in the contemporary Northern art? That Northern school is my subject
to-day; and yet I give you, as type of the intermediate condition
between Egypt and England--not Holbein, but Botticelli. I am obliged to
do this; because in the Southern art, the religious temper remains
unconquered by the doctrines of the Reformation. Botticelli was--what
Luther wished to be, but could not be--a reformer still believing in the
Church: his mind is at peace; and his art, therefore, can pursue the
delight of beauty, and yet remain prophetic. But it was far otherwise in
Germany. There the Reformation of manners became the destruction of
faith; and art therefore, not a prophecy, but a protest. It is the
chief work of the greatest Protestant who ever lived,[AI] which I ask
you to study with me to-day.
149. I said that the power of engraving had developed itself during the
introduction of three new--(practically and vitally new, that is to
say)--elements, into the minds of men: elements which briefly may be
expressed thus:
1. Classicism, and Literary Science.
2. Medicine, and Physical Science.[AJ]
3. Reformation, and Religious Science.
And first of Classicism.
You feel, do not you, in this typical work of Gainsborough's, that his
subject as well as his picture is 'artless' in a lovely sense;--nay, not
only artless, but ignorant, and unscientific, in a beautiful way? You
would be afterwards remorseful, I think, and angry with yourself--seeing
the effect produced on her face--if you were to ask this little lady to
spell a very long word? Also, if you wished to know how many times the
sevens go in forty-nine, you would perhaps wisely address yourself
elsewhere. On the other hand, you do not doubt that _this_ lady[AK]
knows very well how many times the sevens go in forty-nine, and is more
Mistress of Arts than any of us are Masters of them.
150. You have then, in the one case, a beautiful simplicity, and a
blameless ignorance; in the other, a beautiful artfulness, and a wisdom
which you do not dread,--or, at least, even though dreading, love. But
you know also that we may remain in a hateful and culpable ignorance;
and, as I fear too many of us in competitive effort feel, become
possessed of a hateful knowledge.
Ignorance, therefore, is not evil absolutely; but, innocent, may be
lovable.
Knowledge also is not good absolutely; but, guilty, may be hateful.
So, therefore, when I now repeat my former statement, that the first
main opposition between the Northern and Southern schools is in the
simplicity of the one, and the scholarship of the other, that statement
may imply sometimes the superiority of the North, and sometimes of the
South. You may have a heavenly simplicity opposed to a hellish (that is
to say, a lustful and arrogant) scholarship; or you may have a barbarous
and presumptuous ignorance opposed to a divine and disciplined wisdom.
Ignorance opposed to learning in both cases; but evil to good, as the
case may be.
151. For instance: the last time I was standing before Raphael's
arabesques in the Loggias of the Vatican, I wrote down in my pocket-book
the description, or, more modestly speaking, the inventory, of the small
portion of that infinite wilderness of sensual fantasy which happened to
be opposite me. It consisted of a woman's face, with serpents for hair,
and a virgin's breasts, with stumps for arms, ending in blue
butterflies' wings, the whole changing at the waist into a goat's body,
which ended below in an obelisk upside-down, to the apex at the bottom
of which were appended, by graceful chains, an altar, and two bunches of
grapes.
Now you know in a moment, by a glance at this 'design'--beautifully
struck with free hand, and richly gradated in color,--that the master
was familiar with a vast range of art and literature: that he knew all
about Egyptian sphinxes, and Greek Gorgons; about Egyptian obelisks, and
Hebrew altars; about Hermes, and Venus, and Bacchus, and satyrs, and
goats, and grapes.
You know also--or ought to know, in an instant,--that all this learning
has done him no good; that he had better have known nothing than any of
these things, since they were to be used by him only to such purpose;
and that his delight in armless breasts, legless trunks, and obelisks
upside-down, has been the last effort of his expiring sensation, in the
grasp of corrupt and altogether victorious Death. And you have thus, in
Gainsborough as compared with Raphael, a sweet, sacred, and living
simplicity, set against an impure, profane, and paralyzed knowledge.
152. But, next, let us consider the reverse conditions.
Let us take instance of contrast between faultful and treacherous
ignorance, and divinely pure and fruitful knowledge.
In the place of honor at the end of one of the rooms of your Royal
Academy--years ago--stood a picture by an English Academician, announced
as a representation of Moses sustained by Aaron and Hur, during the
discomfiture of Amalek. In the entire range of the Pentateuch, there is
no other scene (in which the visible agents are mortal only) requiring
so much knowledge and thought to reach even a distant approximation to
the probabilities of the fact. One saw in a moment that the painter was
both powerful and simple, after a sort; that he had really sought for a
vital conception, and had originally and earnestly read his text, and
formed his conception. And one saw also in a moment that he had chanced
upon this subject, in reading or hearing his Bible, as he might have
chanced on a dramatic scene accidentally in the street. That he knew
nothing of the character of Moses,--nothing of his law,--nothing of the
character of Aaron, nor of the nature of a priesthood,--nothing of the
meaning of the event which he was endeavoring to represent, of the
temper in which it would have been transacted by its agents, or of its
relations to modern life.
153. On the contrary, in the fresco of the earlier scenes in the life of
Moses, by Sandro Botticelli, you know--not 'in a moment,' for the
knowledge of knowledge cannot be so obtained; but in proportion to the
discretion of your own reading, and to the care you give to the picture,
you _may_ know,--that here is a sacredly guided and guarded learning;
here a Master indeed, at whose feet you may sit safely, who can teach
you, better than in words, the significance of both Moses' law and
Aaron's ministry; and not only these, but, if he chose, could add to
this an exposition as complete of the highest philosophies both of the
Greek nation, and of his own; and could as easily have painted, had it
been asked of him, Draco, or Numa, or Justinian, as the herdsman of
Jethro.
154. It is rarely that we can point to an opposition between faultful,
because insolent, ignorance, and virtuous, because gracious, knowledge,
so direct, and in so parallel elements, as in this instance. In general,
the analysis is much more complex. It is intensely difficult to indicate
the mischief of involuntary and modest ignorance, calamitous only in a
measure; fruitful in its lower field, yet sorrowfully condemned to that
lower field--not by sin, but fate.
When first I introduced you to Bewick, we closed our too partial
estimate of his entirely magnificent powers with one sorrowful
concession--he could draw a pig, but not a Venus.
Eminently he could so, because--which is still more sorrowfully to be
conceded--he liked the pig best. I have put now in your educational
series a whole galaxy of pigs by him; but, hunting all the fables
through, I find only one Venus, and I think you will all admit that she
is an unsatisfactory Venus.[AL] There is honest simplicity here; but you
regret it; you miss something that you find in Holbein, much more in
Botticelli. You see in a moment that this man knows nothing of Sphinxes,
or Muses, or Graces, or Aphrodites; and, besides, that, knowing nothing,
he would have no liking for them even if he saw them; but much prefers
the style of a well-to-do English housekeeper with corkscrew curls, and
a portly person.
155. You miss something, I said, in Bewick which you find in Holbein.
But do you suppose Holbein himself, or any other Northern painter, could
wholly quit himself of the like accusations? I told you, in the second
of these lectures, that the Northern temper, refined from savageness,
and the Southern, redeemed from decay, met, in Florence. Holbein and
Botticelli are the purest types of the two races. Holbein is a civilized
boor; Botticelli a reanimate Greek. Holbein was polished by
companionship with scholars and kings, but remains always a burgher of
Augsburg in essential nature. Bewick and he are alike in temper; only
the one is untaught, the other perfectly taught. But Botticelli _needs_
no teaching. He is, by his birth, scholar and gentleman to the heart's
core. Christianity itself can only inspire him, not refine him. He is as
tried gold chased by the jeweler,--the roughest part of him is the
outside.
Now how differently must the newly recovered scholastic learning tell
upon these two men. It is all out of Holbein's way; foreign to his
nature, useless at the best, probably cumbrous. But Botticelli receives
it as a child in later years recovers the forgotten dearness of a
nursery tale; and is more himself, and again and again himself, as he
breathes the air of Greece, and hears, in his own Italy, the lost voice
of the Sibyl murmur again by the Avernus Lake.
156. It is not, as we have seen, every one of the Southern race who can
thus receive it. But it graces them all; is at once a part of their
being; destroys them, if it is to destroy, the more utterly because it
so enters into their natures. It destroys Raphael; but it graces him,
and is a part of him. It all but destroys Mantegna; but it graces him.
And it does not hurt Holbein, just because it does _not_ grace
him--never is for an instant a part of him. It is with Raphael as with
some charming young girl who has a new and beautifully made dress
brought to her, which entirely becomes her,--so much, that in a little
while, thinking of nothing else, she becomes _it_; and is only the
decoration of her dress. But with Holbein it is as if you brought the
same dress to a stout farmer's daughter who was going to dine at the
Hall; and begged her to put it on that she might not discredit the
company. She puts it on to please you; looks entirely ridiculous in it,
but is not spoiled by it,--remains herself, in spite of it.
157. You probably have never noticed the extreme awkwardness of Holbein
in wearing this new dress; you would the less do so because his own
people think him all the finer for it, as the farmer's wife would
probably think her daughter. Dr. Woltmann, for instance, is enthusiastic
in praise of the splendid architecture in the background of his
Annunciation. A fine mess it must have made in the minds of simple
German maidens, in their notion of the Virgin at home! I cannot show you
this Annunciation; but I have under my hand one of Holbein's Bible cuts,
of the deepest seriousness and import--his illustration of the
Canticles, showing the Church as the bride of Christ.
[Illustration]
You could not find a subject requiring more tenderness, purity, or
dignity of treatment. In this maid, symbolizing the Church, you ask for
the most passionate humility, the most angelic beauty: "Behold, thou art
fair, my dove." Now here is Holbein's ideal of that fairness; here is
his "Church as the Bride."
I am sorry to associate this figure in your minds, even for a moment,
with the passages it is supposed to illustrate; but the lesson is too
important to be omitted. Remember, Holbein represents the temper of
Northern Reformation. He has all the nobleness of that temper, but also
all its baseness. He represents, indeed, the revolt of German truth
against Italian lies; but he represents also the revolt of German
animalism against Hebrew imagination. This figure of Holbein's is
half-way from Solomon's mystic bride, to Rembrandt's wife, sitting on
his knee while he drinks.
But the key of the question is not in this. Florentine animalism has at
this time, also, enough to say for itself. But Florentine animalism, at
this time, feels the joy of a gentleman, not of a churl. And a
Florentine, whatever he does,--be it virtuous or sinful, chaste or
lascivious, severe or extravagant,--does it with a grace.
158. You think, perhaps, that Holbein's Solomon's bride is so ungraceful
chiefly because she is overdressed, and has too many feathers and
jewels. No; a Florentine would have put any quantity of feathers and
jewels on her, and yet never lost her grace. You shall see him do it,
and that to a fantastic degree, for I have an example under my hand.
Look back, first, to Bewick's Venus (Lecture III.). You can't accuse her
of being overdressed. She complies with every received modern principle
of taste. Sir Joshua's precept that drapery should be "drapery, and
nothing more," is observed more strictly even by Bewick than by Michael
Angelo. If the absence of decoration could exalt the beauty of his
Venus, here had been her perfection.
Now look back to Plate II. (Lecture IV.), by Sandro; Venus in her
planet, the ruling star of Florence. Anything more grotesque in
conception, more unrestrained in fancy of ornament, you cannot find,
even in the final days of the Renaissance. Yet Venus holds her divinity
through all; she will become majestic to you as you gaze; and there is
not a line of her chariot wheels, of her buskins, or of her throne,
which you may not see was engraved by a gentleman.
[Illustration: V.
"Heat considered as a Mode of Motion."
Florentine Natural Philosophy.]
159. Again, Plate V., opposite, is a facsimile of another engraving of
the same series--the Sun in Leo. It is even more extravagant in
accessories than the Venus. You see the Sun's epaulets before you see
the sun; the spiral scrolls of his chariot, and the black twisted rays
of it, might, so far as types of form only are considered, be a design
for some modern court-dress star, to be made in diamonds. And yet all
this wild ornamentation is, if you will examine it, more purely Greek in
spirit than the Apollo Belvedere.
You know I have told you, again and again, that the soul of Greece is
her veracity; that what to other nations were fables and symbolisms, to
her became living facts--living gods. The fall of Greece was instant
when her gods again became fables. The Apollo Belvedere is the work of a
sculptor to whom Apollonism is merely an elegant idea on which to
exhibit his own skill. He does not himself feel for an instant that the
handsome man in the unintelligible attitude,[AM] with drapery hung over
his left arm, as it would be hung to dry over a clothes-line, is the
Power of the Sun. But the Florentine believes in Apollo with his whole
mind, and is trying to explain his strength in every touch.
For instance; I said just now, "You see the sun's epaulets before the
sun." Well, _don't_ you, usually, as it rises? Do you not continually
mistake a luminous cloud for it, or wonder where it is, behind one?
Again, the face of the Apollo Belvedere is agitated by anxiety, passion,
and pride. Is the sun's likely to be so, rising on the evil and the
good? This Prince sits crowned and calm: look at the quiet fingers of
the hand holding the scepter,--at the restraint of the reins merely by a
depression of the wrist.
160. You have to look carefully for those fingers holding the scepter,
because the hand--which a great anatomist would have made so exclusively
interesting--is here confused with the ornamentation of the arm of the
chariot on which it rests. But look what the ornamentation is;--fruit
and leaves, abundant, in the mouth of a cornucopia. A quite vulgar and
meaningless ornament in ordinary renaissance work. Is it so here, think
you? Are not the leaves and fruits of earth in the Sun's hand?[AN]
You thought, perhaps, when I spoke just now of the action of the right
hand, that less than a depression of the wrist would stop horses such as
those. You fancy Botticelli drew them so, because he had never seen a
horse; or because, able to draw fingers, he could not draw hoofs! How
fine it would be to have, instead, a prancing four-in-hand, in the style
of Piccadilly on the Derby-day, or at least horses like the real Greek
horses of the Parthenon!
Yes; and if they had had real ground to trot on, the Florentine would
have shown you he knew how they should trot. But these have to make
their way up the hill-side of other lands. Look to the example in your
standard series, Hermes Eriophoros. You will find his motion among
clouds represented precisely in this laboring, failing, half-kneeling
attitude of limb. These forms, toiling up through the rippled sands of
heaven, are--not horses;--they are clouds themselves, _like_ horses, but
only a little like. Look how their hoofs lose themselves, buried in the
ripples of cloud; it makes one think of the quicksands of Morecambe Bay.
And their tails--what extraordinary tufts of tails, ending in points!
Yes; but do you not see, nearly joining with them, what is not a horse
tail at all; but a flame of fire, kindled at Apollo's knee? All the rest
of the radiance about him shoots _from_ him. But this is rendered _up_
to him. As the fruits of the earth are in one of his hands, its fire is
in the other. And all the warmth, as well as all the light of it, are
his.
We had a little natural philosophy, gentlemen, as well as theology, in
Florence, once upon a time.
161. Natural philosophy, and also natural art, for in this the Greek
reanimate was a nobler creature than the Greek who had died. His art had
a wider force and warmer glow. I have told you that the first Greeks
were distinguished from the barbarians by their simple humanity; the
second Greeks--these Florentine Greeks reanimate--are human more
strongly, more deeply, leaping from the Byzantine death at the call of
Christ, "Loose him, and let him go." And there is upon them at once the
joy of resurrection, and the solemnity of the grave.
[Illustration: VI.
Fairness of the Sea and Air.
In VENICE and ATHENS.]
162. Of this resurrection of the Greek, and the form of the tomb he had
been buried in "those four days," I have to give you some account in the
last lecture. I will only to-day show you an illustration of it which
brings us back to our immediate question as to the reasons why Northern
art could not accept classicism. When, in the closing lecture of "Aratra
Pentelici,"[AO] I compared Florentine with Greek work, it was to point
out to you the eager passions of the first as opposed to the formal
legalism and proprieties of the other. Greek work, I told you, while
truthful, was also restrained, and never but under majesty of law; while
Gothic work was true, in the perfect law of Liberty or Franchise. And
now I give you in facsimile (Plate VI.) the two Aphrodites thus
compared--the Aphrodite Thalassia of the Tyrrhene seas, and the
Aphrodite Urania of the Greek skies. You may not at first like the
Tuscan best; and why she is the best, though both are noble, again I
must defer explaining to next lecture. But now turn back to Bewick's
Venus, and compare her with the Tuscan Venus of the Stars, (Plate II.);
and then here, in Plate VI., with the Tuscan Venus of the Seas, and the
Greek Venus of the Sky. Why is the English one vulgar? What is it, in
the three others, which makes them, if not beautiful, at least
refined?--every one of them 'designed' and drawn, indisputably, by a
gentleman?
I never have been so puzzled by any subject of analysis as, for these
ten years, I have been by this. Every answer I give, however plausible
it seems at first, fails in some way, or in some cases. But there is
the point for you, more definitely put, I think, than in any of my
former books;--at present, for want of time, I must leave it to your own
thoughts.
163. II. The second influence under which engraving developed itself, I
said, was that of medicine and the physical sciences. Gentlemen, the
most audacious, and the most valuable, statement which I have yet made
to you on the subject of practical art, in these rooms, is that of the
evil resulting from the study of anatomy. It is a statement so
audacious, that not only for some time I dared not make it to you, but
for ten years, at least, I dared not make it to myself. I saw, indeed,
that whoever studied anatomy was in a measure injured by it; but I kept
attributing the mischief to secondary causes. It _can't_ be this drink
itself that poisons them, I said always. This drink is medicinal and
strengthening: I see that it kills them, but it must be because they
drink it cold when they have been hot, or they take something else with
it that changes it into poison. The drink itself _must_ be good. Well,
gentlemen, I found out the drink itself to be poison at last, by the
breaking of my choicest Venice glass. I could not make out what it was
that had killed Tintoret, and laid it long to the charge of chiaroscuro.
It was only after my thorough study of his Paradise, in 1870, that I
gave up this idea, finding the chiaroscuro, which I had thought
exaggerated, was, in all original and undarkened passages, beautiful and
most precious. And then at last I got hold of the true clue: "Il disegno
di Michel Agnolo." And the moment I had dared to accuse that, it
explained everything; and I saw that the betraying demons of Italian
art, led on by Michael Angelo, had been, not pleasure, but knowledge;
not indolence, but ambition; and not love, but horror.
164. But when first I ventured to tell you this, I did not know, myself,
the fact of all most conclusive for its confirmation. It will take me a
little while to put it before you in its total force, and I must first
ask your attention to a minor point. In one of the smaller rooms of the
Munich Gallery is Holbein's painting of St. Margaret and St. Elizabeth
of Hungary,--standard of his early religious work. Here is a photograph
from the St. Elizabeth; and, in the same frame, a French lithograph of
it. I consider it one of the most important pieces of comparison I have
arranged for you, showing you at a glance the difference between true
and false sentiment. Of that difference, generally, we cannot speak
to-day, but one special result of it you are to observe;--the omission,
in the French drawing, of Holbein's daring representation of disease,
which is one of the vital honors of the picture. Quite one of the chief
strengths of St. Elizabeth, in the Roman Catholic view, was in the
courage of her dealing with disease, chiefly leprosy. Now observe, I say
_Roman_ Catholic view, very earnestly just now; I am not at all sure
that it is so in a Catholic view--that is to say, in an eternally
Christian and Divine view. And this doubt, very nearly now a certainty,
only came clearly into my mind the other day after many and many a
year's meditation on it. I had read with great reverence all the
beautiful stories about Christ's appearing as a leper, and the like; and
had often pitied and rebuked myself alternately for my intense dislike
and horror of disease. I am writing at this moment within fifty yards of
the grave of St. Francis, and the story of the likeness of his feelings
to mine had a little comforted me, and the tradition of his conquest of
them again humiliated me; and I was thinking very gravely of this, and
of the parallel instance of Bishop Hugo of Lincoln, always desiring to
do service to the dead, as opposed to my own unmitigated and
Louis-Quinze-like horror of funerals;--when by chance, in the cathedral
of Palermo, a new light was thrown for me on the whole matter.