The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote—in a preface to certain
Dante illustrations by Stradanus, a sixteenth-century artist of no
great excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892—that
the illustrations of Gustave Doré, ‘in spite of glaring artistic
defects, must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to
translate Dante’s conceptions into terms of plastic art.’ One can only
account for this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by supposing
that a temperament, strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness
the countless schools and influences of the Renaissance in Italy, is
of necessity a little lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the
finer substances of emotion. It is more difficult to account for so
admirable a scholar not only preferring these illustrations to the work
of what he called ‘the graceful and affected Botticelli,’—although
‘Doré was fitted for his task, not by dramatic vigour, by feeling for
beauty, or by anything sterling in sympathy with the supreme poet’s
soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity and gloom’—but
preferring them because ‘he created a fanciful world, which makes the
movement of Dante’s _dramatis personæ_ conceivable, introducing the
ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged with destinies
of souls and creeds and empires.’ When the ordinary student finds
this intelligence in an illustrator, he thinks, because it is his
own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation of the text,
while work of the extraordinary intelligences is merely an expression
of their own ideas and feelings. Doré and Stradanus, he will tell
you, have given us something of the world of Dante, but Blake and
Botticelli have builded worlds of their own and called them Dante’s—as
if Dante’s world were more than a mass of symbols of colour and form
and sound which put on humanity, when they arouse some mind to an
intense and romantic life that is not theirs; as if it was not one’s
own sorrows and angers and regrets and terrors and hopes that awaken to
condemnation or repentance while Dante treads his eternal pilgrimage;
as if any poet or painter or musician could be other than an enchanter
calling with a persuasive or compelling ritual, creatures, noble or
ignoble, divine or dæmonic, covered with scales or in shining raiment,
that he never imagined, out of the bottomless deeps of imaginations he
never foresaw; as if the noblest achievement of art was not when the
artist enfolds himself in darkness, while he casts over his readers a
light as of a wild and terrible dawn.
Let us therefore put away the designs to _The Divine Comedy_, in which
there is ‘an ordinary intelligence,’ and consider only the designs
in which the magical ritual has called up extraordinary shapes, the
magical light glimmered upon a world, different from the Dantesque
world of our own intelligence in its ordinary and daily moods, upon
a difficult and distinguished world. Most of the series of designs
to Dante, and there are a good number, need not busy any one for a
moment. Genelli has done a copious series, which is very able in
the ‘formal’ ‘generalized’ way which Blake hated, and which is
spiritually ridiculous. Penelli has transformed the ‘Inferno’ into a
vulgar Walpurgis night, and a certain Schuler, whom I do not find in
the biographical dictionaries, but who was apparently a German, has
prefaced certain flaccid designs with some excellent charts, while
Stradanus has made a series for the ‘Inferno,’ which has so many of
the more material and unessential powers of art, and is so extremely
undistinguished in conception, that one supposes him to have touched
in the sixteenth century the same public Doré has touched in the
nineteenth.
Though with many doubts, I am tempted to value Flaxman’s designs to the
‘Inferno,’ the ‘Purgatorio,’ and the ‘Paradiso,’ only a little above
the best of these, because he does not seem to have ever been really
moved by Dante, and so to have sunk into a formal manner, which is a
reflection of the vital manner of his Homer and Hesiod. His designs to
_The Divine Comedy_ will be laid, one imagines, with some ceremony in
that immortal wastepaper-basket in which Time carries with many sighs
the failures of great men. I am perhaps wrong, however, because Flaxman
even at his best has not yet touched me very deeply, and I hardly ever
hope to escape this limitation of my ruling stars. That Signorelli
does not seem greatly more interesting except here and there, as in the
drawing of ‘The Angel,’ full of innocence and energy, coming from the
boat which has carried so many souls to the foot of the mountain of
purgation, can only be because one knows him through poor reproductions
from frescoes half mouldered away with damp. A little-known series,
drawn by Adolph Stürler, an artist of German extraction, who was
settled in Florence in the first half of this century, are very
poor in drawing, very pathetic and powerful in invention, and full
of most interesting pre-Raphaelitic detail. There are admirable and
moving figures, who, having set love above reason, listen in the
last abandonment of despair to the judgment of Minos, or walk with a
poignant melancholy to the foot of his throne through a land where owls
and strange beasts move hither and thither with the sterile content of
the evil that neither loves nor hates, and a Cerberus full of patient
cruelty. All Stürler’s designs have, however, the languor of a mind
that does its work by a succession of delicate critical perceptions
rather than the decision and energy of true creation, and are more a
curious contribution to artistic methods than an imaginative force.
The only designs that compete with Blake’s are those of Botticelli and
Giulio Clovio, and these contrast rather than compete; for Blake did
not live to carry his ‘Paradiso’ beyond the first faint pencillings,
the first thin washes of colour, while Botticelli only, as I think,
became supremely imaginative in his ‘Paradiso,’ and Clovio never
attempted the ‘Inferno’ and ‘Purgatorio’ at all. The imaginations of
Botticelli and Clovio were overshadowed by the cloister, and it was
only when they passed beyond the world or into some noble peace, which
is not the world’s peace, that they won a perfect freedom. Blake had
not such mastery over figure and drapery as had Botticelli, but he
could sympathize with the persons and delight in the scenery of the
‘Inferno’ and the ‘Purgatorio’ as Botticelli could not, and could
fill them with a mysterious and spiritual significance born perhaps
of mystical pantheism. The flames of Botticelli give one no emotion,
and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot of the Church led by
the gryphon, half eagle, half lion, of Christ’s dual nature, but is
a fragment of some mediæval pageant pictured with a merely technical
inspiration. Clovio, the illuminator of missals, has tried to create
with that too easy hand of his a Paradise of serene air reflected in a
little mirror, a heaven of sociability and humility and prettiness,
a heaven of women and of monks; but one cannot imagine him deeply
moved, as the modern world is moved, by the symbolism of bird and
beast, of tree and mountain, of flame and darkness. It was a profound
understanding of all creatures and things, a profound sympathy with
passionate and lost souls, made possible in their extreme intensity
by his revolt against corporeal law, and corporeal reason, which made
Blake the one perfectly fit illustrator for the ‘Inferno’ and the
‘Purgatorio’; in the serene and rapturous emptiness of Dante’s Paradise
he would find no symbols but a few abstract emblems, and he had no love
for the abstract, while with the drapery and the gestures of Beatrice
and Virgil, he would have prospered less than Botticelli or even Clovio.
1897.