CHAPTER V. _The Decorative Quality._—Disagreement 114

between the painter and the public—The “average person” in the gallery—The painter in the gallery—Art as representation _vs._ art as decoration—The artist devoted to the decorative—Art has always been decorative—Origin of painting—In the Stone Age—Primitive man as artist—The artist in Egypt—In Assyria and Greece—Filling of space on Greek coins—The Gothic Age and decoration—Giotto, Masaccio—Line-composition with Raphael and Michael Angelo—Light-and-shade composition with Leonardo, Correggio, Giorgione—Color-composition with Titian and Paolo Veronese—Art history explained on purely technical grounds—Titian and his ideas in art—The Decadence and why it came—Lack of technical skill—Why art flourished in the Seventeenth Century with Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velasquez—The decorative in modern art—Revision of technical methods by Millet, Manet, and Monet—Advance of painting with new discoveries—The spontaneity of art—Materials and the craftsman in literary art—Absence of the decorative in Walt Whitman and Holman Hunt—The lasting value of the decorative—The “Venus of Milo” and Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love”—And Shakespeare again