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Title: Lectures on painting, delivered at the Royal Academy, by Henry
Fuseli, P.P.
With additional observations and notes
Author: Henry Fuseli
Release Date: July 9, 2023 [eBook #71154]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES ON PAINTING,
DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY, BY HENRY FUSELI, P.P. ***
LECTURES
ON
PAINTING.
Printed by A. and R. Spottiswoode,
Printers-Street, London.
[Illustration: HENRY FUSELI ESQR. R.A.
_Engraved by R. W. Sievier, from a Miniature by Moses Haughton._
_Published May 1, 1820, by T. Cadell & W. Davies, Strand, London._]
LECTURES
ON
PAINTING,
DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY,
BY HENRY FUSELI, P.P.
WITH ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS AND NOTES.
[Illustration]
LONDON:
PRINTED FOR T. CADELL AND W. DAVIES, IN THE STRAND,
BOOKSELLERS TO THE ROYAL ACADEMY
AND W. BLACKWOOD, EDINBURGH.
1820.
INTRODUCTION.
It cannot be considered as superfluous or assuming to present the
reader of the following lectures, with a succinct characteristic sketch
of the principal technic instruction, ancient and modern, which we
possess: I say, a sketch, for an elaborate and methodical survey, or a
plan well digested and strictly followed, would demand a volume. These
observations, less written for the man of letters and cultivated taste,
than for the student who wishes to inform himself of the history and
progress of his art, are to direct him to the sources from which my
principles are deduced, to enable him, by comparing my authors with
myself, to judge how far the theory which I deliver, may be depended on
as genuine, or ought to be rejected as erroneous or false.
The works or fragments of works which we possess, are either purely
elementary, critically historical, biographic, or mixed up of all three.
On the books purely elementary, the van of which is led by Lionardo
da Vinci and Albert Durer, and the rear by Gherard Lairesse, as the
principles which they detail must be supposed to be already in the
student’s possession, or are occasionally interwoven with the topics
of the Lectures, I shall not expatiate, but immediately proceed to the
historically critical writers; who consist of all the antients yet
remaining, Pausanias excepted.
We may thank Destiny that, in the general wreck of antient art, a
sufficient number of entire and mutilated monuments have escaped the
savage rage of barbarous conquest, and the still more savage hand of
superstition, not only to prove that the principles which we deliver,
formed the body of antient art, but to furnish us with their standard
of style. For if we had nothing to rely on to prove its existence than
the historic and critical information left us, such is the chaos
of assertion and contradiction, such the chronologic confusion, and
dissonance of dates, that nothing short of a miracle could guide us
through the labyrinth, and the whole would assume a fabulous aspect.
Add to this the occupation and character of the writers, none of them a
professional man. For the rules of Parrhasius, the volumes of Pamphilus,
Apelles, Metrodorus, all irrecoverably lost, we must rely on the hasty
compilations of a warrior, or the incidental remarks of an orator,
Pliny and Quintilian. Pliny, authoritative in his verdicts, a Roman in
decision, was rather desirous of knowing much, than of knowing well;
the other, though, as appears, a man of exquisite taste, was too much
occupied by his own art to allow ours more than a rapid glance. In Pliny,
it is necessary, and for an artist not very difficult, to distinguish
when he speaks from himself and when he delivers an extract, however
short; whenever he does the first, he is seldom able to separate the
kernel from the husk; he is credulous, irrelevant, ludicrous. The Jupiter
of Phidias, the Doryphorus of Polycletus, the Aphrodite of Praxiteles,
the Demos of Parrhasius, the Venus of Apelles, provoke his admiration
in no greater degree than the cord drawn over the horns and muzzle of
the bull in the group of Amphion Zetus and Antiopa; the spires and
windings of the serpents in that of the Laocoon, the effect of the foam
from the sponge of Protogenes, the partridge in his Jalysus, the grapes
that imposed on the birds, and the curtain which deceived Zeuxis. Such
is Pliny when he speaks from himself, or perhaps from the hints of some
Dilettante; but when he delivers an extract, his information is not
only essential and important, but expressed by the most appropriate
words. Such is his account of the glazing-method of Apelles, in which,
as Reynolds has observed, he speaks the language of an artist; such is
what he says of the manner in which Protogenes embodied his colours,
though it may require the practice of an artist to penetrate his meaning.
No sculptor could describe better in many words than he does in one,
the manœuvre by which Nicias gave the decided line of correctness to
the models of Praxiteles; the word _circumlitio_, shaping, rounding
the moist clay with the finger is evidently a term of art. Thus when
he describes the method of Pausias, who, in painting a sacrifice,
foreshortened the bull and threw his shade on part of the surrounding
crowd, he throws before us the depth of the scenery and its forcible
chiaroscuro; nor is he less happy, at least in my opinion, when he
translates the deep aphorism by which Eupompus directed Lysippus to recur
to Nature, and to animate the rigid form with the air of life.
In his dates he seldom errs, and sometimes adjusts or corrects the
errours of Greek chronology, though not with equal attention; for
whilst he exposes the impropriety of ascribing to Polycletus a statue
of Hephestion, the friend of Alexander, who lived a century after him,
he thinks it worth his while to repeat that Erynna, the contemporary of
Sappho, who lived nearly as many years before him, celebrated in her
poems a work of his friend and fellow-scholar Myron of Eleutheræ. His
text is at the same time so deplorably mutilated that it often equally
defies conjecture and interpretation. Still, from what is genuine it must
be confessed that he condenses in a few chapters the contents of volumes,
and fills the whole atmosphere of art. Whatever he tells, whether the
most puerile legend, or the best attested fact, he tells with dignity.
Of Quintilian, whose information is all relative to style, the tenth
chapter of the twelfth book, a passage on Expression in the eleventh,
and scattered fragments of observations analogous to the process of his
own art, is all that we possess; but what he says, though comparatively
small in bulk with what we have of Pliny, leaves us to wish for more.
His review of the revolutions of style in painting, from Polygnotus
to Apelles, and in sculpture from Phidias to Lysippus, is succinct
and rapid; but though so rapid and succinct, every word is poised
by characteristic precision, and can only be the result of long and
judicious inquiry, and perhaps even minute examination. His theory and
taste savour neither of the antiquary nor the mere Dilettante; he
neither dwells on the infancy of art with doating fondness, nor melts
its essential and solid principles in the crucibles of merely curious or
voluptuous execution.
Still less in volume, and still less intentional are the short but
important observations on the principles of art and the epochs of style,
scattered over nearly all the works of Cicero, but chiefly his Orator
and Rhetoric Institutions. Some of his introductions to these books
might furnish the classic scenery of Poussin with figures; and though he
seems to have had as little native taste for painting and sculpture, and
even less than he had taste for poetry, he had a conception of nature;
and, with his usual acumen, comparing the principles of one art with
those of another, frequently scattered useful hints, or made pertinent
observations. For many of these he might probably be indebted to
Hortensius, with whom, though his rival in eloquence, he lived on terms
of familiarity, and who was a man of declared taste and one of the first
collectors of the time.
Pausanias, the Cappadocian, was certainly no critic, and his credulity
is at least equal to his curiosity; he is often little more than a
nomenclator, and the indiscriminate chronicler of legitimate tradition
and legendary trash; but the minute and scrupulous diligence with which
he examined what fell under his own eye, amply makes up for what he
may want of method or of judgment. His description of the pictures of
Polygnotus at Delphi, and of the Jupiter of Phidias at Olympia, are
perhaps superiour to all that might have been given by men of more
assuming powers, mines of information, and inestimable legacies to our
arts.
The Heroics of the elder, and the Eicones or Picture Galleries of the
elder and younger Philostratus, though perhaps not expressly written for
the artist, and rather to amuse than to instruct, cannot be sufficiently
consulted by the epic or dramatic artist. The Heroics furnish the
standard of form and habits for the Grecian and Troic warriours, from
Protesilaus to Paris and Euphorbus; and he who wishes to acquaint
himself with the limits the ancients prescribed to invention, and the
latitude they allowed to expression, will find no better guide than an
attentive survey of the subjects displayed in their galleries.
Such are the most prominent features of antient criticism, and those
which we wish the artist to be familiar with; the innumerable hints,
maxims, anecdotes, descriptions, scattered over Lucian, Ælian, Athenæus,
Achilles Tatius, Tatian, Pollux, and many more, may be consulted to
advantage by the man of taste and letters, and probably may be neglected
without much loss by the student.
Of modern writers on art, Vasari leads the van; theorist, artist,
critic, and biographer in one. The history of modern art owes no doubt
much to Vasari; he leads us from its cradle, to its maturity, with the
anxious diligence of a nurse, but he likewise has her derelictions; for
more loquacious than ample, and less discriminating styles than eager
to accumulate descriptions, he is at an early period exhausted by
the superlatives lavished on inferiour claims, and forced into frigid
rhapsodies and astrologic nonsense to do justice to the greater. He
swears by the divinity of M. Agnolo. He tells us himself that he copied
every figure of the Capella Sistina and the Stanze of Raffaello; yet
his memory was either so treacherous[1], or his rapidity in writing so
inconsiderate, that his account of both is a mere heap of errours and
unpardonable confusion; and one might almost fancy that he had never
entered the Vatican. Of Correggio he leaves us less informed than of
Apelles. Even Bottari, the learned editor of his work, his countryman
and advocate against the complaints of Agostino Carracci and Federigo
Zucchero, though ever ready to fight his battles, is at a loss to account
for his mistakes. He has been called the Herodotus of our art, and if the
main simplicity of his narrative, and the desire of heaping anecdote
on anecdote, entitle him in some degree to that appellation, we ought
not to forget, that the information of every day adds something to the
authenticity of the Greek historian, whilst every day furnishes matter to
question the credibility of the Tuscan.
What we find not in Vasari it is useless to search for amid the rubbish
of his contemporaries or followers, from Condivi to Ridolfi, and on to
Malvasia, whose criticism on the style of Lodovico Carracci and his
pupils in the cloisters of St. Michele in Bosco, near Bologna, amount to
little more than a sonorous rhapsody of ill applied or empty metaphors
and extravagant praise; till the appearance of Lanzi, who in his ‘Storia
Pittorica della Italia,’ has availed himself of all the information
existing in his time, has corrected most of those who wrote before
him, and though perhaps not possessed of great discriminative powers,
has accumulated more instructive anecdotes, rescued more deserving
names from oblivion, and opened a wider prospect of art than all his
predecessors.[2]
The French critics composed a complete system of rules. Du Fresnoy spent
his life in composing and revising general aphorisms in Latin classic
verse; some on granted, some on disputable, some on false principles.
Though Horace was his model, neither the Poet’s language nor method
have been imitated by him. From Du Fresnoy himself, we learn not
what is essential, what accidental, what superinduced, in style; from
his text none ever rose practically wiser than he sat down to study
it: if he be useful, he owes his usefulness to the penetration of his
English commentator; the notes of Reynolds, treasures of practical
observation, place him among those whom we may read with profit. What
can be learnt from precept, founded on prescriptive authority, more
than on the verdicts of nature, is displayed in the volumes of De Piles
and Felibien; a system, as it has been followed by the former students
of their academy, and sent out with the successful combatants for the
premium to their academic establishment at Rome, to have its efficiency
proved by the contemplation of Italian style and execution. The timorous
candidates for fame, knowing its rules to be the only road to success at
their return, whatever be their individual bent of character, implicitly
adopt them, and the consequence is, as may be supposed, that technical
equality, which borders on mediocrity. After an exulting and eager survey
of the wonders the place exhibits, they all undergo a similar course
of study. Six months are allotted to the Vatican, and in equal portions
divided between the Fierté of M. Agnolo, and the more correct graces of
Raffaello; the next six months are in equal intervals devoted to the
academic powers of Annibale Carracci, and the purity of the antique.
About the middle of the last century the German critics, established at
Rome, began to claim the exclusive privilege of teaching the art, and
to form a complete system of antique style. The verdicts of Mengs and
Winkelmann became the oracles of Antiquaries, dilettanti, and artists
from the Pyrenees to the utmost North of Europe, have been detailed, and
are not without their influence here. Winkelmann was the parasite of
the fragments that fell from the conversation or the tablets of Mengs,
a deep scholar, and better fitted to comment a classic than to give
lessons on art and style, he reasoned himself into frigid reveries and
Platonic dreams on beauty. As far as the taste or the instructions of
his tutor directed him, he is right, whenever they are, and between his
own learning and the tuition of the other, his history of art delivers
a specious system and a prodigious number of useful observations. He
has not, however, in his regulation of epochs, discriminated styles,
and masters, with the precision, attention, and acumen, which from
the advantages of his situation and habits might have been expected;
and disappoints us as often by meagreness, neglect, and confusion, as
he offends by laboured and inflated rhapsodies on the most celebrated
monuments of art. To him Germany owes the shackles of her artists, and
the narrow limits of their aim; from him they have learnt to substitute
the means for the end, and by a hopeless chace after what they call
beauty, to lose what alone can make beauty interesting, expression and
mind. The works of Mengs himself are no doubt full of the most useful
information, deep observation, and often consummate criticism. He has
traced and distinguished the principles of the moderns from those
of the ancients; and in his comparative view of the design, colour,
composition, and expression of Raffaello Correggio and Tiziano, with
luminous perspicuity and deep precision, pointed out the prerogative or
inferiority of each. As an artist he is an instance of what perseverance,
study, experience and encouragement can atchieve to supply the place of
genius.
Of English critics, whose writings preceded the present century, whether
we consider solidity of theory or practical usefulness, the last is
undoubtedly the first. To compare Reynolds with his predecessors would
equally disgrace our judgment and impeach our gratitude. His volumes can
never be consulted without profit, and should never be quitted by the
student’s hand, but to embody by exercise the precepts he gives and the
means he points out.
ERRATA.
Transcriber’s Note: The errata have been corrected.
Page 159. line 4. put a comma after “life,” instead of a semicolon.
160. line 9. put a comma after “genus.”
182. line 5. put a comma after “friend,” instead of a full point.
206. last line, for “alternately,” read “alternates.”
212. line 11. for “humorous,” read “numerous.”
214. line 12. dele the comma after “lower.”
224. line 3. put a comma after “one.”
FIRST LECTURE.
ANCIENT ART.
Ταυτα μεν ὀυν πλαστων και γραφεων και ποιητων παιδες ὀργασονται. ὁ δε
πασιν ἐπανθει τουτοις, ἡ χαρις, μαλλον δε ἁπασαι ἁμα, ὁποσαι χαριτες, και
ὁποσοι ἐρωτες περίχορευοντες, τις ἀν μιμησασθαι δυναιτο?
ΛΟΥΚΙΑΝΟΥ Σαμ. ἐικονες.
ARGUMENT.
Introduction. Greece the legitimate parent of the Art.—Summary
of the local and political causes. Conjectures on the mechanic
process of the Art. Period of preparation—Polygnotus—essential
style—Apollodorus—characteristic style. Period of establishment—Zeuxis,
Parrhasius, Timanthes. Period of refinement—Eupompus—Apelles, Aristides,
Euphranor.
FIRST LECTURE.
The difficulties of the task prescribed to me, if they do not
preponderate are at least equal to the honour of the situation. If, to
discourse on any topic with truth, precision, and clearness, before
a mixed or fortuitous audience, before men neither initiated in the
subject, nor rendered minutely attentive by expectation, be no easy task,
how much more arduous must it be to speak systematically on an art,
before a select assembly, composed of _Professors_ whose life has been
divided between theory and practice, of _Critics_ whose taste has been
refined by contemplation and comparison, and of _Students_, who bent on
the same pursuit, look for the best and always most compendious method of
mastering the principles, to arrive at its emoluments and honours. Your
lecturer is to instruct _them_ in the principles of ‘composition; to form
their taste for design and colouring; to strengthen their judgment; to
point out to them the beauties and imperfections of celebrated works of
art; and the particular excellencies and defects of great masters; and
finally, to lead them into the readiest and most efficacious paths of
study.’[3]—If, Gentlemen, these directions presuppose in the student a
sufficient stock of elementary knowledge, an expertness in the rudiments,
not mere wishes but a peremptory will of improvement, and judgment with
docility; how much more do they imply in the person selected to address
them—knowledge founded on theory, substantiated and matured by practice,
a mass of select and well digested materials, perspicuity of method and
command of words, imagination to place things in such views as they are
not commonly seen in, presence of mind, and that resolution, the result
of conscious vigour, which in daring to correct errours, cannot be easily
discountenanced.—As conditions like these would discourage abilities far
superior to mine, my hopes of approbation, moderate as they are, must in
a great measure depend on that indulgence which may grant to my will what
it would refuse to my powers.
Before I proceed to the history of style itself, it seems to be necessary
that we should agree about the terms which denote its object and
perpetually recur in treating of it; that my vocabulary of technic
expression should not clash with the dictionary of my audience: mine is
nearly that of your late president. I shall confine myself at present
to a few of the most important; the words nature, beauty, grace, taste,
copy, imitation, genius, talent. Thus, by _nature_ I understand the
general and permanent principles of visible objects, not disfigured by
accident, or distempered by disease, not modified by fashion or local
habits. Nature is a collective idea, and though its essence exist in
each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a
single object. On _beauty_ I do not mean to perplex you or myself with
abstract ideas, and the romantic reveries of platonic philosophy, or to
inquire whether it be the result of a simple or complex principle. As a
local idea, beauty is a despotic princess, and subject to the anarchies
of despotism, enthroned to-day, dethroned to-morrow. The beauty we
acknowledge is that harmonious whole of the human frame, that unison
of parts to one end, which enchants us; the result of the standard
set by the great masters of our art, the ancients, and confirmed by
the submissive verdict of modern imitation. By _grace_ I mean that
artless balance of motion and repose sprung from character, founded on
propriety, which neither falls short of the demands nor overleaps the
modesty of nature. Applied to execution, it means that dextrous power
which hides the means by which it was attained, the difficulties it has
conquered. When we say _taste_, we mean not crudely the knowledge of
what is right in art: taste estimates the degrees of excellence, and by
comparison proceeds from justness to refinement. Our language, or rather
those who use it, generally confound, when speaking of the art, _copy_
with _imitation_, though essentially different in operation and meaning.
Precision of eye and obedience of hand are the requisites of the former,
without the least pretence to choice, what to select, what to reject;
whilst choice directed by judgment or taste constitutes the essence of
imitation, and alone can raise the most dextrous copyist to the noble
rank of an artist. The imitation of the ancients was, _essential_,
_characteristic_, _ideal_. The first cleared nature of accident, defect,
excrescence; the second found the stamen which connects character with
the central form; the third raised the whole and the parts to the highest
degree of unison. Of _genius_ I shall speak with reserve, for no word has
been more indiscriminately confounded; by genius I mean that power which
enlarges the circle of human knowledge, which discovers new materials of
nature, or combines the known with novelty, whilst _talent_ arranges,
cultivates, polishes the discoveries of genius.
Guided by these preliminaries we now approach that happy coast, where,
from an arbitrary hieroglyph, the palliative of ignorance, from a tool
of despotism, or a ponderous monument of eternal sleep, art emerged into
life, motion and liberty; where situation, climate, national character,
religion, manners and government conspired to raise it on that permanent
basis, which after the ruins of the fabric itself, still subsists and
bids defiance to the ravages of time; as uniform in the principle as
various in its applications, the art of the Greeks possessed in itself
and propagated, like its chief object Man, the germs of immortality.
I shall not detail here the reasons and the coincidence of fortunate
circumstances which raised the Greeks to be the arbiters of form.[4] The
standard they erected, the canon they framed, fell not from Heaven: but
as they fancied themselves of divine origin, and _Religion_ was the first
mover of their art, it followed that they should endeavour to invest
their authors with the most perfect form; and as Man possesses that
exclusively, they were led to a complete and intellectual study of his
elements and constitution; this, with their _climate_, which allowed that
form to grow, and to shew itself to the greatest advantage; with their
_civil_ and _political_ institutions, which established and encouraged
exercises and manners best calculated to develop its powers; and above
all that simplicity of their end, that uniformity of pursuit which in
all its derivations retraced the great principle from which it sprang,
and like a central stamen drew it out into one immense connected web of
congenial imitation; these, I say, are the reasons why the Greeks carried
the art to a height which no subsequent time or race has been able to
rival or even to approach.
Great as these advantages were, it is not to be supposed that Nature
deviated from her gradual progress in the development of human faculties,
in favour of the Greeks. Greek Art had her infancy, but the Graces rocked
the cradle, and Love taught her to speak. If ever legend deserved our
belief, the amorous tale of the Corinthian maid, who traced the shade
of her departing lover by the secret lamp, appeals to our sympathy, to
grant it; and leads us at the same time to some observations on the first
mechanical essays of Painting, and that _linear method_ which, though
passed nearly unnoticed by _Winkelmann_, seems to have continued as the
basis of execution, even when the instrument for which it was chiefly
adapted, had long been laid aside.
The etymology of the word used by the Greeks to express _Painting_ being
the same with that which they employ for _Writing_, makes the similarity
of tool, materials, method, almost certain. The tool was a style or pen
of wood or metal; the materials a board, or a levigated plane of wood,
metal, stone, or some prepared compound; the method, letters or lines.
The first essays of the art were _Skiagrams_, simple outlines of a shade,
similar to those which have been introduced to vulgar use by the students
and parasites of Physiognomy, under the name of Silhouettes; without any
other addition of character or feature but what the profile of the object
thus delineated, could afford.
The next step of the art was the _Monogram_, outlines of figures without
light or shade, but with some addition of the parts within the outline,
and from that to the _Monochrom_, or paintings of a single colour on
a plane or tablet, primed with white, and then covered with what they
called punic wax, first amalgamated with a tough resinous pigment,
generally of a red, sometimes dark brown, or black colour. _In_, or
rather _through_ this thin inky ground, the outlines were traced with a
firm but pliant style, which they called _Cestrum_; if the traced line
happened to be incorrect or wrong, it was gently effaced with the finger
or with a sponge, and easily replaced by a fresh one. When the whole
design was settled, and no farther alteration intended, it was suffered
to dry, was covered, to make it permanent, with a brown encaustic
varnish, the lights were worked over again, and rendered more brilliant
with a point still more delicate, according to the gradual advance from
mere outlines to some indications, and at last to masses of light and
shade, and from those to the superinduction of different colours, or
the invention of the _Polychrom_, which by the addition of the _pencil_
to the style, raised the mezzotinto or stained drawing to a legitimate
picture, and at length produced that vaunted _harmony_, the magic scale
of Grecian colour.[5]
If this conjecture, for it is not more, on the process of linear
painting, formed on the evidence and comparison of passages always
unconnected, and frequently contradictory, be founded in fact, the
rapturous astonishment at the supposed momentaneous production of the
Herculanean dancers and the figures on the earthen vases of the ancients,
will cease; or rather, we shall no longer suffer ourselves to be deluded
by palpable impossibility of execution: on a ground of levigated lime or
on potters ware, no velocity or certainty attainable by human hands can
conduct a full pencil with that degree of evenness equal from beginning
to end with which we see those figures executed, or if it could, would
ever be able to fix the line on the glassy surface without its flowing:
to make the appearances we see, possible, we must have recourse to the
linear process that has been described, and transfer our admiration,
to the perseverance, the correctness of principle, the elegance of
taste that conducted the artist’s hand, without presuming to arm it
with contradictory powers: the figures he drew and we admire, are not
the magic produce of a winged pencil, they are the result of gradual
improvement, exquisitely finished _monochroms_.
How long the pencil continued only to assist, when it began to engross
and when it at last entirely supplanted the cestrum, cannot in the
perplexity of accidental report be ascertained. Apollodorus in the 93d
Olymp. and Zeuxis in the 94th, are said to have used it with freedom
and with power. The battle of the Lapithæ and the Centaurs, which
according to Pausanias, Parrhasius painted on the shield of the Minerva
of Phidias, to be chased by Mys, could be nothing but a monochrom, and
was probably designed with the cestrum, as an instrument of greater
accuracy.[6] Apelles and Protogenes, nearly a century afterwards, drew
their contested lines with the pencil; and that alone, as delicacy
and evanescent subtlety were the characteristic of those lines, may
give an idea of their mechanic excellence. And yet in their time the
_diagraphic_ process[7], which is the very same with the _linear_ one
we have described, made a part of liberal education. And Pausias of
Sicyon, the contemporary of Apelles, and perhaps the greatest master of
composition amongst the ancients, when employed to repair the decayed
pictures of Polygnotus at Thespiæ, was adjudged by general opinion to
have egregiously failed in the attempt, because he had substituted the
pencil to the cestrum, and entered a contest of superiority with weapons
not his own.
Here it might seem in its place to say something on the Encaustic method
used by the ancients; were it not a subject by ambiguity of expression
and conjectural dispute so involved in obscurity that a true account of
its process must be despaired of: the most probable idea we can form of
it is, that it bore some resemblance to our oil-painting, and that the
name was adopted to denote the use of materials, inflammable or prepared
by fire, the supposed durability of which, whether applied hot or cold,
authorised the terms ἐνεκαυσε and _inussit_.
The first great name of that epoch of the preparatory period when facts
appear to overbalance conjecture, is that of Polygnotus of Thasos, who
painted the poecile at Athens, and the lesche or public hall at Delphi.
Of these works, but chiefly of the two large pictures at Delphi, which
represented scenes subsequent to the eversion of Troy, and Ulysses
consulting the spirit of Tiresias in Hades, Pausanias[8] gives a minute
and circumstantial detail; by which we are led to surmise, that what is
now called composition was totally wanting in them as a whole: for he
begins his description at one end of the picture, and finishes it at
the opposite extremity, a senseless method if we suppose that a central
group, or a principal figure to which the rest were in a certain degree
subordinate, attracted the eye; it appears as plain that they had no
perspective, the series of figures on the second or middle ground being
described as placed above those on the fore-ground, and the figures in
the distance above the whole: the honest method too which the painter
chose of annexing to many of his figures, their names in writing, savours
much of the infancy of painting.—We should however be cautious to impute
solely to ignorance or imbecility, what might rest on the firm base of
permanent principle. The genius of Polygnotus was more than that of any
other artist before or after, Phidias perhaps alone excepted, a public
genius, his works monumental works, and these very pictures the votive
offerings of the Gnidians. The art at that summit, when exerting its
powers to record the feats, consecrate the acts, perpetuate the rites,
propagate the religion, or to disseminate the peculiar doctrines of a
nation, heedless of the rules prescribed to inferior excellence and
humbler pursuits, returns to its elements, leaps strict possibility,
combines remote causes with present effects, connects local distance and
unites separate moments.—Simplicity, parallelism, apposition, take place
of variety, contrast and composition.—Such was the Lesche painted by
Polygnotus, and if we consider the variety of powers that distinguished
many of the parts, we must incline to ascribe the primitive arrangement
of the whole rather to the artist’s choice and lofty simplicity, than
want of comprehension: nature had endowed him with that rectitude of
taste which in the individuum discovers the stamen of the genus, hence
his style of design was essential with glimpses of _grandeur_[9] and
ideal beauty. Polygnotus, says Aristotle, _improves_ the model. His
invention reached the conception of undescribed being, in the dæmon
Eurynomus; filled the chasm of description in Theseus and Pirithous, in
Ariadne and Phædra; and improved its terrours in the spectre of Tityus;
whilst colour to assist it, became in his hand an organ of expression;
such was the prophetic glow which still _crimsoned_ the cheeks of his
Cassandra in the time of Lucian.[10] The improvements in painting which
Pliny ascribes to him, of having dressed the heads of his females in
variegated veils and _bandeaus_, and robed them in lucid drapery, of
having gently opened the lips, given a glimpse of the teeth, and lessened
the former monotony of face, such improvements I say were surely the
most trifling part of a power to which the age of Apelles and that of
Quintilian paid equal homage: nor can it add much to our esteem for him,
to be told by Pliny that there existed, in the portico of Pompey, a
picture of his with the figure of a warrior in an attitude so ambiguous
as to make it a question whether he were ascending or descending. Such
a figure could only be the offspring of mental or technic imbecility,
even if it resembled the celebrated one of a Diomede carrying off the
palladium with one and holding a sword in the other hand, on the intaglio
inscribed, I think, with the name of Dioscorides.
With this simplicity of manner and materials the art seems to have
proceeded from Polygnotus, Aglaophon, Phidias, Panænus, Colotes, and
Evenor, the father of Parrhasius, during a period of more or less
disputed olympiads, to the appearance of Apollodorus the Athenian, who
applied the essential principles of Polygnotus to the delineation of
the species, by investigating the leading forms that discriminate the
various classes of human qualities and passions. The acuteness of his
taste led him to discover that as all men were connected by one general
form, so they were separated each by some predominant power, which fixed
character and bound them to a class: that in proportion as this specific
power partook of individual peculiarities, the farther it was removed
from a share in that harmonious system which constitutes nature, and
consists in a due balance of all its parts; thence he drew his line of
imitation, and personified the central form of the class, to which his
object belonged; and to which the rest of its qualities administered
without being absorbed: agility was not suffered to destroy firmness,
solidity or weight; nor strength and weight agility; elegance did not
degenerate to effeminacy, or grandeur swell to hugeness; such were his
principles of style: his expression extended them to the mind, if we may
judge from the two subjects mentioned by Pliny, in which he seems to
have personified the characters of devotion and impiety; _that_, in the
adoring figure of a priest, perhaps of Chryses, expanding his gratitude
at the shrine of the God whose arrows avenged his wrongs and restored
his daughter: and _this_, in the figure of Ajax wrecked, and from the
sea-swept rock hurling defiance unto the murky sky. As neither of these
subjects can present themselves to a painters mind without a contrast of
the most awful and terrific tones of colour, magic of light and shade,
and unlimited command over the tools of art, we may with Pliny and with
Plutarch consider Apollodorus as the first assertor of the pencil’s
honours, as the first colourist of his age, and the man who opened the
gates of art which the Heracleot Zeuxis entered.[11]
From the essential style of Polygnotus and the specific discrimination
of Apollodorus, Zeuxis, by comparison of what belonged to the genus and
what to the class, framed at last that ideal form, which in his opinion,
constituted the supreme degree of human beauty, or in other words,
embodied possibility, by uniting the various but homogeneous powers
scattered among many, in one object, to one end. Such a system, if it
originated in genius, was the considerate result of taste refined by the
unremitting perseverance with which he observed, consulted, compared,
selected the congenial but scattered forms of nature. Our ideas are
the offspring of our senses, we are not more able create the form of a
being, we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are
able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the
most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence, and
he alone can comprehend what one degree of beauty wants to become equal
to another, and at last superlative. He who thinks the pretty handsome,
will think the handsome a beauty, and fancy he has met an ideal form in a
merely handsome one, whilst he who has compared beauty with beauty, will
at last improve form upon form to a perfect image; this was the method of
Zeuxis, and this he learnt from Homer, whose mode of ideal composition,
according to Quintilian, he considered as his model. Each individual of
Homer forms a class, expresses and is circumscribed by one quality of
heroic power; Achilles alone unites their various but congenial energies.
The grace of Nireus, the dignity of Agamemnon, the impetuosity of Hector,
the magnitude, the steady prowess of the great, the velocity of the
lesser Ajax, the perseverance of Ulysses, the intrepidity of Diomede,
are emanations of energy that reunite in one splendid centre fixed in
Achilles. This standard of the unison of homogeneous powers exhibited in
_successive action_ by the poet, the painter, invigorated no doubt by
the contemplation of the works of Phidias, transferred to his own art
and substantiated by _form_, when he selected the congenial beauties
of Croton to compose a perfect female. Like Phidias too, he appears to
have been less pathetic than sublime, and even in his female forms more
ample and august than elegant or captivating: his principle was epic,
and this Aristotle either considered not or did not comprehend, when he
refuses him the expression of character in action and feature: Jupiter
on his throne encircled by the celestial synod, and Helen, the arbitress
of Troy, contained probably the principal elements of his style; but he
could trace the mother’s agitation in Alcmena, and in Penelope the pangs
of wedded love.
On those powers of his invention which Lucian relates in the memoir
inscribed with the name of Zeuxis, I shall reserve my observations for a
fitter moment. Of his colour we know little, but it is not unreasonable
to suppose that it emulated the beauties and the grandeur of his design;
and that he extended light and shade to masses, may be implied from his
peculiar method of painting monochroms on a black ground, adding the
lights in white.[12]
The correctness of Parrhasius succeeded to the genius of Zeuxis. He
circumscribed his ample style, and by subtle examination of outline
established that standard of divine and heroic form which raised him
to the authority of a legislator from whose decisions there was no
appeal. He gave to the divine and heroic character in painting, what
Polycletus had given to the human in sculpture, by his Doryphorus, a
canon of proportion. Phidias had discovered in the nod of the Homeric
Jupiter the characteristic of majesty, _inclination of the head_: this
hinted to him a higher elevation of the neck behind, a bolder protrusion
of the front, and the increased perpendicular of the profile. To this
conception Parrhasius fixed a maximum; that point from which descends
the ultimate line of celestial beauty, the angle within which moves what
is inferior, beyond which what is portentous. From the head conclude
to the proportions of the neck, the limbs, the extremities; from the
father to the race of gods; all, the sons of one, Zeus; derived from
one source of tradition, Homer; formed by one artist, Phidias: on him
measured and decided by Parrhasius. In the simplicity of this principle,
adhered to by the succeeding periods, lies the uninterrupted progress
and the unattainable superiority of Grecian art. With this prerogative,
which evidently implies a profound as well as general knowledge of the
parts, how are we to reconcile the criticism passed on the intermediate
parts of his forms as inferior to their outline? or how could Winkelmann,
in contradiction with his own principles, explain it, by a want of
anatomic knowledge[13]? how is it possible to suppose that he who
decided his outline with such intelligence that it appeared ambient, and
pronounced the parts that escaped the eye, should have been uninformed
of its contents? let us rather suppose that the defect ascribed to the
intermediate forms of his bodies, if such a fault there was, consisted
in an affectation of smoothness bordering on insipidity, in something
effeminately voluptuous, which absorbed their character and the idea
of elastic vigour; and this Euphranor seems to have hinted at, when in
comparing his own Theseus with that of Parrhasius, he pronounced the
Ionian’s to have fed on roses, his own on flesh[14]: emasculate softness
was not in his opinion, the proper companion of the contour, or flowery
freshness of colour an adequate substitute for the sterner tints of
heroic form.
None of the ancients seem to have united or wished to combine as man
and artist, more qualities seemingly incompatible than Parrhasius.—The
volubility and ostentatious insolence of an Asiatic with Athenian
simplicity and urbanity of manners; punctilious correctness with
blandishments of handling and luxurious colour, and with sublime and
pathetic conception, a fancy libidinously sportive[15]. If he was not the
inventor, he surely was the greatest master of allegory, supposing that
he really embodied by signs universally comprehended that image of the
Athenian ΔΗΜΟΣ or people, which was to combine and to express at once its
contradictory qualities. Perhaps he traced the jarring branches to their
source, the aboriginal moral principle of the Athenian character, which
he made intuitive. This supposition alone can shed a dawn of possibility
on what else appears impossible. We know that the personification of the
Athenian Δημος was an object of sculpture, and that its images by Lyson
and Leochares[16] were publicly set up; but there is no clue to decide
whether they preceded or followed the conceit of Parrhasius. It was
repeated by Aristolaus, the son of Pausias.
The decided forms of Parrhasius, Timanthes the Cythnian, his competitor
for fame, attempted to inspire with mind and to animate with passions. No
picture of antiquity is more celebrated than his immolation of Iphigenia
in Aulis, painted, as Quintilian informs us, in contest with Colotes of
Teos, a painter and sculptor from the school of Phidias; crowned with
victory at its rival exhibition, and since, the theme of unlimited praise
from the orators and historians of antiquity, though the solidity or
justice of their praise relatively to our art, has been questioned by
modern criticism. On this subject, which not only contains the gradations
of affection from the most remote to the closest link of humanity, but
appears to me to offer the fairest specimen of the limits which the
theory of the ancients had prescribed to the expression of pathos, I
think it my duty the more circumstantially to expatiate, as the censure
passed on the method of Timanthes, has been sanctioned by the highest
authority in matters of art, that of your late President, in his eighth
discourse at the delivery of the academic prize for the best picture
painted from this very subject.
How did Timanthes treat it? Iphigenia, the victim ordained by the oracle,
to be offered for the success of the Greek expedition against Troy, was
represented standing ready for immolation at the altar, the priest,
the instruments of death at her side; and around her, an assembly of
the most important agents or witnesses of the terrible solemnity, from
Ulysses, who had disengaged her from the embraces of her mother at
Mycenæ, to her nearest male relations, her uncle Menelaus, and her own
father, Agamemnon. Timanthes, say Pliny and Quintilian with surprising
similarity of phrase, when, in gradation he had consumed every image of
grief within the reach of art, from the unhappy priest, to the deeper
grief of Ulysses, and from that to the pangs of kindred sympathy in
Menelaus, unable to express _with dignity_ the father’s woe, threw a
veil, or if you will, a mantle over his face.——This mantle, the pivot of
objection, indiscriminately borrowed, as might easily be supposed, by
all the concurrents for the prize, gave rise to the following series of
criticisms:
‘Before I conclude, I cannot avoid making one observation
on the pictures now before us. I have observed, that every
candidate has copied the celebrated invention of Timanthes in
hiding the face of Agamemnon in his mantle; indeed such lavish
encomiums have been bestowed on this thought, and that too by
men of the highest character in critical knowledge,—Cicero,
Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, and Pliny,—and have been since
re-echoed by almost every modern that has written on the Arts,
that your adopting it can neither be wondered at, nor blamed.
It appears now to be so much connected with the subject, that
the spectator would perhaps be disappointed in not finding
united in the picture what he always united in his mind, and
considered as indispensably belonging to the subject. But it
may be observed, that those who praise this circumstance were
not painters. They use it as an illustration only of their
own art; it served their purpose, and it was certainly not
their business to enter into the objections that lie against
it in another Art. I fear _we_ have but very scanty means of
exciting those powers over the imagination, which make so very
considerable and refined a part of poetry. It is a doubt with
me, whether we should even make the attempt. The chief, if not
the only occasion which the painter has for this artifice, is,
when the subject is improper to be more fully represented,
either for the sake of decency, or to avoid what would be
disagreeable to be seen; and this is not to raise or increase
the passions, which is the reason that is given for this
practice, but on the contrary to diminish their effect.
‘Mr. Falconet has observed, in a note on this passage in his
translation of Pliny, that the circumstance of covering the
face of Agamemnon was probably not in consequence of any fine
imagination of the painter,—which he considers as a discovery
of the critics,—but merely copied from the description of the
sacrifice, as it is found in Euripides.
‘The words from which the picture is supposed to be taken,
are these: _Agamemnon saw Iphigenia advance towards the fatal
altar; he groaned, he turned aside his head, he shed tears, and
covered his face with his robe_.
‘Falconet does not at all acquiesce in the praise that
is bestowed on Timanthes; not only because it is not his
invention, but because he thinks meanly of this trick of
concealing, except in instances of blood, where the objects
would be too horrible to be seen; but, says he, “in an
afflicted Father, in a King, in Agamemnon, you, who are a
painter, conceal from me the most interesting circumstance, and
then put me off with sophistry and a veil. You are (he adds) a
feeble painter, without resources: you do not know even those
of your Art. I care not what veil it is, whether closed hands,
arms raised, or any other action that conceals from me the
countenance of the Hero. You think of veiling Agamemnon; you
have unveiled your own ignorance.”
‘To what Falconet has said, we may add, that supposing this
method of leaving the expression of grief to the imagination,
to be, as it was thought to be, the invention of the painter,
and that it deserves all the praise that has been given
it, still it is a trick that will serve but once; whoever
does it a second time, will not only want novelty, but be
justly suspected of using artifice to evade difficulties. If
difficulties overcome make a great part of the merit of Art,
difficulties evaded can deserve but little commendation.’
To this string of animadversions, I subjoin with diffidence the following
observations:
The subject of Timanthes was the immolation of Iphigenia; Iphigenia was
the principal figure, and her form, her resignation, or her anguish the
painter’s principal task; the figure of Agamemnon, however, important, is
merely accessory, and no more necessary to make the subject a completely
tragic one, than that of Clytemnestra the mother, no more than that
of Priam, to impress us with sympathy at the death of Polyxena. It is
therefore a misnomer of the French critic, to call Agamemnon ‘the hero’
of the subject.
Neither the French nor the English critic appear to me to have
comprehended the real motive of Timanthes, as contained in the words
‘_decere_, _pro dignitate_, and _digne_,’ in the passages of Tully,
Quintilian, and Pliny[17]; they ascribe to impotence what was the
forbearance of judgment; Timanthes felt like a father: he did not
hide the face of Agamemnon, because it was beyond the power of his
art, not because it was beyond the _possibility_, but because it was
beyond the _dignity_ of expression, because the inspiring feature of
paternal affection at that moment, and the action which of necessity
must have accompanied it, would either have destroyed the grandeur of
the character and the solemnity of the scene, or subjected the painter
with the majority of his judges to the imputation of insensibility. He
must either have represented him in tears, or convulsed at the flash
of the raised dagger, forgetting the chief in the father, or shown him
absorbed by despair, and in that state of stupefaction, which levels all
features and deadens expression; he might indeed have chosen a fourth
mode, he might have exhibited him fainting and palsied in the arms of his
attendants, and by this confusion of male and female character, merited
the applause of every theatre at Paris. But Timanthes had too true a
sense of nature to expose a father’s feelings or to tear a passion to
rags; nor had the Greeks yet learnt of Rome to steel the face. If he
made Agamemnon bear his calamity as a man, he made him also feel it as
a man. It became the leader of Greece to sanction the ceremony with his
presence, it did not become the father to see his daughter beneath the
dagger’s point: the same nature that threw a real mantle over the face
of Timoleon, when he assisted at the punishment of his brother, taught
Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither
height nor depth, _propriety_ of expression was his aim.
The critic grants that the expedient of Timanthes may be allowed in
‘instances of blood,’ the supported aspect of which would change a scene
of commiseration and terror into one of abomination and horror, which
ought for ever to be excluded from the province of art, of poetry as
well as painting: and would not the face of Agamemnon, uncovered, have
had this effect? was not the scene he must have witnessed a scene of
blood? and whose blood was to be shed? that of his own daughter—and what
daughter? young, beautiful, helpless, innocent, resigned—the very idea
of resignation in such a victim, must either have acted irresistibly to
procure her relief, or thrown a veil over a father’s face. A man who is
determined to sport wit at the expence of heart alone could call such
an expedient ridiculous—‘as ridiculous,’ Mr. Falconet continues, ‘as
a poet would be, who in a pathetic situation, instead of satisfying
my expectation, to rid himself of the business, should say, that the
sentiments of his hero are so far above whatever can be said on the
occasion, that he shall say nothing.’ And has not Homer, though he does
not tell us this, acted upon a similar principle? has he not, when
Ulysses addresses Ajax in Hades, in the most pathetic and conciliatory
manner, instead of furnishing him with an answer, made him remain in
indignant silence during the address, then turn his step and stalk away?
has not the universal voice of genuine criticism with Longinus told us,
and if it had not, would not Nature’s own voice tell us, that that
silence was characteristic, that it precluded, included, and soaring
above all answer, consigned Ulysses for ever to a sense of inferiority?
Nor is it necessary to render such criticism contemptible to mention the
silence of Dido in Virgil, or the Niobe of Æschylus, who was introduced
veiled, and continued mute during her presence on the stage.
But in hiding Agamemnon’s face Timanthes loses the honour of invention,
as he is merely the imitator of Euripides, who did it before him[18]? I
am not prepared with chronologic proofs to decide whether Euripides or
Timanthes, who were contemporaries, about the period of the Peloponnesian
war, fell first on this expedient; though the silence of Pliny and
Quintilian on that head, seems to be in favour of the painter, neither
of whom could be ignorant of the celebrated drama of Euripides, and
would not willingly have suffered the honour of this master-stroke of
an art they were so much better acquainted with than painting, to be
transferred to another from its real author, had the poet’s claim been
prior: nor shall I urge that the picture of Timanthes was crowned with
victory by those who were in daily habits of assisting at the dramas
of Euripides, without having their verdict impeached by Colotes or his
friends, who would not have failed to avail themselves of so flagrant
a proof of inferiority as the want of invention, in the work of his
rival:—I shall only ask, what is invention? if it be the combination of
the most important moment of a fact with the most varied effects of the
reigning passion on the characters introduced—the invention of Timanthes
consisted in shewing, by the gradation of that passion in the faces of
the assistant mourners, the _reason why that of the principal_ one, _was
hid_. This he performed, and this the poet, whether prior or subsequent,
did not and could not do, but left it with a silent appeal to our own
mind and fancy.
In presuming to differ on the propriety of this mode of expression in
the picture of Timanthes from the respectable authority I have quoted, I
am far from a wish to invalidate the equally pertinent and acute remarks
made on the danger of its imitation, though I am decidedly of opinion
that it is strictly within the limits of our art. If it be a ‘trick,’ it
is certainly one that ‘has served more than once.’ We find it adopted
to express the grief of a beautiful female figure on a bassorelievo
formerly in the palace Valle at Rome, and preserved in the Admiranda
of S. Bartoli; it is used, though with his own originality, by Michael
Angelo in the figure of Abijam, to mark unutterable woe; Raphael, to shew
that he thought it the best possible mode of expressing remorse and the
deepest sense of repentance, borrowed it in the expulsion from Paradise,
without any alteration, from Masaccio; and like him, turned Adam out
with both his hands before his face. And how has he represented Moses at
the burning bush, to express the astonished awe of human in the visible
presence of divine nature? by a double repetition of the same expedient;
once in the ceiling of a Stanza, and again in the loggia of the Vatican,
with both his hands before his face, or rather with his face immersed in
his hands. As we cannot suspect in the master of expression the unworthy
motive of making use of this mode merely to avoid a difficulty, or to
denote the insupportable splendour of the vision, which was so far from
being the case, that, according to the sacred record, Moses stept out of
his way to examine the ineffectual blaze: we must conclude that nature
herself dictated to him this method as superior to all he could express
by features; and that he recognized the same dictate in Masaccio, who
can no more be supposed to have been acquainted with the precedent of
Timanthes, than Shakspeare with that of Euripides, when he made Macduff
draw his hat over his face.
Masaccio and Raphael proceeded on the principle, Gherard Lairesse copied
only the image of Timanthes, and has perhaps incurred by it the charge
of what Longinus calls _parenthyrsos_, in the ill-timed application of
supreme pathos, to an inadequate call. Agamemnon is introduced covering
his face with his mantle, at the death of Polyxena, the captive daughter
of Priam, sacrificed to the manes of Achilles, her betrothed lover,
treacherously slain in the midst of the nuptial ceremony, by her brother
Paris. The death of Polyxena, whose charms had been productive of the
greatest disaster that could befal the Grecian army, could not perhaps
provoke in its leader emotions similar to those which he felt at that of
his own daughter: it must however be owned that the figure of the chief
is equally dignified and pathetic; and that, by the introduction of the
spectre of Achilles at the immolation of the damsel to his manes, the
artist’s fancy has in some degree atoned for the want of discrimination
in the professor.
Such were the artists, who according to the most corresponding data
formed the style of that second period, which fixed the end and
established the limits of art, on whose firm basis arose the luxuriant
fabric of the third or the period of refinement, which added grace and
polish to the forms it could not surpass; amenity or truth to the tones
it could not invigourate; magic and imperceptible transition to the
abrupt division of masses; gave depth and roundness to composition;
at the breast of nature herself caught the passions as they rose, and
familiarized expression: The period of Apelles, Protogenes, Aristides,
Euphranor, Pausias, the pupils of Pamphilus and his master Eupompus,
whose authority obtained what had not been granted to his great
predecessor and countryman Polycletus, the new establishment of the
school of Sicyon.[19]
The leading principle of Eupompus may be traced in the advice which
he gave to Lysippus, (as preserved by Pliny,) whom, when consulted on
a standard of imitation, he directed to the contemplation of human
variety in the multitude of the characters that were passing by, with
the axiom, ‘that nature herself was to be imitated, not an artist.’
Excellence, said Eupompus, is thy aim, such excellence as that of Phidias
and Polycletus; but it is not obtained by the servile imitation of
works, however perfect, without mounting to the principle which raised
them to that height; that principle apply to thy purpose, there fix thy
aim. He who, with the same freedom of access to nature as another man,
contents himself to approach her only through his medium, has resigned
his birth-right and originality together; his master’s manner will be
his style. If Phidias and Polycletus have discovered the substance and
established the permanent principle of the human frame, they have not
exhausted the variety of human appearances and human character; if they
have abstracted the forms of majesty and those of beauty, nature compared
with their works will point out a grace that has been left for thee; if
they have pre-occupied man as he _is_, be thine to give him that air with
which he actually _appears_.[20]
Such was the advice of Eupompus: less lofty, less ambitious than what
the departed epoch of genius would have dictated, but better suited to
the times, and better to his pupil’s mind. When the spirit of liberty
forsook the public, grandeur had left the private mind of Greece: subdued
by Philip, the gods of Athens and Olympia had migrated to Pella, and
Alexander was become the representative of Jupiter; still those who had
lost the substance fondled the shadow of liberty; rhetoric mimicked the
thunders of oratory, sophistry and metaphysic debate that philosophy,
which had guided life, and the grand taste that had dictated to art the
monumental style, invested gods with human form and raised individuals to
heroes, began to give way to refinements in appreciating the degrees of
elegance or of resemblance in imitation: the advice of Eupompus however,
far from implying the abolition of the old system, recalled his pupil
to the examen of the great principle on which it had established its
excellence, and to the resources which its inexhaustible variety offered
for new combinations.
That Lysippus considered it in that light, his devotion to the Doryphorus
of Polycletus, known even to Tully, sufficiently proved. That figure
which comprised the pure proportions of juvenile vigour, furnished
the readiest application for those additional refinements of variety,
character, and fleshy charms, that made the base of his invention: its
symmetry directing his researches amid the insidious play of accidental
charms, and the claims of inherent grace, never suffered imitation to
deviate into incorrectness; whilst its squareness and elemental beauty
melted in more familiar forms on the eye, and from an object of cold
admiration became the glowing one of sympathy. Such was probably the
method formed by Lysippus on the advice of Eupompus, more perplexed than
explained by the superficial extract and the rapid phrase of Pliny.
From the statuary’s we may form our idea of the painter’s method. The
doctrine of Eupompus was adopted by Pamphilus the Amphipolitan, the most
scientific artist of his time, and by him communicated to Apelles of Cos,
or as Lucian will have it, of Ephesus[21], his pupil; in whom, if we
believe tradition, nature exhibited, _once_, a specimen what her union
with education and circumstances could produce.
The name of Apelles in Pliny is the synonime of unrivalled and
unattainable excellence, but the enumeration of his works points out the
modification which we ought to apply to that superiority; it neither
comprises exclusive sublimity of invention, the most acute discrimination
of character, the widest sphere of comprehension, the most judicious and
best balanced composition, nor the deepest pathos of expression: his
great prerogative consisted more in the unison than in the extent of his
powers; he knew better what he could do, what ought to be done, at what
point he could arrive, and what lay beyond his reach, than any other
artist. Grace of conception and refinement of taste were his elements,
and went hand in hand with grace of execution and taste in finish,
powerful and seldom possessed singly, irresistible when united: that he
built both on the firm basis of the former system, not on its subversion,
his well-known contest of lines with Protogenes, not a legendary tale,
but a well-attested fact, irrefragably proves: what those lines were,
drawn with nearly miraculous subtlety in different colours, one upon the
other or rather within each other, it would be equally unavailing and
useless to inquire; but the corollaries we may deduce from the contest,
are obviously these, that the schools of Greece recognized all one
elemental principle: that acuteness and fidelity of eye and obedience
of hand form precision; precision, proportion; proportion, beauty:
that it is the ‘little more or less,’ imperceptible to vulgar eyes,
which constitutes grace and establishes the superiority of one artist
over another: that the knowledge of the degrees of things, or taste,
presupposes a perfect knowledge of the things themselves: that colour,
grace, and taste are ornaments not substitutes of form, expression and
character, and when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid
faults.
Such were the principles on which Apelles formed his Venus, or rather
the personification of Female Grace, the wonder of art, the despair
of artists; whose outline baffled every attempt at emendation, whilst
imitation shrunk from the purity, the force, the brilliancy, the
evanescent gradations of her tints.[22]
The refinements of the art were by Aristides of Thebes applied to the
mind. The passions which tradition had organized for Timanthes, Aristides
caught as they rose from the breast or escaped from the lips of Nature
herself; his volume was man, his scene society: he drew the subtle
discriminations of mind in every stage of life, the whispers, the simple
cry of passion and its most complex accents. Such, as history informs
us, was the suppliant whose voice you seemed to hear, such his sick
man’s half-extinguished eye and labouring breast, such Byblis expiring
in the pangs of love, and above all the half-slain mother shuddering
lest the eager babe should suck the blood from her palsied nipple. This
picture was probably at Thebes, when Alexander sacked that town; what his
feelings were when he saw it, we may guess from his sending it to Pella.
Its expression, poised between the anguish of maternal affection and
the pangs of death, gives to commiseration an image, which neither the
infant piteously caressing his slain mother in the group of Epigonus[23],
nor the absorbed feature of the Niobe, nor the struggle of the Laocoon
excite. Timanthes had marked the limits that discriminate terrour from
the excess of horrour; Aristides drew the line that separates it from
disgust. His subject is one of those that touch the ambiguous line of a
squeamish sense.—Taste and smell, as sources of tragic emotion, and in
consequence of their power, commanding gesture, seem scarcely admissible
in art or on the theatre, because their extremes are nearer allied to
disgust, and loathsome or risible ideas, than to terrour. The prophetic
trance of Cassandra, who scents the prepared murder of Agamemnon at the
threshold of the ominous hall; the desperate moan of Macbeth’s queen on
seeing the visionary spot still uneffaced infect her hand—are images
snatched from the lap of terrour—but soon would cease to be so, were
the artist or the actress to inforce the dreadful hint with indiscreet
expression or gesture. This, completely understood by Aristides, was as
completely missed by his imitators, Raphael[24] in the _Morbetto_, and
Poussin in his plague of the Philistines. In the group of Aristides, our
sympathy is immediately interested by the mother, still alive though
mortally wounded, helpless, beautiful, and forgetting herself in the
anguish for her child, whose situation still suffers hope to mingle with
our fears; he is only approaching the nipple of the mother. In the group
of Raphael, the mother dead of the plague, herself an object of apathy,
becomes one of disgust, by the action of the man, who bending over her,
at his utmost reach of arm, with one hand removes the child from the
breast, whilst the other, applied to his nostrils, bars the effluvia
of death. Our feelings alienated from the mother, come too late even
for the child, who by his languor already betrays the mortal symptoms
of the poison he imbibed at the parent corpse. It is curious to observe
the permutation of ideas which takes place, as imitation is removed from
the sources of nature: Poussin, not content with adopting the group of
Raphael, once more repeats the loathsome attitude in the same scene;
he forgot, in his eagerness to render the idea of contagion still more
intuitive, that he was averting our feelings with ideas of disgust.
The refinements of expression were carried still farther by the disciple
of Aristides, Euphranor the Isthmian, who excelled equally as painter
and statuary, if we may form our judgment from the Theseus he opposed
to that of Parrhasius and the bronze figure of Alexander Paris, in
whom, says Pliny[25], the umpire of the goddesses, the lover of Helen,
and yet the murderer of Achilles might be traced. This account, which
is evidently a quotation of Pliny’s, and not the assumed verdict of a
connoisseur, has been translated with an emphasis it does not admit of,
to prove that an attempt to express different qualities or passions at
once in the same object, must naturally tend to obliterate the effect
of each. ‘Pliny,’ says our critic, ‘observes, that in a statue of Paris
by Euphranor, you might discover at the same time, three different
characters: the dignity of a judge of the goddesses, the lover of Helen,
and the conqueror of Achilles. A statue in which you endeavour to unite
stately dignity, youthful elegance, and stern valour, must surely possess
none of these to any eminent degree.’ The paraphrase, it is first to
be observed, lends itself the mixtures to Pliny it disapproves of; we
look in vain for the coalition of ‘stately dignity, stern valour, and
youthful elegance,’ in the Paris _he_ describes: the murderer of Achilles
was not his conqueror. But may not dignity, elegance, and valour, or
any other not irreconcileable qualities, be visible at once in a figure
without destroying the primary feature of its character, or impairing its
expression? Let us appeal to the Apollo. Is he not a figure of character
and expression, and does he not possess all three in a supreme degree?
Will it imply mediocrity of conception or confusion of character, if we
were to say that his countenance, attitude, and form combines divine
majesty, enchanting grace, and lofty indignation? Yet not all three,
one ideal whole irradiated the mind of the artist who conceived the
divine semblance. He gave, no doubt, the preference of expression to the
action in which the god is engaged, or rather, from the accomplishment
of which he recedes with lofty and contemptuous ease.—This was the first
impression which he meant to make upon us: but what contemplation stops
here? what hinders us when we consider the beauty of these features,
the harmony of these forms, to find in them the abstract of all his
other qualities, to roam over the whole history of his atchievements? we
see him enter the celestial synod, and all the gods rise at his august
appearance[26]; we see him sweep the plain after Daphne; precede Hector
with the ægis and disperse the Greeks; strike Patroclus with his palm
and decide his destiny.—And is the figure frigid because its great idea
is inexhaustible? might we not say the same of the infant Hercules of
Zeuxis or of Reynolds? did not the idea of the man inspire the hand that
framed the mighty child? his magnitude, his crushing grasp, his energy
of will, are only the germ, the prelude of the power that rid the earth
of monsters, and which our mind pursues. Such was no doubt the Paris of
Euphranor: he made his character so pregnant, that those who knew his
history might trace in it the origin of all his future feats, though
first impressed by the expression allotted to the predominant quality
and moment. The acute inspector, the elegant umpire of female form
receiving the contested pledge with a dignified pause, or with enamoured
eagerness presenting it to the arbitress of his destiny, was probably
the predominant idea of the figure: whilst the deserter of Oenone, the
seducer of Helen, the subtle archer, that future murderer of Achilles,
lurked under the insidious eyebrow, and in the penetrating glance of
beauty’s chosen minion. Such appeared to me the character and expression
of the sitting Paris in the voluptuous Phrygian dress, formerly in the
cortile of the palace Altheims, at Rome. A figure nearly colossal, which
many of you may remember, and a faint idea of whom may be gathered
from the print among those in the collection published of the Museum
Clementinum. A work, in my opinion, of the highest style and worthy of
Euphranor, though I shall not venture to call it a repetition in marble
of his bronze.
From these observations on the collateral and unsolicited beauties
which must branch out from the primary expression of every great idea,
it will not, I hope, be suspected, that I mean to invalidate the
necessity of its unity, or to be the advocate of pedantic subdivision.
All such division diminishes, all such mixtures impair the simplicity
and clearness of expression: in the group of the Laocoon, the frigid
ecstasies of German criticism have discovered pity like a vapour swimming
on the father’s eyes; he is seen to suppress in the groan for his
children the shriek for himself—his nostrils are drawn upward to express
indignation at unworthy sufferings, whilst he is said at the same time
to implore celestial help. To these are added the winged effects of the
serpent-poison, the writhings of the body, the spasms of the extremities:
to the miraculous organization of such expression, Agesander, the
sculptor of the Laocoon, was too wise to lay claim. His figure is a
class, it characterizes every beauty of virility verging on age; the
prince, the priest, the father are visible, but absorbed in the man serve
only to dignify the victim of one great expression; though poised by
the artist, for us to apply the compass to the face of the Laocoon, is
to measure the wave fluctuating in the storm: this tempestuous front,
this contracted nose, the immersion of these eyes, and above all that
long-drawn mouth, are, separate and united, seats of convulsion, features
of nature struggling within the jaws of death.
SECOND LECTURE.
ART OF THE MODERNS.
ὉΙ ΤΙΝΕΣ ΗΓΕΜΟΝΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΚΟΙΡΑΝΟΙ ΗΣΑΝ.
ΠΛΗΘΥΝ Δ’ ΟΥΚ ΑΝ ΕΓΩ ΜΥΘΗΣΟΜΑΙ ΟΥΔ’ ΟΝΟΜΗΝΩ
ΟΥΔ’ ΕΙ ΜΟΙ ΔΕΚΑ ΜΕΝ ΓΛΩΣΣΑΙ, ΔΕΚΑ ΔΕ ΣΤΟΜΑΤ’ ΕΙΕΝ,
ΦΩΝΗ Δ’ ΑΡΡΗΚΤΟΣ.
Homer. Iliad. B. 487.
ARGUMENT.
Introduction—different direction of the art. Preparative
style—Masaccio—Lionardo da Vinci. Style of establishment—Michael Angelo,
Raphael, Titiano, Correggio. Style of refinement, and depravation.
Schools—of Tuscany, Rome, Venice, Lombardy. The Ecclectic school.
Machinists. The German school—Albert Durer. The Flemish school—Rubens.
The Dutch school—Rembrandt. Observations on art in Switzerland. The
French school. The Spanish school. England—Conclusion.
SECOND LECTURE
In the preceding discourse I have endeavoured to impress you with the
general features of ancient art in its different periods of preparation,
establishment, and refinement. We are now arrived at the epoch of its
restoration in the fifteenth century of our æra, when religion and wealth
rousing emulation, reproduced its powers, but gave to their exertion a
very different direction. The reigning church found itself indeed under
the necessity of giving more splendour to the temples and mansions
destined to receive its votaries, of subduing their senses with the
charm of appropriate images and the exhibition of events and actions,
which might stimulate their zeal and inflame their hearts: but the
sacred mysteries of divine Being, the method adopted by Revelation, the
duties its doctrine imposed, the virtues it demanded from its followers,
faith, resignation, humility, sufferings, substituted a medium of art
as much inferior to the resources of Paganism in a physical sense
as incomparably superior in a spiritual one. Those public customs,
that perhaps as much tended to spread the infections of vice as they
facilitated the means of art, were no more; the heroism of the Christian
and his beauty were internal, and powerful or exquisite forms allied him
no longer exclusively to his God. The chief repertory of the artist,
the sacred records, furnished indeed a sublime cosmogony, scenes of
patriarchal simplicity and a poetic race, which left nothing to regret
in the loss of heathen mythology; but the stem of the nation whose
history is its exclusive theme, if it abounded in characters and powers
fit for the exhibition of passions, did not teem with forms sufficiently
exalted, to inform the artist and elevate the art. Ingredients of a
baser cast mingled their alloy with the materials of grandeur and of
beauty. Monastic legend and the rubric of martyrology claimed more than
a legitimate share from the labours of the pencil and the chisel, made
nudity the exclusive property of emaciated hermits or decrepit age, and
if the breast of manhood was allowed to bare its vigour, or beauty to
expand her bosom, the antidotes of terrour and of horrour were ready at
their side to check the apprehended infection of their charms. When we
add to this the heterogeneous stock on which the reviving system of arts
was grafted, a race indeed inhabiting a genial climate, but itself the
fœces of barbarity, the remnants of Gothic adventurers, humanised only by
the cross, mouldering amid the ruins of the temples they had demolished,
the battered fragments of the images their rage had crushed—when we
add this, I say, we shall less wonder at the languor of modern art in
its rise and progress, than be astonished at the vigour by which it
adapted and raised materials partly so unfit and defective, partly so
contaminated, to the magnificent system which we are to contemplate.
Sculpture had already produced respectable specimens of its reviving
powers in the bassorelievos of Lorenzo Ghiberti, some works of Donato,
and the Christ of Philippo Brunelleschi[27], when the first symptoms of
imitation appeared in the frescos of Tommaso da St. Giovanni, commonly
called Masaccio, from the total neglect of his appearance and person[28]:
Masaccio first conceived that parts are to constitute a whole; that
composition ought to have a centre; expression, truth; and execution,
unity: his line deserves attention, though his subjects led him not
to investigation of form, and the shortness of his life forbade his
extending those elements which Raphael, nearly a century afterward,
carried to perfection—it is sufficiently glorious for him to have been
more than once copied by that great master of expression, and in some
degree to have been the herald of his style: Masaccio lives more in the
figure of Paul preaching on the areopagus, of the celebrated cartoon in
our possession, and in the borrowed figure of Adam expelled from paradise
in the loggia of the Vatican, than in his own mutilated or retouched
remains.
The essays of Masaccio in imitation and expression, Andrea Mantegna[29]
attempted to unite with form; led by the contemplation of the antique,
fragments of which he ambitiously scattered over his works: though a
Lombard, and born prior to the discovery of the best ancient statues,
he seems to have been acquainted with a variety of characters, from
forms that remind us of the Apollo, Mercury or Meleager, down to the
fauns and satyrs: but his taste was too crude, his fancy too grotesque,
and his comprehension too weak to advert from the parts that remained
to the whole that inspired them: hence in his figures of dignity or
beauty we see not only the meagre forms of common models, but even their
defects tacked to ideal Torso’s; and his fauns and satyrs, instead of
native luxuriance of growth and the sportive appendages of mixed being,
are decorated with heraldic excrescences and arabesque absurdity. His
triumphs are known to you all; they are a copious inventory of classic
lumber, swept together with more industry than taste, but full of
valuable materials. Of expression he was not ignorant: his burial of
Christ furnished Raphael with the composition, and some of the features
and attitudes in his picture on the same subject in the palace of the
Borghese’s—the figure of St. John, however, left out by Raphael, proves
that Mantegna sometimes mistook grimace for the highest degree of
grief. His oil-pictures exhibit little more than the elaborate anguish
of missal-painting; his frescoes destroyed at the construction of the
Clementine museum, had freshness, freedom and imitation.
To Luca Signorelli, of Cortona[30], nature more than atoned for the
want of those advantages which the study of the antique had offered to
Andrea Mantegna. He seems to have been the first who contemplated with a
discriminating eye his object, saw what was accident and what essential;
balanced light and shade, and decided the motion of his figures. He
foreshortened with equal boldness and intelligence, and thence it is,
probably, that Vasari fancies to have discovered in the last judgment of
Michael Angelo traces of imitation from the Lunetta, painted by Luca, in
the church of the Madonna, at Orvieto; but the powers which animated him
there, and before at Arezzo, are no longer visible in the Gothic medley
with which he filled two compartments in the chapel of Sixtus IV. at Rome.
Such was the dawn of modern art, when Lionardo da Vinci[31] broke forth
with a splendour which distanced former excellence: made up of all the
elements that constitute the essence of genius, favoured by education
and circumstances, all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor,
anatomist, architect, engineer, chemist, machinist, musician, man of
science, and sometimes empiric[32], he laid hold of every beauty in the
enchanted circle, but without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed
in her turn each. Fitter to scatter hints than to teach by example,
he wasted life, insatiate, in experiment. To a capacity which at once
penetrated the principle and real aim of the art, he joined an inequality
of fancy that at one moment lent him wings for the pursuit of beauty,
and the next, flung him on the ground to crawl after deformity: we owe
him chiaroscuro with all its magic, we owe him caricature with all its
incongruities. His notions of the most elaborate finish and his want
of perseverance were at least equal:—want of perseverance alone could
make him abandon his cartoon destined for the great council-chamber at
Florence, of which the celebrated contest of horsemen was but one group;
for to him who could organize that composition, Michael Angelo himself
ought rather to have been an object of emulation than of fear: and
that he was able to organize it, we may be certain from the remaining
imperfect sketch in the ‘Etruria Pittrice;’ but still more from the
admirable print of it by Edelinck, after a drawing of Rubens, who was
Lionardo’s great admirer, and has said much to impress us with the
beauties of his last supper in the refectory of the Dominicans at Milano,
the only one of his great works which he carried to ultimate finish,
through all its parts, from the head of Christ to the least important
one: it perished soon after him, and we can estimate the loss only from
the copies that survive.
Bartolomeo della Porta, or di S. Marco, the last master of this
period[33], first gave gradation to colour, form and masses to drapery,
and a grave dignity, till then unknown, to execution. If he was not
endowed with the versatility and comprehension of Lionardo, his
principles were less mixed with base matter and less apt to mislead
him. As a member of a religious order, he confined himself to subjects
and characters of piety, but the few nudities which he allowed himself
to exhibit, show sufficient intelligence and still more style: he
foreshortened with truth and boldness, and whenever the figure did admit
of it, made his drapery the vehicle of the limb it invests. He was the
true master of Raphael, whom his tuition weaned from the meanness of
Pietro Perugino, and prepared for the mighty style of Michael Angelo
Buonarroti.
Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner are
the elements of Michael Angelo’s style.[34] By these principles he
selected or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter, as sculptor,
as architect, he attempted, and above any other man succeeded to unite
magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts with the
utmost simplicity and breadth. His line is uniformly grand: character
and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient
to grandeur. The child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him
indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the
patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity;
his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man;
his men are a race of giants. This is the ‘terribil via’ hinted at by
Agostino Carracci, though perhaps as little understood by the Bolognese
as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To
give the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty,
was the exclusive power of Michael Angelo. He is the inventor of epic
painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine chapel, which exhibits
the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He
has personified motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; embodied
sentiment on the monuments of St. Lorenzo, unravelled the features of
meditation in the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine chapel; and in the
last judgment, with every attitude that varies the human body, traced
the master-trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though as
sculptor, he expressed the character of flesh more perfectly than all
who went before or came after him, yet he never submitted to copy an
individual; Julio the second only excepted, and in him he represented
the reigning passion rather than the man.[35] In painting he contented
himself with a negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected
all meretricious ornament.[36] The fabric of St. Peter, scattered
into infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he
concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex gave the air
of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him all in all, was M. Angelo,
the salt of art: sometimes he no doubt had his moments of dereliction,
deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his forms with futile
and ostentatious anatomy: both met with armies of copyists, and it has
been his fate to have been censured for their folly.
The inspiration of Michael Angelo was followed by the milder genius
of Raphael Sanzio[37], the father of dramatic painting, the painter
of humanity; less elevated, less vigorous, but more insinuating, more
pressing on our hearts, the warm master of our sympathies. What effect
of human connexion, what feature of the mind, from the gentlest emotion
to the most fervid burst of passion, has been left unobserved, has not
received a characteristic stamp from that examiner of man? M. Angelo
came to nature, nature came to Raphael—he transmitted her features like
a lucid glass unstained, unmodified. We stand with awe before M. Angelo,
and tremble at the height to which he elevates us—we embrace Raphael,
and follow him wherever he leads us. Energy, with propriety of character
and modest grace poise his line and determine his correctness. Perfect
human beauty he has not represented; no face of Raphael’s is perfectly
beautiful; no figure of his, in the abstract, possesses the proportions
that could raise it to a standard of imitation: form to him was only a
vehicle of character or pathos, and to those he adapted it in a mode
and with a truth which leaves all attempts at emendation hopeless. His
invention connects the utmost stretch of possibility, with the most
plausible degree of probability, in a manner that equally surprizes our
fancy, persuades our judgment, and affects our heart. His composition
always hastens to the most necessary point as its centre, and from that
disseminates, to that leads back as rays, all secondary ones. Group,
form, and contrast are subordinate to the event, and common-place ever
excluded. His expression, in strict unison with and decided by character,
whether calm, animated, agitated, convulsed, or absorbed by the inspiring
passion, unmixed and pure, never contradicts its cause, equally remote
from tameness and grimace: the moment of his choice never suffers the
action to stagnate or to expire; it is the moment of transition, the
crisis big with the past and pregnant with the future.—If, separately
taken, the line of Raphael has been excelled in correctness, elegance,
and energy; his colour far surpassed in tone and truth, and harmony;
his masses in roundness, and his chiaroscuro in effect—considered as
instruments of pathos, they have never been equalled; and in composition,
invention, expression, and the power of telling a story, he has never
been approached.
Whilst the superiour principles of the art were receiving the homage of
Tuscany and Rome, the inferiour but more alluring charm of colour began
to spread its fascination at Venice, from the pallet of Giorgione da
Castel Franco[38], and irresistibly entranced every eye that approached
the magic of Titiano Vecelli of Cador.[39] To no colourist before or
after him, did nature unveil herself with that dignified familiarity
in which she appeared to Titiano. His organ, universal and equally fit
for all her exhibitions, rendered her simplest to her most compound
appearances with equal purity and truth. He penetrated the essence
and the general principle of the substances before him, and on these
established his theory of colour. He invented that breadth of local tint
which no imitation has attained; and first expressed the negative nature
of shade: his are the charms of glazing, and the mystery of reflexes,
by which he detached, rounded, connected, or enriched his objects.
His harmony is less indebted to the force of light and shade, or the
artifices of contrast, than to a due balance of colour, equally remote
from monotony and spots. His backgrounds seem to be dictated by nature.
Landscape, whether it be considered as the transcript of a spot, or the
rich combination of congenial objects, or as the scene of a phœnomenon,
dates its origin from him: he is the father of portrait painting,
of resemblance with form, character with dignity, and costume with
subordination.
Another charm was yet wanting to complete the round of art—harmony: it
appeared with Antonio Læti[40] called Correggio, whose works it attended
like an enchanted spirit. The harmony and the grace of Correggio are
proverbial: the medium which by breadth of gradation unites two opposite
principles, the coalition of light and darkness by imperceptible
transition, are the element of his style.—This inspires his figures with
grace, to this their grace is subordinate: the most appropriate, the
most elegant attitudes were adopted, rejected, perhaps sacrificed to the
most awkward ones, in compliance with this imperious principle: parts
vanished, were absorbed, or emerged in obedience to it. This unison of
a whole, predominates over all that remains of him, from the vastness
of his cupolas to the smallest of his oil-pictures.—The harmony of
Correggio, though assisted by exquisite hues, was entirely independent
of colour: his great organ was chiaroscuro in its most extensive sense;
compared with the expanse in which he floats, the effects of Lionardo da
Vinci are little more than the dying ray of evening, and the concentrated
flash of Giorgione discordant abruptness. The bland central light of a
globe, imperceptibly gliding through lucid demi-tints into rich reflected
shades, composes the spell of Correggio, and affects us with the soft
emotions of a delicious dream.
Such was the ingenuity that prepared, and such the genius that raised to
its height the fabric of modern art. Before we proceed to the next epoch,
let us make an observation:
Form not your judgment of an artist from the exceptions which his conduct
may furnish, from the exertions of accidental vigour, some deviations
into other walks, or some unpremeditated flights of fancy, but from the
predominant rule of his system, the general principle of his works. The
line and style of Titian’s design, sometimes expand themselves like
those of Michael Angelo. His Abraham prevented from sacrificing Isaac;
his David adoring over the giant-trunk of Goliah; the Friar escaping
from the murderer of his companion in the forest, equal in loftiness of
conception and style of design, their mighty tone of colour and daring
execution: the heads and groups of Raphael’s frescos and portraits
sometimes glow and palpitate with the tints of Titian, or coalesce
in masses of harmony, and undulate with graces superior to those of
Correggio; who in his turn once reached the highest summit of invention,
when he embodied silence and personified the mysteries of love in the
voluptuous group of Jupiter and Io; and again exceeded all competition
of expression in the divine features of his Ecce-Homo. But these sudden
irradiations, these flashes of power are only exceptions from their
wonted principles; pathos and character own Raphael for their master,
colour remains the domain of Titian, and harmony the sovereign mistress
of Correggio.
The resemblance which marked the two first periods of ancient and modern
art, vanishes altogether as we extend our view to the consideration
of the third, or that of refinement, and the origin of schools. The
pre-eminence of ancient art, as we have observed, was less the result
of superiour powers, than of simplicity of aim and uniformity of
pursuit. The Helladic and the Ionian schools appear to have concurred
in directing their instruction to the grand principles of form and
expression: this was the stamen which they drew out into one immense
connected web. The talents that succeeded genius, applied and directed
their industry and polish to decorate the established system, the
refinements of taste, grace, sentiment, colour, adorned beauty, grandeur
and expression. The Tuscan, the Roman, the Venetian, and the Lombard
schools, whether from incapacity, want of education, of adequate or
dignified encouragement, meanness of conception, or all these together,
separated, and in a short time substituted the medium for the end.
Michael Angelo lived to see the electric shock which his design and style
had given to art, propagated by the Tuscan and Venetian schools, as the
ostentatious vehicle of puny conceits and emblematic quibbles, or the
palliative of empty pomp and degraded luxuriance of colour. He had been
copied but was not imitated by Andrea Vannucchi, surnamed del Sarto, who
in his series of pictures on the life of John the Baptist, in preference
adopted the meagre style of Albert Durer. The artist who appears to have
penetrated deepest to his mind, was Pelegrino Tibaldi, of Bologna[41];
celebrated as the painter of the frescos in the academic institute of
that city, and as the architect of the Escurial under Philip II. The
compositions, groups, and single figures of the institute exhibit a
singular mixture of extraordinary vigour and puerile imbecility of
conception, of character and caricature, of style and manner. Polypheme
groping at the mouth of his cave for Ulysses, and Æolus granting him
favourable winds, are striking instances of both: than the cyclops,
Michael Angelo himself never conceived a form of savage energy, with
attitude and limbs more in unison; whilst the god of winds is degraded
to a scanty and ludicrous semblance of Thersites, and Ulysses with his
companions travestied by the semibarbarous look and costume of the age
of Constantine or Attila; the manner of Michael Angelo is the style of
Pelegrino Tibaldi; from him Golzius, Hemskerk, and Spranger borrowed
the compendium of the Tuscan’s peculiarities. With this mighty talent,
however, Michael Angelo seems not to have been acquainted, but by that
unaccountable weakness incident to the greatest powers, and the severe
remembrancer of their vanity, he became the superintendant and assistant
tutor of the Venetian Sebastiano[42], and of Daniel Ricciarelli, of
Volterra[43]; the first of whom, with an exquisite eye for individual,
had no sense for ideal colour, whilst the other rendered great diligence
and much anatomical erudition, useless by meagreness of line and
sterility of ideas: how far Michael Angelo succeeded in initiating
either in his principles, the far-famed pictures of the resuscitation
of Lazarus, by the first, once in the cathedral of Narbonne, and
since inspected by us all at the Lyceum here[44], and the fresco of
the descent from the cross, in the church of La Trinità del Monte, at
Rome, by the second, sufficiently evince: pictures which combine the
most heterogeneous principles. The group of Lazarus in Sebastian del
Piombo’s and that of the women, with the figure of Christ, in Daniel
Ricciarelli’s, not only breathe the sublime conception that inspired,
but the master-hand that shaped them: offsprings of Michael Angelo
himself, models of expression, style, and breadth, they cast on all the
rest an air of inferiority, and only serve to prove the incongruity
of partnership between unequal powers; this inferiority however is
respectable, when compared with the depravations of Michael Angelo’s
style by the remainder of the Tuscan school, especially those of Giorgio
Vasari[45], the most superficial artist and the most abandoned mannerist
of his time, but the most acute observer of men and the most dextrous
flatterer of princes. He overwhelmed the palaces of the Medici and of the
popes, the convents and churches of Italy, with a deluge of mediocrity,
commended by rapidity and shameless ‘bravura’ of hand: he alone did more
work than all the artists of Tuscany together, and to him may be truly
applied, what he had the insolence to say of Tintoretto, that he turned
the art into a boy’s toy.
Whilst Michael Angelo was doomed to lament the perversion of his style,
death prevented Raphael from witnessing the gradual decay of his. The
exuberant fertility of Julio Pipi called Romano[46], and the less
extensive but classic taste of Polydoro da Caravaggio deserted indeed the
standard of their master, but with a dignity and magnitude of compass
which command respect. It is less from his tutored works in the Vatican,
than from the colossal conceptions, the pathetic or sublime allegories,
and the voluptuous reveries which enchant the palace del T, near Mantoua,
that we must form our estimate of Julio’s powers; they were of a size to
challenge all competition, had he united purity of taste and delicacy
of mind with energy and loftiness of thought; as they are, they resemble
a mighty stream, sometimes flowing in a full and limpid vein, but
oftener turbid with rubbish. He has left specimens of composition from
the most sublime to the most extravagant; to a primeval simplicity of
conception in his mythologic subjects, which transports us to the golden
age of Hesiod, he joined a rage for the grotesque; to uncommon powers
of expression a decided attachment to deformity and grimace, and to the
warmest and most genial imagery, the most ungenial colour.
With nearly equal, but still more mixed fertility, Francesco
Primaticcio[47] propagated the style and the conceptions of his master
Julio on the gallic side of the Alps, and with the assistance of Nicolo,
commonly called Dell’ Abbate after him, filled the palaces of Francis
I. with mythologic and allegoric works, in frescos of an energy and
depth of tone till then unknown. Theirs was the cyclus of pictures from
the Odyssea of Homer at Fontainbleau, a mine of classic and picturesque
materials: they are destroyed, and we may estimate their loss, even
through the disguise of the mannered and feeble etchings of Theodore Van
Tulden.
The compact style of Polydoro[48], formed on the antique, such as it is
exhibited in the best series of the Roman military bassorelievos, is more
monumental, than imitative or characteristic. But the virility of his
taste, the impassioned motion of his groups, the simplicity, breadth, and
never excelled elegance and probability of his drapery, with the forcible
chiaroscuro of his compositions, make us regret the narrowness of the
walk, to which he confined his powers.
No painter ever painted his own mind so forcibly as Michael Angelo
Amerigi, surnamed Il Caravaggi.[49] To none nature ever set limits with
a more decided hand. Darkness gave him light; into his melancholy cell
light stole only with a pale reluctant ray, or broke on it, as flashes on
a stormy night. The most vulgar forms he recommended by ideal light and
shade, and a tremendous breadth of manner.
The aim and style of the Roman school deserve little further notice
here, till the appearance of Nicolas Poussin[50] a Frenchman, but
grafted on the Roman stock. Bred under Quintin Varin a French painter
of mediocrity, he found on his arrival in Italy that he had more to
unlearn than to follow of his master’s principles, renounced the national
character, and not only with the utmost ardour adopted, but suffered
himself to be wholly absorbed by the antique. Such was his attachment
to the ancients, that it may be said he less imitated their spirit than
copied their relics and painted sculpture; the costume, the mythology,
the rites of antiquity were his element; his scenery, his landscape are
pure classic ground. He has left specimens to shew that he was sometimes
sublime, and often in the highest degree pathetic, but history in the
strictest sense, was his property, and in that he ought to be followed.
His agents only appear, to tell the fact, they are subordinate to the
story. Sometimes he attempted to tell a story that cannot be told: of his
historic dignity the celebrated series of Sacraments; of his sublimity,
the vision he gave to Coriolanus; of his pathetic power, the infant
Pyrrhus; and of the vain attempt to tell by figures what words alone
can tell, the testament of Eudamidas, are striking instances. His eye,
though impressed with the tint, and breadth, and imitation of Titiano,
seldom inspired him to charm with colour, crudity and patches frequently
deform his effects. He is unequal in his style of design; sometimes his
comprehension fails him, he supplies, like Pietro Testa, ideal heads and
torso’s with limbs and extremities transcribed from the model. Whether
from choice or want of power he has seldom executed his conceptions on
a larger scale than that which bears his name, and which has perhaps as
much contributed to make him the darling of this country, as his merit.
The wildness of Salvator Rosa[51] opposes a powerful contrast to the
classic regularity of Poussin. Terrific and grand in his conceptions of
inanimate nature, he was reduced to attempts of hiding by boldness of
hand, his inability of exhibiting her impassioned, or in the dignity
of character: his line is vulgar: his magic visions less founded on
principles of terrour than on mythologic trash and caprice, are to the
probable combinations of nature, what the paroxysms of a fever are to the
flights of vigorous fancy. Though so much extolled and so ambitiously
imitated, his banditti are a medley made up of starveling models, shreds
and bits of armour from his lumber-room, brushed into notice by a daring
pencil. Salvator was a satyrist and a critic, but the rod which he had
the insolence to lift against the nudities of Michael Angelo, and the
anachronism of Raphael, would have been better employed in chastising his
own misconceptions.
The principle of Titiano, less pure in itself and less decided in its
object of imitation, did not suffer so much from its more or less
appropriate application by his successors, as the former two. Colour once
in a very high degree attained, disdains subordination and engrosses the
whole. Mutual similarity attracts, body tends to body, as mind to mind,
and he, who has once gained supreme dominion over the eye, will hardly
resign it to court the more coy approbation of mind, of a few opposed to
nearly all. Add to this the character of the place and the nature of the
encouragement held out to the Venetian artists. Venice was the centre
of commerce, the repository of the riches of the globe, the splendid
toy-shop of the time: its chief inhabitants princely merchants, or a
patrician race elevated to rank by accumulations from trade, or naval
prowess; the bulk of the people mechanics or artisans, administering
the means, and in their turn fed by the produce of luxury. Of such a
system, what could the art be more than the parasite? Religion itself
had exchanged its gravity for the allurements of ear and eye, and even
sanctity disgusted, unless arrayed by the gorgeous hand of fashion.—Such
was, such will always be the birth-place and the theatre of colour: and
hence it is more matter of wonder that the first and greatest colourists
should so long have forborne to overstep the modesty of nature in the use
of that alluring medium, than that they yielded by degrees to its golden
solicitations.[52]
The principle of Correggio vanished with its author, though it found
numerous imitators of its parts. Since him, no eye has conceived that
expanse of harmony with which the voluptuous sensibility of his mind
arranged and enchanted all visible nature. His grace, so much vaunted and
so little understood, was adopted and improved to elegance by Francesco
Mazzuoli, called il Parmegiano[53], but instead of making her the measure
of propriety he degraded her to affectation: in Parmegiano’s figures
action is the adjective of the posture; the accident of attitude; they
‘make themselves air, into which they vanish.’ That disengaged play of
delicate forms, the ‘Sueltezza’ of the Italians, is the prerogative of
Parmegiano, though nearly always obtained at the expence of proportion.
His grandeur as conscious as his grace, sacrifices the motive to the
mode, simplicity to contrast: his St. John loses the fervour of the
apostle in the orator; his Moses the dignity of the lawgiver in the
savage. With incredible force of chiaroscuro, he united bland effects and
fascinating hues, but their frequent ruins teach the important lesson,
that the mixtures which anticipate the beauties of time, are big with the
seeds of premature decay.
Such was the state of the art, when, towards the decline of the sixteenth
century, Lodovico Carracci[54], with his cousins Agostino and Annibale,
founded at Bologna that ecclectic school, which by selecting the
beauties, correcting the faults, supplying the defects and avoiding the
extremes of the different styles, attempted to form a perfect system.
But as the mechanic part was their only object, they did not perceive
that the projected union was incompatible with the leading principle of
each master. Let us hear this plan from Agostino Carracci himself, as
it is laid down in his sonnet[55] on the ingredients required to form
a perfect painter, if that may be called a sonnet, which has more the
air of medical prescription. ‘Take,’ says Agostino, ‘the design of Rome,
Venetian motion and shade, the dignified tone of Lombardy’s colour,
the terrible manner of Michael Angelo, the just symmetry of Raphael,
Titiano’s truth of nature, and the sovereign purity of Correggio’s
style: add to these the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, the learned
invention of Primaticcio, and a little of Parmegiano’s grace: but to save
so much study, such weary labour, apply your imitation to the works which
our dear Nicolo has left us here.’ Of such advice, balanced between the
tone of regular breeding and the cant of an empiric, what could be the
result? excellence or mediocrity? who ever imagined that a multitude of
dissimilar threads could compose an uniform texture, that dissemination
of spots would make masses, or a little of many things produce a
legitimate whole? indiscriminate imitation must end in the extinction of
character, and that in mediocrity—the cypher of art.
And were the Carracci such? separate the precept from the practice,
the artist from the teacher; and the Carracci are in possession of
my submissive homage. Lodovico, far from implicitly subscribing to a
master’s dictates, was the sworn pupil of nature. To a modest style of
form, to a simplicity eminently fitted for those subjects of religious
gravity which his taste preferred, he joined that solemnity of hue,
that sober twilight, the air of cloistered meditation, which you have
so often heard recommended as the proper tone of historic colour. Too
often content to rear the humbler graces of his subject, he seldom
courted elegance, but always, when he did, with enviable success. Even
now, though nearly in a state of evanescence, the three nymphs in the
garden scene of St. Michele in Bosco, seem moulded by the hand, inspired
by the breath of love. Agostino, with a singular modesty which prompted
him rather to propagate the fame of others by his graver, than by steady
exertion to rely on his own power for perpetuity of name, combined with
some learning a cultivated taste, correctness, though not elegance of
form, and a corregiesque colour. Annibale, superior to both in power
of execution and academic prowess, was inferior to either in taste and
sensibility and judgment; for the most striking proof of this inferiority
I appeal to his master-work, the work on which he rests his fame, the
gallery of the Farnese palace: a work whose uniform vigour of execution,
nothing can equal but its imbecility and incongruity of conception. If
impropriety of ornament were to be fixed by definition, the subjects
of the Farnese gallery might be quoted as the most decisive instances.
Criticism has attempted to dismiss Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto from
the province of legitimate history with the contemptuous appellation
of ornamental painters, not for having painted subjects inapplicable
to the public and private palaces, the churches and convents, which
they were employed to decorate, but because they treated them sometimes
without regard to costume, or the simplicity due to sacred, heroic or
allegoric subjects: if this be just, where shall we class him, who with
the Capella Sistina, and the Vatican before his eye, fills the mansion
of religious austerity and episcopal dignity, with a chaotic series of
trite fable and bacchanalian revelry, without allegory, void of allusion,
merely to gratify the puerile ostentation of dauntless execution
and academic vigour? if the praise given to a work be not always
transferable to its master; if, as Milton says, ‘the work some praise
and some the architect,’ let us admire the splendour, the exuberance,
the concentration of powers displayed in the Farnese gallery, whilst we
lament their misapplication by Annibale Carracci.
The heterogeneous principle of the ecclectic school soon operated its own
dissolution: the great talents which the Carracci had tutored, soon found
their own bias, and abandoned themselves to their own peculiar taste. B.
Schidone died young in 1615. Barto. Schidone, Guido Reni[56], Giovanni
Lanfranco, Francesco Albani, Domenico Zampieri, and Francesco Barbieri,
called Guercino, differed as much in their objects of imitation as their
names. Schidone, all of whose mind was in his eye, embraced, and often
to meaner subjects applied the harmony and colour of Correggio, whilst
Lanfranco strove, but strove without success, to follow him through
the expanse of his creation and masses. Grace attracted Guido, but it
was the studied grace of theatres: his female forms are abstracts of
antique beauty, attended by languishing attitudes, arrayed by voluptuous
fashions. His male forms, transcripts of models, such as are found in
a genial climate, are sometimes highly characteristic of dignified
manhood or apostolic fervour, like his Peter and Paul, formerly in the
Zampieri at Bologna: sometimes stately, courteous, insipid, like his
Paris attending Helen, more with the air of an ambassadour, by proxy,
than carrying her off with a lover’s fervour. His Aurora deserved to
precede a more majestic sun, and hours less clumsy: his colour varies
with his style, sometimes bland and harmonious, sometimes vigorous
and stern, sometimes flat and insipid. Albani, chiefly attracted by
soft mythologic conceits, formed nereids and oreads on plump Venetian
models, and contrasted their pearly hues with the rosy tints of loves,
the juicy brown of fauns and satyrs, and rich marine or sylvan scenery.
Domenichino, more obedient than the rest to his masters, aimed at the
beauty of the antique, the expression of Raphael, the vigour of Annibale,
the colour of Lodovico, and mixing something of each, fell short of all;
whilst Guercino broke like a torrent over all academic rules, and with an
ungovernable itch of copying whatever lay in his way, sacrificed mind,
form and costume, to effects of colour, fierceness of chiaroscuro, and
intrepidity of hand.
Such was the state of art, when the spirit of machinery, in submission
to the vanities and upstart pride of papal nepotism, destroyed what yet
was left of meaning; when equilibration, contrast, grouping, engrossed
composition, and poured a deluge of gay common-place over the platfonds,
pannels, and cupolas of palaces and temples. Those who could not conceive
a figure singly, scattered multitudes; to count, was to be poor. The
rainbow and the seasons were ransacked for their hues, and every eye
became the tributary of the great, but abused talents of Pietro da
Cortona, and the fascinating but debauched and empty facility of Luca
Giordano.[57]
The same revolution of mind that had organized the arts of Italy, spread,
without visible communication, to Germany, and towards the decline of
the fifteenth century, the uncouth essays of Martin Schön, Michael
Wolgemuth, and Albrecht Altorfer, were succeeded by the finer polish and
the more dextrous method of Albert Durer. The indiscriminate use of the
words genius and talent has perhaps no where caused more confusion than
in the classification of artists. Albert Durer was in my opinion a man
of great ingenuity, without being a genius. He studied, and, as far as
his penetration reached, established certain proportions of the human
frame, but he did not invent a style: every work of his is a proof that
he wanted the power of imitation, of concluding from what he saw, to
what he did not see, that he copied rather than selected the forms that
surrounded him, and sans remorse tacked deformity and meagreness to
fulness, and sometimes to beauty.[58] Such is his design; in composition
copious without taste, anxiously precise in parts, and unmindful of
the whole, he has rather shewn us what to avoid than what to follow.
He sometimes had a glimpse of the sublime, but it was only a glimpse:
the expanded agony of Christ on the mount of Olives, and the mystic
conception of his figure of Melancholy, are thoughts of sublimity, though
the expression of the last is weakened by the rubbish he has thrown about
her. His Knight, attended by Death and the Fiend, is more capricious
than terrible; and his Adam and Eve are two common models shut up in a
rocky dungeon. If he approached genius in any part of art, it was in
colour. His colour went beyond his age, and as far excelled in truth and
breadth and handling the oil colour of Raphael, as Raphael excels him
in every other quality. I speak of easel-pictures—his drapery is broad
though much too angular, and rather snapt than folded. Albert is called
the father of the German school, though he neither reared scholars, nor
was imitated by the German artists of his or the succeeding century. That
the exportation of his works to Italy should have effected a temporary
change in the principles of some Tuscans who had studied Michael Angelo,
of Andrea del Sarto, and Jacopo da Pontormo, is a fact which proves that
minds at certain periods may be subject to epidemic influence as well as
bodies.
Lucas of Leyden[59] was the Dutch imitator of Albert; but the forms of
Aldegraver, Sebald Beheim, and George Pentz, appear to have been the
result of careful inspection of Marc Antonio’s prints from Raphael, of
whom Pentz was probably a scholar; and ere long the style of Michael
Angelo, as adopted by Pelegrino Tibaldi, and spread by the graver of
Giorgio Mantuano, provoked those caravans of German, Dutch and Flemish
students, who on their return from Italy, at the courts of Prague and
Munich, in Flanders and the Netherlands, introduced that preposterous
manner, the bloated excrescence of diseased brains, which in the form of
man left nothing human, distorted action and gesture with insanity of
affectation, and dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes; the
style of Golzius and Spranger, Heynz and ab Ach: but though content to
feed on the husks of Tuscan design, they imbibed the colour of Venice,
and spread the elements of that excellence which distinguished the
succeeding schools of Flanders and of Holland.
This frantic pilgrimage to Italy ceased at the apparition of the two
meteors of art, Peter Paul Rubens[60], and Rembrandt Van Rhyn; both of
whom disdaining to acknowledge the usual laws of admission to the temple
of fame, boldly forged their own keys, entered and took possession,
each, of a most conspicuous place by his own power. Rubens, born at
Cologne, in Germany, but brought up at Antwerp, then the depository of
western commerce, a school of religious and classic learning, and the
pompous seat of Austrian and Spanish superstition, met these advantages
with an ardour and success of which ordinary minds can form no idea,
if we compare the period at which he is said to have seriously applied
himself to painting, under the tuition of Otho Van Veen, with the
unbounded power he had acquired over the instruments of art when he set
out for Italy; where we instantly discover him not as the pupil, but
as the successful rival of the masters whose works he had selected for
the objects of his emulation. Endowed with a full comprehension of his
own character, he wasted not a moment on the acquisition of excellence
incompatible with its fervour, but flew to the centre of his ambition,
Venice, and soon compounded from the splendour of Paolo Veronese and the
glow of Tintoretto, that florid system of mannered magnificence which
is the element of his art and the principle of his school. He first
spread that ideal pallet, which reduced to its standard the variety of
nature, and once methodized, whilst his mind tuned the method, shortened
or superseded individual imitation. His scholars, however dissimilar in
themselves, saw with the eye of their master; the eye of Rubens was
become the substitute of nature: still the mind alone that had balanced
these tints, and weighed their powers, could apply them to their objects,
and determine their use in the pompous display of historic and allegoric
magnificence; for _that_ they were selected, for _that_ the gorgeous
nosegay swelled: but when in the progress of depraved practice they
became the mere palliatives of mental impotence, empty representatives
of themselves, the supporters of nothing but clumsy forms and clumsier
conceits, they can only be considered as splendid improprieties, as the
substitutes for wants which no colour can palliate and no tint supply.
In this censure I am under no apprehension of being suspected to
include either the illustrious name of Vandyck[61], or that of Abraham
Diepenbeck. Vandyck, more elegant, more refined, to graces, which the
genius of Rubens disdained to court, joined that exquisite taste which,
in following the general principle of his master, moderated, and adapted
its application to his own pursuits. His sphere was portrait, and the
imitation of Titiano insured him the second place in that. The fancy
of Diepenbeck, though not so exuberant, if I be not mistaken, excelled
in sublimity the imagination of Rubens: his Bellerophon, Dioscuri,
Hippolytus, Ixion, Sisyphus, fear no competitor among the productions of
his master.
Rembrandt[62] was, in my opinion, a genius of the first class in whatever
relates not to form. In spite of the most portentous deformity, and
without considering the spell of his chiaroscuro, such were his powers
of nature, such the grandeur, pathos, or simplicity of his composition,
from the most elevated or extensive arrangement to the meanest and most
homely, that the best cultivated eye, the purest sensibility, and the
most refined taste dwell on them, equally enthralled. Shakspeare alone
excepted, no one combined with so much transcendent excellence, so
many, in all other men unpardonable faults—and reconciled us to them.
He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of all the tints
that float between them: he tinged his pencil with equal success in the
cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in the livid flash, in evanescent
twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a stedfast
eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into
her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity or baldness, and plucked
a flower in every desart. None ever like Rembrandt knew to improve an
accident into a beauty, or give importance to a trifle. If ever he had
a master, he had no followers; Holland was not made to comprehend his
power. The succeeding school of colourists were content to tip the
cottage, the hamlet, the boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and the haze of
winter, with orient hues, or the glow of setting summer suns.
In turning our eye to Switzerland we shall find great powers without
great names, those of Hans Holbein[63] and Francis Mola only excepted.
But the scrupulous precision, the high finish, and the tizianesque
colour of Hans Holbein, make the least part of his excellence for those
who have seen his Designs of the Passion, and that series of emblematic
groups, known under the name of Holbein’s Dance of Death. From Belinzona
to Basle, invention appears to have been the characteristic of Helvetic
art: the works of Tobias Stimmer, Christopher Murer, Jost Amman, Gotthard
Ringgli, are mines of invention, and exhibit a style of design, equally
poised between the emaciated dryness of Albert Durer and the bloated
corpulence of Golzius.
The seeds of mediocrity which the Carracci had attempted to scatter
over Italy, found a more benign soil, and reared an abundant harvest in
France: to mix up a compound from something of every excellence in the
catalogue of art, was the principle of their theory and their aim in
execution. It is in France where Michael Angelo’s right to the title of
a painter was first questioned. The fierceness of his line, as they call
it, the purity of the antique, and the characteristic forms of Raphael,
are only the road to the academic vigour, the librated style of Annibale
Carracci, and from that they appeal to the model; in composition they
consult more the artifice of grouping, contrast and richness, than the
subject or propriety; their expression is dictated by the theatre. From
the uniformity of this process, not to allow that the school of France
offers respectable exceptions, would be unjust; without recurring again
to the name of Nicolas Poussin, the works of Eustache le Sueur[64],
Charles le Brun, Sebastien Bourdon, and sometimes Pierre Mignard, contain
original beauties and rich materials. Le Sueur’s series of pictures in
the Chartreux exhibit the features of contemplative piety, in a purity of
style and a placid breadth of manner that moves the heart. His dignified
martyrdom of St. Laurence and the burning of the magic books at Ephesus,
breathe the spirit of Raphael. The powerful comprehension of a whole,
only equalled by the fire which pervades every part of the battles of
Alexander, by Charles le Brun, would entitle him to the highest rank in
history, had the characters been less mannered, had he not exchanged the
Argyraspids and the Macedonian phalanx for the compact legionaries of
the Trajan pillar; had he distinguished Greeks from barbarians, rather
by national feature and form than by accoutrement and armour. The seven
works of charity by Seb. Bourdon teem with surprising pathetic and always
novel images; and in the plague of David, by Pierre Mignard, our sympathy
is roused by energies of terrour and combinations of woe, which escaped
Poussin and Raphael himself.
The obstinacy of national pride[65], perhaps more than the neglect of
government or the frown of superstition, confined the labours of the
Spanish school, from its obscure origin at Sevilla to its brightest
period, within the narrow limits of individual imitation. But the degree
of perfection attained by Diego Velasquez, Joseph Ribera, and Morillo, in
pursuing the same object by means as different as successful, impresses
us with deep respect for the variety of their powers.
That the great style ever received the homage of Spanish genius, appears
not; neither Alfonso Berruguette, nor Pellegrino Tibaldi, left followers:
but that the eyes and the taste fed by the substance of Spagnuoletto and
Morillo, should without reluctance have submitted to the gay volatility
of Luica Giordano, and the ostentatious flimsiness of Sebastian Conca,
would be matter of surprize, did we not see the same principles
successfully pursued in the platfonds of Antonio Raphael Mengs, the
painter of philosophy, as he is stiled by his biographer D’Azara. The
cartoons of the frescoes painted for the royal palace at Madrid,
representing the apotheosis of Trajan and the temple of Renown, exhibit
less the style of Raphael in the nuptials of Cupid and Psyche at the
Farnesina, than the gorgeous but empty bustle of Pietro da Cortona.
From this view of art on the continent, let us cast a glance on its state
in this country, from the age of Henry VIII. to our own.—From that period
to this, Britain never ceased pouring its caravans of noble and wealthy
pilgrims over Italy, Greece and Ionia, to pay their devotions at the
shrines of virtù and taste: not content with adoring the obscure idols,
they have ransacked their temples, and none returned without some share
in the spoil: in plaister or in marble, on canvas or in gems, the arts
of Greece and Italy were transported to England, and what Petronius said
of Rome, that it was easier to meet there with a god than a man, might
be said of London. Without inquiring into the permanent and accidental
causes of the inefficacy of these efforts with regard to public taste and
support of art, it is observable, that, whilst Francis I. was busied,
not to aggregate a mass of painted and chiselled treasures merely to
gratify his own vanity, and brood over them with sterile avarice, but to
scatter the seeds of taste over France, by calling, employing, enriching
Andrea del Sarto, Rustici, Rosso, Primaticcio, Cellini, Niccolo; in
England, Holbein and Torregiano under Henry, and Federigo Zucchero
under Elizabeth, were condemned to gothic work and portrait painting.
Charles indeed called Rubens and his scholars to provoke the latent
English spark, but the effect was intercepted by his destiny. His son,
in possession of the cartoons of Raphael, and with the magnificence of
Whitehall before his eyes, suffered Verio to contaminate the walls of
his palaces, or degraded Lely to paint the Cymons and Iphigenias of his
court; whilst the manner of Kneller swept completely what yet might be
left of taste, under his successors: such was the equally contemptible
and deplorable state of English art, till the genius of Reynolds first
rescued from the mannered depravation of foreigners his own branch, and
soon extending his view to the higher departments of art, joined that
select body of artists who addressed the ever open ear, ever attentive
mind of our Royal Founder, with the first idea of this establishment.
His beneficence soon gave it a place and a name, his august patronage,
sanction, and individual encouragement: the annually increased merits
of thirty exhibitions in this place, with the collateral ones contrived
by the speculations of commerce, have told the surprising effects:
a mass of self-taught and tutored powers burst upon the general eye,
and unequivocally told the world what might be expected from the
concurrence of public encouragement—how far this have been or may be
granted or withheld, it is not here my province to surmise: the plans
lately adopted and now organizing within these walls for the dignified
propagation and support of art, whether fostered by the great, or left
to their own energy, must soon decide what may be produced by the unison
of British genius and talent, and whether the painters school of that
nation which claims the foremost honours of modern poetry, which has
produced with Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough and Wilson, shall submit
to content themselves with a subordinate place among the schools we have
enumerated.
THIRD LECTURE.
INVENTION.
_PART I._
——ΤΙ Τ’ ΑΡ ΑΥ ΦΘΟΝΕΕΙΣ, ΕΡΗΙΡΟΝ ΑΟΙΔΟΝ
ΤΕΡΠΕΙΝ, ΟΠΠΗ ΟΙ ΝΟΟΣ ΟΡΝΥΤΑΙ; ΟΥ ΝΥ Τ’ ΑΟΙΔΟΙ
ΑΙΤΙΟΙ, ΑΛΛΑ ΠΟΘΙ ΖΕΥΣ ΑΙΤΙΟΣ, ὉΣΤΕ ΔΙΔΩΣΙΝ
ΑΝΔΡΑΣΙΝ ΑΛΦΗΣΤΗΣΙΝ, ΟΠΩΣ ΕΘΕΛΗΣΙΝ ΕΚΑΣΤΩΙ.
Homer. Odyss. A. 346.
ARGUMENT.
Introduction. Discrimination of Poetry and Painting. General idea
of Invention—its right to select a subject from nature itself.
Visiones—Theon—Agasias. Cartoon of Pisa—Incendio del Borgo.
Specific idea of Invention: Epic subjects—Michael Angelo. Dramatic
subjects—Raphael. Historic subjects—Poussin, &c. Invention has a right
to adopt ideas—examples. Duplicity of subject and moment inadmissible.
Transfiguration of Raphael.
THIRD LECTURE.
The brilliant antithesis ascribed to Simonides, that ‘painting is mute
poesy and poetry speaking painting,’ made, I apprehend, no part of the
technic systems of antiquity: for this we may depend on the general
practice of its artists, and still more safely on the philosophic
discrimination of Plutarch[66], who tells us, that as poetry and painting
resemble each other in their uniform address to the senses, for the
impression they mean to make on our fancy and by that on our mind, so
they differ as essentially in their _materials_ and their _modes_ of
application, which are regulated by the diversity of the organs they
address, ear and eye. _Successive action_ communicated by sounds, and
_time_, are the medium of poetry; _form_ displayed in _space_, and
momentaneous energy, are the element of painting.
As, if these premises be true, the distinct representation of continued
action is refused to an art which cannot express even in a series of
subjects, but by a supposed mental effort in the spectator’s mind, the
regular succession of their moments, it becomes evident, that instead of
attempting to impress us by the indiscriminate usurpation of a principle
out of its reach, it ought chiefly to rely for its effect on its great
characteristics space and form, singly or in apposition. In forms alone
the idea of existence can be rendered permanent. Sounds die, words
perish or become obsolete and obscure, even colours fade, forms alone
can neither be extinguished nor misconstrued; by application to their
standard alone description becomes intelligible and distinct. Thus the
effectual idea of corporeal beauty can strictly exist only in the plastic
arts: for as the notion of beauty arises from the pleasure we feel in the
harmonious co-operation of the various parts of some favourite object to
one end at once, it implies their immediate co-existence in the mass they
compose; and therefore can be distinctly perceived and conveyed to the
mind by the eye alone: hence the representation of form in figure is the
_physical_ element of the Art.
But as bodies exist in time as well as in space; as the pleasure
arising from the mere symmetry of an object is as transient as it is
immediate; as harmony of parts, if the body be the agent of an internal
power, depends for its proof on their application, it follows, that the
exclusive exhibition of inert and unemployed form, would be a mistake of
the medium for the end, and that character or action is required to make
it an interesting object of imitation. And this is the _moral_ element of
the art.
Those important moments then which exhibit the united exertion of form
and character in a single object or in participation with collateral
beings, _at once_, and which with equal rapidity and pregnancy give us a
glimpse of the past and lead our eye to what follows, furnish the true
materials of those technic powers, that select, direct, and fix the
objects of imitation to their centre.
The most eminent of these, by the explicit acknowledgment of all ages,
and the silent testimony of every breast, is _invention_. He whose eye
athwart the outward crust of the rock penetrates into the composition of
its materials, and discovers a gold mine, is surely superiour to him who
afterwards adapts the metal for use. Colombo, when he from astronomic and
physical inductions concluded to the existence of land in the opposite
hemisphere, was surely superiour to Amerigo Vespucci who took possession
of its continent; and when Newton improving accident by meditation,
discovered and established the laws of attraction, the projectile and
centrifuge qualities of the system, he gave the clue to all who after him
applied it to the various branches of philosophy, and was in fact the
author of all the benefits accruing from their application to society.
Homer, when he means to give the principal feature of man, calls him
inventor (αλφηστης.)
From what we have said it is clear that the term invention never
ought to be so far misconstrued as to be confounded with that of
_creation_, incompatible with our notions of limited being, an idea of
pure astonishment, and admissible only when we mention Omnipotence:
to _invent_ is to find: to find something, presupposes its existence
somewhere, implicitly or explicitly, scattered or in a mass: nor should I
have presumed to say so much on a word of a meaning so plain, had it not
been, and were it not daily confounded, and by fashionable authorities
too, with the term creation.
Form in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelops our
senses, and its counterpart the invisible one that agitates our mind
with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the element and the realm
of invention; it discovers, selects, combines the _possible_, the
_probable_, the _known_, in a mode that strikes with an air of truth
and novelty, at once. Possible strictly means an effect derived from a
cause, a body composed of materials, a coalition of forms, whose union or
co-agency imply in themselves no absurdity, no contradiction: applied to
our art it takes a wider latitude; it means the representation of effects
derived from causes, or forms compounded from materials, heterogeneous
and incompatible among themselves, but rendered so plausible to our
senses, that the transition of one part to another seems to be accounted
for by an air of organization, and the eye glides imperceptibly or with
satisfaction from one to the other and over the whole: that this was
the condition on which, and the limits within which alone the ancients
permitted invention to represent what was strictly speaking impossible,
we may with plausibility surmise from the picture of Zeuxis, described
by Lucian in the memoir to which he has prefixed that painter’s name,
who was probably one of the first adventurers in this species of
imagery.—Zeuxis had painted a family of centaurs; the dam a beautiful
female to the middle, with the lower parts gradually sliding into the
most exquisite forms of a young Thessalian mare half reclined in playful
repose and gently pawing the velvet ground, offered her human nipple
to one infant centaur, whilst another greedily sucked the ferine udder
below, but both with their eyes turned up to a lyon-whelp held over them
by the male centaur their father, rising above the hillock on which the
female reclined, a grim feature, but whose ferocity was somewhat tempered
by a smile. The scenery, the colour, the chiaroscuro, the finish of the
whole was no doubt equal to the style and the conception. This picture
the artist exhibited, expecting that justice from the penetration of the
public which the genius deserved that taught him to give plausibility to
a compound of heterogeneous forms, to inspire them with suitable soul,
and to imitate the laws of existence: he was mistaken. The novelty of the
conceit eclipsed the art that had embodied it, the artist was absorbed
in his subject, and the unbounded praise bestowed, was that of idle
restless curiosity, gratified. Sick of gods and goddesses, of demigods
and pure human combinations, the Athenians panted only for what was new.
The artist, as haughty as irritable, ordered his picture to be withdrawn;
cover it, Micchio, said he to his attendant, cover it and carry it home,
for this mob stick only to the clay of our art.—Such were the limits
set to invention by the ancients; secure within these, it defied the
ridicule thrown on that grotesque conglutination, which Horace exposes;
guarded by these, their mythology scattered its metamorphoses, made every
element its tributary, and transmitted the privilege to us, on equal
conditions: their Scylla and the Portress of Hell, their dæmons and our
spectres, the shade of Patroclus and the ghost of Hamlet, their naiads,
nymphs, and oreads, and our sylphs, gnomes, and fairies, their furies and
our witches, differ less in essence, than in local, temporary, social
modifications: their common origin was fancy, operating on the materials
of nature, assisted by legendary tradition and the curiosity implanted in
us of diving into the invisible[67]; and they are suffered or invited to
mix with or superintend real agency, in proportion of the analogy which
we discover between them and ourselves. Pindar praises Homer less for
that ‘winged power’ which whirls incident on incident with such rapidity,
that absorbed by the whole, and drawn from the impossibility of single
parts, we swallow a tale too gross to be believed in a dream; than for
the greater power by which he contrived to connect his imaginary creation
with the realities of nature and human passions[68]; without this the
fiction of the poet and the painter will leave us stupified rather by its
insolence than impressed by its power, it will be considered only as a
superior kind of legerdemain, an exertion of ingenuity to no adequate end.
Before we proceed to the process and the methods of invention, it is
not superfluous to advert to a question which has often been made, and
by some has been answered in the negative; _whether it be within the
artist’s province or not, to find or to combine a subject from himself,
without having recourse to tradition or the stores of history and
poetry?_ Why not, if the subject be within the limits of art and the
combinations of nature, though it should have escaped observation?
shall the immediate avenues of the mind, open to all its observers,
from the poet to the novelist, be shut only to the artist? shall he be
reduced to receive as alms from them what he has a right to share as
common property? assertions like these, say in other words, that the
Laocoon owes the impression he makes on us to his name alone, and that
if tradition had not told a story and Pliny fixed it to that work, the
artist’s conception of a father with his sons, surprised and entangled
by two serpents within the recesses of a cavern or lonesome dell, was
inadmissible and transgressed the laws of invention. I am much mistaken,
if, so far from losing its power over us with its traditional sanction,
it would not rouse our sympathy more forcibly, and press the subject
closer to our breast, were it considered only as the representation of
an incident common to humanity. The ancients were so convinced of their
right to this disputed prerogative that they assigned it its own class,
and Theon the Samian is mentioned by Quintilian, whom none will accuse
or suspect of confounding the limits of the arts, in his list of primary
painters, as owing his celebrity to that intuition into the sudden
movements of nature, which the Greeks called φαντασιας, the Romans
_visiones_, and we might circumscribe by the phrase of ‘unpremeditated
conceptions’ the reproduction of associated ideas; he explains what he
understood by it in the following passage adapted to his own profession,
rhetoric.[69] ‘We give,’ says he, ‘the name of visions to what the Greeks
call phantasies; that power by which the images of absent things are
represented by the mind with the energy of objects moving before our
eyes: he who conceives these rightly will be a master of passions; his
is that well-tempered fancy which can imagine things, voices, acts, as
they really exist, a power perhaps in a great measure dependent on our
will. For if these images so pursue us, when our minds are in a state of
rest, or fondly fed by hope, or in a kind of waking dream; that we seem
to travel, to sail, to fight, to harangue in public, or to dispose of
riches we possess not, and all this with an air of reality, why should we
not turn to use this vice of the mind?—Suppose I am to plead the case of
a murdered man, why should not every supposable circumstance of the act
float before my eyes? shall I not see the murderer unawares rush in upon
him? in vain he tries to escape—see how pale he turns—hear you not his
shrieks, his entreaties? do you not see him flying, struck, falling? will
not his blood, his ashy semblance, his groans, his last expiring gasp,
seize on my mind?’
Permit me to apply this organ of the orator for one moment to the
poet’s process: by this radiant recollection of associated ideas, the
spontaneous ebullitions of nature, selected by observation, treasured
by memory, classed by sensibility and judgment, Shakspeare became the
supreme master of passions and the ruler of our hearts; this embodied
his Falstaff and his Shylock, Hamlet and Lear, Juliet and Rosalind. By
this power he saw Warwick uncover the corpse of Gloster, and swear to his
assassination and his tugs for life; by this he made Banquo see the weird
sisters bubble up from earth, and in their own air vanish; this is the
hand that struck upon the bell when Macbeth’s drink was ready, and from
her chamber pushed his dreaming wife, once more to methodize the murder
of her guest.—
And this was the power of Theon[70]; such was the unpremeditated
conception that inspired him with the idea of that warriour, who in the
words of Ælian, seemed to embody the terrible graces and the enthusiastic
furor of the god of war. Impetuous he rushed onward to oppose the sudden
incursion of enemies; with shield thrown forward and high brandished
faulchion, his step as he swept on, seemed to devour the ground: his
eye flashed defiance; you fancied to hear his voice, his look denounce
perdition and slaughter without mercy. This figure, single and without
other accompaniments of war than what the havock of the distance shewed,
Theon deemed sufficient to answer the impression he intended to make on
those whom he had selected to inspect it. He kept it covered, till a
trumpet, prepared for the purpose, after a prelude of martial symphonies,
at once, by his command, blew with invigourated fierceness, a signal
of attack—the curtain dropped, the terrific figure appeared to start
from the canvass, and irresistibly assailed the astonished eyes of the
assembly.
To prove the relation of Ælian no hyperbolic legend, I need not insist
on the magic effect which the union of two sister powers must produce on
the senses: of what our art alone and unassisted may perform, the most
unequivocal proof exists within these walls; your eyes, your feelings,
and your fancy have long anticipated it: whose mind has not now recalled
that wonder of a figure, the misnomed gladiator of Agasias, a figure
whose tremendous energy embodies every element of motion, whilst its
pathetic dignity of character enforces sympathies, which the undisguised
ferocity of Theon’s warriour in vain solicits. But the same irradiation
which shewed the soldier to Theon, shewed to Agasias the leader: Theon
saw the passion, Agasias[71] its rule.
But the most striking instance of the eminent place due to this
intuitive faculty among the principal organs of invention, is that
celebrated performance, which by the united testimony of cotemporary
writers, and the evident traces of its imitation, scattered over the
works of cotemporary artists, contributed alone more to the restoration
of art and the revolution of style, than the united effort of the two
centuries that preceded it: I mean the astonishing design commonly
called the cartoon of Pisa, the work of Michael Agnolo Buonarrotti, begun
in competition with Lionardo da Vinci, and at intervals finished at
Florence. This work, whose celebrity subjected those who had not seen it
to the supercilious contempt of the luckier ones who had; which was the
common centre of attraction to all the students of Tuscany and Romagna,
from Raphael Sanzio to Bastian da St. Gallo, called Aristotile, from
his loquacious descants on its beauties; this inestimable work itself
is lost, and its destruction is with too much appearance of truth fixed
on the mean villany of Baccio Bandinelli, who, in possession of the key
to the apartment where it was kept, during the revolutionary troubles
of the Florentine republic, after making what use he thought proper of
it, is said to have torn it in pieces. Still we may form an idea of
its principal groups from some ancient prints and drawings; and of its
composition from a small copy now existing at Holkham, the outlines of
which have been lately etched. Crude, disguised, or feeble, as these
specimens are, they will prove better guides than the half-informed
rhapsodies of Vasari, the meagre account of Ascanio Condivi, better than
the mere anatomic verdict of Benvenuto Cellini, who denies that the
powers afterward exerted in the Capella Sistina, arrive at ‘half its
excellence.’[72]
It represents an imaginary moment relative to the war carried on by the
Florentines against Pisa: and exhibits a numerous group of warriours,
roused from their bathing in the Arno, by the sudden signal of a trumpet
and rushing to arms. This composition may without exaggeration be said to
personify with unexampled variety that motion, which Agasias and Theon
embodied in single figures: in imagining this transient moment from a
state of relaxation to a state of energy, the ideas of motion, to use the
bold figure of Dante, seem to have showered into the artist’s mind. From
the chief, nearly placed in the centre, who precedes, and whose voice
accompanies the trumpet, every age of human agility, every attitude,
every feature of alarm, haste, hurry, exertion, eagerness, burst into
so many rays, like sparks flying from the hammer. Many have reached,
some boldly step, some have leaped on the rocky shore; here two arms
emerging from the water grapple with the rock, there two hands cry for
help, and their companions bend over or rush on to assist them; often
imitated, but inimitable is the ardent feature of the grim veteran whose
every sinew labours to force over the dripping limbs his cloaths, whilst
gnashing he pushes the foot through the rending garment. He is contrasted
by the slender elegance of a half averted youth, who, though eagerly
buckling the armour to his thigh, methodizes haste; another swings the
high-raised hauberk on his shoulder, whilst one who seems a leader,
mindless of dress, ready for combat, and with brandished spear, overturns
a third, who crouched to grasp a weapon—one naked himself buckles on
the mail of his companion, and he, turned toward the enemy, seems to
stamp impatiently the ground.—Experience and rage, old vigour, young
velocity, expanded or contracted, vie in exertions of energy. Yet in this
scene of tumult one motive animates the whole, eagerness to engage with
subordination to command; this preserves the dignity of action, and from
a straggling rabble changes the figures to men whose legitimate contest
interests our wishes.
This intuition into the pure emanations of nature, Raphael Sanzio
possessed in the most enviable degree, from the utmost conflict of
passions, to the enchanting round of gentler emotion, and the nearly
silent hints of mind and character. To this he devoted the tremendous
scenery of that magnificent fresco, known to you all under the name
of the _Incendio del Borgo_, in which he sacrificed the historic and
mystic part of his subject to the effusion of the various passions
roused by the sudden terrours of nocturnal conflagration. It is not for
the faint appearance of the miracle which approaches with the pontiff
and his train in the back-ground, that Raphael invites our eyes; the
perturbation, necessity, hope, fear, danger, the pangs and efforts of
affection grappling with the enraged elements of wind and fire, displayed
on the fore-ground, furnish the pathetic motives that press on our
hearts. That mother, who but half awake or rather in a waking trance,
drives her children instinctively before her; that prostrate female half
covered by her streaming hair, with elevated arms imploring heaven;
that other who over the flaming tenement, heedless of her own danger,
absorbed in maternal agony, boldly reaches over to drop the babe into the
outstretched arms of its father; that common son of nature, who careless
of another’s woe, intent only on his own safety, librates a leap from the
burning wall; the vigorous youth who followed by an aged mother bears the
palsied father on his shoulder from the rushing wreck; the nimble grace
of those helpless females that vainly strive to administer relief—these
are the real objects of the painter’s aim, and leave the pontiff and the
miracle, with taper, bell and clergy—unheeded in the distance.
I shall not at present expatiate in tracing from this source the novel
combinations of affection by which Raphael contrived to interest us in
his numerous repetitions of Madonnas and holy Families, selected from
the warmest effusions of domestic endearment, or in Milton’s phrase,
from ‘all the charities of father, son, and mother.’ Nor shall I follow
it in its more contaminated descent, to those representations of local
manners and national modifications of society, whose characteristic
discrimination and humorous exuberance, for instance, we admire in
Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passions of the day, every hour
contributes something to obliterate, which soon become unintelligible
by time, or degenerate into caricature, the chronicle of scandal, the
history-book of the vulgar.
Invention in its more specific sense receives its subjects from poetry
or authenticated tradition; they are _epic_ or sublime, _dramatic_
or impassioned, _historic_ or circumscribed by truth. The first
_astonishes_; the second _moves_; the third _informs_.
The aim of the epic painter is to impress one general idea, one great
quality of nature or mode of society, some great maxim, without
descending to those subdivisions, which the detail of character
prescribes: he paints the elements with their own simplicity, height,
depth, the vast, the grand, darkness, light; life, death; the past,
the future; man, pity, love, joy, fear, terrour, peace, war, religion,
government: and the visible agents are only engines to force _one_
irresistible idea upon the mind and fancy, as the machinery of
Archimedes served only to convey _destruction_, and the wheels of a watch
serve only to tell _time_.
Such is the first and general sense of what is called the _sublime_,
epic, allegoric, lyric substance. Homer, to impress one forcible idea of
_war_, its origin, its progress, and its end, set to work innumerable
engines of various magnitude, yet none but what uniformly tends to
enforce this and only this idea; gods and demigods are only actors, and
nature but the scene of war; no character is discriminated but where
discrimination discovers a new look of war; no passion is raised but what
is blown up by the breath of war, and as soon absorbed in its universal
blaze:—As in a conflagration we see turrets, spires, and temples
illuminated only to propagate the honours of destruction, so through the
stormy page of Homer, we see his heroines and heroes, but by the light
that blasts them.
This is the principle of that divine series of frescoes, with which under
the pontificates of Julius II. and Paul III. Michael Angelo adorned the
lofty compartments of the _Capella Sistina_, and from a modesty or a
pride for ever to be lamented, only not occupied the _whole_ of its ample
sides. Its subject is _theocracy_ or the empire of religion, considered
as the parent and queen of man; the origin, the progress, and final
dispensation of Providence, as taught by the sacred records. Amid this
imagery of primeval simplicity, whose sole object is the relation of the
race to its Founder, to look for minute discrimination of character,
is to invert the principle of the artist’s invention: here is only God
with man. The veil of eternity is rent; time, space, and matter teem
in the creation of the elements and of earth; life issues from God and
adoration from man, in the creation of Adam and his mate; transgression
of the precept at the tree of knowledge proves the origin of evil, and
of expulsion from the immediate intercourse with God; the œconomy of
justice and grace commences in the revolutions of the deluge, and the
covenant made with Noah; and the germs of social character are traced
in the subsequent scene between him and his sons; the awful synod of
prophets and sibyls are the heralds of the Redeemer, and the host of
patriarchs the pedigree of the Son of Man; the brazen serpent and the
fall of Haman, the giant subdued by the stripling in Goliah and David,
and the conquerour destroyed by female weakness in Judith, are types of
his mysterious progress, till Jonah pronounces him immortal; and the
magnificence of the last judgment by shewing the Saviour in the judge of
man, sums up the whole, and reunites the founder and the race.
Such is the spirit of the Sistine chapel, and the outline of its
_general_ invention, with regard to the cycle of its subjects—as in
their choice they lead to each other without intermediate chasms in the
transition; as each preceding one prepares and directs the conduct of the
next, this the following; and as the intrinsic variety of all, conspires
to the simplicity of one great end. The _specific_ invention of the
pictures separate, as each constitutes an independent whole, deserves our
consideration next: each has its centre, from which it disseminates, to
which it leads back all secondary points; arranged, hid, or displayed, as
they are more or less organs of the inspiring plan: each rigorously is
circumscribed by its generic character, no inferiour merely conventional,
temporary, local, or disparate beauty, however in itself alluring, is
admitted; each finally turns upon that transient moment, the moment of
suspense, big with the past, and pregnant with the future; the action
no where expires, for action and interest terminate together. Thus in
the creation of Adam, the Creator borne on a group of attendant spirits,
the personified powers of omnipotence, moves on toward his last, best
work, the lord of his creation: the immortal spark, issuing from his
extended arm, electrifies the new-formed being, who tremblingly alive,
half raised half reclined, hastens to meet his Maker. In the formation of
Eve the astonishment of life, just organised, is absorbed in the sublimer
sentiment of adoration; perfect, though not all disengaged from the side
of her dreaming mate, she moves with folded hands and humble dignity
towards the majestic Form whose half raised hand attracts her—what
words can express the equally bland and irresistible velocity of that
mysterious Being, who forms the sun and moon, and already past, leaves
the earth, compleatly formed, behind him? Here apposition is the symbol
of immensity.[73]
From these specimens of invention exerted in the more numerous
compositions of this _sublime_ cycle, let me fix your attention for a few
moments on the powers it displays in the single figures of the Prophets,
those organs of embodied sentiment: their expression and attitude,
whilst it exhibits the unequivocal marks of inspired contemplation in
all; and with equal variety, energy, and delicacy, stamps character on
each; exhibits in the occupation of the present moment the traces of
the past and hints of the future. Esaiah, the image of _inspiration_,
sublime and lofty, with an attitude expressive of the sacred trance
in which meditation on the Messiah had immersed him, starts at the
voice of an attendant genius, who seems to pronounce the words, ‘to us
a child is born, to us a son is given.’ Daniel, the humbler image of
eager _diligence_, transcribes from a volume held by a stripling, with a
gesture natural to those who, absorbed in the progress of their subject,
are heedless of convenience; his posture shews that he had inspected the
volume from which now he is turned, and shall return to it immediately.
Zachariah personifies _consideration_, he has read, and ponders on what
he reads. _Inquiry_ moves in the dignified activity of Joel; hastening
to open a sacred scrowl, and to compare the scriptures with each other.
Ezechiel, the fervid feature of _fancy_, the seer of resurrection,
represented as on the field strewn with bones of the dead, points
downward and asks, ‘can these bones live?’ the attendant angel, borne on
the wind that agitates his locks and the prophet’s vestments, with raised
arm and finger, pronounces, they shall rise; last, Jeremiah, subdued by
_grief_ and exhausted by lamentation, sinks in silent woe over the ruins
of Jerusalem. Nor are the sibyls, those female oracles, less expressive,
less individually marked—they are the echo, the counterpart of the
prophets; Vigilance, Meditation, Instruction, Divination are personified.
If the artist, who absorbed by the uniform power and magnitude of
execution, saw only breadth and nature in their figures, must be told
that he has discovered the least part of their excellence; the critic who
charges them with affectation, can only be dismissed with our contempt.
On the immense plain of the last judgment, Michael Angelo has wound
up the destiny of man, simply considered as the subject of religion,
faithful or rebellious; and in one generic manner has distributed
happiness and misery, the general feature of passions is given, and
no more.—But had Raphael meditated that subject, he would undoubtedly
have applied to our sympathies for his choice of imagery; he would have
combined all possible emotions with the utmost variety of probable
or real character: a father meeting his son, a mother torn from her
daughter, lovers flying into each others arms, friends for ever
separated, children accusing their parents, enemies reconciled; tyrants
dragged before the tribunal by their subjects, conquerors hiding
themselves from their victims of carnage; innocence declared, hypocrisy
unmasked, atheism confounded, detected fraud, triumphant resignation; the
most prominent features of connubial, fraternal, kindred connexion.—In
a word, the heads of that infinite variety which Dante has minutely
scattered over his poem—all domestic, politic, religious relations;
whatever is not local in virtue and in vice: and the sublimity of the
greatest of all events, would have been merely the minister of sympathies
and passions[74].
If opinions be divided on the respective advantages and disadvantages of
these two modes; if to some it should appear, though from consideration
of the plan which guided Michael Angelo, I am far from subscribing to
their notions, that the scenery of the last judgment, might have gained
more by the dramatic introduction of varied pathos, than it would
have lost by the dereliction of its generic simplicity: there can,
I believe, be but one opinion with regard to the methods adopted by
him and Raphael in the invention of the moment that characterises the
creation of Eve: both artists applied for it to their own minds, but
with very different success: the elevation of Michael Angelo’s soul,
inspired by the operation of creation itself, furnished him at once with
the feature that stamps on human nature its most glorious prerogative:
whilst the characteristic subtilty, rather than sensibility of Raphael’s
mind, in this instance, offered nothing but a frigid succedaneum; a
symptom incident to all, when after the subsided astonishment on a
great and sudden event, the mind recollecting itself, ponders on it
with inquisitive surmise. In Michael Angelo, all self-consideration is
absorbed in the sublimity of the sentiment which issues from the august
Presence that attracts Eve; ‘her earthly,’ in Milton’s expression,
‘by his heavenly overpowered,’ pours itself in _adoration_: whilst in
the inimitable cast of Adam’s figure, we trace the hint of that half
conscious moment when sleep began to give way to the vivacity of the
dream inspired. In Raphael, creation is complete—Eve is presented to
Adam, now awake: but neither the new-born charms, the submissive grace
and virgin purity of the beauteous image; nor the awful presence of her
Introductor, draw him from his mental trance into effusions of love or
gratitude; at ease reclined, with fingers pointing at himself and his new
mate, he seems to methodize the surprising event that took place during
his sleep, and to whisper the words ‘flesh of my flesh.’
Thus, but far better adapted, has Raphael personified _Dialogue_, moved
the lips of _Soliloquy_, unbent or wrinkled the features, and arranged
the limbs and gesture of _Meditation_, in the pictures of the Parnassus
and of the school of Athens, parts of the immense allegoric drama that
fills the stanzas, and displays the brightest ornament of the Vatican;
the immortal monument of the towering ambition, unlimited patronage,
and refined taste of Julius II. and Leo X., its cycle represents the
origin, the progress, extent, and final triumph of _church empire_, or
ecclesiastic government; in the first subject, of the Parnassus, Poetry
led back to its origin and first duty, the herald and interpreter of
a first Cause, in the universal language of imagery addressed to the
senses, unites man, scattered and savage, in social and religious bands.
What was the surmise of the eye and the wish of hearts, is gradually
made the result of reason, in the characters of the school of Athens, by
the researches of philosophy, which from bodies to mind, from corporeal
harmony to moral fitness, and from the duties of society, ascends to
the doctrine of God and hopes of immortality. Here revelation in its
stricter sense commences, and conjecture becomes a glorious reality:
in the composition of the dispute on the sacrament, the Saviour after
ascension seated on his throne, the attested son of God and Man,
surrounded by his types, the prophets, patriarchs, apostles and the
hosts of heaven, institutes the mysteries and initiates in his sacrament
the heads and presbyters of the church militant, who in the awful
presence of their Master and the celestial synod, discuss, explain,
propound his doctrine. That the sacred mystery shall clear all doubt
and subdue all heresy, is taught in the miracle of the blood-stained
wafer; that without arms, by the arm of Heaven itself, it shall release
its votaries, and defeat its enemies, the deliverance of Peter, the
overthrow of Heliodorus, the flight of Attila, the captive Saracens, bear
testimony; that nature itself shall submit to its power and the elements
obey its mandates, the checked conflagration of the Borgo, declares:
till hastening to its ultimate triumphs, its union with the state, it
is proclaimed by the vision of Constantine, confirmed by the rout of
Maxentius, established by the imperial pupils receiving baptism, and
submitting to accept his crown at the feet of the mitred pontiff.
Such is the rapid outline of the cycle painted or designed by Raphael
on the compartments of the stanzas sacred to his name. Here is the
mass of his powers in poetic conception and execution, here is every
period of his style, his emancipation from the narrow shackles of Pietro
Perugino, his discriminations of characteristic form, on to the heroic
grandeur of his line. Here is that master-tone of fresco painting, the
real instrument of history, which with its silver purity and breadth
unites the glow of Titiano and Correggio’s tints. Every where we meet the
superiority of genius, but more or less impressive, with more or less
felicity in proportion as each subject was more or less susceptible of
dramatic treatment. From the bland enthusiasm of the Parnassus, and the
sedate or eager features of meditation in the school of Athens, to the
sterner traits of dogmatic controversy in the dispute of the sacrament,
and the symptoms of religious conviction or inflamed zeal at the mass of
Bolsena. Not the miracle, as we have observed, the fears and terrours
of humanity inspire and seize us at the conflagration of the Borgo: if
in the Heliodorus the sublimity of the vision balances sympathy with
astonishment, we follow the rapid ministers of grace to their revenge,
less to rescue the temple from the gripe of sacrilege, than inspired by
the palpitating graces, the helpless innocence, the defenceless beauty
of the females and children scattered around; and thus we forget the
vision of the labarum, the angels and Constantine in the battle, to
plunge in the wave with Maxentius, or to share the agonies of the father
who recognizes his own son in the enemy he slew.
With what propriety Raphael introduced portrait, though in its most
dignified and elevated sense, into some compositions of the great work
which we are contemplating, I shall not now discuss; the allegoric part
of the work may account for it: he has, however, by its admission,
stamped that branch of painting at once with its essential feature,
character, and has assigned it its place and rank: ennobled by character,
it rises to dramatic dignity, destitute of that, it sinks to mere
mechanic dexterity, or floats, a bubble of fashion. Portrait is to
historic painting in art, what physiognomy is to pathognomy in science;
_that_ shews the character and powers of the being which it delineates,
in its formation and at rest: _this_ shews it in exertion. Bembo,
Bramante, Dante, Gonzaga, Savonarola, Raphael himself may be considered
in the inferior light of mere characteristic ornament; but Julius the
second authenticating the miracle at the mass of Bolsena, or borne into
the temple, rather to authorize than to witness the punishment inflicted
on its spoiler; Leo with his train calmly facing Attila, or deciding on
his tribunal the fate of the captive Saracens, tell us by their presence
that they are the heroes of the drama, that the action has been contrived
for them, is subordinate to them, and has been composed to illustrate
their character. For as in the epic, act and agent are subordinate to
the maxim, and in pure history are mere organs of the fact; so the drama
subordinates both fact and maxim to the agent, his character and passion:
what in them was end is but the medium here.
Such were the principles on which he treated the beautiful tale of Amor
and Psyche: the allegory of Apuleius became a drama under the hand
of Raphael, though it must be owned, that with every charm of scenic
gradation and lyric imagery, its characters, as exquisitely chosen as
acutely discriminated, exhibit less the obstacles and real object of
affection, and its final triumph over mere appetite and sexual instinct,
than the voluptuous history of his own favourite passion. The faint light
of the maxim vanishes in the splendour which expands before our fancy
the enchanted circle of wanton dalliance and amorous attachment.
But the power of Raphael’s invention exerts itself chiefly in subjects
where the drama, divested of epic or allegoric fiction, meets pure
history, and elevates, invigourates, impresses the pregnant moment of
a _real_ fact, with character and pathos: The summit of these is that
magnificent series of coloured designs commonly called the cartoons, so
well known to you all, part of which we happily possess; formerly when
complete and united, and now, in the copies of the tapestry annually
exhibited in the colonnade of the Vatican, they represent in thirteen
compositions the origin, sanction, œconomy and progress of the Christian
religion. In whatever light we consider their invention, as parts of _one
whole_ relative to each other, or independent _each of the rest_, and as
single subjects, there can be scarcely named a beauty or a mystery of
which the cartoons furnish not an instance or a clue; they are poised
between perspicuity and pregnancy of moment; we shall have opportunities
to speak of all or the greater part of them, but that of Paul on the
areopagus, will furnish us at present with conclusions for the remainder.
It represents the Apostle announcing his God from the height of the
areopagus. Enthusiasm and curiosity make up the subject; simplicity of
attitude invests the speaker with sublimity; the parallelism of his
action invigorates his energy; situation gives him command over the
whole; the light in which he is placed, attracts the first glance; he
appears the organ of a superior Power. The assembly, though selected
with characteristic art for the purpose, are the natural offspring of
place and moment. The involved meditation of the Stoic, the Cynic’s
ironic sneer, the incredulous smile of the elegant Epicurean, the eager
disputants of the Academy, the elevated attention of Plato’s school, the
rankling malice of the Rabbi, the Magician’s mysterious glance, repeat
in louder or in lower tones the novel doctrine; but whilst curiosity and
meditation, loud debate and fixed prejudice, tell, ponder on, repeat,
reject, discuss it, the animated gesture of conviction in Dionysius and
Damaris, announce the power of its tenets, and hint the established
belief of _immortality_.
But the powers of Raphael in combining the drama with pure historic fact,
are best estimated when compared with those exerted by other masters on
the same subject. For this we select from the series we examine that
which represented the massacre, as it is called, of the innocents, or of
the infants at Bethlem; an original, precious part of which still remains
in the possession of a friend of art among us. On this subject Baccio
Bandinelli, Tintoretto, Rubens, Le Brun, and Poussin, have tried their
various powers.
The massacre of the infants by Baccio Bandinelli, contrived chiefly to
exhibit his anatomic skill, is a complicated tableau of every contorsion
of human attitude and limbs that precedes dislocation; the expression
floats between a studied imagery of frigid horrour and loathsome
abomination.
The stormy brush of Tintoretto swept individual woe away in general
masses. Two immense wings of light and shade divide the composition, and
hide the want of sentiment in tumult.
To Rubens magnificence and contrast dictated the actors and the scene. A
loud lamenting dame, in velvet robes, with golden locks dishevelled, and
wide extended arms, meets our first glance. Behind, a group of steel-clad
satellites open their rows of spears to admit the nimble, naked ministers
of murder, charged with their infant prey, within their ranks, ready
to close again against the frantic mothers who pursue them: the pompous
gloom of the palace in the middle ground is set off by cottages and
village scenery in the distance.
Le Brun surrounded the allegoric tomb of Rachel with rapid horsemen,
receiving the children whom the assassins tore from their parents arms,
and strewed the field with infant-slaughter.
Poussin tied in one vigorous group what he conceived of blood-trained
villany and maternal frenzy. Whilst Raphael, in dramatic gradation,
disclosed all the mother through every image of pity and of terrour;
through tears, shrieks, resistance, revenge, to the stunned look of
despair; and traced the villain from the palpitations of scarce initiated
crime to the sedate grin of veteran murder.
History, strictly so called, follows the drama: fiction now ceases, and
invention consists only in selecting and fixing with dignity, precision,
and sentiment, the moments of _reality_. Suppose that the artist choose
the death of Germanicus—He is not to give us the highest images of
_general_ grief which impresses the features of a people or a family at
the death of a beloved chief or father; for this would be epic imagery:
we should have Achilles, Hector, Niobe. He is not to mix up characters
which observation and comparison have pointed out to him as the fittest
to excite the gradations of sympathy; not Admetus and Alceste, not
Meleager and Atalanta; for this would be the drama. He is to give us the
idea of a Roman dying amidst Romans, as tradition gave him, with all the
real modifications of time and place, which may serve unequivocally to
discriminate that moment of grief from all others. Germanicus, Agrippina,
Caius, Vitellius, the legates, the centurions at Antioch; the hero, the
husband, the father, the friend, the leader, the struggles of nature
and sparks of hope must be subjected to the phisiognomic character and
the features of Germanicus, the son of Drusus, the Cæsar of Tiberius.
Maternal, female, connubial passion must be tinged by Agrippina, the
woman absorbed in the Roman, less lover than companion of her husband’s
grandeur: even the bursts of friendship, attachment, allegiance, and
revenge, must be stamped by the military, ceremonial, and distinctive
costume of Rome.
The judicious observation of all this does not reduce the historic
painter to the anxiously minute detail of a copyist. Firm he rests
on the true basis of art, imitation: the fixed character of things
determines all in his choice, and mere floating accident, transient modes
and whims of fashion, are still excluded. If defects, if deformities
are represented, they must be permanent, they must be inherent in the
character. Edward the first and Richard the third must be marked, but
marked, to strengthen rather than to diminish the interest we take in
the man; thus the deformity of Richard will add to his terrour, and the
enormous stride of Edward to his dignity. If my limits permitted, your
own recollection would dispense me from expatiating in examples on this
more familiar branch of invention. The history of our own times and of
our own country has produced a specimen, in the death of a military hero,
as excellent as often imitated, which, though respect forbids me to name
it, cannot, I trust, be absent from your mind.
Such are the stricter outlines of general and specific invention in the
three principal branches of our art; but as their near alliance allows
not always a strict discrimination of their limits; as the mind and
fancy of men, upon the whole, consist of mixed qualities, we seldom meet
with a human performance exclusively made up of epic, dramatic, or pure
historic materials.
Novelty and feelings will make the rigid historian sometimes launch out
into the marvellous, or warm his bosom and extort a tear; the dramatist,
in gazing at some tremendous feature, or the pomp of superiour agency,
will drop the chain of sympathy and be absorbed in the sublime; whilst
the epic or lyric painter forgets his solitary grandeur, sometimes
descends and mixes with his agents. Thus Homer gave the feature of the
drama in Hector and Andromache, in Irus and Ulysses; the spirit from the
prison house stalks like the shade of Ajax, in Shakspeare; the daughter
of Soranus pleading for her father, and Octavia encircled by centurions,
melt like Ophelia and Alceste, in Tacitus; thus Raphael personified the
genius of the river in Joshua’s passage through the Jordan, and again at
the ceremony of Solomon’s inauguration; and thus Poussin raised before
the scared eye of Coriolanus, the frowning vision of Rome, all armed,
with her attendant, Fortune.
These general excursions from one province of the art into those of its
congenial neighbours, granted by judicious invention to the artist, let
me apply to the grant of a more specific licence[75]: Horace, the most
judicious of critics, when treating on the use of poetic words, tells his
pupils, that the adoption of an old word, rendered novel by a skilful
construction with others, will entitle the poet to the praise of original
diction. The same will be granted to the judicious adoption of figures in
art.
Far from impairing the originality of invention, the unpremeditated
discovery of an appropriate attitude or figure in the works of antiquity,
or of the great old masters after the revival, and its adoption, or
the apt transposition of one misplaced in some inferiour work, will
add lustre to a performance of commensurate or superiour power, by a
kind coalition with the rest, immediately furnished by nature and the
subject. In such a case it is easily discovered whether a subject have
been chosen merely to borrow an idea, an attitude or figure, or whether
their eminent fitness procured them their place. An adopted idea or
figure in a work of genius is a foil or a companion of the rest; but
an idea of genius borrowed by mediocrity, tears all associate shreds,
it is the giant’s thumb by which the pigmy offered the measure of his
own littleness. We stamp the plagiary on the borrower, who, without fit
materials or adequate conceptions of his own, seeks to shelter impotence
under purloined vigour; we leave him with the full praise of invention,
who by the harmony of a whole proves that what he adopted might have
been his own offspring though anticipated by another. If he take now,
he soon may give. Thus Michael Angelo scattered the Torso of Apollonius
in every view, in every direction, in groups and single figures, over
the composition of the last judgment; and in the Lunetta of Judith and
her maid gave an original turn to figures adopted from the gem of Pier
Maria da Pescia: if the figure of Adam dismissed from Paradise, by
Raphael, still own Masaccio for its inventor, he can scarcely be said to
have furnished more than the hint of that enthusiasm and energy which
we admire in Paul on the areopagus: in the picture of the covenant with
Noah, the sublimity of the vision, and the graces of the mother entangled
by her babes, find their originals in the Sistine chapel, but they are
equalled by the fervour which conceived the Patriarch who, with the
infant pressed to his bosom, with folded hands, and prostrate on his
knees, adores. What figure or what gesture in the cartoon of Pisa, has
not been imitated? Raphael, Parmegiano, Poussin, are equally indebted to
it; in the sacrament of baptism, the last did little more than transcribe
that knot of powers, the fierce feature of the veteran who, eager to pull
on his cloaths, pushes his foot through the rending garment.—Such are the
indulgences which invention grants to fancy, taste, and judgment.
But a limited fragment of observations must not presume to exhaust what
in itself is inexhaustible; the features of invention are multiplied
before me as my powers decrease: I shall therefore no longer trespass on
your patience, than by fixing your attention for a few moments on one
of its boldest flights, the transfiguration of Raphael; a performance
equally celebrated and censured; in which the most judicious of
inventors, the painter of propriety, is said to have not only wrestled
for extent of information with the historian, but attempted to leap the
boundaries, and, with a less discriminating than daring hand, to remove
the established limits of the art, to have arbitrarily combined two
actions, and consequently two different moments.
Were this charge founded, I might content myself with observing, that the
transfiguration, more than any other of Raphael’s oil-pictures, was a
public performance, destined by Julio de Medici, afterward Clement VII.
for his archiepiscopal church at Narbonne; that it was painted in contest
with Sebastian del Piombo, assisted in his rival-picture of Lazarus
by Michael Angelo; and thus, considering it as framed on the simple
principles of the monumental style, established in my first discourse, on
the pictures of Polygnotus at Delphi, I might frame a plausible excuse
for the modern artist; but Raphael is above the assistance of subterfuge,
and it is sufficient to examine the picture, in order to prove the
futility of the charge. Raphael has connected with the transfiguration
not the _cure_ of the maniac, but his _presentation for it_; if,
according to the[76] Gospel record, this happened at the foot of the
mountain, whilst the apparition took place at the top, what improbability
is there in assigning the _same moment_ to both?
Raphael’s design was to represent Jesus as the Son of God, and at the
same time as the reliever of human misery, by an unequivocal fact.
The transfiguration on Tabor, and the miraculous cure which followed
the descent of Jesus, united, furnished that fact. The difficulty was
how to combine two successive actions in one moment: he overcame it by
sacrificing the moment of the cure to that of the apparition, by implying
the lesser miracle in the greater. In subordinating the cure to the
vision he obtained sublimity, in placing the crowd and the patient on the
fore-ground, he gained room for the full exertion of his dramatic powers;
it was not necessary that the dæmoniac should be represented in the
moment of recovery, if its certainty could be expressed by other means:
it is implied, it is placed beyond all doubt by the glorious apparition
above; it is made nearly intuitive by the uplifted hand and finger of
the apostle in the centre, who without hesitation, undismayed by the
obstinacy of the dæmon, unmoved by the clamour of the crowd and the
pusillanimous scepticism of some of his companions, refers the father of
the maniac in an authoritative manner for certain and speedy help to his
master[77] on the mountain above, whom, though unseen, his attitude at
once connects with all that passes below; here is the point of contact,
here is that union of the two parts of the fact in one moment, which
Richardson and Falconet could not discover.
FOURTH LECTURE.
INVENTION.
_PART II._
ΦΘΟΝΕΡΑ Δ’ ΑΛΛΟΣ ἈΝΗΡ ΒΛΕΠΩΝ,
ΓΝΩΜΑΝ ΚΕΝΕΑΝ ΣΚΟΤΩΙ ΚΥΛΙΝΔΕΙ
ΧΑΜΑΙΠΕΤΟΙΣΑΝ.
ΠΙΝΔΑΡ. ΝΕΜ. ΕΙΔ. Δ.
ARGUMENT.
Choice of subjects; divided into positive, negative,
repulsive.—Observations on the Parerga, or Accessories of Invention.
FOURTH LECTURE.
The imitation of Nature, as it presents itself in space and figure,
being the real sphere of plastic Invention, it follows, that whatever
can occupy a place and be circumscribed by lines, characterised by
form, substantiated by colour and light and shade, without provoking
incredulity, shocking our conception by absurdity, averting our eye by
loathsomeness or horrour, is strictly within its province: but though
all Nature seem to teem with objects of imitation, the ‘Choice’ of
subjects is a point of great importance to the Artist; the conception,
the progress, the finish, and the success of his work depend upon it. An
apt and advantageous subject rouses and elevates Invention, invigourates,
promotes, and adds delight to labour; whilst a dull or repulsive one
breeds obstacles at every step, dejects and wearies—the Artist loses his
labour, the spectator his expectation.
The first demand on every work of art is that it constitute one whole,
that it fully pronounce its own meaning, that it tell itself; it
ought to be independent; the essential part of its subject ought to
be comprehended and understood without collateral assistance, without
borrowing its commentary from the historian or the poet; for as we are
soon wearied with a poem whose fable and motives reach us only by the
borrowed light of annexed notes, so we turn our eye discontented from a
picture or a statue whose meaning depends on the charity of a Cicerone,
or must be fetched from a book.
As the condition that each work of art should fully and essentially tell
its own tale, undoubtedly narrows the quantity of admissible objects,
singly taken, to remedy this, to enlarge the range of subjects, Invention
has contrived by a Cyclus or series to tell the most important moments of
a long story, its beginning, its middle, and its end: for though some of
these may not, in themselves, admit of distinct discrimination, they may
receive and impart light by connection.
Of him who undertakes thus to personify a tale, the first demand is,
that his Invention dwell on the firm basis of the story, on its most
important and significant moments, or its principal actors. Next, as the
nature of the art which is confined to the apparition of single moments
forces him to leap many intermediate ones, he cannot be said to have
invented with propriety, if he neglect imperceptibly to fill the chasm
occasioned by their omission; and, finally, that he shall not interrupt
or lose the leading thread of his plan in quest of episodes, in the
display of subordinate or adventitious beauties. On the observation of
these rules depends the perspicuity of his work, the interest we take
in it, and, consequently, all that can be gained by the adoption of a
historic series.
When form, colour, with conception and execution, are deducted from a
work, its subject, the unwrought stuff only, the naked materials remain,
and these we divide into three classes.
The first are positive, advantageous, commensurate with and adapted
for the art. The whole of the work lies prepared in their germ, and
spontaneously meets the rearing hand of the Artist.
The second class, composed of subjects negative and uninteresting in
themselves, depends entirely on the manner of treating; such subjects
owe what they can be to the genius of the Artist.
The repulsive, the subjects which cannot pronounce their own meaning,
constitute the third class. On them genius and talent are equally
wasted, because the art has no medium to render them intelligible. Taste
and execution may recommend them to our eye, but never can make them
generally impressive, or stamp them with perspicuity.
To begin with advantageous subjects, immediately above the scenes of
vulgar life, of animals, and common landscape, the simple representation
of actions purely human, appears to be as nearly related to the art as
to ourselves; their effect is immediate; they want no explanation; from
them, therefore, we begin our scale. The next step leads us to pure
historic subjects, singly or in a series; beyond these the delineation
of character, or, properly speaking, the drama, invites; immediately
above this we place the epic with its mythologic, allegoric, and symbolic
branches.
On these four branches of Invention, as I have treated diffusely in the
lecture published on this subject, and since successively in these
prelections, I shall not at present circumstantially dwell, but as
succinctly as possible remind you only of their specific difference and
elements.
The first class, which, without much boldness of metaphor, may be said
to draw its substance immediately from the lap of Nature, to be as
elemental as her emotions, and the passions by which she sways us, finds
its echo in all hearts, and imparts its charm to every eye; from the
mutual caresses of maternal affection and infant simplicity, the whispers
of love or eruptions of jealousy and revenge, to the terrours of life,
struggling with danger, or grappling with death. The Madonnas of Raphael;
the Ugolino, the Paolo and Francesca of Dante; the conflagration of the
Borgo; the Niobe protecting her daughter; Hæmon piercing his own breast,
with Antigone hanging dead from his arm[78], owe the sympathies they
call forth to their assimilating power, and not to the names they bear:
without names, without reference to time and place, they would impress
with equal energy, because they find their counterpart in every breast,
and speak the language of mankind. Such were the Phantasiae of the
ancients, which modern art, by indiscriminate laxity of application, in
what is called Fancy-Pictures, has more debased than imitated. A mother’s
and a lover’s kiss acquire their value from the lips they press, and
suffering deformity mingles disgust with pity.
Historic Invention administers to truth. History, as contradistinguished
from arbitrary or poetic narration, tells us not what might be, but what
is or was; circumscribes the probable, the grand, and the pathetic, with
truth of time, place, custom; gives “local habitation and a name:” its
agents are the pure organs of a fact. Historic plans, when sufficiently
distinct to be told, and founded on the basis of human nature, have that
prerogative over mere natural imagery, that whilst they bespeak our
sympathy, they interest our intellect. We were pleased with the former
as men, we are attracted by this as members of society: bound round with
public and private connections and duties, taught curiosity by education,
we wish to regulate our conduct by comparisons of analogous situations
and similar modes of society: these History furnishes; transplants
us into other times; empires and revolutions of empires pass before
us with memorable facts and actors in their train, the legislator,
the philosopher, the discoverer, the polishers of life, the warriour,
the divine, are the principal inhabitants of this soil: it is perhaps
unnecessary to add, that nothing trivial, nothing grovelling or mean,
should be suffered to approach it. This is the department of Tacitus
and Poussin. The exhibition of character in the conflict of passions
with the rights, the rules, the prejudices of society, is the legitimate
sphere of dramatic invention. It inspires, it agitates us by reflected
self-love, with pity, terrour, hope, and fear; whatever makes events, and
time and place, the ministers of character and pathos, let fiction or
reality compose the tissue, is its legitimate claim: it distinguishes and
raises itself above historic representation by laying the chief interest
on the _actors_, and moulding the _fact_ into mere situations contrived
for their exhibition: they are the end, this the medium. Such is the
invention of Sophocles and Shakspeare, and uniformly that of Raphael. The
actors, who in Poussin and the rest of historic painters, shine by the
splendour of the fact, reflect it in Raphael with unborrowed rays: they
are the luminous object to which the action points.
Of the epic plan, the loftiest species of human conception, the aim is to
astonish whilst it instructs; it is the sublime allegory of a maxim. Here
Invention arranges a plan by general ideas, the selection of the most
prominent features of Nature, or favourable modes of society, visibly to
substantiate some great maxim. If it admits history for its basis, it
hides the limits in its grandeur; if it select characters to conduct its
plan, it is only in the genus, their features reflect, their passions
are kindled by the maxim, and absorbed in its universal blaze: at this
elevation heaven and earth mingle their boundaries, men are raised to
demigods, and gods descend. This is the sphere of Homer, Phidias, and
Michael Agnolo.
Allegory, or the personification of invisible physic and metaphysic
ideas, though not banished from the regions of Invention, is equally
inadmissible in pure epic, dramatic, and historic plans, because,
wherever it enters, it must rule the whole.[79] It rules with propriety
the mystic drama of the Vatican, where the characters displayed are only
the varied instruments of a mystery by which the church was established,
and Julio and Leone are the allegoric image, the representatives of that
church; but the epic, dramatic, and historic painter embellish with
poetry or delineate with truth, what either was or is supposed to be
real; they must therefore conduct their plans by personal and substantial
agency, if they mean to excite that credibility, without which it is not
in their power to create an interest in the spectator or the reader.
That great principle, the necessity of a moral tendency or of some
doctrine useful to mankind in the _whole_ of an epic performance,
admitted, are we therefore to sacrifice the uniformity of its parts,
and thus to lose that credibility which _alone_ can impress us with the
importance of the maxim that dictated to the poet narration and to the
artist imagery? Are the agents sometimes to be real beings, and sometimes
abstract ideas? Is the Zeus of Homer, of whose almighty will the bard,
at the very threshold of his poem, proclaims himself only the herald,
by the purblind acuteness of a commentator, to be turned into Æther;
and Juno, just arriving from her celestial toilet, changed into air, to
procure from their mystic embraces the allegoric offspring of vernal
impregnation? When Minerva, by her weight, makes the chariot of Diomede
groan, and Mars wounded, roars with the voice of ten thousand, are they
nothing but the symbol of military discipline, and the sound of the
battle’s roar? or Ate, seized by her hair, and by Zeus dashed from the
battlements of heaven, is she only a metaphysic idea? Forbid it, Sense!
As well might we say, that Milton, when he called the porteress of hell,
Satan’s daughter, _Sin_, and his son and dread antagonist, _Death_, meant
only to impress us with ideas of privation and nonentity, and sacrificed
the real agents of his poem to an unskilful choice of names? Yet it
is their name that has bewildered his commentator and biographer in
criticisms equally cold, repugnant and incongruous, on the admissibility
and inadmissibility of allegory in poems of supposed reality. What
becomes of the interest the poet and the artist mean to excite in us, if,
in the moment of reading or contemplating, we do not believe what the one
tells and the other shews? It is that magic which places on the same
basis of existence, and amalgamates the mythic or superhuman, and the
human parts of the Ilias, of Paradise Lost, and of the Sistine chapel,
that enraptures, agitates, and whirls us along as readers or spectators.
When Poussin represented Coriolanus in the Volscian camp, he placed
before him in suppliant attitudes his mother, wife, and children, with a
train of Roman matrons kneeling, and behind them the erect and frowning
form of an armed female, accompanied by another with streaming hair,
recumbent on a wheel. On these two, unseen to all else, Coriolanus,
perplexed in the extreme, in an attitude of despair, his sword half
drawn, as if to slay himself, fixes his scared eyes: who discovers
not that he is in a trance, and in the female warriour recognises the
tutelary genius of Rome, and her attendant Fortune, to terrify him into
compliance? Shall we disgrace with the frigid conceit of an allegory the
powerful invention which disclosed to the painter’s eye the agitation in
the Roman’s breast and the proper moment for fiction? Who is not struck
by the sublimity of a vision which, without diminishing the credibility
of the fact, adds to its importance, and raises the hero, by making him
submit not to the impulse of private ties, but to the imperious destiny
of his country?
Among the paltry subterfuges contrived by dullness to palliate the want
of invention, the laborious pedantry of emblems ranks foremost, by which
arbitrary and conventional signs have been substituted for character and
expression. If the assertion of S. Johnson, that the plastic arts ‘can
illustrate, but cannot inform,’ be false as a general maxim, it gains
an air of truth with regard to this hieroglyphic mode of exchanging
substance for signs; and the story which he adds in proof, of a young
girl’s mistaking the usual figure of Justice with a steel-yard for a
cherry-woman, becomes here appropriate. The child had seen many stall
and market-women, and always with a steel-yard or a pair of scales, but
never a figure of Justice; and it might as well be pretended that one not
initiated in the Egyptian mysteries, should discover in the Scarabæus of
an obelisk the summer solstice, as that a child, a girl, or a man not
acquainted with Cæsar Ripa, or some other emblem-coyner, should find in a
female holding a balance over her eyes, in another with a bridle in her
hand, in a third leaning on a broken pillar, and in a fourth loaded with
children, the symbols of Justice, Temperance, Fortitude and Charity. If
these signs be at all admissible, they ought, at least, to receive as
much light from the form, the character, and expression of the figures
they accompany, as they reflect on them, else they become burlesque,
instead of being attributes. Though this rage for emblem did not become
epidemic before the lapse of the sixteenth century, when the Cavalieri of
the art, the Zucchari, Vasari and Porta’s undertook to deliver more work
than their brains could furnish with thought, yet even the philosophers
of the art, in the classic days of Julio and Leo, cannot be said to have
been entirely free from it. What analogy is there between an ostrich at
the side of a female with a balance in her hand, and the idea of Justice?
Yet thus has Raphael represented her in a stanza of the Vatican. Nor has
he been constant to the same emblem, as on the ceiling of another stanza,
he has introduced her with a scale, and armed with a sword. The _Night_
of M. Agnolo, on the Medicean tombs, might certainly be taken for what
she professes to be, without the assistance of the mask, the poppies,
and the owl at her feet, for the dominion of sleep is personified in
her expression and posture: perhaps even her beautiful companion, whose
faintly stretching attitude and half-opened eyes, express the symptoms
of approaching _morn_, might be conceived for its representative[80];
but no stretch of fancy can, in their male associates, reach the symbols
of _full day_ and _eve_, or in the females of the monument of Julio II.
the ideas of _contemplative_ and _active life_.
To means so arbitrary, confused and precarious, the ancients never
descended: their general ideas had an uniform and general typus, which
invention never presumed to alter or to transgress; but this typus lay
less in the attributes than in the character and form. The inverted
torch and moon-flower were the accompaniments, and not the substitutes,
of _Death_ and _Sleep_; neither _Psyche_ nor _Victory_ depended on her
wings. Mercury was recognized without the caduceus or purse, and Apollo
without his bow or lyre; various and similar, the branches of one family,
their leading lines descended from that full type of majesty which
Phidias, the architect of gods, had stamped on his Jupiter. Whether we
ought to consider the son of Charmidas as the inventor or the regulator
of this supreme and irremovable standard, matters not, from _him_ the
ancient writers date the epoch of mythic invention; no revolutions of
style changed the character of his forms, talent only polished with more
or less success what his laws had established. Phidias, says Quintilian,
was framed to form gods; Phidias, says Pliny, gave in his Jupiter a new
motive to religion.
Whether or not, after the restoration of art, the Supreme Being, the
eternal essence of incomprehensible perfection, ought ever to have been
approached by the feeble efforts of human conception, it is not my office
to discuss, perhaps it ought not—but since it has, as the Roman church
has embodied divine substance, and called on our arts for an auxiliary,
it was to be expected that, to make assistance effectual, a full type,
a supreme standard of form, should have been established for the author
and the agents of the sacred circle: but, be it from the tyranny of
religious barbarians, or inability, or to avoid the imputation of copying
each other, painters and sculptors, widely differing among themselves
in the conception of divine or sainted form and character, agree in
nothing but attributes and symbols: triangular glories, angelic ministry
and minstrelsy, the colours of the drapery; the cross, the spear, the
stigmata; the descending dove; in implements of ecclesiastic power or
instruments of martyrdom.
The Biblic expression, as it is translated, ‘of the Ancient of
Days’—which means ‘He that existed before time,’ furnished the primitive
artists, instead of an image of supreme majesty, only with the hoary
image of age: and such a figure borne along by a globe of angels, and
crowned with a kind of episcopal mitre, recurs on the bronzes of Lorenzo
Ghiberti. The sublime mind of M. Agnolo, soaring beyond the idea of
decrepitude and puny formality, strove to form a type in the elemental
energy of the Creator of Adam, and darted life from His extended hand,
but in the Creator of Eve sunk again to the idea of age. Raphael strove
to compound a form from M. Angelo and his predecessors, to combine energy
and rapidity with age: in the Loggia he follows M. Agnolo, in the Stanza
the prior artists; here his gods are affable and mild, there rapid, and
perhaps more violent than energetic. After these two great names, it were
profanation to name the attempts of their successors.
The same fluctuation perplexes the effigy of the Saviour. Lionardo da
Vinci attempted to unite power with calm serenity, but in the Last Supper
alone presses on our hearts by humanity of countenance. The Infant Christ
of M. Agnolo is a superhuman conception, but as Man and Redeemer with his
cross, in the Minerva, he is a figure as mannered in form and attitude,
as averting by stern severity; and, as the Judge of Mankind in the Last
Judgment, he seems to me as unworthy of the artist’s mind as of his
master-hand. The Christs of Raphael, as infants, are seldom more than
lovely children; as a man, the painter has poised His form between church
tradition and the dignified mildness of his own character.
Two extremes appear to have co-operated to impede the establishment of
a type in the formation of the Saviour: by one He is converted into a
character of mythology, the other debases Him to the dregs of mankind.
‘The character corresponding with that of Christ,’ says Mengs[81], ‘ought
to be a compound of the characters of Jupiter and of Apollo, allowing
only for the accidental expression of the moment.’ What magic shall
amalgamate the superhuman airs of Rhea’s and Latona’s sons, with patience
in suffering and resignation? The critic in his exultation forgot the
leading feature of his Master—condescending humility. In the race of
Jupiter majesty is often tempered by emanations of beauty and of grace,
but never softened to warm humanity. Here lies the knot:
The Saviour of mankind extending his arm to relieve, without visible
means, the afflicted, the hopeless, the dying, the dead, is a subject
that visits with awe the breast of every one who calls himself after His
name; the artist is in the sphere of adoration.
An exalted sage descending to every beneficent office of humanity,
instructing ignorance, not only forgiving but excusing outrage, pressing
his enemy to his breast, commands the sympathy of every man, though he be
no believer; the artist is in the sphere of sentiment.
But a mean man, marked with the features of a mean race, surrounded by
a beggarly, ill-shaped rabble and stupid crowds—may be mistaken for a
juggler, that claims the attention of no man. Of this let Art beware.
From these observations on positive we now proceed to the class of
_negative_ subjects. Negative we call those which in themselves possess
little that is significant, historically true or attractive, pathetic or
sublime, which leave our heart and fancy listless and in apathy, though
by the art with which they are executed they allure and retain the eye:
here, if ever, the artist creates his own work, in raising, by ingenious
combination, that to a positive subject which in its parts is none, or
merely passive.
The first rank among these claims that mystic class of monumental
pictures, allusive to mysteries of religion and religious institutions,
asylums, charities; or votive pictures of those who dedicate offerings
of gratitude for life saved or happiness conferred: in these the male
and female patrons of such creeds, societies and persons, prophets,
apostles, saints, warriours and doctors, with and without the donor or
the suppliant, combine in apposition or groups, and are suffered to flank
each other without incurring the indignation due to Anachronism, as they
are always placed in the presence of the Divine Being, before whom the
distance of epochs, place, and races; the customs, dress, and habits of
different nations, are supposed to vanish; and the present, past, and
future to exist in the same moment.
These, which the simplicity of primitive art dismissed without more
invention than elevating the Madonna with the infant Saviour, and
arranging the saints and suppliants in formal parallels beneath, the
genius of greater masters often, though not always, transformed to organs
of sublimity, or connected in an assemblage of interesting and highly
pleasing groups, by inventing a congruous action or scenery, which spread
warmth over a subject that, simply considered, threatened to freeze the
beholder. Let us give an instance.
The Madonna, called Dell’ Impannato by Raphael, is one of these: it is so
called because he introduced, in the back-ground, the old Italian linen
or paper window. Maria is represented standing or raising herself to
offer the Infant to St. Elizabeth, who stretches out her arms to receive
him. Mary Magdalen behind, and bending over her, points to St. John, and
caresses the child; he with infantine joy escapes from her touch, and
looking at her, leaps up to his mother’s neck. St. John, as the principal
figure, is placed in the fore-ground on a leopard’s skin, and with
raised hand seems to prophesy of Christ; he appears to have eight or ten
years, Christ scarcely two. At this anachronism, or the much bolder one
committed in the admission of M. Magdalen, who was probably younger than
Christ, those only will be shocked who have not considered the nature of
a votive picture: this was dedicated to St. John, as the tutelary saint
of Florence, and before it was transferred to the Pitti Gallery, was the
altar-piece in a domestic chapel of the Medicean family.[82]
The greater part of this audience are acquainted, some are familiar
with the celebrated painting of Correggio, formerly treasured in the
Pilotta of Parma; transported to the Louvre and again replaced. In
the invention of this work, which exhibits St. Jerome, to whom it was
dedicated, presenting his translation of the Scriptures, by the hand of
an angel, to the infant seated in the lap of the Madonna, the patron
of the piece, is sacrificed in place to the female and angelic group
which occupies the middle. The figure that chiefly attracts, has, by
its suavity, for centuries, attracted, and still absorbs the general
eye, is that charming one of the Magdalen, in a half kneeling, half
recumbent posture, pressing the foot of Jesus to her lips. By doing
this, the painter has, undoubtedly, offered to the Graces the boldest
and most enamoured sacrifice which they ever received from art. He has
been rewarded, accordingly, for the impropriety of her usurping the first
glance which ought to fix itself on the Divinity, and the Saint vanishes
in the amorous gaze on her charms. If the Magdalen has long possessed the
right of being present where the Madonna presides, she ought to assist
the purpose of the picture in subordinate entreaty; her action should
have been that of supplication; as it is, it is the effusion of fondling,
unmixed love.
The true medium between dry apposition and exuberant contrast, appears to
have been kept by Titian, in an altar-piece of the Franciscans, or Frari,
in spite of French selection, still at Venice; and of which the simple
grandeur has been balanced by Reynolds against the artificial splendour
of Rubens in a similar subject. It probably was what it represents, the
thanks-offering of a noble family, for some victory obtained, or conquest
made in the Morea. The heads of the family, male and female, presented
by St. Francis, occupy the two wings of the composition, kneeling, and
with hands joined in prayer, in attitudes nearly parallel. Elevated in
the centre, St. Peter stands at the altar, between two columns, his hand
in the Gospel-book, the keys before him, addressing the suppliants.
Above him, to the right, appears the Madonna, holding the infant, and
with benign countenance, seems to sanction the ceremony. Two stripling
cherubs on an airy cloud, right over the centre, rear the cross; an armed
warriour with the standard of victory, and behind him a turbaned Turk or
Moor, approach from the left and round the whole.
Such is the invention of a work, which, whilst it fills the mind, refuses
utterance to words; of which it is difficult to say, whether it subdue
more by simplicity, command by dignity, persuade by propriety, assuage by
repose, or charm by contrast. A great part of these groups consists of
portraits in habiliments of the time, deep, vivid, brilliant; but all are
completely subject to the tone of gravity that emanates from the centre,
a sacred silence enwraps the whole; all gleams and nothing flashes.
Steady to his purpose, and penetrated by his motive, though brooding over
every part of his work, the artist appears no where.[83]
Next to this higher class of negative subjects, though much lower, may
be placed the magnificence of ornamental painting, the pompous machinery
of Paolo Veronese, Pietro da Cortona, and Rubens. Splendour, contrast,
and profusion, are the springs of its invention. The painter, not the
story, is the principal subject here. Dazzled by piles of Palladian
architecture, tables set out with regal luxury, terrasses of plate,
crowds of Venetian nobles, pages, dwarfs, gold-collared Moors, and choirs
of vocal and instrumental music, embrowned and tuned by meridian skies,
what eye has time to discover, in the brilliant chaos, the visit of
Christ to Simon the Pharisee, or the sober nuptials of Canah? but when
the charm dissolves, though avowedly wonders of disposition, colour, and
unlimited powers of all-grasping execution, if considered in any other
light than as the luxurious trappings of ostentatious wealth, judgment
must pronounce them ominous pledges of irreclaimable depravity of taste,
glittering masses of portentous incongruities and colossal baubles.
The next place to representation of pomp among negative subjects, but far
below, we assign to Portrait. Not that characteristic portrait by which
Silanion, in the face of Apollodorus, personified habitual indignation;
Apelles in Alexander superhuman ambition; Raphael in Julio the IId.
pontifical fierceness; Titian in Paul IIId. testy age with priestly
subtlety; and in Machiavelli and Cæsar Borgia the wily features of
conspiracy and treason.—Not that portrait by which Rubens contrasted the
physiognomy of philosophic and classic acuteness with that of genius in
the conversation-piece of Grotius, Meursius, Lipsius, and himself; not
the nice and delicate discriminations of Vandyk, nor that power which,
in our days, substantiated humour in Sterne, comedy in Garrick, and
mental and corporeal strife, to use his own words, in Samuel Johnson. On
that broad basis, portrait takes its exalted place between history and
the drama. The portrait I mean is that common one as widely spread as
confined in its principle; the remembrancer of insignificance, mere human
resemblance, in attitude without action, features without meaning, dress
without drapery, and situation without propriety. The aim of the artist
and the sitter’s wish are confined to external likeness; that deeper,
nobler aim, the personification of character, is neither required, nor,
if obtained, recognised. The better artist, condemned to this task, can
here only distinguish himself from his duller brother by execution, by
invoking the assistance of back-ground, chiaroscuro and picturesque
effects, and thus, sometimes produces a work which delights the eye and
leaves us, whilst we lament the misapplication, with a strong impression
of his power; him we see, not the insignificant individual that usurps
the centre, one we never saw, care not if we never see, and if we do,
remember not, for his head can personify nothing but his opulence or his
pretence; it is furniture.
If any branch of art be once debased to a mere article of fashionable
furniture, it will seldom elevate itself above the taste and the caprice
of the owner, or the dictates of fashion; for its success depends on
both; and though there be not a bauble thrown by the sportive hand of
fashion which taste may not catch to advantage, it will seldom be allowed
to do it, if fashion dictate the mode. Since liberty and commerce have
more levelled the ranks of society, and more equally diffused opulence,
private importance has been increased, family connections and attachments
have been more numerously formed, and hence portrait painting, which
formerly was the exclusive property of princes, or a tribute to beauty,
prowess, genius, talent, and distinguished character, is now become a
kind of family calendar, engrossed by the mutual charities of parents,
children, brothers, nephews, cousins, and relatives of all colours.
To portrait painting, thus circumstanced, we subjoin, as the last branch
of uninteresting subjects, that kind of landscape which is entirely
occupied with the tame delineation of a given spot; an enumeration of
hill and dale, clumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and
houses, what is commonly called Views. These, if not assisted by nature,
dictated by taste, or chosen for character, may delight the owner
of the acres they enclose, the inhabitants of the spot, perhaps the
antiquary or the traveller, but to every other eye they are little more
than topography. The landscape of Titian, of Mola, of Salvator, of the
Poussins, Claude, Rubens, Elzheimer, Rembrandt and Wilson, spurns all
relation with this kind of mapwork. To them nature disclosed her bosom in
the varied light of rising, meridian, setting suns; in twilight, night
and dawn. Height, depth, solitude, strike, terrify, absorb, bewilder in
their scenery. We tread on classic or romantic ground, or wander through
the characteristic groups of rich congenial objects. The usual choice of
the Dutch school, which frequently exhibits no more than the transcript
of a spot, borders, indeed, nearer on the negative kind of landscape;
but imitation will not be entitled to the pleasure we receive, or the
admiration we bestow, on their genial works, till it has learnt to
give an air of choice to necessity, to imitate their hues, spread their
masses, and to rival the touch of their pencil.
Subjects which cannot, in their whole compass, be brought before the eye,
which appeal for the best part of their meaning, to the erudition of the
spectator, and the refinements of sentimental enthusiasm, seem equally
to defy the powers of invention. The labour of disentangling the former,
dissolves the momentary magic of the first impression, and leaves us
cold: the second evaporates under the grosser touch of sensual art. It
may be more than doubted whether the resignation of Alcestis can ever be
made intuitive; the pathos of the story consists in the heroic resolution
of Alcestis to save her husband’s life by resigning her own. Now the
art can shew no more than Alcestis dying: the cause of her death, her
elevation of mind, the disinterested heroism of her resolution to die,
are beyond its power.
Raffaelle’s celebrated donation of the keys to St. Peter in the cartoon
before us, as ineffectually struggles with more than the irremovable
obscurity, with the ambiguity of the subject: a numerous group of
grave and devout characters, in attitudes of anxious debate and eager
curiosity, press forward to witness the behests of a person who, with one
hand, seems to have consigned two massy keys to their foremost companion
on his knees, and with the other hand points to a flock of sheep,
grazing behind. What associating power can find the connexion between
those keys and the pasturing herd? or discover in an obtrusive allegory
the only real motive of the emotions that inspire the apostolic group?
the artist’s most determined admirer, if not the slave of pontifical
authority, ready to transubstantiate whatever comes before him, must
confine his homage to the power that interests us in a composition
without a subject.
Poussin’s extolled picture of the testament of Eudamidas is another
proof of the inefficacy to represent the enthusiasm of sentiment by the
efforts of art. The figures have simplicity, the expression energy,
it is well composed, in short, it possesses every requisite but that
which alone could make it what it pretends to be:—you see an elderly
man on his death-bed; a physician, pensive, with his hand on the man’s
breast, his wife and daughter desolate at the foot of the bed; one, who
resembles a notary, eagerly writing; a buckler and a lance on the wall;
and the simple implements of the scene, tell us the former occupation
and the circumstances of Eudamidas—but his legacy—the secure reliance on
the friend to whom he bequeaths his daughter—the noble acceptance and
magnanimity of that friend, these we ought to see, and seek in vain for
them; what is represented in the picture may be as well applied to any
other man who died, made a will, and left a daughter and a wife, as to
the Corinthian Eudamidas.
This is not the only instance in which Poussin has mistaken erudition and
detail of circumstances for evidence. The exposition of Infant Moses on
the Nile, is a picture as much celebrated as the former: a woman shoves
a child placed in a basket from the shore. A man mournfully pensive
walks off followed by a boy who turns towards the woman and connects
the groups; a girl in the back-ground, points to a distance, where we
discover the Egyptian princess, and thus anticipate the fate of the
child. The statue of a river god recumbent on the sphinx, a town with
lofty temples, pyramids and obelisks tell Memphis and the Nile; and
smoaking brick-kilns still nearer allude to the servitude and toil of
Israel in Egypt: not one circumstance is omitted that could contribute to
explain the meaning of the whole; but the repulsive subject completely
baffled the painter’s endeavour to shew the _real_ motive of the action.
We cannot penetrate the _cause_ that forces these people to expose the
child on the river, and hence our sympathy and participation languish,
we turn from a subject that gives us danger without fear, to admire the
expression of the parts, the classic elegance, the harmony of colours,
the mastery of execution.
* * * * *
The importance of some secondary points of invention, of scenery,
back-ground, drapery, ornament, is frequently such, that, independent
of the want of more essential parts, if possessed in a very eminent
degree, they have singly raised from insignificance to esteem, names
that had few other rights to consideration; and neglected, in spite of
superiour comprehension, in the choice or conception of a subject, in
defiance of style and perhaps of colour, of expression, and sometimes
composition, often have left little but apathy to the contemplation of
works produced by men of superiour grasp and essential excellence. Fewer
would admire Poussin were he deprived of his scenery, though I shall
not assert with Mengs, that in his works the subject is more frequently
the appendix than the principle of the back-ground; what right could
the greater part of Andrea del Sarto’s historic compositions claim to
our attention, if deprived of the parallelism, the repose and space
in which his figures are arranged, or the ample draperies that invest
them, and hide with solemn simplicity their vulgarity of character and
limbs: it often requires no inconsiderable degree of mental power and
technic discrimination to separate the sublimity of Michael Agnolo, and
the pathos of Raffaelle from the total neglect or the incongruities
of scenery and back-ground, which frequently involve or clog their
conceptions, to add by fancy the place on which their figures ought
to stand, the horizon that ought to elevate or surround them, and the
masses of light and shade indolently neglected or sacrificed to higher
principles. How deeply the importance of scenery and situation, with
their proper degree of finish, were felt by Tiziano, before and after
his emancipation from the shackles of Giov. Bellino, every work of his
during the course of nearly a centenary practice proves: to select two
from all, the Martyrdom of the Dominican Peter, that summary of his
accumulated powers, and the presentation of the Virgin, one of his first
historic essays, owe, if not all, their greatest effect, to scenery:
loftiness and solitude of site, assist the sublimity of the descending
vision to consecrate the actors beyond what their characters and style
of limbs could claim, and render the first an object of submissive
admiration, whilst its simple grandeur renders the second one of
cheerful and indulgent acquiescence; and reconciles us to a detail of
portrait-painting, and the impropriety of associating domestic and vulgar
imagery with a consecrated subject.
It is for these reasons that the importance of scenery and back-ground
has been so much insisted on by Reynolds; who frequently declared, that
whatever preparatory assistance he might admit in the draperies or other
parts of his figures, he always made it a point to keep the arrangement
of the scenery, the disposition and ultimate finish of the back-ground to
himself.
By the choice and scenery of the back-ground we are frequently enabled to
judge how far a painter entered into his subject, whether he understood
its nature, to what class it belonged, what impression it was capable
of making, what passion it was calculated to rouse: the sedate, the
solemn, the severe, the awful, the terrible, the sublime, the placid, the
solitary, the pleasing, the gay, are stamped by it. Sometimes it ought
to be negative, entirely subordinate, receding or shrinking into itself,
sometimes more positive, it acts, invigourates, assists the subject,
and claims attention; sometimes its forms, sometimes its colour ought to
command.—A subject in itself bordering on the usual or common, may become
sublime or pathetic by the back-ground alone, and a sublime or pathetic
one may become trivial and uninteresting by it: a female leaning her
head on her hand on a rock might easily suggest itself to any painter
of portrait, but the means of making this figure interesting to those
who are not concerned in the likeness, were not to be picked from the
mixtures of the palette, Reynolds found the secret in contrasting the
tranquillity and repose of the person by a tempestuous sea and a stormy
shore in the distance; and in another female contemplating a tremulous
sea by a placid moonlight, he connected elegance with sympathy and desire.
Whatever connects the individual with the elements, whether by abrupt or
imperceptible means, is an instrument of sublimity, as, whatever connects
it in the same manner with, or tears it from the species, may become an
organ of pathos: in this discrimination lies the rule by which our art,
to astonish or move, ought to choose the scenery of its subjects. It
is not by the accumulation of infernal or magic machinery, distinctly
seen, by the introduction of Hecate and a chorus of female dæmons and
witches, by surrounding him with successive apparitions at once, and a
range of shadows moving above or before him, that Macbeth can be made an
object of terrour,—to render him so you must place him on a ridge, his
down-dashed eye absorbed by the murky abyss; surround the horrid vision
with darkness, exclude its limits, and shear its light to glimpses.
This art of giving to the principal figure the command of the horizon,
is perhaps the only principle by which modern art might have gained
an advantage over that of the antients, and improved the dignity of
composition, had it been steadily pursued by its great restorers, the
painters of Julio II. and Leone X. though we find it more attended to in
the monumental imagery of the Capella Sistina, than in the Stanze and the
cartoons of Raffaello, which being oftener pathetic or intellectual than
sublime, suffered less by neglecting it.
The same principle which has developed in the cone, the form generally
most proper for composing a single figure or a group, contains the reason
why the principal figure or group should be the most elevated object of
a composition, and locally command the accidents of scenery and place.
The Apollo of Belvedere, singly or in a group, was surely not composed
to move at the bottom of a valley, nor the Zeus of Phidias to be covered
with a roof.
The improprieties attendant on the neglect of this principle are,
perhaps, in no work of eminence more offensively evident than in the
celebrated resuscitation of Lazarus by Sebastian del Piombo, whose
composition, if composition it deserve to be called, seems to have been
dictated by the back-ground. It usurps the first glance; it partly
buries, every where throngs, and in the most important place squeezes
the subject into a corner. The horizon is at the top, Jesus, Maria, and
Lazarus at the bottom of the scene. Though its plan and groups recede
in diminished forms, they advance in glaring opaque colour, nor can it
avail in excuse of the artist, to say that the multitude of figures
admitted are characters chosen to shew in different modes of expression
the effect of the miracle, whilst their number gives celebrity to it and
discriminates it from the obscure trick of a juggler: all this, if it had
been done, though perhaps it has not, for by far the greater part are not
spectators, might have been done with subordination: the most authentic
proof of the reality of the miracle ought to have beamed from the
countenance of Him who performed it, and of the restored man’s sister.—In
every work something must be first, something last; that is essential,
this optional; that is present by its own right, this by courtesy and
convenience.[84]
The rival picture of the resuscitation of Lazarus, the Transfiguration of
Christ by Raffaello, avoids the inconvenience of indiscriminate crowding,
and the impertinent _luxuriance_ of scenery which we have censured, by
the artifice of escaping from what is strictly called back-ground, and
excluding it altogether: the action on the fore-ground is the basis
and Christ the apex of the cone, and what they might have suffered
from diminution of size is compensated by elevation and splendour. In
sacrificing to this principle the rules of a perspective which he was so
well acquainted with, Raffaello succeeded to unite the beginning, the
middle, and the end of the event which he represented in one moment; he
escaped every atom of common-place or unnecessary embellishment, with a
simplicity and so artless an air, that few but the dull, the petulant,
and the pedant, can refuse him their assent, admiration and sympathy; if
he has not, strictly speaking, embodied possibility, he has perhaps done
more, he has done what Homer did, by hiding the unmanageable but less
essential part of his materials, he has transformed it to probability.
I have said that by the choice of scenery alone, we may often, if not
always, judge how far an artist has penetrated his subject, what emotion
in treating it he meant to excite. No subjects can elucidate this with
so much perspicuity, as those generally distinguished by the name of
Madonnas: subjects stamped with a mystery of religion, and originally
contrived under the bland images of maternal fondness to subdue the
heart. In examining the considerable number of those by Raffaello, we
find generally some reciprocal feature of filial and parental love,
‘the charities of father, son, and mother,’ sometimes varied by infant
play and female caresses, sometimes dignified by celestial ministry and
homage; the endearments of the nursery selected and embodied by forms
more charming than exalted, less beautiful than genial—accordingly the
choice of scenery consists seldom in more than a pleasing accompaniment:
the flower and the shrub, the rivulet and grove, enamel the seat or
embower the repose of the sacred pilgrims under the serenity of a placid
sky, expanded or breaking through trees, or sheltering rains; whilst in
those surrounded by domestic scenery, a warm recess veils the mother,
now hiding her darling from profane aspect, now pressing him to her
bosom, or contemplating in silent rapture his charms displayed on her
lap—accompaniments and actions, though appropriate, without allusion
to the mysterious personages they profess to exhibit—to discriminate
them the chair, the window, the saddle on which Joseph sits in one, the
flowers which he kneeling presents in another, the cradle, the bath, are
called on. Raffaello was less penetrated by a devout than by an amorous
principle; his design was less to stamp maternal affection with the seal
of religion than to consecrate the face he adored; his Holy Families,
with one exception, are the apotheosis of his Fornarina.
This exception, as it proves what had been advanced of the rest, so it
proves, likewise, that the omission of its beauties in them was more a
matter of choice than want of comprehension. Than the face and attitude
of the Madonna of Versailles, known from a print by Edelinck, copied
by Giac. Frey, nature and art combined never offered to the sense and
heart a more exalted sentiment, or more correspondent forms. The face
still, indeed, offers his favourite lines, lines not of supreme beauty,
but they have assumed a sanctity which is in vain looked for in all its
sister faces; serious without severity, pure without insipidity, humble
though majestic, charming and modest at once, and without affectation
graceful; face and figure unite what we can conceive of maternal beauty,
equally poised between effusion of affection and the mysterious sentiment
of superiority in the awful Infant, whom she bends to receive from his
slumbers.
The bland imagery of Raffaello was exalted to a type of devotion by M.
Angelo, and place and scenery are adjusted with allegoric or prophetic
ornament: thus in the picture painted for Angelo Doni, where the
enraptured mother receives the Infant from the hands of Joseph, the scene
behind exhibits the new sacrament in varied groups of Baptists, immersing
themselves or issuing from the fount. In another, representing the
annunciation, we discover in the awful twilight of a recess, the figure
of Moses breaking the tables he received on Sinai, an allusion to the
abolition of the old law—an infringement of Jewish habits, for the figure
is not an apparition, but a statue, readily forgiven to its allegoric
beauty. Even in those subjects relating to Christ and his family, where
the back-ground is destitute of allusive ornament, it appears the seat
of meditation or virgin purity, and consecrates the sentiment or action
of the figures, as in the salutation of St. Giovanni in Laterano, and in
that where Maria contemplates her son spread in her lap, and seems to
bend under the presentiment of the terrible moment which shall spread
him at her feet, under the cross; but in that monumental image of Jesus
expired on the cross, with the Madonna and John on each side, what is the
scenery but the echo of the subject? The surrounding element sympathises
with the woe of the sufferers in the two mourning Genii emerging from
the air—a sublime conception, which Vasari fancied to have successfully
imitated and perhaps improved, when in a repetition of the same subject,
he travestied them to Phœbus and Diana extinguishing their orbs, as
symbols of sun and moon eclipsed.[85]
What has been said of the luxuriance of Poussin’s scenery, leads to that
intemperate abuse which allots it a greater space, a more conspicuous
situation, a higher finish and effect than the importance of the subject
itself permits—by which, unity is destroyed, and it becomes doubtful
to what class a work belongs, whether it be a mixture of two or more,
or all, where portrait with architecture, landscape with history, for
‘mastery striving, each rules a moment.’ It cannot be denied that some
of the noblest works of art are liable to this imputation, and that the
fond admiration of the detailed beauties in the scenery of the Pietro
Martire of Titian, if it does not detract from the main purpose for
which the picture was or ought to have been painted, certainly adds
nothing to its real interest—nature finishes all, but an attempt to mimic
nature’s universality palsies the hand of art; the celebrated ‘Cene,’ or
Supper-Scenes of Paolo Cagliari can escape this imputation only by being
classed as models of ornamental painting; and were it not known, that
notwithstanding their grandeur propriety, and pathos of composition,
the Cartoons of Raffaello had been originally destined, still more for
popular amusement, than the poised admiration of select judges, it would
be difficult to excuse or to account for the exuberance, not seldom
the impropriety of accompaniment and of scenery, with which some of
them are loaded: in the Cartoon of the miraculous draught of fishes,
perhaps Giovanni d’ Udine would not have been allowed to treat us with
fac-similes of the herons of the lake on its fore-ground; in that of Paul
on the Areopagus, there would probably have been less agglomeration of
finished, unfinished, or half-demolished buildings; in the miracle of
Peter and John, the principal agents would scarcely have been hemmed in
by a barbaric colonnade, loaded with profane ornament; or in the Massacre
of the Infants, the humble cottages of Bethlehem been transformed to
piles of Ionian architecture, girt with gods in inter-columnar niches,
and the metropolitan pomp of Rome.
FIFTH LECTURE.
COMPOSITION, EXPRESSION.
ΠΟΛΛΑ Δ’ ΕΝ
ΚΑΡΔΙΑΙΣ ΑΝΔΡΩΝ ΕΒΑΛΟΝ
ὩΡΑΙ ΠΟΛΥΑΝΘΕΜΟΙ ΑΡΧΑΙΑ
ΣΟΦΙΣΜΑΘ’. ἉΠΑΝ Δ’ ΕΥΡΟΝΤΟΣ ΕΡΓΟΝ.
ΠΙΝΔΑΡ. ΟΛΥΜΠ. Π.
ARGUMENT.
Elements of Composition; Grouping; M. Agnolo; Correggio; Raffaello;
Breadth;—Expression; its Classes, its Limits.
FIFTH LECTURE.
Invention is followed by Composition. Composition, in its stricter sense,
is the dresser of Invention, it superintends the disposition of its
materials.
Composition has physical and moral elements: those are Perspective and
Light with shade; these, Unity, Propriety and Perspicuity; without Unity
it cannot span its subject; without Propriety it cannot tell the story;
without Perspicuity it clouds the fact with confusion; destitute of light
and shade it misses the effect, and heedless of perspective it cannot
find a place.
Composition, like all other parts of style, had a gradual progress;
it began in monotony and apposition, emerged to centre and depth,
established itself on harmony and masses, was debauched by contrast and
by grouping, and finally supplanted by machinery, common-place, and
manner.
Of sculpture as infant painting had borrowed its first theory of forms,
so it probably borrowed its method of arranging them; and this is
Apposition, a collateral arrangement of figures necessary for telling a
single or the scattered moments of a fact. If statuary indulged in the
combination of numerous groups, such as those of the Niobe, it might
dispose them in composition, it might fix a centre and its rays, and
so produce an illusion as far as colourless form is capable of giving
it. But sculpture, when it was first consulted by painting, was not yet
arrived at that period which allowed the display of such magnificence;
a single figure or a single group could not sufficiently inform the
painter; he was reduced to consult bassorelievo, and of that Apposition
is the element.
And in this light we ought to contemplate a great part of the Capella
Sistina. Its plan was monumental, and some of its compartments were
allotted to Apposition, not because M. Agnolo was a sculptor, but
because it was a more comprehensive medium to exhibit his general plan
than the narrower scale of composition. He admitted and like a master
treated composition, whenever his subject from the primeval simplicity
of elemental nature retreated within the closer bounds of society:
his Patriarchs, his Prophets and his Sibyls, singly considered or as
groups, the scenery of the Brazen Serpent, of David and of Judith, of
Noah and his sons, are models of the roundest and grandest composition.
What principle of composition do we miss in the creation of Adam and of
Eve? Can it grasp with more unity, characterise with more propriety,
present with brighter perspicuity, give greater truth of place or round
with more effect? If collateral arrangement be the ruling plan of the
Last Judgment, if point of sight and linear and aërial perspective in
what is elevated, comes forward or recedes, if artificial masses and
ostentatious roundness, on the whole, be absorbed by design or sacrificed
to higher principles, what effects has the greatest power of machinery
ever contrived to emulate the conglobation of those struggling groups
where light and shade administered to terrour or sublimity? What, to
emulate the boat of Charon disemboguing its crew of criminals, flung in
a murky mass of shade across the pallid concave and bleak blast of light
that blows it on us? A meteor in the realms of chiaroscuro which obscures
whatever the most daring servants of that power elsewhere produced.
If the plan of M. Agnolo must be estimated by other principles, his
process must be settled by other rules than the plan and process of
Correggio at Parma. Though the first and greatest, Correggio was no
more than a Machinist. It was less the Assumption of the Virgin, less
a monument of triumphant Religion he meditated to exhibit by sublimity
of conception or characteristic composition, than by the ultimate
powers of linear and aërial perspective at an elevation which demanded
eccentric and violent foreshortening, set off and tuned by magic light
and shade, to embody the medium in which the actors were to move; and
to the splendour and loftiness of that he accommodated the subject and
subordinated the agents. Hence his work, though moving in a flood of
harmony, is not legitimate Composition. The synod that surrounds the
glory, the glory itself that embosoms the Virgin and her angelic choir,
Christ who precipitates himself to meet the glory, are equally absorbed
in the _bravura_ of the vehicle, they radiate reflect and mass, but shew
us little more than limbs. This makes the cupola of Correggio less epic
or dramatic than ornamental. The technic part of Composition alone,
though carried to the highest pitch of perfection, if its ostentation
absorb the subject, stamps inferiority on the master. Take away Homer’s
language, and you take much, but you leave the epic poet unimpaired; take
it from Virgil, strip him of the majesty, the glow, the propriety of his
diction, and the remainder of his claim to epic poetry will nearly be
reduced to what he borrowed from Homer’s plan. What is it we remember
when we leave the cupolas of Correggio, what when we leave the chapel of
Sixtus? There, a man who transferred to a colossal scale the dictates
of his draped or naked model, applied them with a comprehensive eye and
set them off by magic light and shade and wide expanded harmony of tone;
here an epic plan combined and told in simple modes of grandeur. Each man
gave what he had, Correggio limbs and effect, M. Agnolo being, form and
meaning. If the cupola of Correggio be in its kind, unequalled by earlier
or succeeding plans, if it leave far behind the effusions of Lanfranchi
and Pietro da Cortona, it was not the less their model; the ornamental
style of machinists dates not the less its origin from him.
Various are the shapes in which Composition embodies its subject and
presents it to our eye. The cone or pyramid, the globe, the grape, flame
and stream, the circle and its segments, lend their figure to elevate,
concentrate, round, diffuse themselves or undulate in its masses. It
towers in the Apollo, it darts its flame forward in the warriour of
Agasias, its lambent spires wind upward with the Laocoon; it inverts the
cone in the Hercules of Glycon, it doubles it, or undulates in Venus
and the Graces. In the bland central light of a globe imperceptibly
gliding through lucid demi-tints into rich reflected shades, it composes
the spell of Correggio and entrances like a delicious dream; whilst
like a torrent it rushes from the hand of Tintorett over the trembling
canvass in enormous wings of light and shade, and sweeps all individual
importance in general effects. But whether its groups be imbrowned on
a lucid sky, or emerge from darkness, whether it break like a meridian
sun on the reflected object with Rubens, or from Rembrandt, flash on it
in lightning, whatever be its form or its effect, if it be more or less
than what it ought to be—a vehicle, if it branch not out of the subject
as the produce of its root, if it do not contain all that distinguishes
it from other subjects, if it leave out aught that is characteristic and
exclusively its own, and admit what is superfluous or common-place—it is
no longer Composition, it is grouping only, an ostentatious or useless
scaffolding about an edifice without a base; such was not the Composition
of Raffaello.
The leading principle of Raffaello’s composition is that simple air, that
artlessness which persuades us that his figures have been less composed
by skill than grouped by Nature, that the fact must have happened as we
see it represented. Simplicity taught him to grasp his subject, propriety
to give it character and form, and perspicuity to give it breadth and
place. The School of Athens in the Vatican, the Death of Ananias, and the
Sacrifice at Lystra, among the cartoons may serve as instances.
A metaphysical composition, if it be numerous, will be oftener mistaken
for dilapidation of fragments than regular distribution of materials. The
School of Athens communicates to few more than an arbitrary assemblage of
speculative groups. Yet if the subject be the dramatic representation of
Philosophy, as it prepares for active life, the parts of the building are
not connected with more regular gradation than those groups. Archimedes
and Pythagoras, Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Democritus, Epictetus,
Diogenes and Aristippus, in different degrees of characteristic modes,
tell one great doctrine, that, fitted by physical and intellectual
harmony, man ascends from himself to society, from society to God. For
this, group balances group, action is contrasted by repose, each weight
has its counterpoise; unity and variety shed harmony over the whole.
In the cartoon of Ananias, at the first glance, and even before we are
made acquainted with the particulars of the subject, we become partners
of the scene. The disposition is amphitheatric, the scenery a spacious
hall, the heart of the action is the centre, the wings assist, elucidate,
connect it with the ends. The apoplectic man before us, is evidently the
victim of a supernatural power, inspiring the apostolic figures, who
on the raised platform with threatening arm, pronounced, and with the
word enforced his doom. The terrour occasioned by the sudden stroke is
best expressed by the features of youth and middle age on each side of
the sufferer; it is instantaneous, because its shock has not yet spread
beyond them, a contrivance not to interrupt the dignity due to the sacred
scene, and to stamp the character of devout attention on the assembly.
What preceded and what followed is equally implied in their occupation,
and in the figure of a matron entering and absorbed in counting money,
though she approaches the fatal centre, and whom we may suppose to be
Sapphira, the accomplice and the wife of Ananias, and the devoted partner
of his fate. In this composition of near thirty figures, none can be
pointed out as a figure of common place or mere convenience; legitimate
offsprings of one subject, they are linked to each other, and to the
centre by one common chain, all act and all have room to act, repose
alternates with energy.
The Sacrifice at Lystra, though as a whole it has more of collateral
arrangement than depth of Composition, as it traces in the moment of
its choice the motive that produced and shews the disappointment that
checks it, has collected actors and faces the most suitable to express
both: actors and features of godlike dignity, superstitious devotion and
eager curiosity: the scene is the vestibule of the temple of Hermes, and
Paul the supposed representative of that deity, though not placed in
the centre or a central light, by his elevation, gesture, and the whole
of the composition streaming toward him, commands the first glance. At
the very onset of the ceremony the sacrificer is arrested in the act
of smiting the victim, by the outstretched arm of a young man bursting
through the hymning throng of priests and victimarii, observing Paul
indignant rending his garment in horrour of the idolatrous perversion of
his miracle.[86] The miracle itself is personified in that characteristic
figure of the healed man, who with eyes flashing joy and gratitude on the
Apostle, and hands joined in adoration, rushes in, accompanied by an aged
man of gravity and rank, who, lifting up part of the garment that covered
his thigh, attests him to have been the identic owner of those crutches
that formerly supported him, though now as useless thrown on the pavement.
Among the cartoons which we do not possess, and probably exist only in
the tapestries of Rome and Madrid, and engravings copied from them,
the Resurrection of Christ and his Ascension, equally mark Raphael’s
discriminative powers in their contrasted compositions. The Resurrection
derives its interest from the convulsive rapidity, the Ascension from
its calmness of motion. In that, the hero like a ball of fire shoots up
from the bursting tomb and sinking cearments, and scatters astonishment
and dismay. What apprehension dared not to suspect, what fancy could
not dream of, no eye had ever beheld and no tongue ever uttered, blazes
before us: the passions dart in rays resistless from the centre. Fear,
terrour, conviction, wrestle with dignity and courage in the centurion;
convulse brutality, overwhelm violence, enervate resistance, absorb
incredulity in the guard. The whole is tempestuous. The Ascension is the
majestic last of many similar scenes: no longer with the rapidity of a
conqueror, but with the calm serenity of triumphant power, the Hero is
borne up in splendour, and gradually vanishes from those, who by repeated
visions had been taught to expect whatever was amazing. Silent and
composed, with eyes more absorbed in adoration than wonder they follow
the glorious emanation; till addressed by the white-robed messengers of
their departed king, they relapse to the feelings of men.
We have considered hitherto the mental part of Raffaello’s composition,
let us say a word of the technic. His excellence in this is breadth of
masses, and of positive light and shade.
Breadth, or that quality of execution which makes a whole so predominate
over the parts as to excite the idea of uninterrupted unity amid the
greatest variety, modern art, as it appears to me, owes to M. Agnolo.
The breadth of M. Agnolo resembles the tide and ebb of a mighty sea;
waves approach, arrive, retreat, but in their rise and fall, emerging or
absorbed, impress us only with the image of the power that raises, that
directs them; whilst the discrepance of obtruding parts in the works of
the infant Florentine, Venetian and German schools, distracts our eye
like the numberless breakers of a shallow river, or as the brambles and
creepers that entangle the paths of a wood, and instead of shewing us our
road, perplex us only with themselves. By breadth the artist puts us
into immediate possession of the whole, and from that, gently leads us
to the examination of the parts according to their relative importance:
hence it follows, that in a representation of organized surfaces, breadth
is the judicious display of fullness, not a substitute of vacuity.
Breadth might be easily obtained if emptiness could give it. Yet even in
that degraded state, if gratification of the eye be a first indispensable
duty of an art, that can impress us only by that organ, it is preferable
to the laboured display of parts ambitiously thronging for admittance
at the expence of the whole; to that perplexed diligence, which wearies
us with impediment before we can penetrate a meaning or arrive at the
subject whose clear idea must be first obtained before we can judge of
the propriety or impropriety of parts. The principle which constitutes
the breadth of Raphael was neither so absolute nor so comprehensive as
that of M. Agnolo’s. But his perspicacity soon discovered that great,
uninterrupted masses of light and shade, bespeak, satisfy, conduct
and give repose to the eye; that opposition of light and shade gives
perspicuity. Convinced of this, he let their mass fall as broad on
his figures as their importance, attitude and relation to each other
permitted, and as seldom as possible, interrupted it. Masses of shade he
opposed to light, and lucid ones to shade. The strict observation of
this rule appears to be the cause why every figure of Raffaello, however
small, even at a considerable distance, describes itself, and strikes the
eye with distinctness; so, that even the comparatively diminutive figures
of his Loggia are easily discriminated from the Cortile below. To this
maxim he remained faithful in all his works, a few instances excepted,
when instead of light and shade he separated figures by reflexes of a
different colour; exceptions more dictated by necessity than choice, and
which serve rather to confirm than to impair the rule.
It cannot be denied that, if this positive opposition gave superior
distinctness, it occasioned sometimes abruptness. Each part is broad,
but separation is too visible. Reflexes he uniformly neglects, and
from whatever cause is often inattentive to transition; he does not
sufficiently connect with breadth of demi-tint the two extremes of his
masses; and, though much less in fresco than in oil, seems not always to
have had a distinct idea of the gradations required completely to round
as well as to spread a whole; to have been more anxious to obtain breadth
itself than its elemental harmony.
It does not appear that the great masters of legitimate composition
in the sixteenth century, attended to or understood the advantages
which elevation of site and a low horizon are capable of giving to
a subject. They place us in the gallery to behold their scenes; but
from want of keeping the horizontal line becomes a perpendicular, and
drops the distance on the fore-ground; the more remote groups do not
approach, but fall or stand upon the foremost actors. As this impedes
the principles of unity and grandeur in numerous composition, so it
impairs each individual form; which, to be grand, ought to rise upward in
moderate foreshortening, command the horizon, or be in contact with the
sky. Reverse this plan in the composition of Pietro Martyre by Tiziàn,
let the horizontal line be raised above the friar on the fore-ground,
space, loftiness, and unity, vanish together. What gives sublimity to
Rembrandt’s Ecce Homo more than this principle? A composition, which
though complete, hides in its grandeur the limits of its scenery.
Its form is as a pyramid whose top is lost in the sky as its base in
tumultuous murky waves. From the fluctuating crowds who inundate the
base of the tribunal, we rise to Pilate, surrounded and perplexed by the
varied ferocity of the sanguinary synod, to whose remorseless gripe he
surrenders his wand; and from him we ascend to the sublime resignation of
innocence in Christ, and regardless of the roar below, securely repose on
his countenance. Such is the grandeur of a conception, which in its blaze
absorbs the abominable detail of materials too vulgar to be mentioned;
had the materials been equal to the conception and composition, the Ecce
Homo of Rembrandt, even unsupported by the magic of its light and shade,
or his spell of colours, would have been an assemblage of superhuman
powers.
* * * * *
Far, too far, from having answered all the demands of composition, my
limits force me, and my subject requires, to give a faint sketch of the
most prominent features of Expression, its assistant and interpreter.
They interweave themselves so closely with each other, and both with
Invention, that we can scarcely conceive one without supposing the
presence of the rest, and applying the principles of each to all; still
they are separate powers, and may be possessed singly. The figure
of Christ by M. Agnolo in the Minerva, embracing his cross and the
instruments of suffering, is sublimely conceived, powerfully arranged;
but neither his features or expression are those of Christ.
Expression is the vivid image of the passion that affects the mind; its
language, and the portrait of its situation. It animates the features,
attitudes, and gestures, which Invention selected and Composition
arranged; its principles, like theirs, are simplicity, propriety, and
energy.
It is important to distinguish the materials and the spirit of
expression. To give this we must be masters of the forms and of the hues
that embody it. Without truth of line no true expression is possible;
and the passions, whose inward energy stamped form on feature, equally
reside, fluctuate, flash or lower on it in colour, and give it energy by
light and shade.
To make a face speak clearly and with propriety, it must not only be
well constructed, but have its own exclusive character. Though the
element of the passions be the same in all, they neither speak in all
with equal energy nor are circumscribed by equal limits. Though joy
be joy, and anger anger, the joy of the sanguine is not that of the
phlegmatic, nor the anger of the melancholy that of the fiery character;
and the discriminations established by complexion are equally conspicuous
in those of climate, habit, education, and rank. Expression has its
classes. Decebalus and Syphax, though both determined to die, meet
death with eye as different as hues. The tremulous emotion of Hector’s
breast when he approaches Ajax, is not the palpitation of Paris when
he discovers Menelaus; the frown of the Hercynian Phantom may repress
the ardour, but cannot subdue the dignity of Drusus; the fear of Marius
cannot sink to the panic of the Cimber, who drops the dagger at entering
his prison, nor the astonishment of Hamlet degenerate into the fright of
vulgar fear.
Le Sueur was not aware of this when he painted his Alexander. Perhaps no
picture is, in spite of common sense, oftener quoted for its expression
than Alexander sick on his bed, with the cup at his lips, observing
the calumniated physician. The manner in which he is represented is
as inconsistent with the story as injurious to the character of the
Macedonian hero. The Alexander of Le Sueur has the prying look of a spy.
He who was capable of that look would no more have ventured on quaffing
a single drop of the suspected medicine, than on the conquest of the
Persian empire. If Alexander, when he drank the cup, had not the most
positive faith in the incorruptibility of Philippus, he was more than
an ideot, he was a felon against himself and a traitour to his army,
whose safety depended on the success of the experiment. His expression
ought to be open and unconcerned confidence—as that of his physician,
a contemptuous smile, or curiosity suspended by indignation, or the
indifference of a mind conscious of innocence, and fully relying on its
being known to his friend. Le Sueur, instead of these, has given him
little more than a stupid stare and vulgar form.
The emanations of the passions, which pathognomy has reduced to the
four principal sources of _calm emotion_; _joy_; _grief simple, or with
pain_; and _terrour_;—may be divided into internal and external ones:
those hint their action only, they influence a feature or some extremity;
these extend their sway over the whole frame—they animate, agitate,
depress, convulse, absorb form. The systematic designers of pathognomy
have given their element, their extremes, the mask; the ancients have
established their technic standard, and their degrees of admissibility
in art. The Apollo is animated; the warriour of Agasias is agitated;
the dying gladiator or herald suffers in depression; the Laocoon is
convulsed; the Niobe is absorbed. The greater the mental vigour, dignity,
or habitual self-command of a person, the less perceptible to superficial
observation or vulgar eyes, will be the emotion of his mind. The greater
the predominance of fancy over intellect, the more ungovernable the
conceits of self-importance, so much the more will passion partake of
outward and less dignified energy. The Jupiter of Homer manifests his
will and power by the mere contraction of his eyebrows; Socrates in
the school of Athens only moves his finger, and Ovid in the Parnassus
only lays it over his lips, and both say enough; but Achilles throws
himself headlong, and is prevented from slaying himself by the grasp
of his friend. Only then, when passion or suffering become too big
for utterance, the wisdom of ancient art has borrowed a feature from
tranquillity, though not its air. For every being seized by an enormous
passion, be it joy or grief, or fear sunk to despair, loses the character
of its own individual expression, and is absorbed by the power of the
feature that attracts it. Niobe and her family are assimilated by extreme
anguish; Ugolino is petrified by the fate that swept the stripling at
his foot, and sweeps in pangs the rest. The metamorphoses of ancient
mythology are founded on this principle, are allegoric. Clytia, Biblis,
Salmacis, Narcissus, tell only the resistless power of sympathetic
attraction.
Similar principles award to Raffaello the palm of expression among the
moderns: driven to extremes after his demise by Julio Romano and a long
interval of languor, it seemed to revive in Domenichino; I say seemed,
for his sensibility was not supported by equal comprehension, elevation
of mind, or dignity of motion; his sentiment wants propriety, he is a
mannerist in feeling, and tacks the imagery of Theocritus to the subjects
of Homer. A detail of petty though amiable conceptions, is rather
calculated to diminish than to enforce the energy of a pathetic whole:
a lovely child taking refuge in the lap or bosom of a lovely mother,
is an idea of nature, and pleasing in a lowly, pastoral, or domestic
subject; but, perpetually recurring, becomes common-place, and amid the
terrours of martyrdom, is a shred sewed to a purple robe. In touching the
characteristic circle that surrounds the Ananias of Raffaello, you touch
the electric chain, a genuine spark irresistibly darts from the last as
from the first, penetrates, subdues; at the Martyrdom of St. Agnes by
Domenichino, you saunter among the adventitious mob of a lane, where the
silly chat of neighbouring gossips announces a topic as silly, till you
find with indignation, that instead of a broken pot or a petty theft, you
are to witness a scene for which heaven opens, the angels descend, and
Jesus rises from his throne.
It is however but justice to observe, that there is a subject in which
Domenichino has not unsuccessfully wrestled, and, in my opinion,
even excelled Raffaello; I mean the demoniac boy among the series of
frescos at Grotto Ferrata: that inspired figure is evidently the organ
of an internal, superiour, preternatural agent, darted upward without
contorsion, and considered as unconnected with the story, never to be
confounded with a merely tumultuary distorted maniac, which is not
perhaps the case of the boy in the Transfiguration; the subject too being
within the range of Domenichino’s powers, domestic, the whole of the
persons introduced is characteristic: awe, with reliance on the saint
who operates the miracle or cure, and terrour at the redoubled fury of
his son, mark the rustic father; nor could the agonizing female with the
infant in her arm, as she is the mother, be exchanged to advantage, and
with propriety occupies that place which the fondling females in the
pictures of St. Sebastian, St. Andrew, and St. Agnes, only usurp.
The martyrdom, or rather the brutally ostentatious murder of St. Agnes
leads us to the _limits_ of expression: sympathy and disgust are the
irreconcileable parallels that must for ever separate legitimate terrour
and pity from horrour and aversion. We cannot sympathise with what we
detest or despise, nor fully pity what we shudder at or loath. So little
were these limits understood by the moderns, M. Agnolo excepted, that
even the humanity and delicacy of Raffaello did not guard him from
excursions into the realms of horrour and loathsomeness: it is difficult
to conceive what could provoke him to make a finished design of the
inhumanities that accompany the martyrdom of St. Felicitas at which even
description shudders? a design made on purpose to be dispersed over
Europe, perpetuated and made known to all by the graver of Marc Antonio:
was it to prove to Albert Durer and the Germans of his time that they had
not exhausted the sources of abomination? He made an equal mistake in
the Morbetto, where, though not with so lavish a hand as Poussin after
him, instead of the moral effects of the plague, he has personified
the effluvia of putrefaction. What _he_ had not penetration to avoid
could not be expected to be shunned by his scholars. Julio Romano
delighted in studied images of torture as well as of the most abandoned
licentiousness. Among his contemporaries, Correggio even attempted to
give a zest to the most wanton cruelty by an affectation of grace in
the picture of the Saints Placido and Flavia: but the enamoured trance
of Placido with his neck half cut, and the anthem that quivers on the
lips of Flavia whilst a sword is entering her side, in vain bespeak our
sympathy, for whilst we detest the felons who slaughter them, we loath
to inspect the actual process of the crime; mangling is contagious, and
spreads aversion from the slaughterman to the victim. If St. Bartholemew
and St. Erasmus are subjects for painting, they can only be so before,
and neither under nor after the operation of the knife or windlass. A
decollated martyr represented with his head in his hand, as Rubens did,
and a headless corpse with the head lying by it, as Correggio, can only
prove the brutality, stupidity, or bigotry of the employer and the callus
or venality of the artist.
The gradations of expression within, close to, and beyond its limits
cannot perhaps be elucidated with greater perspicuity than by comparison;
and the different moments which Julio Romano, Vandyke and Rembrandt,
have selected to represent the subject of Samson betrayed by Delilah,
offers one of the fairest specimens furnished by art. Considering it as
a drama, we may say that Julio forms the plot, Vandyke unravels it, and
Rembrandt shews the extreme of the catastrophe.
In the composition of Julio, Samson, satiated with pleasure, plunged into
sleep, and stretched on the ground, rests his head and presses with his
arm the thigh of Delilah on one side, whilst on the other a nimble minion
busily but with timorous caution fingers and clips his locks; such is his
fear, that, to be firm, he rests one knee on a foot-stool tremblingly
watching the sleeper, and ready to escape at his least motion. Delilah
seated between both, fixed by the weight of Samson warily turns her
head toward a troop of warriours in the back ground, with the left arm
stretched out she beckons their leader, with the finger of the right
hand she presses her lip to enjoin silence and noiseless approach. The
Herculean make and lion port of Samson, his perturbed though ponderous
sleep, the quivering agility of the curled favourite employed, the harlot
graces and meretricious elegance contrasted by equal firmness and sense
of danger in Delilah, the attitude and look of the grim veteran who heads
the ambush, whilst they give us the clue to all that followed, keep us in
anxious suspense, we palpitate in breathless expectation; this is the
plot.
The terrours which Julio made us forbode, Vandyke summons to our eyes.
The mysterious lock is cut; the dreaded victim is roused from the lap
of the harlot-priestess. Starting unconscious of his departed power, he
attempts to spring forward, and with one effort of his mighty breast
and expanded arms to dash his foes to the ground and fling the alarmed
traitress from him—in vain, shorn of his strength he is borne down by the
weight of the mailed chief that throws himself upon him, and overpowered
by a throng of infuriate satellites. But though overpowered, less aghast
than indignant, his eye flashes reproach on the perfidious female whose
wheedling caresses drew the fatal secret from his breast; the plot is
unfolded, and what succeeds, too horrible for the sense, is left to fancy
to brood upon, or drop it.
This moment of horrour the gigantic but barbarous genius of Rembrandt
chose, and, without a metaphor, _executed_ a subject, which humanity,
judgment and taste taught his rivals, only to _treat_; he displays a
scene which no eye but that of Domitian or Nero could wish or bear to
see. Samson stretched on the ground is held by one Philistine under
him, whilst another chains his right arm, and a third clenching his
beard with one, drives a dagger into his eye with the other hand. The
pain that blasts him, darts expression from the contortions of the mouth
and his gnashing teeth to the crampy convulsions of the leg dashed high
into the air. Some fiend-like features glare through the gloomy light
which discovers Delilah, her work now done, sliding off, the shears in
her left, the locks of Samson in her right hand. If her figure, elegant,
attractive, such as Rembrandt never conceived before or after, deserve
our wonder rather than our praise; no words can do justice to the
expression that animates her face, and shews her less shrinking from the
horrid scene than exulting in being its cause. Such is the work whose
magic of colour, tone and chiaroscuro irresistibly entrap the eye, whilst
we detest the brutal choice of the moment.[87]
Let us in conclusion contrast the stern pathos of this scenery with the
placid emotions of a milder subject, in the celebrated pictures which
represent the Communion or death of St. Jerome by Agostino Carracci and
his scholar Domenichino, that an altar-piece in the Certosa near Bologna,
this in the church of St. Girolamo della Carità at Rome; but for some
time both exhibited in the gallery of the Louvre at Paris. What I have to
say on the Invention, Expression, Characters, Tone and Colour of either
is the result of observations lately made on both in that gallery, where
then they were placed nearly opposite to each other.
In each picture, St. Jerome brought from his cell to receive the
sacrament is represented on his knees, supported by devout attendants; in
each the officiating priest is in the act of administering to the dying
saint; the same clerical society fills the portico of the temple in both,
in both the scene is witnessed from above by infant angels.
The general opinion is in favour of the Pupil, but if in the economy of
the whole Domenichino surpasses his master, he appears to me greatly
inferiour both in the character and expression of the hero. Domenichino
has represented Piety scarcely struggling with decay, Agostino triumphant
over it, his saint becomes in the place where he is, a superiour being,
and is inspired by the approaching god: that of Domenichino seems divided
between resignation, mental and bodily imbecility and desire. The saint
of Agostino is a lion, that of Domenichino a lamb.
In the sacerdotal figure administering the viaticum, Domenichino has less
improved than corrected the unworthy choice of his master. The priest
of Agostino is one of the Frati Godenti of Dante, before they received
the infernal hood; a gross, fat, self-conceited terrestrial feature, a
countenance equally proof to elevation, pity or thought. The priest of
Domenichino is a minister of grace, stamped with the sacred humility that
characterized his master, and penetrated by the function of which he is
the instrument.
We are more impressed with the graces of youth than the energies of
manhood verging on age: in this respect, as well as that of contrast
with the decrepitude of St. Jerome, the placid contemplative beauty of
the young deacon on the fore-ground of Domenichino, will probably please
more, than the poetic trance of the assistant friar with the lighted
taper in the fore-ground of Agostino. This must however be observed, that
as Domenichino thought proper to introduce supernatural witnesses of the
ceremony in imitation of his master, their effect seems less ornamental
and more interwoven with the plan, by being perceived by the actors
themselves.
If the attendant characters in the picture of Agostino are more numerous,
and have on the whole, furnished the hints of admission to those of
Domenichino, this, with one exception, may be said to have used more
propriety and judgment in the choice. Both have introduced a man with a
turban, and opened a portico to characterise an Asiatic scene.
With regard to composition, Domenichino undoubtedly gains the palm. The
disposition on the whole he owes to his master, though he reversed it,
but he has cleared it of that oppressive bustle which rather involves and
crouds the principal actors in Agostino than attends them. He spreads
tranquillity with space and repose without vacuity.
With this corresponds the tone of the whole. The evening-freshness of an
oriental day tinges every part; the medium of Agostino partakes too much
of the fumigated inside of a catholic chapel.
The draperies of both are characteristic and unite subordination with
dignity, but their colour is chosen with more judgment by Domenichino,
the imbrowned gold and ample folds of the robe of the administering
priest are more genial than the cold blue, white and yellow on the priest
of his master; in both, perhaps, the white draperies on the fore-ground
figures have too little strength for the central colours, but it is more
perceived in Carracci than in Domenichino.
The forms of the saint in Carracci are grander and more ideal than in the
saint of Domenichino, some have even thought them too vigorous: both, in
my opinion are in harmony with the emotion of the face and expression
of either. The eagerness that animates the countenance of the one may
be supposed to spread a momentary vigour over his frame. The mental
dereliction of countenance in the other with equal propriety relaxes and
palsies the limbs which depend on it.
The colour of Carracci’s saint is much more characteristic of fleshy
though nearly bloodless substance, than that chosen by his rival, which
is withered, shrivelled, leathery in the lights, and earthy in the
shades; but the head of the officiating priest in Domenichino, whether
considered as a specimen of colour independent of the rest, or as set
off by it, for truth, tone, freshness, energy, is not only the best
Domenichino ever painted, but perhaps the best that can be conceived.
SIXTH LECTURE.
CHIAROSCURO.
Non sumum ex fulgore, sed ex sumo dare lucem.
Horat. de Arte Poet. I. 143.
ARGUMENT.
Definition.—Lionardo da Vinci.—Giorgione.—Antonio da Correggio.
SIXTH LECTURE.
The term Chiaroscuro, adopted from the Italian, in its primary and
simplest sense, means the division of a single object into light and
shade, and in its widest compass comprises their distribution over a
whole composition: whether the first derive its splendour by being
exposed to a direct light, or from colours in its nature luminous; and
whether the second owe their obscurity directly to the privation of
light, or be produced by colours in themselves opaque. Its exclusive
power is, to give substance to form, place to figure and to create
space. It may be considered as legitimate or spurious: it is legitimate
when, as the immediate offspring of the subject, its disposition,
extent, strength or sweetness are subservient to form, expression, and
invigourate or illustrate character, by heightening the primary actor
or actors, and subordinating the secondary; it is spurious when from an
assistant aspiring to the rights of a principal, it becomes a substitute
for indispensible or more essential demands. As such, it has often been
employed by the machinists of different schools, for whom it became
the refuge of ignorance, a palliative for an incurable disease, and
the asylum of emptiness; still, as even a resource of this kind proves
a certain vigour of mind, it surprises into something like unwilling
admiration and forced applause.
Of every subject Unity is the soul: unity, of course, is inseparable from
legitimate chiaroscuro: hence the individual light and shade of every
figure that makes part of a given or chosen subject, whether natural or
ideal, as well as the more compound one of the different intermediate
groups, must act as so many rays emanating from one centre and terminate,
blazing, evanescent, or obscured, in rounding it to the eye.
Truth is the next requisite of chiaroscuro, whatever be the subject.
Some it attends without ambition, content with common effects, some it
invigourates or inspires: but in either case, let the effect be that of
usual expanded day-light, or artificial and condensed, it ought to be
regulated by truth in extent, strength, brilliancy, softness and above
all, by simplicity in its positive and purity in its negative parts. As
shade is the mere absence of light, it cannot, except from reflexes,
possess any hue or colour of its own, and acquires all its charms from
transparency.
But to the rules which art prescribes to Chiaroscuro, to round each
figure of a composition with truth, to connect it with the neighbouring
groups, and both with the whole—it adds, that all this should be done
with strict adherence to propriety, at the least possible expence of
the subordinate parts, and with the utmost attainable degree of effect
and harmony—demands which it is not my duty to inquire, whether they
entered ever with equal evidence the mind of any one artist, ancient or
modern: whether, if it be granted possible that they did, they were ever
balanced with equal impartiality; and grant this, whether they ever were
or could be executed with equal felicity. A character of equal universal
power is not a human character—and the nearest approach to perfection
can only be in carrying to excellence one great quality with the least
alloy of defects. Thus in the School of Athens, Raffaello’s great aim
being to embody on the same scene, the gradations, varieties and utmost
point of human culture _as it proceeds from the individual to society,
and from that ascends to God_; he suffered expression and character to
preponderate over effect and combination of masses, and contriving to
unite the opposite wings with the centre by entrance and exit at each
extremity, as far as expression could do it, succeeded, to make what
in itself is little more than apposition of single figures or detached
groups, one grand whole.—I say, as far as expression could satisfy a mind
qualified to contemplate and penetrate his principle, however unsatisfied
a merely picturesque eye might wander over a scattered assemblage of
figures equally illuminated and unconnected by a commanding mass of light
and shade.
From this deficiency of effect in the composition we speak of, it is
evident, that mere natural light and shade, however separately or
individually true, is not always legitimate Chiaroscuro in art. Nature
sheds or withholds her ray indiscriminately, and every object has what
share it can obtain by place and position, which it is the business of
art to arrange by fixing a centre and distributing the rays according to
the more or less important claims of the subject: as long as it regulates
itself by strict observance of that principle, it matters not whether
its principal mass radiate from the middle, wind in undulating shapes,
dart in decided beams from the extremities; emanate from one source,
or borrow additional effect from subordinate ones: let it mount like
flame or descend in lightning; dash in stern tones terrour on the eye,
emergent from a dark or luminous medium; through twilight immerse itself
in impenetrable gloom or gradually vanish in voluptuous repose, guided by
the subject the most daring division of light and shade, becomes natural
and legitimate, and the most regular, spurious and illegitimate without
it.
To attain in the execution the highest possible and widest expanded
effect of light, with equal depth and transparence in the shade,
brilliancy of colour is less required than unison: a sovereign tone
must pervade the whole, which though arbitrary and dependent on choice,
decides all subordinate ones, as the tone of the first instrument in a
regular concert tunes all the rest; their effect intirely depends on
being in unison with it, and discord is produced whenever they revolt:
by thus uniting itself with the whole, the simplest tone well managed
may become, not only harmonious, but rich and splendid, it is then
the tone of nature: whilst the most brilliant one, if contradicted or
disappointed by the detail of the inferiour, may become heavy, leathern,
and discordant.
Though every work of Correggio is an illustration of this principle, and
none with brighter evidence than his ‘Notte,’ in which the central light
of the infant irradiates the whole; perhaps the most decisive, because
most appropriate proof of it is in its companion the less known picture
of St. Sebastian, at Dresden; in which the central light of a glory, not
only surprises the eye with all the splendour of a sun, though its colour
is a yellow comparatively faint, and terminates in brown, but tinges the
whole, perfectly transparent, with its emanation.
That not before the lapse of two hundred years after the resurrection of
Art, the discovery of Chiaroscuro, as a principle of beauty in single
figures and of effect in composition, should be awarded to Lionardo da
Vinci, a patriarch of that school which time has shewn of all others
the least inclined to appreciate its advantages, is at once a proof of
the singularity that marks the local distribution of powers, and of the
inconceivable slowness which attends human perception in the progress
of study: but without generally admitting what has been said with more
energy than judgment or regard to truth, that modern art literally sprang
from the loins of Lionardo, it must be granted that no work anterior or
contemporary with his essays in Chiaroscuro now exist to disprove his
claim to the first vision of its harmony; its magic lent the charm, by
which his females allure, to forms neither ideal nor much varied; sisters
of one family they attract by the light in which they radiate, by the
shade that veils them—for the features of Giotto’s or Memmi’s Madonnas or
virgin-saints floating in the same medium, would require little more to
be their equals.
This principle Lionardo seems seldom if ever to have extended to relieve
or recommend his larger compositions and male figures, if we except
the group of contending horsemen which made or was intended for some
part of his rival cartoon in the Sala del Consiglio: a knot of supreme
powers in Composition and Chiaroscuro; though, as we know it chiefly
from a copy of P. P. Rubens engraved by Edelinck, the gross evidence
of Flemish liberties taken with the style, makes it probable that the
original simplicity of light and shade has been invigourated by the
artificial contrasts of the copyist. Lionardo’s open scenery, tinged
with the glareless evenness of plain day-light, seldom warrants effects
so concentrated. Unostentatious gravity marks the characters of his Last
Supper, and in sober evening tones marked probably the Chiaroscuro of
the groups and scenery, if we may be allowed to form our judgment from
the little that remains unimpaired by the ravages of time and the more
barbarous ones of renovators.
To the discovery of central radiance the genius of Lionardo with equal
penetration added its counterpart, _purity_ of shade and the coalescence
of both through imperceptible demi-tints. Whatever tone of light he
chose, he never forgot that the shade intended to set it off, was
only its absence and not a positive colour, and that both were to be
harmonised by demi-tints composed of both; a principle of which no school
anterior to him has left a trace.
That the discovery of a principle big with advantages as obvious as
important to art should have been reserved for the penetration of
Lionardo, however singular, is less strange than that, when discovered
and its powers demonstrated, it should, with the exception of one name,
have not only met with no imitators, but with an ambiguous and even
discouraging reception from the pupils of his own school, and some next
allied to it. Vasari, his panegyrist rather than biographer, talks of it
more as a singular phænomenon than as an evident principle, and avowing
that he introduced a certain depth of shade into oil-painting, which
enabled succeeding artists to relieve their figures more forcibly[88],
persevered to discolour walls and pannels with washy flat insipidity.
Bartolomeo della Porta alone appears to have had sufficient compass of
mind to grasp its energy and connect it with colour: from him, through
Andrea del Sarto down to Pietro Berettini, who owed his effects rather
to opposition of tints than to legitimate Chiaroscuro, the Tuscan school
gradually suffered it to dwindle into evanescence. Unless we were to
consider its astonishing effects in some of Michael Angelo’s works in the
light of imitations rather than as emanations of his own genius; which
perhaps we are the less warranted to presume as he seems to have paid no
attention to Lionardo’s discovery in its brightest period; for the groups
of his celebrated cartoon exhibit little more than individual light and
shade.
What the Tuscan school treated with neglect the Roman appears not to
have been eager to adopt: if Raffaello did not remain a stranger to the
theories of Lionardo and Frà. Bartolomeo, he suffered the principle to
lie dormant; for no production of his during his intercourse with them
is marked by concentration of light or purity of shade or subordinate
masses: nor is the interval between his last departure from Florence
and his entrance of the Vatican discriminated by any visible progress
in massing and illuminating a whole: the upper and lower parts of the
dispute on the Sacrament, cut sheer asunder, as a whole, are little
relieved in either; and if the Parnassus and the school of Athens have
the beginning, middle, and end of legitimate Composition, they owe it to
expression and feeling; nor can the more vigorous display of Chiaroscuro
in the works of the second stanza, the Deliverance of Peter, the Fall of
Heliodorus, the Attila, the Mass of Bolsena be referred to a principle
of imitation, when we see it neglected in a subject where it might have
ruled with absolute sway, in the Incendio del Borgo, and on the whole in
every Composition of the third and fourth stanza; a series of evidence
that Raffaello considered Chiaroscuro as a subordinate vehicle, and
never suffered its blandishments or energies to absorb meaning or to
supplant expression and form[89]: but the harmony which immediately
after him Giulio Pipi, and Polydoro only excepted, the rest of his pupils
had sacrificed or consecrated to higher beauties, their successors, the
subsequent Roman school from the Zuccari through Giuseppo Cesari down to
C. Maratta, if they did not entirely lose in a heavy display of academic
pedantry, or destroy by the remorseless ‘bravura’ of mannered practice,
they uniformly polluted by bastard theories and adulterated methods of
shade.
When I say that the Roman school uniformly erred in their principle of
shade, I have not forgot M. Angelo da Caravaggio, whose darks are in
such perfect unison with the lights of his chiaroscuro, that A. Carracci
declared he did not grind colour but flesh itself for his tints (‘che
macinava carne’), and whom for that reason and on such authority I choose
rather to consider as the head of his own school than as the member of
another: in some of his surviving works, but far more frequently in those
which without sufficient authenticity are ascribed to him, an abrupt
transition from light to darkness, without an intervening demi-tint, has
offended the eye and provoked the sarcasm of an eminent critic: but as
long as the picture of the entombing of Christ in the Chiesa Nuova at
Rome may be appealed to; as long as the Pilgrim’s kneeling before the
Madonna with the child in her arms, of St. Agostino at Rome, shall retain
their tone; or the Infant Jesus, once in the Spada palace, crushing the
Serpent’s head, shall resist the ravages of time—it will be difficult to
produce in similar works of any other master or any other school, from
Lionardo down to Rembrandt, a system of chiaroscuro which shall equal
the severe yet mellow energy of the first; the departing evening ray and
veiled glow of the second; or, with unimpaired harmony, the bold decision
of masses and stern light and shade of the third.
The homage sparingly granted or callously refused to chiaroscuro by the
two schools of design was with implicit devotion paid to it by the nurse
of colour, the school of Venice. Whether as tradition on the authority
of Vasari maintains, they received it as a principle of imitation from
the perspicacity, or as a native discovery from the genius of Giorgione
Barbarelli, though from what has been advanced on both sides of the
question, it would be presumptuous positively to decide on either,
it must be allowed, that if the Venetian received a hint from the
Florentine, he extended it through a system, the harmony of which was all
his own, and excelled in breadth and amenity the light which it could not
surpass in splendour, added transparence to purity of shade, rounded by
reflexes and discovered by the contrast of deep with aërial colour, that
energy of effect which mere chiaroscuro could not have reached, and which
was carried near perfection by Paolo Cagliari.
Among the varied mischief poured into this country by the rapacious
sophistry of traders and the ambitious cullibility of wealthy collectors,
no hand perhaps has been more destructive to the genuine appreciation
of original styles than the baptism of pictures with names not their
own: by this prolific method worse ones than those of Luini, Aretusi,
Timoteo della Vite, Bonifacio, are daily graced with the honours due to
Lionardo, Correggio, Raffaello, Tiziàn; though none have suffered more by
the multiplication than Giorgione, whom shortness of life, a peculiar
fatality of circumstances, and the ravages of time, have conspired to
render one of the scarcest as well as least authenticated artists even
in Italy: to whom his earliest and latest biographers have been as
critically unjust as chronologically inattentive; Vasari by transferring
to another his principal work; Fiorillo by making him paint the portrait
of Calvin the Reformer.[90]
To form our opinion therefore of Giorgione’s chiaroscuro from a few
portraits or single figures, if legitimate, often restored, or from the
crumbling remnants of his decayed frescoes, would be to form an estimate
of a magnificent fabric from some loose fragment or stone: to do full
justice to his powers we must have recourse to his surprising work in the
school of St. Marco at Venice; a composition whose terrific graces Vasari
descants on with a fervour inferior only to the artist’s own inspiration,
though he unaccountably ascribes it to the elder Palma.[91]
‘In the school of S. Marco he painted the story of the ship
which conducts the body of S. Mark through a horrible tempest,
with other barges assailed by furious winds; and besides,
groups of aërial apparitions, and various forms of fiends
who vent their blasts against the vessels, that by dint of
oars and energy of arms strive to force their way through the
mountainous and hostile waves which threaten to submerge them.
You hear the howling blast, you see the grasp and fiery exertion
of the men, the fluctuation of the waves, the lightning that
bursts the clouds, the oars bent by the flood, the flood broke
by the oars, and dashed to spray by the sinews of the rowers.
What more? In vain I labour to recollect a picture that equals
the terrours of this, whose design, invention, and colour
make the canvass tremble! Often when he finishes, an artist,
absorbed in the contemplation of parts, forgets the main
point of a design, and as the spirits cool, loses the vein
of his enthusiasm; but this man never losing sight of the
subject, guided his conceit to perfection.’
The effect of this work, when it drew such a stream of eulogy from lips
else so frugal in Venetian praise, may be guessed at from the impression
it makes in its present decay—for even now, it might defy the competition
of the most terrific specimens in chiaroscuro, the boat of Charon in
M. Angelo’s Last Judgment, perhaps only excepted. Yet its master was
defrauded of its glory by his panegyrist, whilst it was exciting the
wonder and curiosity of every beholder: Lanzi is the only historian who
notices its remains, and the real author[92]; we look in vain for it
in Ridolfi, who in his Life of Giorgione treats us instead of it with
a delectable account of a night-piece which he painted, exhibiting the
tragi-comedy of castrating a cat.
It has been treated as a mistake to confine the chiaroscuro of a subject
exclusively to one source; nor can it be doubted that often it is and
has been proved to be both necessary and advantageous to admit more;
this is however a licence to be granted with considerable caution, and
it appears to be the privilege of superiour powers to raise a subject,
by the admission of subordinate, sometimes diverging, sometimes opposite
streams of light, to assist and invigourate the effect of the primary
one, without impairing that unity which, alone can ensure a breadth of
effect, without which each part, for mastery striving, soon would be
lost in confusion, or crumble into fragments. The best instances of the
advantages gained by the superinduction of artificial light, appear to
be the Pietro Martire and the S. Lorenzo of Tiziano; if selection can
be made from the works of a master, where to count is to choose. In the
first, the stern light of evening far advanced in the back-ground, is
commanded by the celestial emanation bursting from above, wrapping the
summit in splendour, and diffusing itself in rays more or less devious
over the scenery. The subject of S. Lorenzo, a nocturnal scene, admits
light from two sources—the fire beneath the saint, and a raised torch:
but receives its principal splendour from the aërial reflex of the vision
on high, which sheds its mitigating ray on the martyr.
The nocturnal studies of Tintoretto from models and artificial groups
have been celebrated: these, prepared in wax or clay, he arranged,
raised, suspended, to produce masses, foreshortening, and variety of
effect: it was thence he acquired that decision of chiaroscuro unknown
to more expanded day-light, by which he divided his bodies, and those
wings of obscurity and light by which he separated the groups of his
composition, though the mellowness of his eye nearly always instructed
him to connect the two extremes by something intermediate that partook
of both, as the extremes themselves by reflexes with the back-ground or
the scenery. The general rapidity of his process, by which he baffled his
competitors and often overwhelmed himself, did not indeed always permit
him to attend deliberately to this principle, and often hurried him into
an abuse of practice, which in the lights turned breadth into mannered
or insipid flatness, and in the shadows into total extinction of parts:
of all this, he has in the schools of S. Rocco and Marco given the most
unquestionable instances; the Resurrection of Christ and the Massacre of
the Innocents, comprehend every charm by which chiaroscuro fascinates its
votaries: in the vision, dewy dawn melts into deep but pellucid shade,
itself rent or reflected by celestial splendor and angelic hues: whilst
in the Infant-massacre at Bethlehem alternate sheets of stormy light, and
agitated gloom, dash horrour on the astonished eye.
He pursued, however, another method to create, without more assistance
from chiaroscuro than individual light and shade, an effect equivalent
and perhaps superiour to what the utmost stretch of its powers could
have produced, in the crucifixion of the Albergo, or guest-room of S.
Rocco, the largest and most celebrated of his works. The multitudinous
rabble dispersed over that picture, (for such, rather than composition,
one group excepted, that assemblage of accidental figures deserves to
be called), he connected by a sovereign tone, ingulphing the whole in
one mass of ominous twilight, an eclipse, or what precedes a storm, or
hurricane, or earthquake; nor suffering the captive eye to rest on any
other object than the faint gleam hovering over the head of the Saviour
in the centre, and in still fainter tones dying on the sainted group
gathered beneath the cross. Yet this nearly superhuman contrivance
which raises above admiration a work whose incongruous parts else must
have sunk it beneath mediocrity, Agostino Carracci in his print, with
chalcographic callus, has totally overlooked; for notwithstanding the
iron sky that overhangs the whole, he has spread, if not sunshine, the
most declared day-light from end to end, nor left the eye uninformed of
one motley article, or one blade of grass.
With Iacopo Robusti may be named, though adopted by another school,
Belisario Corenzio an Achæan Greek, his pupil, his imitator in the magic
of chiaroscuro, and with still less compunction his rival in dispatch
and rapidity of hand: the immense compositions in which he overflowed,
he encompassed, and carried to irresistible central splendour by streams
of shade, and hemmed his glories in with clouds, or showery, or pregnant
with thunder. The monasteries and churches of Naples and its dependencies
abound in his frescos.
The more adscititious effects of chiaroscuro produced by the opposition
of dark to lucid, opaque to transparent bodies, and cold to warm tints,
though fully understood by the whole Venetian school, were nearly carried
to perfection by Paolo Cagliari. There is no variety of harmonious or
powerful combination in the empire of colour, as a substitute of light
and shade, which did not emanate from his eye, variegate his canvas, and
invigourate his scenery. Many of his works, however, and principally
the masses scattered over his suppers, prove that he was master of
that legitimate chiaroscuro which, independent of colour, animates
composition: but the gaiety of his mind which inspired him with subjects
of magnificence and splendour, of numerous assemblies canopied by serene
skies or roving lofty palaces, made him seek his effects oftener in
opposed tints, than in powerful depths of light and shade.
But all preceding, contemporary, and subsequent schools, with their
united powers of chiaroscuro, were far excelled both in compass and
magnitude of its application by the genius of Antonio Allegri from the
place of his nativity, surnamed Correggio. To them light and shade was
only necessary as the more or less employed, or obedient attendant on
design, composition and colour: but design, composition and colour, were
no more than the submissive vehicles, or inchanted ministers of its
charms to Correggio. If, strictly speaking, he was not the inventor of
its element, he fully spanned its measure, and expanded the powers of its
harmony through Heaven and earth; in his eye and hand it became the organ
of sublimity; the process of his cupolas made it no longer a question
whether an art circumscribed by lines and figure could convey ideas of
reality and immensity at once. Entranced by his spell, and lap’d in his
elysium, we are not aware of the wide difference between the conception
of the medium, the place, space and mode in which certain beings ought,
or may be supposed to move, and that of those beings themselves; and
forget, though fully adequate to the first, that Correggio was unequal
to the second; that though he could build Heaven he could not people it.
If M. Agnolo found in the depth of his mind and in grandeur of line the
means of rendering the immediate effect of will and power intuitive in
the creation of Adam, by darting life from the finger of Omnipotence, the
coalition of light and darkness opened to the entranced eye of Correggio
the means of embodying the Mosaic. ‘Let there be light,’ and created
light in that stream of glory which, issuing from the divine infant in
his Notte, proclaims a god. If Thought be personified in the prophets
and Sybils of the Sistine chapel, he has made silence audible in the
slumbering twilight that surrounds the Zingara; and filled the gloom
which enbosoms Jupiter and Io, with the whispers of Love.
And though perhaps we should be nearer truth by ascribing the cause of
Correggio’s magic to the happy conformation of his organs, and his calm
serenity of mind, than to Platonic ecstacies, a poet might at least be
allowed to say ‘that his soul, absorbed by the contemplation of infinity,
soared above the sphere of measurable powers, knowing that every object
whose limits can be distinctly perceived by the mind, must be within
its grasp; and however grand, magnificent, beautiful or terrific, fall
short of the conception itself, and be less than sublime.’—In this,
from whatever cause, consists the real spell of Correggio—which neither
Parmegiano nor Annibale Carracci seem to have been able to penetrate:
the Bolognese certainly not; for if we believe himself in his letters to
Ludovico, expressive of his emotions at the first sight of Correggio’s
cupolas, he confines his admiration to the foreshortening and grace of
forms, the successful imitation of flesh, and rigorous perspective.
Of Correggio’s numerous pretending imitators Lodovico Carracci appears
to be the only one who penetrated his principle: the axiom, that the
less the traces appear of the means, by which a work has been produced,
the more it resembles the operations of nature, is not an axiom likely
to spring from the infancy of art. The even colour, veiled splendour,
the solemn twilight; that tone of devotion and cloistered meditation,
which Lodovico Carracci spread over his works could arise only from the
contemplation of some preceding style, analogous to his own feelings
and its comparison with nature, and where could that be met with in
a degree equal to what he found in the infinite unity and variety of
Correggio’s effusions? They inspired his frescos in the cloisters of St.
Michele in Bosco: the foreshortenings of the muscular labourers at the
Hermitage, and of the ponderous dæmon that mocks their toil, the warlike
splendour in the homage of Totila, the nocturnal conflagration of Monte
Cassino, the wild graces of deranged beauty, and the insidious charms
of the sister nymphs in the garden scene, equally proclaim the pupil of
Correggio.
His triumph in oil is the altar piece of St. John preaching in a chapel
of the Certosa at Bologna, whose lights seem embrowned by a golden veil,
and the shadowy gleam of Vallombrosa; though he sometimes indulged in
tones austere, pronounced and hardy: such is the Flagellation of Christ
in the same church, whose tremendous depth of flesh-tints contrasts the
open wide-expanded sky, and less conveys than dashes its terrours on the
astonished sense.
The Schools of Bologna, Parma, Milano, with more or less geniality,
imitated their predecessors, but added no new features to the theory
of light and shade.—As to its progress on this side of the Alps, it is
better to say nothing than little on the wide range of Rubens and the
miracles of Rembrandt.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[1] There will be an opportunity to notice that incredible dereliction of
reminiscence which prompted him to transfer what he had rightly ascribed
to Giorgione, in the Florentine edition, 1550, to the elder Palma in the
subsequent ones. See Lecture on Chiaroscuro.
[2] It ought not, however, to be disguised, that the history of art,
deviating from its real object, has been swelled to a diffuse catalogue
of individuals, who, being the nurslings of different schools, or
picking something from the real establishers of art, have done little
more than repeat or mimic rather than imitate, at second hand, what
their masters or predecessors had found in nature, discriminated and
applied to art in obedience to its dictates. Without depreciating the
merits of that multitude who strenuously passed life in following
others, it must be pronounced a task below history to allow them more
than a transitory glance; neither novelty nor selection and combination
of scattered materials, are entitled to serious attention from him who
only investigates the real progress of art, if novelty is proved to have
added nothing essential to the system, and selection to have only diluted
energy, and by a popular amalgama to have been content with captivating
the vulgar. Novelty, without enlarging the circle of fancy, may delight,
but is nearer allied to whim than to invention; and an Ecclectic system
without equality of parts, as it originated in want of comprehension,
totters on the brink of mediocrity, sinks art, or splits it into crafts
decorated with the specious name of schools, whose members, authorised
by prescript, emboldened by dexterity of hand, encouraged by ignorance,
or heading a cabal, subsist on mere repetition, with few more legitimate
claims to the honours of history than a rhapsodist to those of the poem
which he recites.
[3] Abstract of the Laws of the Royal Academy, article _Professors_: page
21.
[4] This has been done in a superior manner by J. G. Herder, in his
_Ideen zur Philosophie der geschichte der Menschheit_, Vol. iii. Book 13,
a work translated under the title of _Outlines of a Philosophy of the
History of Man_, 4to.
[5] This account is founded on the conjectures of Mr. _Riem_, in his
Treatise on _die Malerey der Alten_, or the _Painting of the Ancients_,
4to. Berlin, 1787.
[6] Pausanias Attic, c. xxviii. The word used by Pausanias καταγραψαι,
shews that the figures of Parrhasius were intended for a Bassorelievo.
They were in profile. This is the sense of the word _Catagrapha_ in
Pliny, xxxv. c. 8. he translates it “obliquas imagines.”
[7] By the authority chiefly of Pamphilus the master of Apelles, who
taught at Sicyon. ‘Hujus auctoritate,’ says Pliny, xxxv. 10. ‘effectum
est Sicyone primum, deinde et in tota Græcia, ut pueri ingenui ante omnia
_diagraphicen_, hoc est, picturam in buxo, docerentur,’ &c. _Harduin_,
contrary to the common editions, reads indeed, and by the authority, he
says, of all the MSS. _graphicen_, which he translates: ars ‘delineandi,’
desseigner, but he has not proved that graphice means not more than
design; and if he had, what was it that Pamphilus taught? he was not the
inventor of what he had been taught himself. He established or rather
renewed a particular method of drawing, which contained the rudiments,
and facilitated the method of painting.
[8] Pausan. Phocica, c. xxv. seq.
[9] This I take to be the sense of Μεγεθος here, which distinguished
him, according to Ælian, Var. Hist. iv. 3. from Dionysius of Colophon.
The word Τελειοις in the same passage: και ἐν τοις τελειοις ἐιργαζετο
τα ἀθλα, I translate: _he aimed at, he sought his praise in the
representation of essential proportion_; which leads to ideal beauty.
The κρειττους, χειρους, ὁμοιους; or the βελτιονας ἦ καθ’ ἡμας, ἦκαι
τοιουτους, ἠ χειρονας, of Aristotle, Poetic. c. 2. by which he
distinguishes Polygnotus, Dionysius, Pauson, confirms the sense given to
the passage of Ælian.
[10] παρειῶν το ἐνερευθες, ὁιαν την Κασσανδραν ἐν τη λεσχη ἐποιησε τοις
Δελφοις. Lucian: ειχονες. This, and what Pausanias tells of the colour
of Eurynomus in the same picture, together with the coloured draperies
mentioned by Pliny; makes it evident, that the ‘simplex color’ ascribed
by Quintilian to Polygnotus and Aglaophon, implies less a single colour,
as some have supposed, than that simplicity always attendant on the
infancy of painting, which leaves every colour unmixed and crudely by
itself. Indeed the _Poecile_ (ἡ ποικιλη στοα) which obtained its name
from his pictures, is alone a sufficient proof of variety of colours.
[11] Hic primus species exprimere instituit, Pliny, xxxv. 96. as
_species_ in the sense Harduin takes it, ‘oris et habitus venustas,’
cannot be refused to Polygnotus, and the artists immediately preceding
Apollodorus, it must mean here the subdivisions of generic form; the
classes.
At this period we may with probability fix the invention of local colour,
and tone; which, though strictly speaking it be neither the light nor the
shade, is regulated by the medium which tinges both. This, Pliny calls
‘splendour.’ To Apollodorus Plutarch ascribes likewise the invention
of tints, the mixtures of colour and the gradations of shade, if I
conceive the passage rightly: Ἀπολλοδωρος ὁ Ζωγραφος Ἀνθρωπων πρωτος
ἐξευρων φθοραν και ἀποχρωσιν Σκιας, (Plutarch, Bellone an pace Ath, &c.
346.) This was the element of the ancient Αρμογη, that imperceptible
transition, which, without opacity, confusion or hardness, united local
colour, demi-tint, shade and reflexes.
[12] ‘Pinxit et monochromata ex albo.’ Pliny, xxxv. 9. This Aristotle,
Poet. c. 6. calls λευκογραφειν.
[13] In lineis extremis palmam adeptus——minor tamen videtur, sibi
comparatus, in mediis corporibus exprimendis. Pliny, xxxv. 10. Here we
find the inferiority of the middle parts merely relative to himself.
Compared with himself, Parrhasius was not all equal.
[14] Theseus, in quo dixit, eundem apud Parrhasium rosa pastum esse, suum
vero carne. Plin. xxxv. 11.
[15] The epithet which he gave to himself of Ἀβροδιαιτος, the delicate,
the elegant, and the epigram he is said to have composed on himself, are
known: See Athenæus, l. xii. He wore, says Ælian, Var. Hist. ix. 11.
a purple robe and a golden garland; he bore a staff wound round with
tendrils of gold, and his sandals were tied to his feet and ancles with
golden straps. Of his easy simplicity we may judge from his dialogue
with Socrates in Xenophon; ἀπομνημονευατων, 1. iii. Of his libidinous
fancy, beside what Pliny says, from his Archigallus, and the Meleager and
Atalanta mentioned by Suetonius in Tiberio, c. 44.
[16] In the portico of the Piræus by Leochares; in the hall of the
Five-hundred, by Lyson: in the back portico of the Ceramicus there
was a picture of Theseus, of Democracy and the Demos, by Euphranor.
Pausan. Attic. i. 3. Aristolaus, according to Pliny was a painter, ‘e
severissimis.’
[17] Cicero Oratore, 73, seq.—In alioque ponatur, aliudque totum sit,
utrum _decere_ an _oportere_ dicas; _oportere_ enim, perfectionem
declarat officii, quo et semper utendum est, et omnibus: _decere_, quasi
aptum esse, consentaneumque tempori et personæ; quod cum in factis
sæpissime, tum in dictis valet, in vultu denique, et gestu, et incessu.
Contraque item _dedecere_. Quod si poeta fugit, ut maximum vitium, qui
peccat, etiam, cum probam orationem affingit improbo, stultove sapientis:
si denique pictor ille vicit, cum immolanda Iphigenia tristis Calchas
esset, mæstior Ulysses, moereret Menelaus, obvolvendum caput Agamemnonis
esse, quoniam summum ilium luctum penicillo, non posset imitari: si
denique histrio, quid deceat quærit: quid faciendum oratori putemus?
M. F. Quintilianus, 1. ii. c. 14.—Operienda sunt quædam, sive ostendi non
debent, sive exprimi _pro dignitate_ non possunt: ut fecit Timanthes,
ut opinor, Cithnius, in ea tabula qua Coloten tejum vicit. Nam cum in
Iphigeniæ immolatione pinxisset tristem Calchantem, tristiorem Ulyssem,
addidisset Menelao quem summum poterat ars efficere Moerorem, consumptis
affectibus, non reperiens quo _digne_ modo Patris vultum possit
exprimere, velavit ejus caput, et sui cuique animo dedit æstimandum.
It is evident to the slightest consideration, that both Cicero and
Quintilian lose sight of their premises, and contradict themselves in
the motive they ascribe to Timanthes. Their want of acquaintance with
the nature of plastic expression made them imagine the face of Agamemnon
beyond the power of the artist. They were not aware that by making him
waste expression on inferior actors at the expence of a principal one,
they call him an improvident spendthrift and not a wise œconomist.
From Valerius Maximus, who calls the subject ‘Luctuosum _immolatæ_
Iphigeniæ sacrificium’ instead of _immolandæ_, little can be expected to
the purpose. Pliny, with the _digne_ of Quintilian has the same confusion
of motive.
[18] It is observed by an ingenious Critic, that in the tragedy of
Euripides, the procession is described, and upon Iphigenia’s looking back
on her father, he groans, and hides his face to conceal his tears; whilst
the picture gives the moment that precedes the sacrifice, and the hiding
has a different object and arises from another impression.
——————ὡς δ’ εσειδεν Αγαμεμνων αναξ
ἐπι σφαγας στειχουσαν ἐις ἀλσος κορην
ἀνεστεναξε. Καμπαλιν στρεψας καρα
Δακρυα προηγεν. ὀμματων πεπλον προθεις.
[19] Pliny, l. xxxv. c. 18.
[20] Lysippum Sicyonium—audendi rationem cepisse pictoris Eupompi
responso. Eum enim interrogatum, quem sequeretur antecedentium, dixisse
demonstrata hominum multitudine, naturam ipsam imitandam esse, non
artificem. Non habet Latinum nomen symmetria, quam diligentissime
custodivit, nova intactaque ratione quadratas veterum staturas
permutando: Vulgoque dicebat, ab illis factos, quales essent, homines: a
se, quales viderentur esse. Plin. xxxiv. 8.
[21] Μαλλον δε Ἀπελλης ὁ Ἐφεσιος παλαι ταυτην προῦλαβε την ἐικονα· Και
γας ἀυ και ὁυτος διαβληθεις προς Πτολεμαιον——
Λουκιανου περι του μ. ῤ. Π. Τ. Δ.
[22] Apelles was probably the inventor of what artists call _glazing_.
See Reynolds on Du Fresnoy, note 37. vol. iii.
[23] In matri interfectæ infante miserabiliter blandiente. Plin. 1.
xxxiv. c. 9.
[24] A design of Raphael, representing the lues of the Trojans in Creta,
known by the print of Marc Antonio Raymondi.
[25] Reynolds’ Disc. V. vol. i p. 120. Euphranoris Alexander Paris est:
in quo laudatur quod omnia simul intelligantur, judex dearum, amator
Helenæ, et tamen Achillis interfector. Plin. 1. xxxiv. 8.
[26] See the Hymn (ascribed to Homer) on Apollo.
[27] See the account of this in Vasari; vita di P. Brunelleschi, tom. ii.
114. It is of wood, and still exists in the chapel of the family Gondi,
in the church of S. Maria Novella. I know that near a century before
Donato, Giotto is said to have worked in marble two bassorelievos on the
campanile of the cathedral of Florence; they probably excel the style of
his pictures, as much as the bronze works executed by Andrea Pisano, from
his designs, at the door of the Battisterio.
[28] Masaccio da S. Giovanni di Valdarno born in 1402, is said to have
died in 1443. He was the pupil of Masolino da Panicale.
[29] Andrea Mantegna died at Mantoua, 1505. A monument erected to his
memory in 1517, by his sons, gave rise to the mistake of dating his death
from that period.
[30] Luca Signorelli died at Cortona 1521, aged 82.
[31] Lionardo da Vinci is said to have died in 1517, aged 75, at Paris.
[32] The flying birds of paste, the lions filled with lilies, the
lizards with dragons wings, horned and silvered over, savour equally of
the boy and the quack. It is singular enough that there exists not the
smallest hint of Lorenzo de Medici having employed or noticed a man of
such powers and such early celebrity; the legend which makes him go to
Rome with Juliano de Medici at the access of Leo X, to accept employment
in the Vatican, whether sufficiently authentic or not, furnishes a
characteristic trait of the man. The Pope passing through the room
allotted for the pictures, and instead of designs and cartoons, finding
nothing but an apparatus of distillery, of oils and varnishes, exclaimed,
_Oimè costui non è per far nulla, da che comincia a pensare alla fine
innanzi il principio dell’ opera!_ From an admirable sonnet of Lionardo,
preserved by Lomazzo, he appears to have been sensible of the inconstancy
of his own temper, and full of wishes, at least, to correct it.
Much has been said of the honour he received by expiring in the arms
of Francis I. It was indeed an honour, by which destiny in some degree
atoned to that monarch for his future disaster at Pavia.
[33] Frà. Bartolomeo died at Florence 1517, at the age of 48.
[34] Michael Angelo Buonarroti born at Castel-Caprese in 1474, died at
Rome 1564, aged 90.
[35] Like Silanion—‘Apollodorum fecit, fictorem et ipsum, sed inter
cunctos diligentissimum artis & inimicum sui judicem, crebro perfecta
signa frangentem, dum satiare cupiditatem nequit artis, et ideo insanum
cognominarum. Hoc in eo expressit, nec hominem ex ære fecit sed
Iracundiam.’ Plin. 1. xxxiv. 7.
[36] When M. Angelo pronounced oil-painting to be _Arte da donna e da
huomini agiati e infingardi_, a maxim to which the fierce Venetian
manner has given an air of paradox, he spoke relatively to fresco: it
was a lash on the short-sighted insolence of Sebastian del Piombo,
who wanted to persuade Paul III. to have the last judgment painted in
oil. That he had a sense for the beauties of oil colour, its glow, its
juice, its richness, its pulp, the praises which he lavished on Titiano,
whom he called the only painter, and his patronage of Frà. Sebastian
himself, evidently prove. When young, M. Angelo attempted oil-painting
with success; the picture painted for Angelo Doni is an instance, and
probably the only intire work of the kind that remains. The Lazarus, in
the picture destined for the cathedral at Narbonne, rejects the claim of
every other hand. The Leda, the cartoon of which, formerly in the palace
of the Vecchietti at Florence, is now in the possession of W. Lock, Esq.,
was painted in distemper; (a tempera); all small or large oil pictures
shown as his, are copies from his designs or cartoons, by Marcello
Venusti, Giacopo da Pontormo, Battista Franco, and Sebastian of Venice.
[37] Raphael Sanzio, of Urbino, died at Rome 1520, at the age of 37.
[38] Giorgio Barbarelli, from his size and beauty called Giorgione, was
born at Castel Franco, in the territory of Venice, 1478, and died at
Venice, 1511.
[39] Titiano Vecelli, or as the Venetians call him, Tiziàn, born at Cador
in the Friulese, died at Venice, 1576, aged 99.
[40] The birth and life of Antonio Allegri, or as he called himself
Læti, surnamed Correggio, is more involved in obscurity than the life
of Apelles. Whether he was born in 1490 or 94 is not ascertained; the
time of his death in 1534 is more certain. The best account of him has
undoubtedly been given by A. R. Mengs in his _Memorie concernenti la vita
e le opere di Antonio Allegri denominato il Correggio_. Vol. ii. of his
works, published by the Spaniard D. G. Niccola d’Azara.
[41] Pelegrino Tibaldi died at Milano in 1592, aged 70.
[42] Sebastiano, afterwards called Del Piombo from the office of the
papal signet, died at Rome in 1547, aged 62.
[43] Daniel Ricciarelli, of Volterra, died in 1566, aged 57.
[44] Now the first ornament of the exquisite collection of J. J.
Angerstein, Esq.
[45] Giorgio Vasari, of Arezzo, died in 1584, aged 68.
[46] Julio Pipi, called Romano, died at Mantoua in 1546, aged 54.
[47] Francesco Primaticcio, made Abbé de St. Martin de Troyes, by Francis
I., died in France 1570, aged 80.
[48] Polydoro Caldara da Caravaggio was assassinated at Messina in 1543,
aged 51.
[49] Michael Angelo Amerigi, surnamed Il Caravaggi, knight of Malta, died
1609, aged 40.
[50] Nicolas Poussin, of Andely, died at Rome 1665, aged 71.
[51] Salvator Rosa, surnamed Salvatoriello, died at Rome 1673, aged 59.
[52] Of the portraits which Raphael in fresco scattered over the
compositions of the Vatican, we shall find an opportunity to speak.
But in oil the real style of portrait began at Venice with Giorgione,
flourished in Sebastian del Piombo, and was carried to perfection by
Titiano, who filled the masses of the first without entangling himself
in the minute details of the second. Tintoretto, Bassan, and Paolo of
Verona, followed the principle of Titiano. After these, it migrated
from Italy to reside with the Spaniard Diego Velasquez; from whom
Rubens and Vandyck attempted to transplant it to Flanders, France and
England, with unequal success. France seized less on the delicacy than
on the affectation of Vandyck, and soon turned the art of representing
men and women into a mere remembrancer of fashions and airs. England
had possessed Holbein, but it was reserved for the German Lely, and
his successor Kneller, to lay the foundation of a manner, which, by
pretending to unite portrait with history, gave a retrograde direction
for near a century, to both. A mob of shepherds and shepherdesses in
flowing wigs and dressed curls, ruffled Endymion’s, humble Juno’s,
withered Hebe’s, surly Allegroes, and smirking Pensierosa’s, usurped the
place of truth, propriety and character. Even the lamented powers of the
greatest painter, whom this country and perhaps our age produced, long
vainly struggled, and scarcely in the eve of life succeeded to emancipate
us from this dastard taste.
[53] Francesco Mazzuoli, called il Parmegiano, died at Casal Maggiore
in 1540, at the age of 36. The magnificent picture of the St. John, we
speak of, was begun by order of the Lady Maria Bufalina, and destined for
the church of St. Salvadore del Lauro at Città di Castello. It probably
never received the last hand of the master, who fled from Rome, where he
painted it, at the sacking of that city, under Charles Bourbon, in 1527;
it remained in the refectory of the convent della Pace for several years,
was carried to Città di Castello by Messer Giulio Bufalini, and is now in
England. The Moses, a figure in fresco at Parma, together with Raphael’s
figure of God in the vision of Ezekiel, is said, by Mr. Mason, to have
furnished Gray with the head and action of his bard: if that was the
case, he would have done well, to acquaint us with the poet’s method, of
making ‘Placidis coire immitia.’
[54] Lodovico Carracci died at Bologna 1619, aged 64.
Agostino Carracci died at Parma in 1602, at the age of 44. His is the St.
Girolamo in the Certosa, near Bologna; his, the Thetis with the nereids,
cupids, and tritons, in the gallery of the palace Farnese. Why, as an
engraver, he should have wasted his powers on the large plate from the
crucifixion, painted by Tintoretto, in the hospitio of the school of St.
Rocco, a picture, of which he could not express the tone, its greatest
merit, is not easily unriddled. Annibale Carracci died at Rome in 1609,
at the age of 49.
[55] _SONNET OF AGOSTINO CARRACCI._
Chi farsi un buon Pittor cerca, e desia,
Il disegno di Roma habbia alla mano,
La mossa coll’ ombrar Veneziano,
E il degno colorir di Lombardia.
Di Michel’ Angiol la terribil via
Il vero natural di Tiziano,
Del Correggio lo stil puro, e sovrano,
E di un Rafel la giusta simetria.
Del Tibaldi il decoro, e il fondamento,
Del dotto Primaticcio l’inventare,
E un po di gratia del Parmigianino.
Ma senza tanti studi, e tanto stento,
Si ponga l’opre solo ad imitare,
Che qui lasciocci il nostro Niccolino.
Malvasia, author of the _Felsina Pittrice_, has made this sonnet the text
to his drowsy rhapsody on the frescoes of Lodovico Carracci and some
of his scholars, in the cloisters of St. Michele in Bosco, by Bologna.
He circumscribes the ‘_Mossa Veneziana_,’ of the sonnet, by ‘_Quel
strepitoso motivo & quel divincolamento_’ peculiar to Tintoretto.
[56] Guido Reni died in 1642, aged 68. Giov. Lanfranco died at Naples in
1647 aged 66. Franc. Albani died in 1660, aged 82. Domenico Zampieri,
called il Domenichino, died in 1641, aged 60. Franc. Barbieri of Cento,
called il Guercino, from a cast in his eye, died in 1667, aged 76.
[57] Pietro Berretini, of Cortona, the painter of the cieling in the
Barberini hall, and of the gallery in the lesser Pamphili palace; the
vernal suavity of whose fresco-tints no pencil ever equalled, died at
Rome in 1669, aged 73. Luca Giordano, nick-named Fa-presto, or Dispatch,
from the rapidity of his execution, the greatest machinist of his time,
died in 1705, aged 76.
[58] We are informed by the Editor of the Latin translation of Albert
Durer’s book, on the symmetry of the parts of the human frame, (Parisiis,
in officina Caroli Perier in vico Bellovaco, sub Bellerophonte, 1557,
fol.) that, during Albert’s stay at Venice, where he resided for a
short time, to procure redress from the Signoria, for the forgery of
Marc Antonio, he became familiar with Giovanni Bellini: and that Andrea
Mantegna, who had heard of his arrival in Italy, and had conceived
an high opinion of his execution and fertility, sent him a message
of invitation to Mantoua, for the express purpose of giving him an
idea of that form of which he himself had obtained a glimpse from the
contemplation of the antique. Andrea was then ill, and expired before
Albert, who immediately prepared to set out for Mantoua, could profit
by his instructions. This disappointment, says my author, Albert never
ceased to lament during his life. How fit the Mantouan was to instruct
the German, is not the question here; but Albert’s regret seems to prove
that he felt a want which his model could not supply; and that he had
too just an idea of the importance of the art to be proud of dexterity
of finger or facility of execution, when employed on objects essentially
defective or comparatively trifling. The following personal account of
Albert deserves to be given in the Latin Editor’s own words: ‘E Pannonia
oriundum accepimus—Erat caput argutum, oculi micantes, nasus honestus
& quern Greci Τετράγωνον vocant; proceriusculum collum, pectus amplum,
castigatus venter, femora nervosa, crura stabilia: sed digitis nihil
dixisses vidisse elegantius.’
Albert Durer was the scholar of Martin Schön and Michael Wolgemuth, and
died at Nuremberg in 1528, aged 57.
[59] Lucas Jacob, called Lucas of Leyden, and by the Italians, Luca
d’Ollanda, died at Leyden in 1533.
[60] Peter Paul Rubens, of Cologne, the disciple of Adam Van Ort and Otho
Venius, died at or near Antwerp in 1641, aged 63.
See the admirable character given of him by Sir Joshua Reynolds, annexed
to his journey to Flanders, vol. ii. of his works.
[61] Anthony Vandyck died in London, 1641, at the age of 42.—The poetic
conception of Abraham Diepenbeck may be estimated from the Temple des
Muses of Mr. de Marolles; re-edited but not improved by Bernard Picart.
[62] Rembrandt died, at Amsterdam? in 1674, aged 68.
[63] Hans Holbein, of Basle, died in London, 1544, at the age of 46.
Peter Francis Mola, the scholar of Giuseppe d’Arpino and Franc. Albani,
was born at the village of Coldre, of the diocese of Balerna, in the
bailliage of Mendrisio, in 1621, and died at Rome in 1666.
[64] Eustache le Sueur, bred under Simon Voüet, died at Paris in 1655, at
the age of 38. His fellow scholar and overbearing rival Charles le Brun,
died in 1690, aged 71.
[65] For the best account of Spanish art, see Lettera di A. R. Mengs a
Don Antonio Ponz. Opere di Mengs, vol. ii. Mengs was born at Ausig, in
Bohemia, in 1728, and died at Rome in 1779.
[66]
Ὑλῃ και τροποις μιμησεως διαφερουςι.
Πλουταρχ. Π. Αθ. κατα Π. ἠ καθ’ ἐ. ἐνδ.
See Lessings Laokoon. Berlin 1766. 8vo.
[67] All minute detail tends to destroy terrour, as all minute
ornament, grandeur. The catalogue of the cauldron’s ingredients in
Macbeth, destroys the terrour attendant on the mysterious darkness of
preternatural agency; and the seraglio trappings of Rubens, annihilate
his heroes.
[68]
Ἐγω δε πλεον ἐλπομαι
Λογον Ὀδυσσεος, ἠ παθεν,
Δια τον ἁδυεπη γενεσθ Ὁμηρον
Ἐπει ψευδεεσσιν ὁι ποτανᾳ γε μαχανᾳ
Σεμνον ἐπεστι τι. σοφια δε
Κλεπτει παραγοισα μυθοις.
Πινδαρ. Νεμ. Ζ.
[69] M. F. Quintilianus, l. xii. 10.—Concipiendis visionibus (quas
ΦΑΝΤΑΣΙΑΣ vocant) Theon Samius—est præstantissimus.
At quomodo fiet ut afficiamur? neque enim sunt motus in nostra
potestate. Tentabo etiam de hoc dicere. Quas Φαντασιας græci
vocant, nos sanè visiones appellamus; per quas imagines rerum
absentium ita repræsentantur animo, ut eas cernere oculis
ac præsentes habere videamur: has quisquis bene conceperit,
is erit in affectibus potentissimus. Hunc quidam dicunt
ἐυφαντασιωτον, qui sibi res, voces, actus, secundum verum
optume finget: quod quidem nobis volentibus facile continget.
Nam ut inter otia animorum et spes inanes, et velut somnia
quædam vigilantium, ita nos hæ de quibus loquimur, imagines
persequuntur, ut peregrinari, navigare, præliari, populos
alloqui, divitiarum quas non habemus, usum videamur disponere;
nec cogitare, sed facere: hoc animi vitium ad utilitatem non
transferemus? ut hominem occisum querar, non omnia quæ in
re præsenti accidisse credibile est, in oculis habebo? non
percussor ille subitus erumpet? non expavescet circumventus?
exclamabit, vel rogabit, vel fugiet? non ferientem, non
concidentem videbo? non animo sanguis, et pallor et gemitus,
extremus denique expirantis hiatus insidebit?
Idem, l. vi. c. 11.
Theon numbered with the ‘Proceres’ by Quintilian, by Pliny with less
discrimination is placed among the ‘Primis Proximos;’ and in some passage
of Plutarch, unaccountably censured for impropriety of subject, ατοπια,
in representing the madness of Orestes.
[70] Αιλιανου ποικ. ιστορ. l. ii. c. 44. Θεωνος του Ζωγραφου πολλα μεν
και ἀλλα ὁμολογει την χειρουργιαν ἀγαθην οὐσαν, ἀ ταρ οὐν και τοδε το
γραμμα.——Και ἐιπες ἀν ἀυτον ἐνθουσιᾶν, ὡσπερ εξ Ἀρεος μανεντα.——Και
σφαττειν βλεπων, και ἀπειλῶν δι ὁλου του σχηματος, ὁτι μηδενος φεισεται.
[71] The name of Agasias, the scholar or son of Dositheos, the Ephesian,
occurs not in ancient record; and whether he be the Egesias of Quintilian
and Pliny, or these the same, cannot be ascertained; though the style
of sculpture, and the form of the letters in the inscription are not
much at variance with the character which the former gives to the age
and style of Calon and Egesias; ‘Signa—duriora et Tuscanicis proxima.’
The impropriety of calling this figure a gladiator has been shewn by
Winkelmann, and on his remark, that it probably exhibits the attitude
of a soldier, who signalized himself in some moment of danger, Lessing
has founded a conjecture, that it is the figure of Chabrias, from
the following passage of Corn. Nepos: ‘Elucet maxime inventum ejus
in proelio, quod apud Thebas fecit, cum Boetiis subsidio venisset.
Namque in eo victoriæ fidente summo duce Agesilao, fugatis jam ab eo
conductitiis catervis, reliquam phalangem loco vetuit cedere; obnixoque
genu scuto, projectâque hastâ, impetum excipere hostium docuit. Id novum
Agesilaus intuens, progredi non est ausus, suosque jam incurrentes tubâ
revocavit. Hoc usque eo in Græcia famâ celebratum est, ut illo statu
Chabrias sibi statuam fieri voluerit, quæ publicè ei ab Atheniensibus in
foro constituta est. Ex quo factum est, ut postea athletæ, _cæterique
artifices_ his statibus in statuis ponendis uterentur, in quibus
victoriam essent adepti?’
On this passage, simple and unperplexed, if we except the words,
‘cæterique ‘artifices,’ where something is evidently dropped or changed,
there can, I trust, be but one opinion—that the manœuvre of Chabrias was
defensive, and consisted in giving the phalanx a stationary, and at the
same time—impenetrable posture, to check the progress of the enemy; a
repulse, not a victory was obtained; the Thebans were content to maintain
their ground, and not a word is said by the historian, of a pursuit, when
Agesilaus, startled at the contrivance, called off his troops: but the
warriour of Agasias rushes forward in an assailing attitude, whilst with
his head and shield turned upwards he seems to guard himself from some
attack above him. Lessing, aware of this, to make the passage square with
his conjecture, is reduced to a change of punctuation, and accordingly
transposes the decisive comma after ‘scuto,’ to ‘genu,’ and reads ‘obnixo
genu,’ scuto projectâque hastâ,—docuit.’ This alone might warrant us to
dismiss his conjecture as less solid than daring and acute.
The statue erected to Chabrias in the Athenian forum was probably of
brass, for ‘statua’ and ‘statuarius,’ in Pliny at least, will I believe
always be found relative to figures and artists in metal; such were
those which at an early period the Athenians dedicated to Harmodios
and Aristogiton: from them the custom spread in every direction, and
iconic figures in metal, began, says Pliny, to be the ornaments of every
municipal forum.
From another passage in Nepos, I was once willing to find in our figure
an Alcibiades in Phrygia, rushing from the flames of the cottage fired to
destroy him, and guarding himself against the javelins and arrows which
the gang of Sysamithres and Bagoas showered on him at a distance. ‘Ille,’
says the historian, ‘sonitu flammæ? excitatus, quod gladius ei erat
subductus, familiaris sui subalare telum eripuit—et—flammæ vim transit.
Quem, ut Barbari incendium effugisse viderunt, telis eminus missis,
interfecerunt. Sic Alcibiades annos circiter quadraginta natus, diem
obiit supremum.’
Such is the age of our figure, and it is to be noticed that the right arm
and hand, now armed with a lance, are modern; if it be objected, that
the figure is iconic, and that the head of Alcibiades, cut off after his
death, was carried to Pharnabazus, and his body burned by his mistress;
it might be observed in reply, that busts and figures of Alcibiades must
have been frequent in Greece, and that the expression found its source in
the mind of Agasias. On this conjecture however I shall not insist: let
us only observe that the character, forms and attitude, might be turned
to better use than what Poussin made of it. It might form an admirable
Ulysses bestriding the deck of his ship to defend his companions from
the descending fangs of Scylla, or rather, with indignation and anguish,
seeing them already snatched up and writhing in the mysterious gripe:
Ἀυταρ ἐγω καταδυς κλυτα τευχεα, και δυο δυoρε
Μακρ’ ἐν χερσιν ἑλων, ἐις ἰκρια νηος ἐβαινον
Πρωρης——ἐκαμον δε μοι ὀσσε
Παντη παπταινοντι προς ἦεροειδεα πετρην
Σκεψαμενος δε——
Ἠδη των ἐνοησα ποδας και χειρας ὑπερθεν
Ὑψος’ ἀειρομενων——
Odyss. M. 328. seq.
[72] Sebbene il divino Michel Agnolo fece la gran Cappella di Papa
Julio, dappoi non arrivò a questo segno mai alla metà, la sun virtù non
aggiunse mai alla forza di quei primi studi. Vita di Benvenuto Cellini,
p. 13.—Vasari, as appears from his own account, never himself saw the
cartoon: he talks of an ‘infinity of combatants on horseback,’ of which
there neither remains nor ever can have existed a trace, if the picture
at Holkham be the work of Bastiano da St. Gallo. This he saw, for it
was painted, at his own desire, by that master, from his small cartoon
in 1542, and by means of Monsignor Jovio transmitted to Francis I. who
highly esteemed it; from his collection it however disappeared, and no
mention is made of it by the French writers for near two centuries. It
was probably discovered at Paris, bought and carried to England by the
late Lord Leicester. That Vasari, on inspecting the copy, should not have
corrected the confused account he gives of the cartoon from hearsay, can
be wondered at, only by those, who are unacquainted with his character as
a writer. One solitary horse and a drummer on the imaginary back-ground
of the groups engraved by Agostino Venetiano, are all the cavalry
remaining of Vasari’s squadrons, and can as little belong to Michel
Agnolo as the spot on which they are placed.
The following are his own words: ‘Si vedeva dalle divine mani di
Michelagnolo chi affrettare lo armarsi per dare ajuto a’compagni, altri
affibbiarsi la corazza, e molti metter altre armi indosso, ed infiniti
combattendo a cavallo cominciare la zuffa.’
Vasari, Vita di M. A. B. p. 183. ed. Bottari.
[73]
Ὁ δε, πως μεγεθυνει τα Δαιμονια;——Την
Ὁρμην ἀντων κοσμικῳ διαστηματι καταμετρει.
Longinus; § 9.
[74] Much has been said of the loss we have suffered in the marginal
drawings which Michael Angelo drew in his Dante. Invention may have
suffered in being deprived of them; they can, however, have been little
more than hints of a size too minute to admit of much discrimination.
The true terrours of Dante depend as much upon the medium in which he
shews, or gives us a glimpse of his figures, as on their form. The
characteristic outlines of his fiends, Michael Angelo personified in the
dæmons of the last judgment, and invigourated the undisguised appetite,
ferocity or craft of the brute, by traits of human malignity, cruelty,
or lust. The Minos of Dante, in Messer Biagio da Cesena, and his Charon,
have been recognized by all; but less the shivering wretch held over the
barge by a hook, and evidently taken from the following passage in the
xxiid of the Inferno:
Et Graffiacan, che gli era più di contra
Gli arroncigliò l’impegolate chiome;
E trasse ’l sù, che mi parve una lontra.
None has noticed as imitations of Dante in the xxivth book, the
astonishing groups in the Lunetta of the brazen serpent; none the various
hints from the Inferno and Purgatorio scattered over the attitudes and
expressions of the figures rising from their graves. In the Lunetta of
Haman, we owe the sublime conception of his figure to the subsequent
passage in the xviith c. of Purgatory:
Poi piobbe dentro al’ alta phantasia
Un Crucifisso, dispettoso e fiero
Nella sua vista, e lo qual si moria.
The bassorelievo on the border of the second rock, in Purgatory,
furnished the idea of the Annunziata, painted by Marcello Venusti from
his design, in the sacristy of St. Giov. Lateran, by order of Tommaso de’
Cavalieri, the select friend and favourite of Michael Angelo.
We are told that Michael Angelo represented the Ugolino of Dante,
inclosed in the tower of Pisa; if he did, his own work is lost: but if,
as some suppose, the bassorelievo of that subject by Pierino da Vinci,
be taken from his idea, notwithstanding the greater latitude, which the
sculptor might claim, in divesting the figures of drapery and costume; he
appears to me, to have erred in the means employed to rouse our sympathy.
A sullen but muscular character, with groups of muscular bodies and
forms of strength, about him, with the allegoric figure of the Arno at
their feet, and that of Famine hovering over their heads, are not the
fierce Gothic chief, deprived of revenge, brooding over despair in the
stony cage; are not the exhausted agonies of a father, petrified by the
helpless groans of an expiring family, offering their own bodies for his
food, to prolong his life.
[75]
Dixeris egregiè, notum si callida verbum
Reddiderit junctura novum.——
Q. Horat. Flacci de A. P. v. 47.
[76] Matt. 17. 5. 6. See Fiorillo, geschichte, &c. 104. seq.
[77] The vision on Tabor, as represented here, is the most characteristic
produced by modern art. Whether we consider the action of the apostles
overpowered by the divine effulgence and divided between adoration and
astonishment; or the forms of the prophets ascending like flame, and
attracted by the lucid centre, or the majesty of Jesus himself, whose
countenance, is the only one we know, expressive of his superhuman
nature. That the unison of such powers, should not, for once, have
disarmed the burlesque of the French critic, rouses equal surprise and
indignation.
[78] The group in the Ludovisi, ever since its discovery, absurdly
misnamed Pætus and Arria, notwithstanding some dissonance of taste and
execution, may with more plausibility claim the title of Hæmon and
Antigone.
[79] The whole of the gallery of Luxemburg by Rubens is but a branch of
its magnificence: general as the elements, universal and permanent as
the affections of human nature, allegory breaks the fetters of time, it
unites with boundless sway, mythologic, feodal, local incongruities,
fleeting modes of society and fugitive fashions: thus, in the picture of
Rubens, Minerva, who instructs, the Graces that surround the royal maiden
at the poetic fount, are not what they are in Homer, the real tutress of
Telemachus, the real dressers of Venus, they are the symbols only of the
education which the princess received. In that sublime design of Michael
Agnolo, where a figure is roused by a descending genius from his repose
on a globe, on which he yet reclines, and with surprize discovers the
phantoms of the passions which he courted, unmasked in wild confusion
flitting round him, M. Agnolo was less ambitious to express the nature
of a dream, or to bespeak our attention to its picturesque effect and
powerful contrasts, than to impress us with the lesson, that all is
vanity and life a farce, unless engaged by virtue and the pursuits of
mind.
[80] L’Aurora Sonnacchiosa.
[81] Speaking of the figure of Christ by Raphael in the Madonna del
Spasimo, he calls it ‘Una Figura d’un Carattere fra quel di Giove, e
quello d’Apollo; quale effettivamente deve esser quello, che corrisponde
a Cristo, aggiungendovi soltanto l’espressione accidentale della
passione, in cui si rappresenta.’ Opere 11. 83.
[82] It is engraved by Villamena.
[83] The composition, and in some degree the lines, but neither its tone
nor effect, may be found among the etchings of Le Fevre.
[84] I cannot quit this picture without observing, that it presents
the most incontrovertible evidence of the incongruities arising from
the jarring coalition of the grand and ornamental styles. The group of
Lazarus may be said to contain the most valuable relic of the classic
time of modern, and perhaps the only specimen left of M. Agnolo’s
oil-painting: an opinion which will scarcely be disputed by him, who has
examined the manner of the Sistine chapel, and in his mind compared it
with the group of the Lazarus, and that with the style and treatment of
the other parts.
[85] In a picture which he painted at Rome for Bindo Altoviti, it
represented ‘Un Cristo quanto il vivo, levato di croce, e posto in terra
a’ piedi della Madre; e nell’ aria Febo, che oscura la faccia del sole,
e Diana quella della Luna. Nel paese poi, oscurato da queste Tenebre, si
veggiono spezzarsi alcuni monti di pietra, mossi dal terremoto, e certi
corpi morti di santi risorgendo, uscire de sepolcri in vari modi; il
quale quadro, finito che fu, per sua grazia non dispiacque al maggior
pittore, scultore, e architetto, che sia stato a’ tempi nostri passati?’
The compliment was not paid to M. Agnolo himself, for the word ‘passati’
tells that he was no more, but it levied a tribute on posterity.
Vita di Giorgio Vasari.
[86] A miracle means an act performed by virtue of an unknown law of
Nature.
[87] The form, but not the soul, of Julio’s composition has been borrowed
by Rubens, or the master of the well known picture in the gallery of
Dulwich college. Few can be unacquainted with the work of Vandyke,
spread by the best engravers of that school. The picture of Rembrandt
is the chief ornament of the collection in the garden-house of the
Schönborn family, in one of the suburbs of Vienna: has been etched on
a large scale, and there is a copy of it in the gallery at Cassel. A
circumstantial account of it may be found in the Eighth Letter, vol. iii.
of Küttner’s Travels.
[88] Nella arte della pittura aggiunse costui alla maniera del colorire
ad olio, una certa oscurità; donde banno dato i moderni gran forza e
rilievo alle Loro figure. Vasari vita di Lion. da Vinci, p. 559. ed. 1550.
[89] In the greater part of the cartoons, it does not appear that
chiaroscuro had more than an ordinary share of attention:
In the Miraculous Draught plain day-light prevails.
In the miracle at the Temple-gate a more forcible and more sublime effect
would have been obtained from a cupola-light and pillars darkened on the
fore-ground.
In the exceccation of Elymas, composition and expression owe little of
their roundness and evidence to chiaroscuro.
Apposition seems to have arranged the Sacrifice at Lystra.
If Dionysius and Damaris, in the cartoon of the Areopagus, had more
forcibly refracted by dark colours or shade, the light against the
speaker, effect and subject would have gained.
Considered individually or in masses, the chiaroscuro in the cartoon of
Ananias appears to be perfect; but the Donation of the Keys owes what
impression it makes on us in a great measure to the skilful distribution
of its light and shade.
[90] In the following absurd description of the well-known picture in
the palace Pitti: ‘It consists of three half-figures, one of which
represents Martin Luther in the habit of an Augustin Monk, who plays
on a harpsichord; Calvin stands by him in a chorister’s dress, with a
violin in his hand: opposite you see a young lively girl in a bonnet
with a plume of white feathers; by her Giorgione meant to represent the
noted Catharine, Luther’s mistress and wife,’ &c. Fiorillo, vol. ii. p.
63. To expose the ignorant credulity which dictated this passage, it is
sufficient to observe, that Giorgione died 1511, and that Calvin was born
1508.
[91] In every edition of the Vite subsequent to his own of 1550. The
following passage deserves to be given in his own words: ‘Giorgione
di Castel franco; il quale sfumò le sue pitture e dette una terribil’
movenzia a certe cose come è una storia nella scuola di san Marco a
Venezia, dove è un tempo turbido che tuona, et trema il dipinto, et le
figure si muovono & si spiccano da la tavola per una certa oscurità di
ombre bene intese.’ Proemio della terza Parte delle Vite, p. 558.
[92] A La Scuola di S. Marco La Tempesta Sedata dal Santo, ove fra Le
altre cose sono tre remiganti ignudi, pregiatissimi pel disegno, e per le
attitudini. Lanzi storia, &c. Tomo II. parte prima. Scuola Veneta.
Printed by A. and R. Spottiswoode,
Printers-Street, London.
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