147. Antient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece, and
the servant of Rome.
148. The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of
climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the
uniformity of their means. If they had schools, the Ionian, that of
Athens and of Sicyon appear to have directed their instruction to one
grand principle, proportion: this was the stamen which they drew out
into one immense connected web; whilst modern art, with its schools of
designers, colourists, machinists, eclectics, is but a tissue of
adventitious threads. Apollonius and the sculptor of the small Hesperian
Hercules in bronze are distinguished only by the degree of execution;
whilst M. Angelo and Bernini had no one principle in common but that of
making groups and figures.
149. Art among a religious race produces reliques; among a military one,
trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.
150. Modern art, reared by superstition in Italy, taught to dance in
France, plumped up to unwieldiness in Flanders, reduced to "chronicle
small beer" in Holland, became a rich old woman by "suckling fools" in
England.
151. The rules of art are either immediately supplied by Nature herself,
or selected from the compendiums of her students who are called masters
and founders of schools. The imitation of Nature herself leads to style,
that of the schools to manner.
_Coroll._--The line of Michael Angelo is uniformly grand; character and
beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to
grandeur:--the child, the female, meanness, deformity were 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.
The design of Raphael is either historic or poetic. The forms of his
historic style are characteristic, those of his poetic style he himself
calls ideal:[30] the former are regulated by nature, but these are only
exaggerations of another style.
The forms of Julio Pipi are poised between character and caricature, but
verge to this; even his dresses and ornaments are caricatures; but no
poet or painter ever rocked the cradle of infant mythology with simpler
or more primitive grace; none ever imparted to allegory a more
insinuating power, or swayed the strife of elemental war with a bolder
hand. What ever equalled the exuberance of invention scattered over the
T of Mantoua?
The line of Polydoro, is that of the antique basso-relievo, seen from
beneath (da sotto in su).
The forms of Titian are those of sanguine health; robust, not grand;
soft without delicacy.
Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michael Angelo with colour,
without tracing its principle.
As Michael Angelo was impressed with an idea of grandeur, so Correggio
was charmed with a notion of harmony: his line was correct when harmony
permitted; it strayed as harmony commanded.
Elegance (sueltezza) was the principle of Parmegiano's line, but he
forgot proportion.
Annibale Carracci, one of the founders of the Eclectic school, attempted
to combine in his line the appearance of Nature with style, and became
the standard of academic drawing.
The medium, not the thing, was the object of the _Tuscan_ and _Venetian_
schools; the school of Urbino[31] aimed at subjecting the medium to the
character of things; the _Lombards_ strove to unite the separate
attainments of the three with the unattainable spell of Correggio; the
_Germans_, with their Flemish and Dutch branches, now humbly followed,
now boldly attempted to improve their Italian masters; the French passed
the Alps to study at Rome and Venice what they were to forget at Paris.
Domenichino aimed at the characteristic line of Raffaelle, the
compactness of Annibale, and the beauty of the antique; and mixing
something of each fell short of all.
Rosso carried anatomy, and the Bolognese Abbate the poetry of their art
to the court of Francis. To the haggard melancholy of the Tuscan and the
laboured richness of the Lombard, the French added their own cold
gaiety, and the French school arose.
The forms of Guido's female heads are abstracts of the antique. The
forms of his male bodies are transcripts of models, such as are found in
a genial climate, though sometimes distorted by fatigue or emaciated by
want.
Pietro Testa copied the Torsos of antiquity, and supplied them with
extremities drawn from the dregs of Nature.
The forms[32] of Caravaggio are either substantial flesh or the
starveling produce of beggary rendered important by ideal light and
shade.
The limbs of Joseph Ribera are excrescences of disease on hectic bodies.
Andrea Mantegna was in Italy what Albert Durer was at Nuremberg; Nature
seems not to have existed in any shape of health in his time: though a
servile copyist of the antique, he never once adverted from the
monuments he copied to the originals that inspired them.
The forms of Albert Durer are blasphemies on Nature, the thwarted growth
of starveling labour and dry sterility--formed to inherit his hell of
paradise. To extend the asperity of this verdict beyond the forms of
Albert Durer, would be equally unjust and ungrateful to the father of
German art, on whom invention often flashed, whom melancholy marked for
her own, whose influence even on Italian art was such that he produced a
temporary revolution in the style of the Tuscan school. Andrea del Sarto
and Giacopo da Puntormo became his imitators and his copyists; nor was
his influence unfelt by Raffaelle himself, but his Christ led to the
Cross (engraved by E. Sadler),[33] compared with that of the Madonna del
Spasimo, leaves the claim of superiority doubtful for sublimity and
pathos. It is a likewise probable that we owe the horrors of the St.
Felicitas to the abominations of his Martyr scenes. The felicity of his
organs, the delicacy of his finger, the freedom and sweep of his touch,
have found an encomiast in the author of the life prefixed to the Latin
edition of his works. What would have been the result of his intended
interview, when in Italy, with Andrea Mantegna, had the death of the
latter (1505) not prevented it, is difficult to guess: if some
amelioration, certainly not the entire change of style, which the
uninterrupted study of the antique, during a long life, had failed to
produce in Andrea himself.
The forms of Luke of Leyden are the vegetation of a swamp.