Italian Art by Andre Chastel
 
Stendhal, who greatly admired Italian art, explained it by Italian intensity of feeling and liveliness of manners, and accounted for these characteristics in their turn by reference to the soil, the rhythm of work and life, and by the prevailing climate.
 
'The southerner,' he wrote in his Histoire de la Peinture en Italie 1817, lives on little and in a fertile country; the northerner consumes much in a sterile land. One seeks repose and the other movement. The southerner, through his physical inactivity, finds himself continually drawn towards meditation. For him a pinprick is more cruel than a sabre cut for the other.
 
Artistic expression, therefore, was bound to be born in the South'; and later, In Italy, the climate engenders stronger passions; governments there do not weigh heavily on the passions; there is no capital city. There is, therefore, more originality, more natural genius.' It is thus in nature itself, in the geographical physiognomy of the peninsula, and in the diversity of its provinces that the most interesting source of Italian art must be sought.