"When on visiting an art gallery one passes from the rooms of the primitives to those in which the glories of oil painting and of a much more considerable material science are displayed, the foot takes a step on the floor but the soul takes a steep fall. It had been taking the air on the everlasting hills: it now finds itself on the floor of a theatre ─ a magnificent theatre. With the sixteenth century the lie installed itself in painting, which began to love science for its own sake, endeavoring to give the illusion of nature and to make us believe that in the presence of a painting we are in the presence of the scene or the subject painted, not in the presence of a painting.
"The great classicists from Raphael to Greco, to Zurbaran, Lorrain, and Watteau, succeeded in purifying art of this lie; realism, and, in a sense, impressionism, delighted in it. Does Cubism in our day, despite its enormous deficiencies, represent the still groping and noisy childhood of an art once again pure? The barbarous dogmatism of its theorists compels one to doubt this very much, and to fear that the new school may be endeavoring to free itself radically from naturalist imitation only to immobilize itself in stultae quaestiones, by denying the primary conditions which essentially distinguish Painting from the other arts, from Poetry, for instance, or from Logic."
~Jacques Maritain: from Art and Scholasticism, Chap. VII.
