There is
our standard of artistic reality. Let anyone give us shapes and colors
which we cannot instantly match in our paltry stock of hackneyed forms
and tints, and we shake our heads at his failure to reproduce things
as we know they certainly are, or we accuse him of insincerity."
Mr. Berenson speaks of our displeasure when a painter "does not
visualize objects exactly as we do," and of the difficulty of
appreciating the art of the Middle Ages because since then "our manner
of visualizing forms has changed in a thousand ways." [Footnote:
_Cf._ also his comment on _Dante's Visual Images, and his Early
Illustrators_ in _The Study and Criticism of Italian Art_ (First
Series), p. 13. "_We_ cannot help dressing Virgil as a Roman,
and giving him a 'classical profile' and 'statuesque carriage,' but
Dante's visual image of Virgil was probably no less mediaeval, no
more based on a critical reconstruction of antiquity, than his entire
conception of the Roman poet. Fourteenth Century illustrators make
Virgil look like a mediaeval scholar, dressed in cap and gown, and
there is no reason why Dante's visual image of him should have been
other than this."] He goes on to show how in regard to the human
figure we have been taught to see what we do see. "Created by
Donatello and Masaccio, and sanctioned by the Humanists, the new canon
of the human figure, the new cast of features .
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