Such is the influence of the plastic Arts on society, on manners,
sentiments, the commodities and the ornaments of life, that we think
ourselves generally entitled to form our estimate of times and nations
by its standard. As our homage attends those whose patronage reared them
to a state of efflorescence or maturity, so we pass with neglect, or
pursue with contempt, the age or race which want of culture or of
opportunity averted from developing symptoms of a similar attachment.
A genuine perception of Beauty is the highest degree of education, the
ultimate polish of man; the master-key of the mind, it makes us better
than we were before. Elevated or charmed by the contemplation of
superior works of Art, our mind passes from the images themselves to
their authors, and from them to the race which reared the powers that
furnish us with models of imitation or multiply our pleasures.
This inward sense is supported by exterior motives in contact with a far
greater part of society, whom wants and commerce connect with the Arts;
for nations pay or receive tribute in proportion as their technic sense
exerts itself or slumbers. Whatever is commodious, amene, or useful,
depends in a great measure on the Arts: dress, furniture, and habitation
owe to their breath what they can boast of grace, propriety, or shape:
they teach Elegance to finish what Necessity invented, and make us
enamoured of our wants.
This benign influence infallibly spreads or diminishes in proportion as
its original source, a sense of genuine Beauty, flows from an ample or a
scanty vein, in a clear or turbid stream. As Taste is adulterated or
sinks, Ornament takes a meagre, clumsy, barbarous, ludicrous, or
meretricious form; Affectation dictates; Simplicity and elegance are
loaded; interest vanishes: in a short time Necessity alone remains, and
Novelty with Error go hand in hand.
These obvious observations on the importance of the Arts, lead to the
question so often discussed, and at no time more important than ours--on
the causes that raised them at various times, and among different
nations--on the means of assisting their progress, and how to check
their decay. Of much that has been said on it, much must be repeated,
and something added.
The Greeks commonly lead the van of the arguments produced to answer
this question. Their religious and civil establishments; their manners,
games, contests of valour and of talents; the Cyclus of their Mythology,
peopled with celestial and heroic forms; the honours, the celebrity of
artists; the serene Grecian sky and mildness of the climate, are the
causes supposed to have carried that nation within the ken of
perfection.
Without refusing to each of these various advantages its share of
effect, History informs us that if Religion and Liberty prepared a
public, and spread a technic taste over all Greece, Athens and Corinth
must be considered as the principal nurses of Art, without whose
fostering care the general causes mentioned could not have had so
decided an effect; for nothing surely contributed so much to the gradual
evolution of Art, as that perpetual opportunity which they presented to
the artist of public exhibition; the decoration of temples, halls,
porticoes, a succession of employments equally numerous, important, and
dignified: hence that emulation to gain the heights of Art; the fervour
of public encouragement, the zeal and gratitude of the artists were
reciprocal: Polygnotus prepared with Cimon what Phidias with Pericles
established, on public taste, Essential, Characteristic, and Ideal
Styles.
Whether human nature admitted of no more, or other causes prevented a
farther evolution of powers, nothing greater did arise; Polish, Elegance,
and Novelty supplied Invention: here is the period of decay; the Art
gradually sunk to mediocrity, and its final reward--Indifference.
The artist and the public are ever in the strictest reciprocity: if the
Arts flourished nowhere as in Greece, no other nation ever interested
itself with motives so pure in their establishment and progress, or
allowed them so ample a compass. As long as their march was marked with
such dignity, whilst their union excited admiration, commanded
attachment, and led the public, they grew, they rose; but when
individually to please, the artist attempted to monopolize the interest
due to Art, to abstract by novelty and to flatter the multitude, ruin
followed. To prosper, the Art not only must feel itself free, it ought
to reign: if it be domineered over, if it follow the dictate of Fashion
or a Patron's whims, then is its dissolution at hand.
To attain the height of the Ancient was impossible for Modern Art,
circumscribed by narrower limits, forced to form itself rapidly and on
borrowed principles; still it owes its origin and support to nearly
similar causes. During the fourteenth, and still more in the course of
the fifteenth century, so much activity, so general a predilection for
Art spread themselves over the greater part of Italy, that we are
astonished at the farrago of various imagery produced at those periods.
The artist and the Art were indeed considered as little more than
craftsmen and a craft; but they were indemnified for the want of
honours, by the dignity of their employment, by commissions to decorate
churches, convents, and public buildings.
Let no one to whom truth and its propagation are dear, believe or
maintain that Christianism was inimical to the progress of Arts, which
probably nothing else could have revived. Nothing less than Christian
enthusiasm could give that lasting and energetic impulse whose magic
result we admire in the works that illustrate the period of Genius and
their establishment. Nor is the objection that England, France, and
Germany professed Christianity, built churches and convents, and yet had
no Art, an objection of consequence; because it might with equal
propriety be asked, why it did not appear sooner in Italy itself. The
Art forms a part of social education and the ultimate polish of man, nor
can it appear during the rudeness of infant societies; and as, among the
Western nations, the Italians were the first who extricated themselves
from the bonds of barbarism and formed asylums for industry, Art and
Science kept pace with the social progress, and produced their first
legitimate essays among them.
How favourably religious enthusiasm operated on Art, their sympathetic
revolutions still farther prove; they flourished, they languished, they
fell together. As zeal relented and public grandeur gave way to private
splendour, the Arts became the hirelings of Vanity and Wealth; servile
they roamed from place to place, ready to administer to the whims and
wants of the best bidder: in this point of sight we can easily solve all
the phænomena which occur in the history of Art,--its rise, its fall,
eclipse, and re-appearance in various places, with styles as different
as various tastes.
The efficient cause, therefore, why higher Art at present is sunk to
such a state of inactivity and languor that it may be doubted whether it
will exist much longer, is not a particular one, which private
patronage, or the will of an individual, however great, can remove; but
a general cause, founded on the bent, the manners, habits, modes of a
nation,--and not of one nation alone, but of all who at present pretend
to culture. Our age, when compared with former ages, has but little
occasion for great works, and that is the reason why so few are
produced:[1]--the ambition, activity, and spirit of public life is
shrunk to the minute detail of domestic arrangements--every thing that
surrounds us tends to show us in private, is become snug, less, narrow,
pretty, insignificant. We are not, perhaps, the less happy on account of
all this; but from such selfish trifling to expect a system of Art built
on grandeur, without a total revolution, would only be less presumptuous
than insane.
What right have we to expect such a revolution in our favour?
Let us advert for a moment to the enormous difference of difficulty
between forming and amending the taste of a public--between legislation
and reform: either task is that of Genius; both have adherents,
disciples, champions; but persecution, derision, checks will generally
oppose the efforts of the latter, whilst submission, gratitude,
encouragement, attend the smooth march of the former. No madness is so
incurable as wilful perverseness; and when men can once, with Medea,
declare that they know what is best, and approve of it, but must, or
choose to follow the worst, perhaps a revolution worse to be dreaded
than the disease itself, must precede the possibility of a cure. Though,
as it has been observed, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries granted
to the artists little more than the attention due to ingenious
craftsmen; they were, from the object of their occupations and the taste
of their employers, the legitimate precursors of M. Agnolo and
Raffaello, who did no more than raise their style to the sublimity and
pathos of the subject. These trod with loftier gait and bolder strides a
path, on which the former had sometimes stumbled, often crept, but
always advanced: the public and the artist went hand in hand--but on
what spot of Europe can the young artist of our day be placed to meet
with circumstances equally favourable? Arm him, if you please, with the
epic and dramatic powers of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, where are the
religious and civic establishments, where the temples and halls open to
receive, where the public prepared to call them forth, to stimulate, to
reward them?
Idle complaints! I hear a thousand voices reply! You accuse the public
of apathy for the Arts, while public and private exhibitions tread on
each other's heels, panorama opens on panorama, and the splendour of
galleries dazzles the wearied eye, and the ear is stunned with the
incessant stroke of the sculptor's hammer, and our temples narrowed by
crowds of monuments shouldering each other to perpetuate the memory of
Statesmen who deluded, or of Heroes who bled at a Nation's call! Look
round all Europe--revolve the page of history from Osymandias to
Pericles, from Pericles to Constantine--and say what age, what race
stretched forth a stronger arm to raise the drooping genius of Art? Is
it the public's fault if encouragement is turned into a job, and
dispatch and quantity have supplanted excellence and quality, as objects
of the artist's emulation?--And do you think that accidental and
temporary encouragement can invalidate charges founded on permanent
causes? What blew up the Art, will in its own surcease terminate its
success. Art is not ephemeral; Religion and Liberty had for ages
prepared what Religion and Liberty were to establish among the ancients:
the germ of the Olympian Jupiter, and the Minerva of Phidias, lay in the
Gods of Aëgina, and that of Theseus, Hercules, and Alcibiades in the
blocks of Harmodios and Aristogiton.
If the revolution of a neighbouring nation emancipated the people from
the yoke of superstition, it has perhaps precipitated them to
irreligion. He who has no visible object of worship is indifferent about
modes, and rites, and places; and unless some great civil provisional
establishment replaces the means furnished by the former system, the
Arts of France, should they disdain to become the minions and handmaids
of fashion, may soon find that the only public occupation left for them
will be a representation of themselves, deploring their new-acquired
advantages. By a great establishment, I mean one that will employ the
living artists, raise among them a spirit of emulation dignified by the
objects of their occupation, and inspire the public with that spirit;
not an ostentatious display of ancient and modern treasures of genius,
accumulated by the hand of conquest or of rapine. To plunder the earth
was a Roman principle, and it is not perhaps matter of lamentation that
Modern Rome, by a retaliation of her own principle, is made to pay the
debt contracted with mankind. But let none fondly believe that the
importation of Greek and Italian works of Art is an importation of Greek
and Italian genius, taste, establishments and means of encouragement;
without transplanting and disseminating these, the gorgeous accumulation
of technic monuments is no more than a dead capital, and, instead of a
benefit, a check on living Art.
With regard to ourselves, the barbarous, though then perhaps useful rage
of image-breakers in the seventeenth century, seems much too
gratuitously propagated as a principle in an age much more likely to
suffer from irreligion than superstition. A public body inflamed by
superstition, suffers, but it suffers from the ebullitions of radical
heat, and may return to a state of health and life; whilst a public body
plunged into irreligion, is in a state of palsied apathy, the cadaverous
symptom of approaching dissolution. Perhaps neither of these two
extremes may be precisely our own state; we probably float between both.
But surely in an age of inquiry and individual liberty of _thought_,
when there are almost as many sects as heads, there was little danger
that the admission of Art to places of devotion could ever be attended
by the errors of idolatry; nor have the motives which resisted the offer
of ornamenting our churches perhaps any eminent degree of ecclesiastic
or political sagacity to recommend them. Who would not rejoice if the
charm of our Art, displaying the actions and example of the sacred
Founder of our religion and of his disciples in temples and conventicles,
contributed to enlighten the zeal, stimulate the feelings, sweeten the
acrimony, or dignify the enthusiasm of their respective audiences? The
source of the grand monumental style of Greece was Religion with Liberty.
At that period the artist, as Pliny expresses himself, was the property of
the public, or in other words, he considered himself as responsible for
the influence of his works on public principle: with the decline of
Religion and Liberty his importance and the Art declined; and though the
Egyptian custom of embalming the dead and suffering the living to linger
had not yet been adopted, from the organ of the public he became the tool
of private patronage; and private patronage, however commendable or
liberal, can no more supply the want of general encouragement, than the
conservatories and hotbeds of the rich, the want of a fertile soil or
genial climate. Luxury in times of taste keeps up execution in proportion
as it saps the dignity and moral principle of the Art; gold is the motive
of its exertions, and nothing that ennobles man was ever produced by gold.
When Nero transported the Pontic Apollo to the golden house, and furnished
the colossal shoulders of the god with his own head, Sculpture lent her
hand to legitimate the sacrilege: why should Painting be supposed to have
been more squeamish when applied to decorate the apartments of his
pleasures and the cabinet of Poppæa with Milesian pollutions, or the
attitudes of Elephantis?
The effect of honours and rewards has been insisted on as a necessary
incentive to artists: they ought indeed to be, they sometimes are, the
result of superior powers; but accidental or partial honours cannot
create Genius, nor private profusion supply public neglect. No genuine
work of Art ever was or ever can be produced, but for its own sake; if
the artist do not conceive to please himself, he never will finish to
please the world. Can we persuade ourselves that all the treasures of
the globe could suddenly produce an Iliad or Paradise Lost, or the
Jupiter of Phidias, or the Capella Sistina? Circumstances may assist or
retard parts, but cannot make them: they are the winds that now blow out
a light, now animate a spark to conflagration. Nature herself has set
her barriers between age and age, between genius and genius, which no
mortal overleaps; all attempts to raise to perfection at once, what can
only be reared by a succession of epochs, must prove abhortive and
nugatory: the very proposals of premiums, honours, and rewards to excite
talent or rouse genius, prove of themselves that the age is unfavourable
to Art; for, had it the patronage of the public, how could it want them?
We have now been in possession of an Academy more than half a century;
all the intrinsic means of forming a style alternate at our commands;
professional instruction has never ceased to direct the student;
premiums are distributed to rear talent and stimulate emulation, and
stipends are granted to relieve the wants of genius and finish
education. And what is the result? If we apply to our Exhibition, what
does it present, in the aggregate, but a gorgeous display of varied
powers, condemned, if not to the beasts, at least to the dictates of
fashion and vanity? What therefore can be urged against the conclusion,
that, as far as the public is concerned, the Art is sinking, and
threatens to sink still deeper, from the want of demand for great and
significant works? Florence, Bologna, Venice, each singly taken,
produced in the course of the sixteenth century alone, more great
historic pictures than all Britain taken together, from its earliest
attempts at painting to its present efforts. What are we to conclude
from this? that the soil from which Shakspeare and Milton sprang, is
unfit to rear the Genius of Poetic Art? or find the cause of this
seeming impotence in that general change of habits, customs, pursuits,
and amusements, which for near a century has stamped the national
character of Europe with apathy or discountenance of the genuine
principles of Art?
But if the severity of these observations, this denudation of our
present state moderates our hopes, it ought to invigorate our efforts
for the ultimate preservation, and, if immediate restoration be
hopeless, the gradual recovery of Art. To raise the Arts to a
conspicuous height may not perhaps be in our power; we shall have
deserved well of posterity if we succeed in stemming their farther
downfall, if we fix them on the solid base of principle. If it be out of
our power to furnish the student's activity with adequate practice, we
may contribute to form his theory; and Criticism founded on experiment,
instructed by comparison, in possession of the labours of every epoch of
Art, may spread the genuine elements of taste, and check the present
torrent of affectation and insipidity.
This is the real use of our Institution, if we may judge from analogy.
Soon after the middle of the sixteenth century, when the gradual
evanescence of the great luminaries in Art began to alarm the public, an
idea started at Florence of uniting the most eminent artists into a
society, under the immediate patronage of the Grand Duke, and the title
of Academy: it had something of a Conventual air, has even now its own
chapel, and celebrates an annual festival with appropriate ceremonies;
less designed to promote than to prevent the gradual debasement of Art.
Similar associations in other places were formed in imitation, and at
the time of the Carracci even the private schools of painters adopted
the same name. All, whether public or private, supported by patronage or
individual contribution, were and are symptoms of Art in distress,
monuments of public dereliction and decay of Taste. But they are at the
same time the asylum of the student, the theatre of his exercises, the
repositories of the materials, the archives of the documents of our art,
whose principles their officers are bound now to maintain, and for the
preservation of which they are responsible to posterity, undebauched by
the flattery, heedless of the sneers, undismayed by the frown of their
own time.
Permit me to part with one final observation. Reynolds has told us, and
from _him_ whose genius was crowned with the most brilliant success
during his life, from him it came with unexampled magnanimity, "that
those who court the applause of their own time, must reckon on the
neglect of posterity." On this I shall not insist as a general maxim;
all depends on the character of the time in which an artist lives, and
on the motive of his exertions. M. Agnolo, Raffaello, Tiziano, and
Vasari, Giuseppe d'Arpino, and Luca Giordano, enjoyed equal celebrity
during their own times. The three first enjoy it now, the three last are
forgotten or censured. What are we to infer from this unequal verdict of
posterity? What, but what Cicero says, that time obliterates the
conceits of opinion or fashion, and establishes the verdicts of Nature?
The age of Julio and Leone demanded genius for its own sake, and found
it--the age of Cosmo, Ferdinand, and Urban, demanded talents and
dispatch to flatter their own vanity, and found them too; but Cosmo,
Ferdinand, and Urban, are sunk in the same oblivion, or involved in the
same censure with their tools--Julio and Leone continue to live with the
permanent powers which they had called forth.