University of Virginia Library

III. INDIVIDUALISM OF ARTISTS

1. Antiquity and Middle Ages. The image of the
individualist artist is tied to the elevation of practi-
tioners from the rank of mere craftsmen to the level
of emancipated creators. Such a change has come about
twice in the history of Western art: in fourth-century
Greece and again in fifteenth-century Italy. A process
of individualization began even earlier in Greece.
Pliny, our main source for Greek artists, reports that
the mid-sixth-century B.C. architect and sculptor,
Theodoros of Samos, cast a bronze self-portrait “famed
as a wondrous likeness” (Pliny, xxxiv, 83; Sellers, 1896).
And the fifth century B.C., the classical period of Greek
art, saw the rise of a diversified literature by artists
on art (Overbeck, 1868; Sellers, 1896; Kalkmann, 1898).
Apelles' teacher, Pamphilos (ca. 390-340 B.C.), was the
first painter who could boast an all-round education
and a special knowledge in arithmetic and geometry
(Pliny, xxxv, 76), and we have it on good authority that
artists during this period wanted to appear as gentle-
men in dress and mien: Zeuxis is reported to have
amassed great wealth and to have displayed his name
woven in golden letters into the embroideries of his
garments, and his rival, Parrhasios, who lived in luxury,
indulged in similar extravagances (Pliny, xxxv, 62, 71).
But despite the highly developed self-esteem of artists,
public recognition was lacking.

The Greeks felt contempt for those who had to toil
with their hands for money; they hardly ranked them
higher than slaves. It was the skill of the craftsman
that was valued (Poeschel, 1925; Schweitzer, 1925;
Zilsel, 1926), and artists, therefore, were mentioned in
the company of barbers, cooks, and blacksmiths.
Moreover, both Plato and Aristotle assigned to the
visual arts a place much below music and poetry.
Plato's doctrine of divine enthusiasm had room for
poets and musicians but not for artists. Nevertheless,
in the fourth century B.C., i.e., in Aristotle's days, the
public's attitude began to change.

Characteristically, at the end of the fourth century
the historian Duris of Samos wrote a book on the Lives
of Painters and Sculptors and this work, of which only
a few fragments have survived, inaugurated the bio-
graphical literature on artists, implying an interest in
artists' personalities and individual idiosyncrasies.
There are many other indications to show that the
respect for the individual creator superseded that for
the anonymous craftsman. The Stoics as well as such
authors as Philostratus (ca. A.D. 170-245) and Pausanias
(late second century A.D.) acknowledged that, just like
poets, painters experienced inspiration and ecstasy
(Schweitzer, 1925). Masterpieces now found eager bid-
ders; an interest in art and involvement in art criticism
became a status symbol. It is credibly reported that
Alexander the Great and his court painter Apelles were
tied by bonds of friendship (Pliny, xxxv, 85). Later, such
Roman emperors as Nero, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurel-
ius regarded painting and sculpting as a suitable pas-
time for themselves. In spite of all this, the old philo-
sophical and social traditions never ceased to assert
themselves; we find them reflected as late as the first
century A.D. in Plutarch's well known dictum “We
enjoy the work and despise the maker” (Pericles i, 4, 5;
Dresdner, 1915); or even a hundred years later in
Lucian's assessment that by becoming a sculptor “you
will be nothing but a labourer... one of the swarming
rabble... whatever your achievement you would be
considered an artisan, a craftsman, one who lives by
the work of his hands” (Somnium, 9).

With the decline and fall of Rome the modest
“breakthrough” of the artist was soon forgotten and

for many centuries he was once again reduced to the
status of artisan and craftsman. This is certainly true,
although we now know that the Victorian image of
the medieval craftsman, content to be an anonymous
member of his lodge and devoted to his work for the
glory of God alone, is a myth unsupported by historical
facts. Many names of medieval artists have come down
to us and even at the darkest period there were masters
of distinct individuality such as S. Eligius, who died
as Bishop of Noyon in 658; before having taken the
vows he had won fame as an artist of remarkable
accomplishments. It is recorded that he was a passion-
ate reader, that he loved precious jewelry and gorgeous
gowns, that he kept servants, and was surrounded by
devoted pupils (Schlosser, 1891). From the eleventh
century onward the names of artists abound and, judg-
ing from some of their self-laudatory inscriptions—such
as those of Rainaldus, one of the architects of Pisa
Cathedral (after 1063), or of Lanfrancus, at Modena
Cathedral (1099)—we may safely assume that they had
a high opinion of their own merits and achievements
(Jahn, 1965). Epithets such as doctus, expertus, probus,
sapiens, prudens, praestans, and artificiosus, frequently
found in early documents and inscriptions should,
however, not be too highly valued as individual char-
acterizations but should, rather, be regarded as refer-
ring to the expert handling of execution. While some
medieval masters rose to positions of trust and distinc-
tion, while some architects in particular attained social
advancement and high honors, the rank and file of
artists were, in the words of Bishop Otto von Freising
(d. 1158), not admitted to higher positions and were
kept away “like the plague... from more honorable
and liberal studies” (Booz, 1956).

When from the thirteenth century onward the urban
working population of western Europe became in-
creasingly organized in guilds, artists could not easily
assert their individuality; in the fourteenth century and
even in the fifteenth the guilds tended to control the
whole man, from the education of apprentices to the
exercise of jurisdiction. Nor did they omit to look after
the physical and moral conduct of their members. Thus
there are good grounds to argue that the guilds had
an equalizing influence, for artists were de jure and
de facto craftsmen with a well-regulated training and
a well-regulated daily routine. On the other hand, it
cannot be denied that the city breeds individualism,
and it is against the very background of the guild-
controlled craftsman that the personality problems of
Renaissance artists appear revolutionary and emphat-
ically real. It would seem that Jacob Burckhardt's
famous thesis of the liberation of the individual in the
age of the Renaissance remains valid, especially in the
field of the visual arts, although Burckhardt excluded
this aspect from his Civilization of the Renaissance
(1860).

2. Renaissance Individualism. The Renaissance
artists' protracted revolt against the guilds was a fight
on several fronts: a fight for social recognition, for the
recognition of art as an intellectual rather than a man-
ual occupation; a fight for the inclusion of painting,
sculpture, and architecture among the disciplines of
the liberal arts; a fight, moreover, for the right of free
men to look after themselves and act as their con-
sciences dictated. In retrospect, it does not seem aston-
ishing that it was in Florence, the most advanced
city-state in Europe, where the individualized artist
showing many modern traits first evolved. The new
class of merchant patrons with their highly developed
individualism, their sense of liberty and enterprise,
their progressive and competitive spirit, found in their
artists an attitude towards life which they themselves
cherished. In this congenial intellectual climate artists
first insisted upon their rights as free individuals in a
manner that was somewhat unpredictable and not
always beyond reproach.

The first memorable case of a challenge of the guild
laws is that of the great Filippo Brunelleschi. He re-
fused to pay his dues and on 20 August 1434 was
thrown into prison (Fabriczy, 1892). But Brunelleschi's
self-assured disobedience ended in victory. He was
released after a few days and no interference in his
work at the cupola of Florence Cathedral is recorded.
This victory had symbolic significance; it was followed
by many others. A wealth of documents shows how
relentlessly and against what odds the artists carried
on their struggle for emancipation. In France the guilds
defended their rights stubbornly until Colbert's reor-
ganization in 1663 of the Académie Royale de Peinture
et de Sculpture (founded in 1635), spelled an end to
their power. In England most painters remained low-
class tradesmen even longer than in France; as “face-
painters” they were organized in the Painter-Stainers
Company on an equal footing with coach-painters and
house-painters (Wittkower, 1968). Not until well into
the eighteenth century, when William Hogarth took
up their cause and the Royal Academy was inaugurated
with Sir Joshua Reynolds in the President's chair (1768),
did British artists achieve a freedom comparable to that
of their Italian confrères of 200 years before.

The process of individualization, first observable in
fifteenth-century Florence, has to be approached from
the viewpoint of the artist as well as the public. Early
in that century, the painter Cennino Cennini wrote
a basically medieval craftsman's manual entitled Il libro
dell'arte, in which he exhorted his fellow painters to
emulate the dignity and temperance of scholars
(Cennini, 1932). Otherwise Cennini's work contains

mainly technical recipes. But at the same moment in
time a new kind of literature on art written by artists
arose. Its first product, Leon Battista Alberti's On
Painting (De pittura), written in 1436, a prophetic work
of great perspicacity, contains the program of the
modern emancipated artist. His art must be given a
firm theoretical foundation, for it ranks equal with
poetry and the theoretical sciences; and the artist him-
self has to be a man of immaculate character and great
learning. In addition, Alberti regards polite manners
and an easy bearing as marks of personality that elevate
the artist above the craftsman with his virtues of mere
industry and technical skill. Alberti's contemporaries
delved into theoretical studies with great eagerness and
many tried their hand in the writing of treatises. The
sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti composed a monumental
work on art and artists that contains the first autobiog-
raphy known to have been written by an artist (Schlos-
ser, 1912). This must be regarded as a phenomenon
of utmost importance, for an autobiography means
looking at one's own life as an observer; it requires
the distance of self-reflection, and introspection be-
came an important character trait of the new race of
artists.

The new ideal of artistic personality propounded by
Alberti adumbrated a conforming, well-adjusted, and
socially integrated type, an ideal that was in fact up-
held in academic circles through the ages. But at the
same time one can also observe the emergence of the
nonconforming, alienated artist, and it is this type that
is of particular interest in the present context. As early
as the fourteenth century a certain class of literary
production in Tuscany shows an anecdotal interest in
the behavior of artists. In Boccaccio's Decamerone and,
above all, in the Tuscan novelle, artists appear mainly
as the perpetrators of entertaining and burlesque prac-
tical jokes. For Boccaccio a painter was a man full
of fun, high-spirited, quite shrewd, of somewhat lax
morals, and not burdened by much learning. And in
one of Franco Sacchetti's novelle one finds a painter's
wife exclaiming: “You painters are all whimsical and
of ever-changing mood; you are constantly drunk and
are not even ashamed of yourselves!” (Sacchetti, 1946).
This remarkable statement sounds like a prophetic
definition of the Bohemian artist, and it is certainly
true that such anecdotes would have been neither
invented nor read if they had not echoed a popular
reaction to artists. But in contrast to the anecdotal topoi
in the Tuscan novelle (Kris and Kurz, 1934), the literary
image of the artist from the fifteenth century onward
loses its jolly and light-hearted connotations and pre-
sents us with serious problems of individualization.

Owing to the rich and, as time went on, steadily
growing literary production concerning artists, some
general observations regarding these problems can
safely be made. Instead of being subjected to the regu-
lated routine of the workshop, the Renaissance artist
was often on his own and developed characteristics
compatible with his freedom. Now periods of most
concentrated and intense work often alternated with
unpredictable lapses into idleness. The vacillation be-
tween obsession with work and creative pauses became
the prerogative of free individuals who felt that they
were ultimately responsible only to themselves. Vasari,
whose Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti
(first published in 1550) was the accepted model of
historical writing on art for over 200 years, conveys
the impression that his Tuscan countrymen showed a
greater obsession with their work than others, and since
they were the proud and conscious pioneers of an
entirely new approach to art, he may not have been
wrong at all. The corollary to obsession with one's work
is indifference to dress, cleanliness, food, family, public
affairs; in short, to everything outside the object of the
fixation. Vasari's Lives abounds with this theme and
consequently many idiosyncratic personalities of artists
come to life. Masaccio is described as careless and
absentminded, entirely unconcerned about worldly
matters; Luca della Robbia, we are told, dedicating
himself day and night to his work, patiently bore phys-
ical discomfort; Paolo Uccello entirely disregarded the
affairs of the world and lived like a hermit, intent only
on unravelling the laws of perspective; Bartolomeo
Torri from Arezzo, a pupil of Giulio Clovio, had to
be turned out of the latter's house because he was so
enamored of the study of anatomy that he kept pieces
of corpses all over his room and even under his bed.
It matters little whether such tales are true or merely
anecdotes. For Vasari, his contemporaries, and suc-
ceeding generations such anecdotes helped to elucidate
individual character traits of artists of distinction.

The emancipated artist needed introspection, and
introspection necessitates pauses, often of considerable
length. Early reports about such unaccustomed behav-
ior in artists are not very frequent, but some are grati-
fyingly explicit. A contemporary of Leonardo has left
us a vivid description of the latter's procedure when
painting the Last Supper. According to this eye-witness
report Leonardo often stayed on the scaffolding from
dawn to dusk without putting down his brush, forget-
ting to eat and drink, painting all the time. Then, for
two, three, or four days he would not touch his work
and yet he would stay there, sometimes an hour, some-
times two hours a day wrapped in contemplation
(Flora, 1952). Similarly, Jacopo da Pontormo would
set out to work in the morning and return in the
evening “without having done anything all day but
stand lost in thought” (Vasari, VI, 289). The sculptor

Giovan Francesco Rustici, a remarkable individualist
who had studied with Leonardo, contrasted the daily
toil of workmen with the responsibility of the artist:
“Works of art cannot be executed without long reflec-
tion” (Vasari, VI, 600). Such a statement, that may
nowadays appear hackneyed, could not be experienced
and verbalized until the Renaissance emancipation of
the artist.

Introspection requires solitude, and solitude and
secrecy became the hallmark of many artists. Petrarch
as well as Erasmus attest that the intellectual recluse
of the Renaissance felt the pangs of isolation. When
artists aligned themselves with scholars and poets, they
developed symptoms, often to an excessive degree, of
the class they joined. Michelangelo never allowed any-
one, not even the Pope, to be near him while he
worked. Artists like Piero di Cosimo, Pontormo, and
many others behaved similarly. Leonardo justified this
kind of conduct. “The painter,” he wrote, “must live
alone, contemplate what his eye perceives and com-
mune with himself” (Ludwig, 1888). And Rustici gave
reasons why one should never show one's work to
anyone before it was finished (Vasari, VI, 600). A breach
of secrecy aroused Franciabigio to such a pitch of anger
that he damaged some figures of his fresco of the
Marriage of the Virgin (SS. Annunziata, Florence) with
a bricklayer's hammer. The result can be seen to this
day. Tintoretto, a pleasant and gracious person, was
of an extremely retiring disposition. He rarely admitted
friends to his studio, “let alone other artists, nor did
he ever let other painters see him at work” (Ridolfi,
1914). At the threshold of the romantic age Goya
talked persuasively about the “looking-into-himself,”
the spiritual monologue. This attitude would seem a
sure sign of a highly developed individualism. No one
reveals this more clearly than the most individualistic
artist of the Renaissance and maybe of all time,
Michelangelo Buonarroti. The essence of the problem
that moved him to the core is perhaps contained in
the three lines of a sonnet that remained a fragment:

(Frey [1897], lxxx, 2).

That experience can only be won in isolation, and
isolation spells agony. His suffering, his distress of mind
is the thread that runs through many of his letters. As
a man of seventy-four he writes to a friend: “You will
say that I am old and mad; but I answer that there
is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety
than being mad” (Milanesi, 1875). At the same period
he put the paradox differently in a famous sonnet:

(Frey [1897], lxxi).

There is no doubt that the agonized revelling in self-
reflection was, at times at least, a satisfying experience
for Michelangelo.

Michelangelo's personality hardly less than his art
has fascinated and puzzled people for close to 500
years. Every possible epithet has been attached to his
name, but in spite of the contradictory light in which
he appeared to his contemporaries as well as to poster-
ity, all agree that he was an eccentric endowed with
a most difficult nature. “He is terrible, as you can see,
and one cannot deal with him,” Pope Julius II once
said during an audience (Gaye, 1839). Michelangelo's
terribilità became proverbial, to indicate both the tor-
mented impetuosity of his character and the sublimity
of his art.

Eccentricity, however, was not Michelangelo's pre-
rogative, as many tend to believe. From the fifteenth
century onward it was regarded as a characteristic of
artists as a professional group. The cases of Piero di
Cosimo and Pontormo stand out among many others.
Both had misanthropic habits of the oddest kind. Piero
di Cosimo was held by many to be rather mad, and
Pontormo, “solitary beyond belief” was, as his diary
kept from 1554 to 1556 reveals, an almost insane hy-
pochondriac. Even minor artists such as Graffione
Fiorentino attracted attention because of their eccen-
tric behavior, while others led by a certain Jacone, a
pupil of Andrea del Sarto, went all out to épater le
bourgeois. As their contemporary Vasari (VI, 451) tells
“... under the pretence of living like philosophers,
they lived like swine and brute beasts... this misera-
ble existence of theirs... was held by them to be the
finest in the world.”

3. The Post-Renaissance Gentleman-Artist. The list
of eccentricities in which artists indulged is long, var-
ied, and well-documented (Wittkower, Born Under
Saturn..., 1963). And the reality of this new type
of artist is thrown into relief by the violence of the
reaction against it. As early as the middle of the six-
teenth century the nonconforming artist with his
foibles and extravagances was no longer fashionable.
It was then felt that artists should unobtrusively merge
with the social and intellectual elite. Vasari himself,
to whom any form of excess was anathema, resorted
in his biography of Raphael to a technique of ideal-
ization: he depicted Raphael as the acme of moral and
intellectual perfection. According to him there was no
greater contrast than that between Raphael's grace,
learning, beauty, modesty, and excellent demeanor and

the majority of artists who showed a detachment from
reality, and displayed eccentricity admixed with mad-
ness and uncouthness (Vasari, IV, 315). Even before this
was written, the Portuguese painter Francisco de
Hollanda, who was in Rome between 1538 and 1540
and put in literary form the talks he supposedly had
with Michelangelo, ascribed the following statement
to the great master, surely in order to give it the weight
of highest authority:

(Hollanda, 1899).

In the second half of the sixteenth century the pro-
scription of the eccentric artist was rather general.
Most revealing passages are to be found in G. B.
Armenini's Dei veri precetti della pittura (1587) and
G. P. Lomazzo's Idea del tempio della pittura (1590).
Artists are strongly advised to keep away “from the
vices of madness, uncouthness, and extravagance, nor
should they aim at originality by acting in a disorderly
way and using nauseating language....” Thus from
the mid-sixteenth century on writers disavowed artists
who displayed conspicuously a nonconforming behav-
ior; instead they created and advocated a new image
of the artist: the conforming, well-bred, rational phi-
losopher-artist, who is richly endowed by nature with
all the graces and virtues. From then onward artists
saw themselves in the role of gentlemen, and the public
complied with this idea. Although the anti-conven-
tional artist had come to stay, it may be claimed that
great gentlemen and great individualists such as Rubens
and Bernini, Lebrun and Reynolds embody most fully
the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideal of the
artist as a versatile, unaffected, well-bred, captivating
man of the world. Much as they differed from each
other, these masters were all great individualists who
left an imprint on their time and later ages, not only
because of their art and through their art but also
because of their powerful personalities.

As early as the 1540's Francisco de Hollanda makes
Vittoria Colonna say that those who knew Michel-
angelo had greater esteem for his person than for his
work. Rubens' affability and prudence, erudition and
eloquence, alert mind, broad culture, and all-embrac-
ing intellect shine forth after centuries just as does
Bernini's spirited Italian individualism, gracing a man
of infinite charm, a brilliant and witty talker, fond of
conviviality, aristocratic in demeanor and “passionate
in his wrath,” as his son Domenico reports. Bernini's
triumphal procession from Rome to Paris in 1665 at
the invitation of Louis XIV was not only an ovation
to the greatest artist then alive and to a truly impres-
sive personality, but also illustrates most vividly the
revolutionary reassessment of art and artists that had
come about in less than 200 years. Indeed, the peak
then reached in the estimation of artistic genius has
hardly ever again been equalled. Nowadays no govern-
ment would take so much trouble to look after a trav-
eling artist and architect. Unlike Colbert, prime minis-
ters would scarcely go out of their way to make his
stay agreeable.

Among eighteenth-century artists, it was Sir Joshua
Reynolds who, in his country, attained a standing and
success comparable to Bernini's. Although he came
from a family of modest means and although neither
lavish praise nor public honors, neither his knighthood
nor his presidency of the Royal Academy changed his
essentially middle-class bearing, he “certainly con-
trived”—as his pupil James Northcote wrote—“to
move in a higher sphere of society than any other
English artist had done before. Thus he procured for
Professors of the Arts a consequence, dignity, and
reception, which they had never before possessed in
this country” (Northcote, 1818). At his death in 1792
a whole nation bowed before the achievement of this
great man. Three dukes, two marquesses, three earls,
and two lords were his pallbearers; ninety-one car-
riages, conveying all the members of the Royal Acad-
emy and scores of distinguished luminaries followed
the body to its resting place in St. Paul's Cathedral.

4. Academicians and Bohemians. The sixteenth
century has been called the century of the academies
and, indeed, before the end of the century some acade-
mies of art were founded. Appropriately, the first one
came to life in Florence in 1563 (Accademia del Di-
segno) with Vasari as its initiator and organizer. The
new type of gentleman-artist would be unthinkable
without the rising social and educational institutions
of the art academies which saw their heyday between
the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Looking
back from the position of the academic artist, the plight
of his pre-academic colleague can be more easily un-
derstood. Not unlike the medieval artist, the acade-
mician enjoyed the benefit of a professional orga-
nization, a center toward which his life gravitated. The
Renaissance artist, by contrast, partaking no longer in
the old and not yet in the new social structure, had
to fend for himself. The Renaissance artist's fight for
liberation from the encumbrances of the guilds was
reenacted in the romantic artist's fight for liberation
from the ties of the academy. Just as the individualism
of the Renaissance artist put an end to the sheltered
position of the late medieval craftsman, so the new

romantic vocabulary—enthusiasm, naïveté, spontane-
ity, feeling, autonomy of artistic creation, intuition,
totality of vision, and so forth—reversed many basic
tenets of the academic artist. The specter arose of the
artist as a kind of being elevated above the rest of
mankind, alienated from the world and answerable in
thought and deed only to his own genius: the image
of the Bohemian took shape, fostered as much by the
 ideology  and conduct of the artist as by the reaction
of the society on the fringe of which he lived. Thus
we see toward the end of the eighteenth century and
at the beginning of the nineteenth problems of person-
ality in the making, which, under kindred circum-
stances, had beset the artists of the Florentine Renais-
sance. With good reason, therefore, one may talk of
a proto-Bohemian period around and after 1500 sepa-
rated from the Bohemian era proper by the centuries
of the conforming artist.

5. Romanticism and its Aftermath. By and large,
Renaissance and post-Renaissance artists regarded the
business of art as an intellectual discipline. The intel-
lectual responsibilities artists took upon themselves had
a noticeable influence upon forming their minds and
personalities. With Michelangelo, they believed that
“a man paints with his brain,” and with Leonardo they
agreed that “painting has to do with natural philoso-
phy,” that it is “truly a science,” and that a painter
had “first to study science and follow with practice
based on science.” Not until the second half of the
eighteenth century does a shift away from intellectual-
ism toward an intuitive approach begin to predomi-
nate. The revolt came into its own when an artist such
as William Blake vented his scorn against the reign of
Reason with these lines:

(Keynes, p. 660).

Romanticism with its “egomania” brought about a most
serious change in the personality of artists. A romantic
pedigree is recognizable in the untrammeled individ-
ualism of many twentieth-century artists and in their
personality and social problems, though it must be
admitted that the freedom they arrogate to themselves
is in the last analysis derived from the revolution of
the Italian Renaissance, the period in history on which
they heap the fullness of their scorn.

When the psychologists entered the arena, artists,
backed by an “authoritative” analysis of the psyche
and armed with an up-to-date vocabulary, could state
with confidence the case for self-expression unencum-
bered by book-learning. Artists of the Freudian and
post-Freudian era claim a degree of subjective and
moral freedom that would bewilder even their roman-
tic precursors. When Pablo Picasso says that “the artist
is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter
where,” or Marc Chagall comments on his pictures “I
do not understand them at all.... They are only
pictorial arrangements that obsess me,” or Mark
Rothko strives to eliminate all obstacles “among others,
memory, history, or geometry” (Wittkower, Born
Under Saturn, 1963), or Jackson Pollock maintains
“When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what
I am doing” (Read, 1967)—they may emphasize and
cultivate the emotional element in their creations, but
theirs is a very conscious surrender to the unconscious.
Contrary, however, to the artists' own belief, “auto-
matism” in art does lead to a loss of artistic individ-
uality. Nevertheless, even though a doodle by Picasso
or Klee may lack a distinct personal quality, one cannot
argue that the public is deceiving itself by paying high
prices for such works. For, obviously, the public places
the artist above the work: it is the name that works
the magic. Behind the name looms the man, the great
artist, in whose integrity we believe and of whose
genius we are convinced.