In this Lecture I shall submit to your consideration some criticisms on
the prevailing method of treating the History of our Art; attended by a
series of observations on the magnificent picture of the Last Supper, by
Lionardo da Vinci, now before you.
History, mindless of its real object, sinking to Biography, has been
swelled into a diffuse catalogue of individuals, who, tutored by
different schools, or picking something from the real establishers of
Art, have done little more than repeat, or imitate through the medium of
either, what those had found in Nature, discriminated, selected, and
applied to Art, according to her dictates. Without wishing to depreciate
the merit of that multitude who felt, proved themselves strong enough,
and strenuously employed life to follow, it must be pronounced below
the historian's dignity to allow them more than a transitory glance.
Neither originality, nor selection and combination of materials
scattered over the various classes of Art by others, have much right to
attention from him who only investigates the real progress of Art, if
the first proves to have added nothing essential to the system by
novelty, and the second to have only diluted energy, and by a popular
amalgama to have pleased the vulgar. Novelty, without enlarging the
circle of knowledge, may delight or strike, but is nearer allied to whim
than to invention; and an eclectic system, without equality of parts, as
it originated in want of comprehension, totters on the brink of
mediocrity.
The first ideas of Expression, Character, Form, Chiaroscuro, and Colour,
originated in Tuscany: Masaccio, Lionardo da Vinci, M. Agnolo,
Bartolomeo della Porta. The first was carried off before he could give
more than hints of dramatic composition; the second appears to have
established character on physiognomy, and to have seen the first vision
of chiaroscuro, though he did not penetrate the full extent of its
charm; the third had power, knowledge, and life sufficiently great,
extensive, and long, to have fixed style on its basis, had not an
irresistible bias drawn off his attention from the modesty and variety
of Nature; Baccio gave amplitude to drapery, and colour to form.
Of the Tuscan School that succeeded these, the main body not only added
nothing to their discoveries, but, if their blind attachment to the
singularities rather than the beauties of the third be excepted, equally
inattentive to expression, character, propriety of form, the charms of
chiaroscuro, and energies of colour, contented themselves to give to
tame or puerile ideas, obvious and common-place conceptions, a kind of
importance by mastery of execution and a bold but monotonous and always
mannered outline; and though Andrea del Sarto, with Francia Bigio,
Giacopo da Pontormo, and Rosso, may be allowed to have thought sometimes
for themselves and struck out paths of their own, will it be asserted
that they enlarged or even filled the circle traced out before? The most
characteristic work of Andrea's original powers, is, no doubt, the
historic series in S. Giovanni dei Scalzi; yet, when compared with the
patriarchal simplicity of the groups in the Lunette of the Sistine
Chapel, the _naïveté_ of his characters and imagery will be found too
much tainted with contemporary, local, and domestic features, for
Divine, Apostolic, and Oriental agents. His drapery, whenever he escapes
from the costume of the day, combines with singular felicity the breadth
of the _Frati_, and the acute angles of Albert Durer; but neither its
amplitude, nor the solemn repose and tranquillity of his scenery, can
supply the want of personal dignity, or consecrate vulgar forms and
trivial features.
The Roman school like an Oriental sun rose, not announced by dawn, and,
setting, left no twilight. Raffaello established his school on the
Drama; its scenery, its expression, its forms; History, Lyrics,
Portrait, became under his hand the organs of passion and character.
With his demise the purity of this principle vanished. Julio Romano, too
original to adopt, formed a school of his own at Mantoua, which, as it
was founded on no characteristic principle, added nothing to Art, and
did not long survive its founder. Polydoro Caldara was more ambitious to
emulate the forms of the antique than to propagate the style of his
master, which was not comprehended by Penny, called Il Fattore, mangled
by Perrino del Vaga, became common-place in the hands of the Zuccari,
barbarous manner during the usurpation of Giuseppe Cesari, sunk to
tameness in the timid imitation of Sacchi and Maratta, and expired under
the frigid method of Mengs.
A certain national, though original character, marks the brightest epoch
of the Venetian School. However deviating from each other, Tiziano,
Tintoretto, Jacopo da Ponte, and Paolo Veronese, acknowledge but one
element of imitation, Nature herself: this principle each bequeathed to
his school, and no attempt to adulterate its simplicity by uniting
different methods, distinguishes their immediate successors: hence they
preserved features of originality longer than the surrounding schools,
whom the vain wish to connect incompatible excellence, soon degraded to
mediocrity, and from that plunged to insignificance.
If what is finite could grasp infinity, the variety of Nature might be
united by individual energy; till then the attempt to amalgamate her
scattered beauties by the imbecility of Art, will prove abortive.
Genius is the pupil of Nature; perceives, is dazzled, and imperfectly
transmits one of her features: thus saw M. Agnolo, Raffaello, Tiziano,
Correggio; and such were their technic legacies, as inseparable from
their attendant flaws, as in equal degrees irreconcilable. That Nature
is not subject to decrepitude, is proved by the superiority of modern
over ancient science; what hinders modern Art to equal that of classic
eras, is the effect of irremovable causes.
But I hasten to the principal object of this Lecture, the consideration
of the technic character of Lionardo da Vinci, one, and in my opinion
the first of the great restorers of modern Art, as deduced from his most
important work, the Last Supper, surviving as a whole in the magnificent
copy of Marco Uggione, rescued from a random pilgrimage by the courage
and vigilance of our President, and by the Academy made our own. The
original of this work, the ultimate test of his most vigorous powers,
the proof of his theory, and what may be called with propriety the first
characteristic composition since the revival of the Art, was the
principal ornament of the Refectory in the Dominican Convent of S.
Maria delle Gratie, at Milan.
Let us begin with the centre, the seat of the principal figure, from
which all the rest emanate like rays. Sublimely calm, the face of the
Saviour broods over the immense, whilst every face and every limb around
him, roused by his mysterious word, fluctuate in restless curiosity and
sympathetic pangs.
The face of the Saviour is an abyss of thought, and broods over the
immense revolution in the economy of mankind, which throngs inwardly on
his absorbed eye--as the spirit creative in the beginning over the
water's darksome wave--undisturbed and quiet. It could not be lost in
the copy before us: how could its sublime conception escape those who
saw the original? It has survived the hand of Time in the study which
Lionardo made in crayons, exhibited with most of the attendant heads in
the British Gallery; and even in the feebler transcript of Del Testa.
I am not afraid of being under the necessity of retracting what I am
going to advance, that neither during the splendid period immediately
subsequent to Lionardo, nor in those which succeeded to our own time,
has a face of the Redeemer been produced which, I will not say equalled,
but approached the sublimity of Lionardo's conception, and in quiet and
simple features of humanity embodied divine, or, what is the same,
incomprehensible and infinite powers. To him who could contrive and give
this combination, the unlimited praise lavished on the inferior
characters who surround the hero, whilst his success in that was
doubted--appears to me not only no praise, but a gross injustice.
Yet such was the judgment of Vasari, and in our days of Lanzi, both
founded on the pretended impossibility of transcribing the beauty of
forms and the varied energies of expression distributed by the artist
among the disciples. "The moment," says Lanzi, and says well, "is that
in which the Saviour says to the Disciples, "One of you will betray me!"
On every one of the innocent men the word acts like lightning: he who is
at a greater distance, distrusting his own ears, applies to his
neighbour; others, according to their variety of character, betray
raised emotions. One of them faints, one is fixed in astonishment; this
wildly rises, the simple candour of another tells that he cannot be
suspected: Judas, meanwhile, assumes a look of intrepidity, but, though
he counterfeits innocence, leaves no doubt of being the traitor. Vinci
used to tell, that for a year he wandered about, perplexed with the
thought how to embody in one face the image of so black a mind; and
frequenting a village which a variety of villains haunted, he met at
last, by the help of some associated features, with his man. Nor was his
success less conspicuous in furnishing both the Jameses with congenial
and characteristic beauty; but being unable to find an ideal superior to
theirs for Christ, he left the head, as Vasari affirms, imperfect,
though Arminine ascribes a high finish even to that."
Thus is the modesty and diffidence of the artist, who, in the midst of
the most glorious success, always sought and wished for more, brought as
evidence against him by all his pretended judges and critics, if we
except the single Bottari, who finds in it, with the highest finish, all
the fortitude of mind characteristic of the Saviour, united to lively
consideration of the suffering that awaited him--though even that is,
in my opinion, below the conception of Lionardo.
Lest those who have read and recollect the character of Lionardo which I
have submitted to the public, should, from the predilection with which I
have dwelt on what I think the principal feature of his performance, the
face and attitude of the hero, suspect I shift my ground, or charge me
with inconsistency, I repeat what I said then, when I was nearly
unacquainted with this work, that the distinguishing feature of his
powers lay in the delineation of character, which he often raised to a
species, and not seldom degraded to caricature. The triumphant proof of
both is the great performance before us; the same mind that could unite
divine power with the purest humanity, by an unaccountable dereliction,
not only of the dignity due to his subject, but of sound sense, thought
it not beneath him to haunt the recesses of deformity to unkennel a
villain. Did he confine villainy to deformity? If he had, he would have
disdained to give him two associates in feature; for the face of him who
holds up his finger, and his who argues on the left extremity of the
table, seem to have proceeded, if not absolutely from the same, from a
very similar mould, yet they are in the number of the elect, and, though
on the brink of caricature, have the air of good men. Expression alone
separates them from the traitor, whom incapacity of remorse, hatred,
rage at being discovered, and habitual meanness, seem to have divided
into equal shares.
The portrait of Cesar Borgia, by Giorgione, now hung up for your study
in the Academy for Painting, proves that the most atrocious mind may
lurk under good, sedate, and even handsome features. Though his hand
were not drawing a dagger, who would expect mercy or remorse from the
evil methodized villainy of that eye? But Judas was capable of remorse;
intolerant of the dreadful suffering with which the horrid act had
overwhelmed him, he rushed on confession of his crime, restitution, and
suicide.
To the countenance and attitude of St. John, blooming with youth,
innocent, resigned, partaking perhaps somewhat too much of the feminine,
and those of the two James's invigorated by the strength of virility,
energetic and bold, none will refuse a competent praise of varied
beauty; but they neither are nor ought to be ideal, and had they been
so, they could neither compete nor interfere with the sublimity that
crowns the Saviour's brow, and stamps his countenance with the God.
The felicity, novelty, and propriety of Lionardo's conception and
invention, are powerfully seconded by every part of execution:--the tone
which veils and wraps actors and scene into one harmonious whole, and
gives it breadth; the style of design, grand without affectation, and,
if not delicate or ideal, characteristic of the actors; the draperies
folded with equal simplicity, elegance, and costume, with all the
propriety of presenting the highest finish, without anxiety of touch, or
thronging the eye.
So artless is the assemblage of the figures, that the very name of
composition seems to degrade what appears arranged by Nature's own hand.
That the nearest by relation, characters and age, should be placed
nearest the master of the feast, and of course attract the eye soonest,
was surely the most natural arrangement; but if they are conspicuous,
they are not so at the expense of the rest: distance is compensated by
action; the centre leads to all, as all lead to the centre. That the
great restorer of light and shade sacrificed the effects and charms of
_chiaroscuro_ at the shrine of character, raised him at once above all
his future competitors; changes admiration to sympathy, and makes us
partners of the feast.
As expression sprang from the subject, so it gave rise to competition.
That Raffaello was acquainted with Lionardo's work, and felt its power,
is evident from his composition, engraved by M. Antonio: finding
invention anticipated, he took refuge in imitation, and filled it with
sentiments of his own; whether, beyond the dignity of attitude, he
attempts to approach the profundity of Lionardo's Christ, cannot, from a
print of very moderate dimensions, be decided. In the listening figure
of Judas, with equal atrocity of guilt he appears to have combined
somewhat more of apostolic consequence.
The well-known Last Supper of the Loggia, painted, or what is more
probable, superintended by Raffaello, is, by being made a night scene,
by contrast and chiaroscuro, become an original conception; but as it
presents little more than groups busy to arrange themselves for sitting
down or breaking up, it cannot excite more interest than what is due to
contrast and effect, and active groups eager to move yet not tumultuary.
But if Lionardo disdained to consult the recesses of composition and the
charms of artificial chiaroscuro, he did not debase his work to mere
apposition: uniting the whole by tone, he gave it substance by truth of
imitation, and effect by the disposition of the characters; the groups
flanking each side of the Saviour, emerge, recede, and support each
other with a roundness, depth, and evidence which leave all attempts at
emendation or improvement hopeless. But why should I attempt to
enumerate beauties which are before you, and which if you do not
perceive yourselves, no words of mine can ever make you feel?
The universality of Lionardo da Vinci is become proverbial: but though
possessed of every element, he rather gave glimpses than a standard of
form; though full of energy, he had not powers effectually to court the
various graces he pursued. His line was free from meagreness, and his
forms presented volume, but he appears not to have ever been much
acquainted, or to have sedulously sought much acquaintance, with the
Antique. Character was his favourite study, and character he has often
raised from an individual to a species, and as often depressed to
caricature. The strength of his execution lay in the delineation of male
heads; those of his females owe nearly all their charms to chiaroscuro,
of which he is the supposed inventor: they are seldom more discriminated
than the children they fondle; they are sisters of one family. The
extremities of his hands are often inelegant, though timorously drawn,
like those of Christ among the Doctors in the picture we lately saw
exhibited. Lionardo da Vinci touched in every muscle of his forms the
master-key of the passion he wished to express, but he is ideal only in
chiaroscuro.
Such was the state of the Art before the appearance of M. Agnolo and
Raffaello, and the establishment of style.
Of M. Agnolo it is difficult to decide who have understood less, his
encomiasts or his critics, though both rightly agree in dating from him
an epoch--those of the establishment, these of the subversion of Art.
It is the lot of Genius to be opposed, and to be invigorated by
opposition. All extremes touch each other: frigid praise and frigid
censure wait on easily attainable or common powers: but the successful
adventurer in the realms of Discovery, in spite of the shrugs, checks,
and sneers of the timid, the malign, and the envious, leaps on an
unknown or long lost shore, ennobles it with his name, and grasps
immortality.
M. Agnolo appeared, and soon discovered that works worthy of perpetuity
could neither be built on defective and unsubstantial forms, nor on the
transient whim of fashion and local sentiment; that their stamina were
the real stamina of Nature, the genuine feelings of humanity; and
planned for painting what Homer had planned for poetry, the epic part,
which, with the utmost simplicity of a whole, should unite magnificence
of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts. His line became
generic, but perhaps too 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," this is that "magic circle," in
which we are told that none durst move but he. No, none but he who makes
sublimity of conception his element of form. M. Agnolo himself offers
the proof: for the lines that bear in a mass on his mighty tide of
thought in the Gods and Patriarchs and Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel,
already too ostentatiously show themselves in the Last Judgement, and
rather expose than support his ebbing powers in the Chapel of Paul.
Considered as a whole, the Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion
of Paul, in that place, are the dotage of M. Agnolo's style; but they
have parts which make that dotage more enviable than the equal vigour of
mediocrity.
With what an eye M. Agnolo contemplated the Antique, we may judge from
his Bacchus, the early production of his youth: in style it is at least
equal, perhaps in pulp and fleshiness superior, to what is called the
Antique Roman Style. His idea seems to have been the personification of
youthful inebriety, but it is the inebriety of a superior being, not yet
forsaken by grace, not yet relinquished by mind. In more advanced years,
the Torso of Apollonius became his standard of form. But the Dæmons of
Dante had too early tinctured his fancy to admit in their full majesty
the Gods of Homer and of Phidias.
Such was the opinion formed of the plan and style of M. Agnolo by the
judges, the critics, the poets, the artists, the public, of his own and
the following age, from Bembo to Ariosto, from Raffaello to Tiziano,
down to Agostino and Annibale Carracci. Let us now compare it with the
technical verdict given by the greatest professional critic, on the
Continent, of our times. "M. Agnolo," says Mengs, "seeking always to be
grand, was perhaps only bulky, and by the perpetual use of a convex
line, over-spanned the forms and irrecoverably lost the line of Nature.
This charged style attended him in his youth, and engrossed him when a
man. For this reason his works will always be much inferior to the
antique of the good style; for though they made robust and muscular
figures, they never made them heavy:--an instance is the Hercules of
Glycon, who, though so bulky, and of form so majestic, is easily seen to
be swift like a stag, and elastic like a ball. The style of M. Agnolo
could not give similar ideas, for the joints of his figures are too
contracted, and seem only made for the posture into which he puts them.
The forms of his flesh are too round, his muscles of a mass and shape
always similar, which hides their springs of motion; nor do you ever see
in his works a muscle in repose, than which a greater fault Design knows
not. He perfectly knew what place each muscle ought to occupy, but never
gave its form. Nor did he understand the nature of tendons, as he made
them equally fleshy from end to end, and his bones too round. Raffaello
partook of all these defects, without ever reaching the profundity of
his muscular theory. Raffaello's strength lay in characterizing aged and
nervous frames; he was too hard for delicacy, and in figures of grandeur
an exaggerated copy of M. Agnolo." So far Mengs.
M. Agnolo appears to have had no infancy; if he had, we are not acquainted
with it. His earliest works are equal in principle and compass of
execution to the vigorous proofs of his virility. Like an oriental sun, he
burst upon us at once, without a dawn. Raffaello Sanzio we see in his
cradle, we hear him stammer, but _propriety_ rocked the cradle, and
_character_ formed his lips. Even in the trammels of Pietro Perugino, dry
and servile in his style of design, he traced what was essential, and
separated it from what was accidental in his model. The works of Lionardo
da Vinci and the Cartoon of Pisa are said to have invigorated his eye, but
it was the Antique that completed the system which he had begun to
establish on Nature; from them he learned discrimination and choice of
forms. He found that in the construction of the body the articulations of
the bones were the true cause of ease and grace in the action of the
limbs, and that the knowledge of this was the reason of the superiority of
antique design. He found that certain features were fittest for certain
expressions and peculiar to certain characters; that such a head, such
hands, such feet, are the stamen or the growth of such a body, and on
physiognomy established homogeneousness. Of all artists he was the
greatest, the most precise, the most acute observer. When he designed, he
first attended to the primary intention and motive of his figure, next to
its general measure, then to the bones and their articulations; from them
to the principal muscles, or the muscles eminently wanted, and their
attendant nerves, and at last to the more or less essential minutiæ. But
the characteristic part of the subject is infallibly the characteristic
part of his design, if it be formed even by a few rapid or a single stroke
of his pen or pencil. The strokes themselves are characteristic, they
follow or indicate the texture or fibre of the part; flesh in their
rounding, nerves in straight, bones in angular touches.
Such was the felicity and such the propriety of Raffaello when employed
in the dramatic evolutions of character,--both suffered when he
attempted to abstract the forms of sublimity or beauty. The painter of
humanity not often wielded with success superhuman weapons. His Gods
never rose above prophetic or patriarchial forms: if the finger of M.
Agnolo impressed the divine countenance oftener with sternness than awe,
the Gods of Raffaello are sometimes too affable and mild, like him who
speaks to Jacob in the ceiling of the Vatican; sometimes too violent,
like him who separates light from darkness in the Loggia: but though
made chiefly to walk with dignity on earth, he soared above it in the
mild effulgence and majestic rapture of Christ on Tabor, not indeed as
we see his face now from the repairs of the manufacturers in the Louvre,
and still more in the frown of the angelic countenance that withers all
the strength of the warrior Heliodorus. Of ideal female beauty, though
he himself, in his letter to Count Castiglione, tells us that from its
scarcity in life he made attempts to reach it by an idea formed in his
own mind, he certainly wanted that standard which guided him in
character. His Goddesses and mythologic females are no more than
aggravations of the generic forms of M. Agnolo. Roundness, mildness,
sanctimony, and insipidity, compose the features and air of his
Madonnas: transcripts of the nursery, or some favourite face. The
Madonna del Impanato, the Madonna Bella, the Madonna della Sedia, and
even the longer proportions and greater delicacy and dignity of the
Madonna formerly in the collection of Versailles, share more or less of
this insipidity: it chiefly arises from the high, smooth, roundish
forehead, the shaven vacuity between the arched semicircular eye-brows,
their elevation above the eyes, and the ungraceful division, growth and
scantiness of hair. This indeed might be the result of his desire not to
stain the virgin character of sanctity with the most distant hint of
coquetry or meretricious charms; for in his Magdalens, he throws it with
luxuriant profusion, and surrounds the breast and shoulders with
undulating waves and plaits of gold. The character of Mary Magdalen met
his,--it was the character of a passion.
It is evident from every picture or design at every period of his art in
which she had a part, that he supposed her enamoured when she follows
the body of the Saviour to the tomb, or throws herself dishevelled over
his feet, or addresses him when he bears his cross. The cast of her
features, her forms, her action, are the character of love in agony.
When character inspired Raffaello, his women became definitions of grace
and pathos at once.
Such is the exquisite line and turn of the averted half-kneeling female
with the two children among the spectators of Heliodorus. Her attitude,
the turn of her neck, supplies all face, and intimates more than he ever
expressed by features; and that she would not have gained by showing
them, may be guessed from her companion on the foreground, who, though
highly elegant and equally pathetic in her action, has not features
worthy of either. The fact is, form and style were by Raffaello
employed chiefly, if not always, as vehicles of character and pathos;
the Drama is his element, and to that he has adapted them in a mode and
with a propriety which leave all attempts at emendation hopeless: if
his lines have been excelled or rivalled in energy, correctness,
elegance,--considered as instruments of the passions, they have never
been equalled, and as parts of invention, composition and expression
relative to his story, have never been approached.
The result of these observations on M. Agnolo and Raffaello is this,
that M. Agnolo drew in generic forms the human race; that Raffaello
drew the forms and characters of society diversified by artificial
wants.
We find therefore M. Agnolo more sublime, and we sympathise more with
Raffaello, because he resembles us more. When Reynolds said that M.
Agnolo had more _imagination_, and Raffaello more _fancy_, he meant to
say, that the one had more sublimity, more elementary fire; the other
was richer in social imagery, in genial conceits, and artificial
variety. Simplicity is the stamen of M. Agnolo; varied propriety, with
character, that of Raffaello.
Of the great restorers of Art, the two we have considered, made Design
and Style the basis of their plan, content with negative and unambitious
colour; the two next inverted the principle, and employed Design and
Style as vehicles of _colour_ or of _harmony_.
The style of Tiziano's design has two periods: he began with copying
what was before him without choice, and for some time continued in the
meagre, anxious, and accidental manner of Giovanni Bellino; but
discovering in the works of Giorgione that breadth of form produced
breadth of colour, he endeavoured, and succeeded, to see Nature by
comparison, and in a more ample light. That he possessed the theory of
the human body, needs not to be proved from the doubtful designs which
he is said to have made for the anatomical work of Vesalio; that he had
familiarized himself with the style of M. Agnolo, and burned with
ambition to emulate it, is less evident from adopting some of his
attitudes in the pictures of Pietro Martyre and the Battle of
Ghiaradadda, than from the elemental conceptions, the colossal style,
and daring foreshortenings which astonish in the Cain and Abel, the
Abraham and Isaac, the Goliath and David, on the ceiling of the fabric
of St. Spirito at Venice. Here, and here alone, is the result of that
union of tone and style which, in Tintoretto's opinion, was required to
make a perfect painter,--for in general the male forms of Tiziano are
those of sanguine health, often too fleshy for character, less elastic
than muscular, or vigorous without grandeur. His females are the fair
dimpled Venetian race, soft without delicacy, too full for elegance, for
action too plump; his infants are poised between both, and preferable to
either. In portrait he has united character and resemblance with
dignity, and still remains unrivalled.
A certain national character marks the brightest æra of the Venetian
school: however deviating from each other, Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassan,
and Paolo, acknowledged but one element of imitation, Nature herself.
This principle each bequeathed to his followers; and no attempt to
adulterate its simplicity, by uniting different methods, distinguished
their immediate successors. Hence they preserved features of originality
longer than the surrounding schools, whom the vain wish to connect
incompatible excellence soon degraded to mediocrity, and from that
plunged to insignificance.
The soft transitions from the convex to the concave line, which connect
grandeur with lightness, form the style of Correggio; but using their
coalition without balance, merely to obtain a breadth of demi-tint and
uninterrupted tones of harmony, he became, from excess of roundness,
oftener heavy than light, and frequently incorrect.
It is not easy, from the unaccountable obscurity in which his life is
involved, to ascertain whether he saw the Antique in sufficient degrees
of quantity or beauty; but he certainly must have been familiar with
modelling, and the helps of sculpture, to plan with such boldness, and
conquer with such ease, the unparalleled difficulties of his
foreshortenings. His grace is oftener beholden to convenience of place
than elegance of line. The most appropriate, the most elegant attitudes
were adopted, rejected, perhaps sacrificed to the most awkward ones, in
compliance with his imperious principle: parts vanished, were absorbed,
or emerged in obedience to it.
The Danaë, of which we have seen duplicates, the head excepted, he seems
to have painted from an antique female torso. But ideal beauty of face,
if ever he conceived, he never has expressed; his beauty is equally
remote from the idea of the Venus, the Niobe, and the best forms of
Nature. The Magdalen, in the picture of St. Girolamo of Parma, is
beholden for the charms of her face to chiaroscuro, and that
incomparable hue and suavity of bloom which scarcely permit us to
discover the defects of forms not much above the vulgar. But that he
sometimes reached the sublime, by hiding the limits of his figures in
the bland medium which inwraps them, his Jupiter and Io prove.
Such were the principles on which the Tuscan, the Roman, the Venetian,
and the Lombard schools established their systems of style, or rather
the _manner_ which, in various directions and modes of application,
perverted style. M. Agnolo lived to see the electric shock which his
design 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.
Of his imitators, the two most eminent are Pellegrino Tibaldi, called
"M. Agnolo riformato" by the Bolognese Eclectics, and Francesco
Mazzuoli, called Parmegiano.
Pellegrino Tibaldi penetrated the technic without the moral principle of
his master's style; he had often grandeur of line without sublimity of
conception; hence the _manner_ of M. Agnolo is frequently the _style_ of
Pellegrino Tibaldi. Conglobation and eccentricity, an aggregate of
convexities suddenly broken by rectangular, or cut by perpendicular
lines, compose his system. His fame principally rests on the Frescoes
of the Academic Institute at Bologna, and the Ceiling of the Merchants'
Hall at Ancona. It is probably on the strength of those, that the
Carracci, his countrymen, are said to have called him their "M. Agnolo
riformato,"--M. Agnolo corrected. I will not do that injustice to the
Carracci to suppose, that for one moment they could allude by this
verdict to the Ceiling and the Prophets and Sibyls of the Capella
Sistina; they glanced perhaps at the technic exuberance of the Last
Judgement, and the senile caprices of the Capella Paolina. These, they
meant to inform us, had been pruned, regulated, and reformed by
Pellegrino Tibaldi. Do his works in the Institute warrant this verdict?
So far from it, that it exhibits little more than the dotage of M.
Agnolo. The single figures, groups, and compositions of the Institute,
present a singular mixture of extraordinary vigour and puerile
imbecility of conception, of character and caricature, of style and
manner.
The figure of Polypheme groping at the mouth of his cave for Ulysses,
and the composition of Æolus granting to Ulysses favourable winds, are
striking instances of both. Than the Cyclops, M. Agnolo himself never
conceived a form of savage energy, provoked by sufferings and revenge,
with attitude and limbs more in unison; whilst the God of Winds is
degraded to the scanty and ludicrous semblance of Thersites, and Ulysses
with his companions travestied by the semi-barbarous look and costume of
the age of Constantine or Attila.
From Pellegrino Tibaldi, the Germans, Dutch, and Flemings, Hemskerk,
Goltzius, and Spranger, borrowed the compendium of the great Tuscan's
peculiarities, dropsied the forms of vigour, or dressed the gewgaws of
children in colossal shapes.
Parmegiano poised his line between the grace of Correggio and the energy
of M. Agnolo, and from contrast produced Elegance; but instead of making
propriety her measure, degraded her to affectation. That disengaged play
of delicate forms, the "sueltezza" of the Italians, is the prerogative
of Parmegiano, though nearly always obtained at the expense of
proportion. He conceived the variety, but not the simplicity of beauty,
and drove contrast to extravagance. The figure of St. John, in the
altar-piece of St. Salvador at Città di Castello, now at the Marquis of
Abercorn's, and known from the print of Giulio Bonasone, which less
imitates than exaggerates its original in the Cartoon of Pisa, is one
proof among many: his action is the accident of his attitude; he is
conscious of his grandeur, and loses the fervour of the apostle in the
orator.
So his celebrated Moses, if I see right, has in his forms less of
grandeur than agility, in his action more passion than majesty, and
loses the legislator in the savage. This figure, together with Raphael's
figure of God in the Vision of Ezekiel, is said to have furnished Gray
with some of the master-traits of his Bard,--figures than which Painting
cannot produce two more dissimilar: calm, placid contemplation, and the
decided burst of passion in coalition.
Whilst M. Agnolo was doomed to live and brood over the perversion of
_his_ style, death prevented Raffaello from witnessing the gradual decay
of his.
Such was the state of style, when, toward the decline of the sixteenth
century, Lodovico Carracci, with his cousins Agostino and Annibale,
founded at Bologna, on the hints caught from Pellegrino Tibaldi, that
Eclectic 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. The specious ingredients of
this technic panacea have been preserved in a complimentary sonnet of
Agostino Carracci, and are compounded of the design and symmetry of
Raffaello, the terrible manner of M. Agnolo, the sovereign purity of
Correggio's style, Tiziano's truth and nature, Tintoretto's and Paolo's
vivacity and chiaroscuro, Lombardy's tone of colour, the learned
invention of Primaticcio, the decorum and solidity of Pellegrino
Tibaldi, and a little of Parmegiano's grace, all amalgamated by Niccolo
dell' Abbate.
I shall not attempt a parody of this prescription by transferring it to
Poetry, and prescribing to the candidate for dramatic fame the imitation
of Shakspeare, Otway, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Congreve, Racine, Addison,
as amalgamated by Nicholas Rowe. Let me only ask whether such a mixture
of demands ever entered 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 collateral defects: to attempt more will
probably 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 is the inventor of that solemn hue, that
sober twilight, which you have heard so often recommended as the proper
tone of historic colour. Agostino, with learning, taste, and form,
combined Corregiesque tints. Annibale, inferior to both in sensibility
and taste, in the wide range of talent, undaunted execution and academic
prowess, left either far behind. But if he preserved the breadth of the
style we speak of, he added nothing to its dignity; his pupils were
inferior to _him_, and to his pupils, their successors. _Style_
continued to linger, with fatal symptoms of decay, in Italy; and if it
survives, has not yet found a place to re-establish its powers on this
side of the Alps.