system, it is necessary to compare them with existing institutions. They might be described as a cross between a professional association, a trade union and an initiation cult. Of this, the esoteric initiation and religious aspect is no doubt the most alien to our ears (in what we might interpret today as a trade union). But for that reason I suspect it was probably the most crucial, in that constant war between spiritualism (metaphysics) and materialism (nihilism), which is better described as the force of will of good men against entropy. Our hubristic failure to grasp the nature of this eternal war perhaps explains why we have lost both the guild practice and the ability to create master works. The solar spirituality that so excites traditionalists and is anathema to Modernists is currently laid low, biding its
time like Cronos sleeping in his cave.

  We have only lost this guild system comparatively recently, to attack from post-French Revolution business interests, for the reason that it impaired the artless transaction of business and impeded the growth of corporatism. In the age of global free trade we do not make anything ourselves at all and are so poor for it and so culturally confused we barely know who we are. These unchecked mercantile values have now eroded us to a lower and more desperate state than were the Russians after communism — and most of us do not even realise it yet.

  Bringing back the guild system, which existed in an unbroken line from prehistory until recent history, would hopefully re-link us with all those masters and their inherited art knowledge, mending the timeline that was broken. There is no point in having an art guild with our current art philosophy, as anybody can literally do anything and no instruction is required. The goofier and more unskilled the better. With guilds, flute playing, painting, carpentry, plumbing, basket weaving should all be seen as the same, each with an objective tier of artistry and utility. The carpenter should know draughtsmanship and carving, the flute player the practical business of music. Simply view art and craft as one cultural expression, objective, clear and meaningful, and abandon the broken, binary view that art is obtuse abstraction and functional building has no artistic creativity.

  Reviving these seemingly dead institutions may seem virtually impossible, or at the expense of too many existing conventions and establishments, but a complete flip of conventional morality is precisely what is required here. It is only an illusion that we cannot take control of the workings of our own society, or that it is impossible to defy business interests, and weave a healthy tapestry of our lives and lineage.

  Return to the atelier method

  “The inventive genius of the great masters of the past had created a certain mould and type of beauty. It was held that diligent study was all that was required in order to perpetuate the beauty of these forms indefinitely, and that all the value of the original creation would be preserved if only the knowledge of how to reproduce the same kind of line and the same kind of figure were handed down from master to pupil in a sort of apostolic succession.”

  – Théodore Duret

  The atelier method was the guild process most suited to the fine arts (in the true meaning of the word) of paintings and sculpture. It was our traditional art training system from time immemorial, in which pupils were tutored manually, often on a one-to-one basis, as prospective fine or decorative artists. Pupils studied under a master, learning a vast retinue of objective skills, intensively, in the visual illusion of painting or the principles of sculpture. Natural talent and hard work were focused on facilitating and engineering genius in line with traditional standards.

  The studio was actually the private workshop of a professional artist where assistants, students and apprentices worked together producing art released under the master’s guidance, supervision and also his name. Hence there was a system of mutual benefit and you see antique artworks today ‘from the studio of Rembrandt’ or from someone who ‘worked under David’ and so on. This peerless traditional and paternal system ensured past accomplishments were not forgotten and, where possible, improved. No vague, irrational philosophy entered the process, championing abstraction or inadequacy. The maintenance of standards was paramount and shows undeniably in their masterwork, still revered today and for all time.

  This was the standard vocational practice for European artists from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century and most likely, once again, like the other craft guilds, going back to Rome, Greece (the studio of Phidias) and into prehistory.

  Gustave Courbet, The Artist’s Studio (L’Atelier du peintre) Musée d’Orsay, Paris & the French Atelier of Painters: titled “School of Fine Arts - Painter Workshop” (Ecole des Beaux-Arts - Atelier de Peintre).

  In Medieval Europe this formal education was usually regulated by guilds, such as the painters’ Guild of Saint Luke. Apprentices usually began quite young, in the way of similar apprenticeships today. The system later became more obscure and faded away, along with the other craft guilds, as the academy became a favoured method of training.

  I would like to repeat again (because our mutual brainwashing rails against the notion) that art, at the root of it, is craft. The chairmaker and the seamstress are artists at varying levels of genius depending on their skill and the quality of their output. The same is true for the painter or architect, each works within the tiers of their chosen trade. A plasterer or mason in ancient Rome or Tudor England needed to have a great many artistic skills. The labourer was no different to the draughtsman or the master – each knew the standard of quality, all were concerned with æsthetics and traditional motif at every level of the work. Making something for pure utilitarian purposes simply did not happen and as such there was a joy in the making of things and a cultural enrichment at the quality and style of handmade goods.

  This philosophy is not actually hard to reclaim, at least at the level of our personal lives. If you need something, try to make it yourself. Use the power of action versus work. Remember work is the drone, the slave, for whom it does not matter what his labour is or the fruits, while action is the strength to labour towards your own immediate ends. Making a table, making a painting, planting a garden, making a house. It is harder but it is fulfilling and tangible. The alternative is slavery.

  That is the mindset of a free man.

  Here is an insight into a proper French painting Atelier, taught by no less than Jean-Leon Gerome. This excerpt is from the The Nation, May 6, 1869, ‘ART-STUDY IN THE IMPERIAL SCHOOL AT PARIS’ by Earl Shinn.

  A Visit from the Master

  A visit from Jean-Léon Gérôme was a special occasion for students in the Ecole des Beaux Arts, occurring only once a week. When the master was not in attendance, the students harassed each other, dueled with mahl sticks, and joked around.

  On a typical morning, they went about their normal routines, making coffee, and, according to a student who was part of the class, “arranging themselves in the tobacco-smoke, setting palettes, filling pipes, trimming crayons, moistening bits of bread, and wringing them into erasing-balls in the corners of handkerchiefs.”

  Gérôme arrived exactly on schedule, removed his hat, and placed it on a peg reserved just for him.

  The students came to attention and the Italian model perked up.

  He started in one corner of the room and went systematically from student to student, standing or sitting in their place, and regarding their drawing or painting with full attention and unsparing criticism.

  “Observe,” he said, looking at a very neat drawing by a student, “Your muscles are inlaid against one another. They are carpentered. There is a something—that is not the vivacity of flesh. Go next Sunday to the Louvre and observe some of the drawings of Raphael. He does not use so much work as you, yet one feels the elasticity of his flesh, packed together of contractile fibers, based upon bone, and sheathed in satin. You tell me you will express that texture afterward. I tell you Raphael expressed it from the first stroke!”

  “Your color rages,” he said to another student. “That of the model is lambent. Besides, your figure is tumbling, it is not on its legs. I will save you labor by telling you the simplest way of correcting this. Turn the canvas upside down and draw it over. The error is radical.”

  To another, he said: “You do not yet understand the continuity of forms in nature. You accent too highly. That is vulgarity. For instance: it appears to you that the internal and external vastus, when gathered in at the knee, cause a break in the outline, like the cap of a pillar. Similarly under the calf. You are deceived, and should use your eyes; the accent is not in the line, it is in the shading beside the line, and even there far more slightly than you think. Here again, the vein crosses the forearm. You make a hideous saliency. Nature never, absolutely never, breaks a line.’

  As you may note, there is no suggestion to ‘jus
t express yourself’, no subjective ‘do whatever you feel’. No pushing towards egalitarian political narrative. The master gives hard, objective advice with reference to past masters (Raphael), demonstrating a clear idea of standards.

  This is, by objective evidence, the clear and ideal way to instruct art and support high culture, and enrich our daily lives and living spaces. Where the tremendous difficulty lies in applying standards is that we must also stamp out the cancerous philosophies that bloom under the illusions of total freedom. The Modernist theory, nurtured by the wealthy business interest, will, if not exposed and trampled, erode any attempts at restoring the high art order. It is in the aid of entropy itself, a dark and lazy force all those with a will to live must combat. It is not enough to allow Modernism to exist side by side with tradition, kind-heartedly. We have tried that and their nonsense will win out as they never cease their long-term game to guile the gullible with sweet talk of equality. At the upper echelons, the custodians of culture, the major academies and galleries and institutions, the proper standard must be met and upheld. The ateliers must be re-opened with the explicit and true purpose of continuing and evolving tribal tradition. This means the people in charge must hold their tribal interests paramount, as unanimously as is possible. I have outlined now the reasons for this — it is simply and ultimately survival itself.

  Concluding remarks.

  Twilight of the Western arts

  “In soft regions are born soft men.”

  – Herodutus

  Sometimes things are exactly as they seem. The first question most people ask themselves, when confronted with jarring Modernist art, is: “Could a child could have done this?” This is the natural response, the rational one, when confronted with something that exhibits no apparent skill. But we have each of us been trained since childhood to suppress this instinctual response, to self-answer it with a relativist assumption: “We cannot judge this work, we must assume it is genius because we have been told so.”