FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  The existence of the Ku K’ai-chih makes it clear that the art of this period (fifth to eighth centuries), was a typical primitive movement.  To call the great vital art of the Liang, Chen, Wei, and Tang dynasties a development out of the exquisitely refined and exhausted art of the Han decadence—­from which Ku K’ai-chih is a delicate straggler—­is to call Romanesque sculpture a development out of Praxiteles.  Between the two some thing has happened to refill the stream of art.  What had happened in China was the spiritual and emotional revolution that followed the onset of Buddhism.]

[Footnote 2:  This is not to say that exact representation is bad in itself.  It is indifferent.  A perfectly represented form may be significant, only it is fatal to sacrifice significance to representation.  The quarrel between significance and illusion seems to be as old as art itself, and I have little doubt that what makes most palaeolithic art so bad is a preoccupation with exact representation.  Evidently palaeolithic draughtsmen had no sense of the significance of form.  Their art resembles that of the more capable and sincere Royal Academicians:  it is a little higher than that of Sir Edward Poynter and a little lower than that of the late Lord Leighton.  That this is no paradox let the cave-drawings of Altamira, or such works as the sketches of horses found at Bruniquel and now in the British Museum, bear witness.  If the ivory head of a girl from the Grotte du Pape, Brassempouy (Musee St. Germain) and the ivory torso found at the same place (Collection St. Cric), be, indeed, palaeolithic, then there were good palaeolithic artists who created and did not imitate form.  Neolithic art is, of course, a very different matter.]

[Footnote 3:  Mr. Roger Fry permits me to make use of an interesting story that will illustrate my view.  When Mr. Okakura, the Government editor of The Temple Treasures of Japan, first came to Europe, he found no difficulty in appreciating the pictures of those who from want of will or want of skill did not create illusions but concentrated their energies on the creation of form.  He understood immediately the Byzantine masters and the French and Italian Primitives.  In the Renaissance painters, on the other hand, with their descriptive pre-occupations, their literary and anecdotic interests, he could see nothing but vulgarity and muddle.  The universal and essential quality of art, significant form, was missing, or rather had dwindled to a shallow stream, overlaid and hidden beneath weeds, so the universal response, aesthetic emotion, was not evoked.  It was not till he came on to Henri Matisse that he again found himself in the familiar world of pure art.  Similarly, sensitive Europeans who respond immediately to the significant forms of great Oriental art, are left cold by the trivial pieces of anecdote and social criticism so lovingly cherished by Chinese dilettanti.  It would be easy to multiply instances did not decency forbid the labouring of so obvious a truth.]