_Claude_ (French: 1600-1682). _See_ 2.
This and the Claude on the other side of the door (14) are of peculiar
interest as being the two which Turner selected for "the noble passage
of arms to which he challenged his rival from the grave." He left
two of his own pictures (479 and 498) to the nation on the express
condition that they should always hang side by side--as they are
hanging to-day--with these two by Claude.[47] To discuss fully the
comparative merits of the pictures would be beyond the scope of this
handbook; the whole of the first volume of _Modern Painters_ was
written to establish the superiority of Turner. We can only select a
few leading points.
"The greatest picture is that which conveys the greatest number of the
greatest ideas." Take first what Ruskin calls "ideas of relation," by
which he means "the perception of intellectual relations, including
everything productive of expression, sentiment, character." Now from
this point of view this picture is a particularly clear instance of
Claude's "inability to see the main point in a matter" or to present
any harmonious conception:--
"The foreground is a piece of very lovely and perfect forest
scenery, with a dance of peasants by a brook side; quite enough
subject to form, in the hands of a master, an impressive and
complete picture. On the other side of the brook, however, we
have a piece of pastoral life; a man with some bulls and goats
tumbling headforemost into the water, owing to some sudden
paralytic affection of all their legs. Even this group is one
too many; the shepherd had no business to drive his flock so
near the dancers, and the dancers will certainly frighten
the cattle. But when we look farther into the picture, our
feelings receive a sudden and violent shock, by the unexpected
appearance, amidst things pastoral and musical, of the
military; a number of Roman soldiers riding in on hobby-horses,
with a leader on foot, apparently encouraging them to make an
immediate and decisive charge on the musicians. Beyond the
soldiers is a circular temple, in exceedingly bad repair; and
close beside it, built against its very walls, a neat watermill
in full work. By the mills flows a large river with a weir all
across it. The weir has not been made for the mill (for that
receives its water from the hills by a trough carried over the
temple), but it is particularly ugly and monotonous in its line
of fall, and the water below forms a dead-looking pond, on
which some people are fishing in punts. The banks of this river
resemble in contour the later geological formations around
London, constituted chiefly of broken pots and oyster-shells.
At an inconvenient distance from the waterside stands a city,
composed of twenty-five round towers and a pyramid. Beyond
the city is a handsome bridge; beyond the bridge, part of the
Campagna, with fragments of aqueducts; beyond the Campagna the
chain of the Alps; on the left, the cascades of Tivoli. This
is, I believe, a fair example of what is commonly called an
'ideal' landscape; _i.e._ a group of the artist's studies from
Nature, individually spoiled, selected with such opposition
of character as may ensure their neutralising each other's
effect, and united with sufficient unnaturalness and violence
of association to ensure their producing a general sensation
of the impossible. Let us analyse the separate subjects a
little in this ideal work of Claude's. Perhaps there is no
more impressive scene on earth than the solitary extent of
the Campagna of Rome under evening light.... A dull purple
poisonous haze stretches level along the desert, veiling its
spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents the red light
rests, like dying fire on defiled altars. The blue ridge of
the Alban Mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green,
clear, quiet sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds stand steadfastly
along the promontories of the Apennines. From the plain to
the mountains the shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt
into darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral
mourners, passing from a nation's grave. Let us, with Claude,
make a few 'ideal' alterations in this landscape. First, we
will reduce the multitudinous precipices of the Apennines to
four sugar loaves. Secondly, we will remove the Alban Mount,
and put a large dust-heap in its stead. Next we will knock
down the greater part of the aqueducts, and leave only an
arch or two, that their infinity of length may no longer be
painful from its monotony. For the purple mist and declining
sun, we will substitute a bright blue sky, with round white
clouds. Finally, we will get rid of the unpleasant ruins in the
foreground; we will plant some handsome trees therein, we will
send for some fiddlers, and get up a dance, and a picnic party.
It will be found, throughout the picture, that the same species
of improvement is made on the materials which Claude had ready
to his hand. The descending slopes of the city of Rome, towards
the pyramid of Caius Cestius, supply not only lines of the most
exquisite variety and beauty, but matter for contemplation and
reflection in every fragment of their buildings. This passage
has been idealised by Claude into a set of similar round
towers, respecting which no idea can be formed but that they
are uninhabitable, and to which no interest can be attached
beyond the difficulty of conjecturing what they could have been
built for. The ruins of the temple are rendered unimpressive
by the juxtaposition of the watermill, and inexplicable by the
introduction of the Roman soldiers. The glide of the muddy
streams of the melancholy Tiber and Anio through the Campagna
is impressive in itself, but altogether ceases to be so when
we disturb their stillness of motion by a weir, adorn their
neglected flow with a handsome bridge, and cover their solitary
surface with punts, nets, and fishermen" (_Modern Painters_,
vol i., preface to second edition, pp. xxxvi.-xxxix.)
Take next the "ideas of truth" in the picture--the perception, that is
to say, of faithfulness in a statement of facts by the thing produced.
And first (1) for truth of _colour_. "Can it be seriously supposed
that those murky browns and melancholy greens are representative of
the tints of leaves under full noonday sun? I know that you cannot
help looking upon all these pictures as pieces of dark relief against
a light wholly proceeding from the distances; but they are nothing
of the kind, they are noon and morning effects with full lateral
light. Be so kind as to match the colour of a leaf in the sun (the
darkest you like) as nearly as you can, and bring your matched colour
and set it beside one of these groups of trees, and take a blade of
common grass, and set it beside any part of the fullest light of
their foregrounds, and then talk about the truth of colour of the old
masters!" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 5).
(2) Next for truth of _chiaroscuro_. Claude neglects that distinctness
of shadow which is the chief means of expressing vividness of light.
Thus "the trunks of the trees between the water-wheel and the white
figure of the middle distance, are dark and visible; but their shadows
are scarcely discernible on the ground, and are quite vague and lost in
the building. In nature, every bit of the shadow, both on the ground
and building, would have been defined and conspicuous; while the trunks
themselves would have been faint, confused, and indistinguishable, in
their illumined parts,[48] from the grass or distance" (_ibid._, ch.
iii. § 4). (3) Thirdly, for truth of _space_. In nature everything is
indistinct, but nothing vacant. But look at the city on the right bank
of the river:--
"I have seen many cities in my life, and drawn not a few; and
I have seen many fortifications, fancy ones included, which
frequently supply us with very new ideas indeed, especially in
matters of proportion; but I do not remember ever having met
with either a city or a fortress _entirely_ composed of round
towers of various heights and sizes, all facsimiles of each
other, and absolutely agreeing in the number of battlements.
I have, indeed, some faint recollection of having delineated
such a one in the first page of a spelling book when I was four
years old; but, somehow or other, the dignity and perfection
of the ideal were not appreciated, and the volume was not
considered to be increased in value by the frontispiece.
Without, however, venturing to doubt the entire sublimity
of the same ideal as it occurs in Claude, let us consider
how nature, if she had been fortunate enough to originate so
perfect a conception, would have managed it in its details.
Claude has permitted us to see every battlement, and the first
impulse we feel upon looking at the picture is to count how
many there are. Nature would have given us a peculiar confused
roughness of the upper lines, a multitude of intersections
and spots, which we should have known from experience was
indicative of battlements, but which we might as well have
thought of creating as of counting. Claude has given you the
walls below in one dead void of uniform gray. There is nothing
to be seen or felt, or guessed at in it; it is gray paint or
gray shade, whichever you may choose to call it, but it is
nothing more. Nature would have let you see, nay, would have
compelled you to see, thousands of spots or lines, not one
to be absolutely understood or accounted for, but yet all
characteristic and different from each other; breaking lights
on shattered stones, vague shadows from waving vegetation,
irregular stains of time and weather, mouldering hollows,
sparkling casements: all would have been there; none indeed
seen as such, none comprehensible or like themselves, but all
visible; little shadows and sparkles, and scratches, making
that whole space of colour a transparent, palpitating, various
infinity"[49] (_ibid._, ch. v. § 7).
(4) Lastly, the picture entirely ignores truth of _mountains_. And
this in two ways. First, there is a total want of magnitude and aerial
distance:--
"In the distance is something white, which I believe must be
intended for a snowy mountain, because I do not see that it
can well be intended for anything else. Now no mountain of
elevation sufficient to be sheeted with perpetual snow can by
any possibility sink so low on the horizon as this something of
Claude's, unless it be at a distance of from fifty to seventy
miles. At such distances ... the mountains rise from the
horizon like transparent films, only distinguishable from mist
by their excessively keen edges and their brilliant flashes
of sudden light; they are as unsubstantial as the air itself,
and impress their enormous size by means of this aerial-ness,
in a far greater degree at these vast distances, than even
when towering above the spectator's head.[50] Now, I ask of
the candid observer if there be the smallest vestige of an
effort to attain, if there be the most miserable, the most
contemptible, shadow of attainment of such an effect by Claude?
Does that white thing on the horizon look seventy miles off?
Is it faint or fading, or to be looked for by the eye before
it can be found out? Does it look high? Does it look large?
Does it look impressive? You cannot but feel that there is not
a vestige of any kind or species of truth in that horizon; and
that however artistical it may be, as giving brilliancy to the
distance (though as far as I have any feeling in the matter
it only gives coldness), it is, in the very branch of art on
which Claude's reputation chiefly rests, aerial perspective,
hurling defiance to nature in her very teeth. But there are
worse failures in this unlucky distance.... No mountain was
ever raised to the level of perpetual snow without an infinite
multiplicity of form. Its foundation is built of a hundred
minor mountains, and from these, great buttresses run in
converging ridges to the central peak.... Consequently, in
distant effect, when chains of such peaks are visible at once,
the multiplicity of form is absolutely oceanic; and though
it is possible in near scenes to find vast and simple masses
composed of lines which run unbroken for a thousand feet or
more, it is physically impossible when these masses are thrown
seventy miles back to have simple outlines, for then these
large features become mere jags and hillocks, and are heaped
and huddled together in endless confusion.... Hence these
mountains of Claude having no indication of the steep vertical
summits which are characteristic of the central ridges, having
soft edges instead of decisive ones, simple forms instead of
varied and broken ones, and being painted with a crude raw
white, having no transparency, nor filminess, nor air in it,
instead of rising in the opalescent mystery which invariably
characterises the distant snows, have the forms and the colours
of heaps of chalk in a limekiln, not of Alps" (_ibid._, sec.
iv. ch. ii. §§ 8, 9).