The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

scenes (as in French tragedies), it is clearly a far greater fault in a picture.

Historical subjects are distinctly disadvantageous only when they confine the painter to a field which has not been chosen for artistic but for other reasons, and especially when this field is poor in picturesque and significant objects — ^if, for example, it is the history of a small, isolated, capricious, hierarchical (i.e., ruled by error), obscure people, like the Jews, despised by the great contemporary nations of the East and the West.

Since the wandering of the tribes lies between us and all ancient nations, as the change of the bed of the ocean lies between the earth’s surface as it is to-day and as it was when those organisations existed which we only know from fossil remains, it is to be regarded generally as a great misfortune that the people whose culture was to be the principal basis of our own were not the Indians or the Greeks, or even the Eomans, but these very Jews.

But it was especially a great misfortune for the Italian painters of genius in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that, in the narrow sphere to which they were arbitrarily driven for the choice of subjects, they were obliged to have recourse to miserable beings of every kind.

For the New Testament, as regards its historical part, is almost more unsuitable for painting than the Old, and the subsequent history of martyrs and doctors of the church is a very unfortunate subject.

Yet of the pictures, whose subject is the history or mythology of Judaism and Christianity, we must carefully distinguish those in which the peculiar, ie., the ethical spirit of Christianity is revealed for perception, by the representation of men who are full of this spirit.

These representations, are in fa^^ the highest and most adnurabie_achiexesaiLent3,,of the art d! painHiiT^ and only~the greatest masters of this art succeeded m thisj particularly Raphael and Correggio, and especially inTHeir eaHieFpTctur^ Pictures of this kind are^ not propSIjr'td^ be^cIaSseJ as historical : for, as a rule, they represent no event, no action ; but are merely groups of

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saints, with the Saviour himself, often still a child, with Hia mother, angels, &c. In their countenances, and especially in the eyes, we see the expression, the reflection, of the completest knowledge, that which is not directed to particular things, but has fully grasped the Ideas, and thus the whole nature of the world and life. And this knowother knowledge, convey motives to it, but on the contrary has become a quieter of all will, from which proceeded the comply "rSignatioD, which is the innermost spirit of Christianity, as of the Indian philosoj)hy ; the surrender of all volition, conversion, the suppression of will, and with it of the whole inner being of this world, that is to saj^ salvation. Thus these masters of art, worthy of ete^f nal“”pfm3e, expr^ed perceptibly in their works the highest wisdom. And this is the summit of all art. It has followed the will in its adequate objectivity, the Ideas, through all its grades, in which it is affected and its nature unfolded in so many ways, first by causes, then by stimuli, and finally by motives. And now art ends with the representation of the free self-suppression of will, by means of the great peace which it gains from the perfect knowledge of its own nature.^

§ 49. The truth which lies at the foundation of all that we have hitherto said about art, is that the object of art, the representation of which is the aim of the artist, and the knowledge of which must therefore precede his work as its germ and source, is an Idea in Plato’s sense, and never anything else; not the particular thing, the object of common appreSiension, and not the concept, the object of rational thought and of science. Although the Idea and the concept have something in common, because both represent as unity a multiplicity of real things ; yet the great difference between them has no doubt been made clear and evident enough by what we have said

^ In order to understand this passage it is necessary to have read th« whole of the next book.

1, reacting upon the will, does not, like

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THE WORLD AS IDEA.

BK. IIL