IN the year 1780 Immanuel Kant finished his Critique of Pure Reason, and about 1880 Cézanne painted the first of his pictures to reveal his definitive style -- these two events can be adduced as justification of the two dates on the title-page of the present book. It is doubtful whether, during the intervening period, there were any other turning-points of such general significance and so pregnant with consequences. One of these events occurred in the field of thought at the end of the Baroque period, the other in the field of pictorial representation of the world at the beginning of modern painting; yet they are basically related because of their profoundly revolutionary character and because they both represented a kind of 'Copernican turning-point'. Both stand for a trend away from the objective world of things towards new perceptive possibilities, towards a new kind of investigation of the premises and constructional laws of the objective world.

It is certainly tempting to ask the reason for such a similarity between two changes of spirit, one of which took place a hundred years later than the other. Does it mean merely that there was an essential relationship between the achievements of two geniuses which, welling up from unfathomable sources, determined future developments for a long time? Are we to consider it as just another proof of the fact that comparable developments in different fields of creative activity do not always take place contemporaneously? Can we, because the difference between the two fields excludes a complete parallelism between their own laws, define as a necessity the fact that an event in the history of thought finds its analogy in the history of painting only much later? These questions cannot receive detailed answers here, but they cannot be disregarded altogether, in so far as they concern laws which seem to govern the development of art. For an attempt to give a condensed account of a century of European painting and sculpture must in part consist in an attempt to define the prevailing lines of development.

The nineteenth century has been and still is decried -- though perhaps less than our own -- on account of the lack of uniformity in its art, on account of its fragmentary nature and many-sidedness, and on account of the increasing rapidity of its changes in the treatment of form. Other reproaches are also levelled against it, above all the increase of individualism, which is regarded as an essential cause of these disturbing features. Nevertheless there is a fundamental tendency underlying the multitude of variations between the end of Baroque art and the last days of Impressionism about 1900. It can be defined as the study of the external appearance of nature. We are not doing an injustice to the nineteenth century if we call it the century of Naturalism. This is certainly true if Naturalism is taken without any more exact limitations. Never before had there been such a degree of Naturalism in painting, not even in Holland in the seventeenth century. To use 'closeness to nature' rather than Naturalism may be a little less precise, but it is

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