grating from the body of the church; and I had, in general, quite an
unusual degree of quiet and comfort at my work. But sometimes it was
paralyzed by the unconscious interference of one of the men employed in
some minor domestic services about the church. When he had nothing to
do, he used to come and seat himself near my grating, not to look at my
work, (the poor wretch had no eyes, to speak of,) nor in any way
meaning to be troublesome; but there was his habitual seat. His nose had
been carried off by the most loathsome of diseases; there were two vivid
circles of scarlet round his eyes; and as he sat, he announced his
presence every quarter of a minute (if otherwise I could have forgotten
it) by a peculiarly disgusting, loud, and long expectoration. On the
second or third day, just I had forced myself into some forgetfulness of
him, and was hard at my work, I was startled from it again by the
bursting out of a loud and cheerful conversation close to me; and on
looking round, saw a lively young fledgling of a priest, seventeen or
eighteen years old, in the most eager and spirited chat with the man in
the chair. He talked, laughed, and spat, himself, companionably, in the
merriest way, for a quarter of an hour; evidently without feeling the
slightest disgust, or being made serious for an instant, by the aspect
of the destroyed creature before him.
166. His own face was simply that of the ordinary vulgar type of
thoughtless young Italians, rather beneath than above the usual
standard; and I was certain, as I watched him, that he was not at all my
superior, but very much my inferior, in the coolness with which he
beheld what was to me so dreadful. I was positive that he could look
this man in the face, precisely because he could _not_ look,
discerningly, at any beautiful or noble thing; and that the reason I
dared not, was because I had, spiritually, as much better eyes than the
priest, as, bodily, than his companion.
Having got so much of clear evidence given me on the matter, it was
driven home for me a week later, as I landed on the quay of Naples.
Almost the first thing that presented itself to me was the sign of a
traveling theatrical company, displaying the principal scene of the
drama to be enacted on their classical stage. Fresh from the theater of
Taormina, I was curious to see the subject of the Neapolitan popular
drama. It was the capture, by the police, of a man and his wife who
lived by boiling children. One section of the police was coming in,
armed to the teeth, through the passage; another section of the police,
armed to the teeth, and with high feathers in its caps, was coming up
through a trap-door. In fine dramatic unconsciousness to the last
moment, like the clown in a pantomime, the child-boiler was represented
as still industriously chopping up a child, pieces of which, ready for
the pot, lay here and there on the table in the middle of the picture.
The child-boiler's wife, however, just as she was taking the top off the
pot to put the meat in, had caught a glimpse of the foremost policeman,
and stopped, as much in rage as in consternation.
167. Now it is precisely the same feeling, or want of feeling, in the
lower Italian (nor always in the lower classes only) which makes him
demand the kind of subject for his secular drama; and the Crucifixion
and Pieta for his religious drama. The only part of Christianity he can
enjoy is its horror; and even the saint and saintess are not always
denying themselves severely, either by the contemplation of torture, or
the companionship with disease.
Nevertheless, we must be cautious, on the other hand, to allow full
value to the endurance, by tender and delicate persons, of what is
really loathsome or distressful to them in the service of others; and I
think this picture of Holbein's indicative of the exact balance and
rightness of his own mind in this matter, and therefore of his power to
conceive a true saint also. He had to represent St. Catherine's chief
effort;--he paints her ministering to the sick, and, among them, is a
leper; and finding it thus his duty to paint leprosy, he courageously
himself studies it from the life. Not to insist on its horror; but to
assert it, to the needful point of fact, which he does with medical
accuracy.
Now here is just a case in which science, in a subordinate degree, is
really required for a spiritual and moral purpose. And you find Holbein
does not shrink from it even in this extreme case in which it is most
painful.
168. If, therefore, you _do_ find him in other cases not using it, you
may be sure he knew it to be unnecessary.
Now it may be disputable whether in order to draw a living Madonna, one
needs to know how many ribs she has; but it would have seemed
indisputable that in order to draw a skeleton, one must know how many
ribs _it_ has.
Holbein is par excellence the draughtsman of skeletons. His painted
Dance of Death was, and his engraved Dance of Death is, principal of
such things, without any comparison or denial. He draws skeleton after
skeleton, in every possible gesture; but never so much as counts their
ribs! He neither knows nor cares how many ribs a skeleton has. There are
always enough to rattle.
Monstrous, you think, in impudence,--Holbein for his carelessness, and I
for defending him! Nay, I triumph in him; nothing has ever more pleased
me than this grand negligence. Nobody wants to know how many ribs a
skeleton has, any more than how many bars a gridiron has, so long as the
one can breathe, and the other broil; and still less, when the breath
and the fire are both out.
169. But is it only of the bones, think you, that Holbein is
careless?[AP] Nay, incredible though it may seem to you,--but, to me,
explanatory at once of much of his excellence,--he did not know anatomy
at all! I told you in my Preface,[AQ] already quoted, Holbein studies
the face first, the body secondarily; but I had no idea, myself, how
completely he had refused the venomous science of his day. I showed you
a dead Christ of his, long ago. Can you match it with your academy
drawings, think you? And yet he did not, and would not, know anatomy.
_He_ would not; but Duerer would, and did:--went hotly into it--wrote
books upon it, and upon 'proportions of the human body,' etc., etc., and
all your modern recipes for painting flesh. How did his studies prosper
his art?
People are always talking of his Knight and Death, and his Melancholia,
as if those were his principal works. They are his characteristic ones,
and show what he might have been _without_ his anatomy; but they were
mere by-play compared to his Greater Fortune, and Adam and Eve. Look at
these. Here is his full energy displayed; here are both male and female
forms drawn with perfect knowledge of their bones and muscles, and modes
of action and digestion,--and I hope you are pleased.
But it is not anatomy only that Master Albert studies. He has a taste
for optics also; and knows all about refraction and reflection. What
with his knowledge of the skull inside, and the vitreous lens outside,
if any man in the world is to draw an eye, here's the man to do it,
surely! With a hand which can give lessons to John Bellini, and a care
which would fain do all so that it can't be done better, and
acquaintance with every crack in the cranium, and every humor in the
lens,--if we can't draw an eye, we should just like to know who can!
thinks Albert.
So having to engrave the portrait of Melanchthon, instead of looking at
Melanchthon as ignorant Holbein would have been obliged to do,--wise
Albert looks at the room window; and finds it has four cross-bars in it,
and knows scientifically that the light on Melanchthon's eye must be a
reflection of the window with its four bars--and engraves it so,
accordingly; and who shall dare to say, now, it isn't like Melanchthon?
Unfortunately, however, it isn't, nor like any other person in his
senses; but like a madman looking at somebody who disputes his hobby.
While in this drawing of Holbein's, where a dim gray shadow leaves a
mere crumb of white paper,--accidentally it seems, for all the fine
scientific reflection,--behold, it is an eye indeed, and of a noble
creature.
170. What is the reason? do you ask me; and is all the common teaching
about generalization of details true, then?
No; not a syllable of it is true. Holbein is right, not because he draws
more generally, but more truly, than Duerer. Duerer draws what he knows is
there; but Holbein, only what he sees. And, as I have told you often
before, the really scientific artist is he who not only asserts bravely
what he _does_ see, but confesses honestly what he does _not_. You must
not draw all the hairs in an eyelash; not because it is sublime to
generalize them, but because it is impossible to see them. How many
hairs there are, a sign painter or anatomist may count; but how few of
them you can see, it is only the utmost masters, Carpaccio, Tintoret,
Reynolds, and Velasquez, who count, or know.
171. Such was the effect, then, of his science upon Duerer's ideal of
beauty, and skill in portraiture. What effect had it on the temper and
quantity of his work, as compared with poor ignorant Holbein's! You have
only three portraits, by Duerer, of the great men of his time, and those
bad ones; while he toils his soul out to draw the hoofs of satyrs, the
bristles of swine, and the distorted aspects of base women and vicious
men.
What, on the contrary, has ignorant Holbein done for you? Shakespeare
and he divide between them, by word and look, the Story of England under
Henry and Elizabeth.
172. Of the effect of science on the art of Mantegna and Marc Antonio,
(far more deadly than on Duerer's,) I must tell you in a future
lecture;--the effect of it on their minds, I must partly refer to now,
in passing to the third head of my general statement--the influence of
new Theology. For Duerer and Mantegna, chiefly because of their science,
forfeited their place, not only as painters of men, but as servants of
God. Neither of them has left one completely noble or completely
didactic picture; while Holbein and Botticelli, in consummate pieces of
art, led the way before the eyes of all men, to the purification of
their Church and land.
173. III. But the need of reformation presented itself to these two men
last named on entirely different terms.
To Holbein, when the word of the Catholic Church proved false, and its
deeds bloody; when he saw it selling permission of sin in his native
Augsburg, and strewing the ashes of its enemies on the pure Alpine
waters of Constance, what refuge was there for _him_ in more ancient
religion? Shall he worship Thor again, and mourn over the death of
Balder? He reads Nature in her desolate and narrow truth, and she
teaches him the Triumph of Death.
But, for Botticelli, the grand gods are old, are immortal. The priests
may have taught falsely the story of the Virgin;--did they not also lie,
in the name of Artemis, at Ephesus;--in the name of Aphrodite, at
Cyprus?--but shall, therefore, Chastity or Love be dead, or the full
moon paler over Arno? Saints of Heaven and Gods of Earth!--shall _these_
perish because vain men speak evil of them! Let _us_ speak good forever,
and grave, as on the rock, for ages to come, the glory of Beauty, and
the triumph of Faith.
174. Holbein had bitterer task.
Of old, the one duty of the painter had been to exhibit the virtues of
this life, and hopes of the life to come. Holbein had to show the vices
of this life, and to obscure the hope of the future. "Yes, we walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, and fear all evil, for Thou
art not with us, and Thy rod and Thy staff comfort us not." He does not
choose this task. It is thrust upon him,--just as fatally as the burial
of the dead is in a plague-struck city. These are the things he sees,
and must speak. He will not become a better artist thereby; no drawing
of supreme beauty, or beautiful things, will be possible to him. Yet we
cannot say he ought to have done anything else, nor can we praise him
specially in doing this. It is his fate; the fate of all the bravest in
that day.
[Illustration: THE CHILD'S BEDTIME.
(Fig. 5) Facsimile from Holbein's woodcut.]
175. For instance, there is no scene about which a shallow and feeble
painter would have been more sure to adopt the commonplaces of the creed
of his time than the death of a child,--chiefly, and most of all, the
death of a country child,--a little thing fresh from the cottage and the
field. Surely for such an one, angels will wait by its sick bed, and
rejoice as they bear its soul away; and over its shroud flowers will be
strewn, and the birds will sing by its grave. So your common
sentimentalist would think, and paint. Holbein sees the facts, as they
verily are, up to the point when vision ceases. He speaks, then, no
more.
The country laborer's cottage--the rain coming through its roof, the
clay crumbling from its partitions, the fire lighted with a few chips
and sticks on a raised piece of the mud floor,--such dais as can be
contrived, for use, not for honor. The damp wood sputters; the smoke,
stopped by the roof, though the rain is not, coils round again, and
down. But the mother can warm the child's supper of bread and milk
so--holding the pan by the long handle; and on mud floor though it be,
they are happy,--she, and her child, and its brother,--if only they
could be left so. They shall not be left so: the young thing must leave
them--will never need milk warmed for it any more. It would fain
stay,--sees no angels--feels only an icy grip on its hand, and that it
cannot stay. Those who loved it shriek and tear their hair in vain,
amazed in grief. 'Oh, little one, must you lie out in the fields then,
not even under this poor torn roof of thy mother's to-night?'
[Illustration: "HE THAT HATH EARS TO HEAR, LET HIM HEAR."
(Fig. 6) Facsimile from Holbein's woodcut.]
176. Again: there was not in the old creed any subject more definitely
and constantly insisted on than the death of a miser. He had been happy,
the old preachers thought, till then: but his hour has come; and the
black covetousness of hell is awake and watching; the sharp harpy claws
will clutch his soul out of his mouth, and scatter his treasure for
others. So the commonplace preacher and painter taught. Not so Holbein.
The devil want to snatch his soul, indeed! Nay, he never _had_ a soul,
but of the devil's giving. His misery to begin on his death-bed! Nay, he
had never an unmiserable hour of life. The fiend is with him now,--a
paltry, abortive fiend, with no breath even to blow hot with. He
supplies the hell-blast _with a machine_. It is winter, and the rich man
has his furred cloak and cap, thick and heavy; the beggar, bare-headed
to beseech him, skin and rags hanging about him together, touches his
shoulder, but all in vain; there is other business in hand. More haggard
than the beggar himself, wasted and palsied, the rich man counts with
his fingers the gain of the years to come.
But of those years, infinite that are to be, Holbein says nothing. 'I
know not; I see not. This only I see, on this very winter's day, the low
pale stumbling-block at your feet, the altogether by you unseen and
forgotten Death. You shall not pass _him_ by on the other side; here is
a fasting figure in skin and bone, at last, that will stop you; and for
all the hidden treasures of earth, here is your spade: dig now, and find
them.'
177. I have said that Holbein was condemned to teach these things. He
was not happy in teaching them, nor thanked for teaching them. Nor was
Botticelli for his lovelier teaching. But they both could do no
otherwise. They lived in truth and steadfastness; and with both, in
their marvelous design, veracity is the beginning of invention, and love
its end.
I have but time to show you, in conclusion, how this affectionate
self-forgetfulness protects Holbein from the chief calamity of the
German temper, vanity, which is at the root of all Duerer's weakness.
Here is a photograph of Holbein's portrait of Erasmus, and a fine proof
of Duerer's. In Holbein's, the face leads everything; and the most lovely
qualities of the face lead in that. The cloak and cap are perfectly
painted, just because you look at them neither more nor less than you
would have looked at the cloak in reality. You don't say, 'How
brilliantly they are touched,' as you would with Rembrandt; nor 'How
gracefully they are neglected,' as you would with Gainsborough; nor 'How
exquisitely they are shaded,' as you would with Lionardo; nor 'How
grandly they are composed,' as you would with Titian. You say only,
'Erasmus is surely there; and what a pleasant sight!' You don't think of
Holbein at all. He has not even put in the minutest letter H, that I can
see, to remind you of him. Drops his H's, I regret to say, often enough.
'My hand should be enough for you; what matters my name?' But now, look
at Duerer's. The very first thing you see, and at any distance, is this
great square tablet with
"The image of Erasmus, drawn from the life by Albert Duerer,
1526,"
and a great straddling A.D. besides. Then you see a cloak, and a table,
and a pot, with flowers in it, and a heap of books with all their
leaves and all their clasps, and all the little bits of leather gummed
in to mark the places; and last of all you see Erasmus's face; and when
you do see it, the most of it is wrinkles.
All egotism and insanity, this, gentlemen. Hard words to use; but not
too hard to define the faults which rendered so much of Duerer's great
genius abortive, and to this day paralyze, among the details of a
lifeless and ambitious precision, the student, no less than the artist,
of German blood. For too many an Erasmus, too many a Duerer, among them,
the world is all cloak and clasp, instead of face or book; and the first
object of their lives is to engrave their initials.
178. For us, in England, not even so much is at present to be hoped; and
yet, singularly enough, it is more our modesty, unwisely submissive,
than our vanity, which has destroyed our English school of engraving.
At the bottom of the pretty line engravings which used to represent,
characteristically, our English skill, one saw always _two_
inscriptions. At the left-hand corner, "Drawn by--so-and-so;" at the
right-hand corner, "Engraved by--so-and-so." Only under the worst and
cheapest plates--for the Stationers' Almanack, or the like--one saw
sometimes, "Drawn and engraved by--so-and-so," which meant nothing more
than that the publisher would not go to the expense of an artist, and
that the engraver haggled through as he could. (One fortunate exception,
gentlemen, you have in the old drawings for your Oxford Almanack, though
the publishers, I have no doubt, even in that case, employed the
cheapest artist they could find.[AR]) But in general, no engraver
thought himself able to draw; and no artist thought it his business to
engrave.
179. But the fact that this and the following lecture are on the subject
of design in engraving, implies of course that in the work we have to
examine, it was often the engraver himself who designed, and as often
the artist who engraved.
And you will observe that the only engravings which bear imperishable
value are, indeed, in this kind. It is true that, in wood-cutting, both
Duerer and Holbein, as in our own days Leech and Tenniel, have workmen
under them who can do all they want. But in metal cutting it is not so.
For, as I have told you, in metal cutting, ultimate perfection of Line
has to be reached; and it can be reached by none but a master's hand;
nor by his, unless in the very moment and act of designing. Never,
unless under the vivid first force of imagination and intellect, can the
Line have its full value. And for this high reason, gentlemen, that
paradox which perhaps seemed to you so daring, is nevertheless deeply
and finally true, that while a woodcut may be laboriously finished, a
grand engraving on metal must be comparatively incomplete. For it must
be done, throughout, with the full fire of temper in it, visibly
governing its lines, as the wind does the fibers of cloud.
180. The value hitherto attached to Rembrandt's etchings, and others
imitating them, depends on a true instinct in the public mind for this
virtue of line. But etching is an indolent and blundering method at the
best; and I do not doubt that you will one day be grateful for the
severe disciplines of drawing required in these schools, in that they
will have enabled you to know what a line may be, driven by a master's
chisel on silver or marble, following, and fostering as it follows, the
instantaneous strength of his determined thought.
FOOTNOTES:
[AG] If you paint a bottle only to amuse the spectator by showing him
how like a painting may be to a bottle, you cannot be considered, in
art-philosophy, as a designer. But if you paint the cork flying out of
the bottle, and the contents arriving in an arch at the mouth of a
recipient glass, you are so far forth a designer or signer; probably
meaning to express certain ultimate facts respecting, say, the
hospitable disposition of the landlord of the house; but at all events
representing the bottle and glass in a designed, and not merely natural,
manner. Not merely natural--nay, in some sense non-natural, or
supernatural. And all great artists show both this fantastic condition
of mind in their work, and show that it has arisen out of a
communicative or didactic purpose. They are the Signpainters of God.
I have added this note to the lecture in copying my memoranda of it here
at Assisi, June 9th, being about to begin work in the Tavern, or
Tabernaculum, of the Lower Church, with its variously significant four
great 'signs.'
[AH] Plate X., Lecture VI.
[AI] I do not mean the greatest teacher of reformed faith; but the
greatest protestant against faith unreformed.
[AJ] It has become the permitted fashion among modern mathematicians,
chemists, and apothecaries, to call themselves 'scientific men,' as
opposed to theologians, poets, and artists. They know their sphere to be
a separate one; but their ridiculous notion of its being a peculiarly
scientific one ought not to be allowed in our Universities. There is a
science of Morals, a science of History, a science of Grammar, a science
of Music, and a science of Painting; and all these are quite beyond
comparison higher fields for human intellect, and require accuracies of
intenser observation, than either chemistry, electricity, or geology.
[AK] The Cumaean Sibyl, Plate VII., Lecture VI.
[AL] Lecture III., Sec. 101.
[AM] I read somewhere, lately, a new and very ingenious theory about the
attitude of the Apollo Belvedere, proving, to the author's satisfaction,
that the received notion about watching the arrow was all a mistake. The
paper proved, at all events, one thing--namely, the statement in the
text. For an attitude which has been always hitherto taken to mean one
thing, and is plausibly asserted now to mean another, must be in itself
unintelligible.
[AN] It may be asked, why not corn also? Because that belongs to Ceres,
who is equally one of the great gods.
[AO] "Aratra Pentelici," Sec. 181.
[AP] Or inventive! See Woltmann, p. 267. "The shinbone, or the lower
part of the arm, exhibits only one bone, while the upper arm and thigh
are often allowed the luxury of two!"
[AQ] See ante, Sec. 141. The "preface" is that to "The Eagle's Nest."
[AR] The drawings were made by Turner, and are now among the chief
treasures of the Oxford Galleries. I ought to add some notice of Hogarth
to this lecture in the Appendix; but fear I shall have no time: besides,
though I have profound respect for Hogarth, as, in literature, I have
for Fielding, I can't criticise them, because I know nothing of their
subjects.
LECTURE VI.
DESIGN IN THE FLORENTINE SCHOOLS OF ENGRAVING.
181. In the first of these lectures, I stated to you their subject, as
the investigation of the engraved work of a group of men, to whom
engraving, as a means of popular address, was above all precious,
because their art was distinctively didactic.
Some of my hearers must be aware that, of late years, the assertion that
art should be didactic has been clamorously and violently derided by the
countless crowd of artists who have nothing to represent, and of writers
who have nothing to say; and that the contrary assertion--that art
consists only in pretty colors and fine words,--is accepted, readily
enough, by a public which rarely pauses to look at a picture with
attention, or read a sentence with understanding.