it would be well if we could agree, in our Schools of Art in England,
to consider our leaders. The first and chief I will not myself presume
to name; he shall be distinguished for you by the authority of those
two great painters of whom we have just been speaking--Reynolds and
Velasquez. You may remember that in your Manchester Art Treasures
Exhibition the most impressive things were the works of those two men--
nothing told upon the eye so much; no other pictures retained it with
such a persistent power. Now, I have the testimony, first of Reynolds
to Velasquez, and then of Velasquez to the man whom I want you to take
as the master of all your English schools. The testimony of Reynolds to
Velasquez is very striking. I take it from some fragments which have
just been published by Mr. William Cotton--precious fragments--of
Reynolds' diaries, which I chanced upon luckily as I was coming down
here: for I was going to take Velasquez' testimony alone, and then fell
upon this testimony of Reynolds to Velasquez, written most fortunately
in Reynolds' own hand-you may see the manuscript. "What _we_ are
all," said Reynolds, "attempting to do with great labor, Velasquez does
at once." Just think what is implied when a man of the enormous power
and facility that Reynolds had, says he was "trying to do with great
labor" what Velasquez "did at once."
Having thus Reynolds' testimony to Velasquez, I will take Velasquez'
testimony to somebody else. You know that Velasquez was sent by Philip
of Spain to Italy, to buy pictures for him. He went all over Italy, saw
the living artists there, and all their best pictures when freshly
painted, so that he had every opportunity of judging; and never was a
man so capable of judging. He went to Rome and ordered various works of
living artists; and while there, he was one day asked by Salvator Rosa
what he thought of Raphael. His reply, and the ensuing conversation,
are thus reported by Boschini, in curious Italian verse, which, thus
translated by Dr. Donaldson, is quoted in Mr. Stirling's Life of
Velasquez:--
"The master" [Velasquez] "stiffly bowed his figure tall
And said, 'For Rafael, to speak the truth--
I always was plain-spoken from my youth--
I cannot say I like his works at all.'
"'Well,' said the other" [Salvator], 'if you can run down
So great a man, I really cannot see
What you can find to like in Italy;
To him we all agree to give the crown.'
"Diego answered thus: 'I saw in Venice
The true test of the good and beautiful;
First in my judgment, ever stands that school,
And Titian first of all Italian men is.'"
"_Tizian ze quel die porta la bandiera_"
Learn that line by heart and act, at all events for some time to come,
upon Velasquez' opinion in that matter. Titian is much the safest
master for you. Raphael's power, such as it characters in his mind; it
is "Raphaelesque," properly so called; but Titian's power is simply the
power of doing right. Whatever came before Titian, he did wholly as it
_ought_ to be done. Do not suppose that now in recommending Titian
to you so strongly, and speaking of nobody else to-night, I am
retreating in anywise from what some of you may perhaps recollect in my
works, the enthusiasm with which I have always spoken of another
Venetian painter. There are three Venetians who are never separated in
my mind--Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret. They all have their own
unequalled gifts, and Tintoret especially has imagination and depth of
soul which I think renders him indisputably the greatest man; but,
equally indisputably, Titian is the greatest painter; and therefore the
greatest painter who ever lived. You may be led wrong by Tintoret
[Footnote: See Appendix I.--"Right and Wrong."] in many respects, wrong
by Raphael in more; all that you learn from Titian will be right. Then,
with Titian, take Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Albert Dürer. I name those
three masters for this reason: Leonardo has powers of subtle drawing
which are peculiarly applicable in many ways to the drawing of fine
ornament, and are very useful for all students. Rembrandt and Dürer are
the only men whose actual work of hand you can have to look at; you can
have Rembrandt's etchings, or Dürer's engravings actually hung in your
schools; and it is a main point for the student to see the real thing,
and avoid judging of masters at second-hand. As, however, in obeying
this principle, you cannot often have opportunities of studying
Venetian painting, it is desirable that you should have a useful
standard of colour, and I think it is possible for you to obtain this.
I cannot, indeed, without entering upon ground which might involve the
hurting the feelings of living artists, state exactly what I believe to
be the relative position of various painters in England at present with
respect to power of colour. But I may say this, that in the peculiar
gifts of colour which will be useful to you as students, there are only
one or two of the pre-Raphaelites, and William Hunt, of the old Water
Colour Society, who would be safe guides for you: and as quite a safe
guide, there is nobody but William Hunt, because the pre-Raphaelites
are all more or less affected by enthusiasm and by various morbid
conditions of intellect and temper; but old William Hunt--I am sorry to
say "old," but I say it in a loving way, for every year that has added
to his life has added also to his skill--William Hunt is as right as
the Venetians, as far as he goes, and what is more, nearly as
inimitable as they. And I think if we manage to put in the principal
schools of England a little bit of Hunt's work, and make that somewhat
of a standard of colour, that we can apply his principles of colouring
to subjects of all kinds. Until you have had a work of his long near
you; nay, unless you have been labouring at it, and trying to copy it,
you do not know the thoroughly grand qualities that are concentrated in
it. Simplicity, and intensity, both of the highest character;--
simplicity of aim, and intensity of power and success, are involved in
that man's unpretending labour.
Finally, you cannot believe that I would omit my own favourite, Turner.
I fear from the very number of his works left to the nation, that there
is a disposition now rising to look upon his vast bequest with some
contempt. I beg of you, if in nothing else, to believe me in this, that
you cannot further the art of England in any way more distinctly than
by giving attention to every fragment that has been left by that man.
The time will come when his full power and right place will be
acknowledged; that time will not be for many a day yet: nevertheless,
be assured--as far as you are inclined to give the least faith to
anything I may say to you, be assured--that you can act for the good of
art in England in no better way than by using whatever influence any of
you have in any direction to urge the reverent study and yet more
reverent preservation of the works of Turner. I do not say "the
exhibition" of his works, for we are not altogether ripe for it: they
are still too far above us; uniting, as I was telling you, too many
qualities for us yet to feel fully their range and their influence;--
but let us only try to keep them safe from harm, and show thoroughly
and conveniently what we show of them at all, and day by day their
greatness will dawn upon us more and more, and be the root of a school
of art in England, which I do not doubt may be as bright, as just, and
as refined as even that of Venice herself. The dominion of the sea
seems to have been associated, in past time, with dominion in the arts
also: Athens had them together; Venice had them together; but by so
much as our authority over the ocean is wider than theirs over the
Ægean or Adriatic, let us strive to make our art more widely beneficent
than theirs, though it cannot be more exalted; so working out the
fulfilment, in their wakening as well as their warning sense, of those
great words of the aged Tintoret:
"Sempre si fa il mare maggiore."
LECTURE III.
MODERN MANUFACTURE AND DESIGN.
_A Lecture delivered at Bradford, March, 1859_.
It is with a deep sense of necessity for your indulgence that I venture
to address you to-night, or that I venture at any time to address the
pupils of schools of design intended for the advancement of taste in
special branches of manufacture. No person is able to give useful and
definite help towards such special applications of art, unless he is
entirely familiar with the conditions of labour and natures of material
involved in the work; and indefinite help is little better than no help
at all. Nay, the few remarks which I propose to lay before you this
evening will, I fear, be rather suggestive of difficulties than helpful
in conquering them: nevertheless, it may not be altogether
unserviceable to define clearly for you (and this, at least, I am able
to do) one or two of the more stern general obstacles which stand at
present in the way of our success in design; and to warn you against
exertion of effort in any vain or wasteful way, till these main
obstacles are removed.
The first of these is our not understanding the scope and dignity of
Decorative design. With all our talk about it, the very meaning of the
words "Decorative art" remains confused and undecided. I want, if
possible, to settle this question for you to-night, and to show you
that the principles on which you must work are likely to be false, in
proportion as they are narrow; true, only as they are founded on a
perception of the connection of all branches of art with each other.
Observe, then, first--the only essential distinction between Decorative
and other art is the being fitted for a fixed place; and in that place,
related, either in subordination or command, to the effect of other
pieces of art. And all the greatest art which the world has produced is
thus fitted for a place, and subordinated to a purpose. There is no
existing highest-order art but is decorative. The best sculpture yet
produced has been the decoration of a temple front--the best painting,
the decoration of a room. Raphael's best doing is merely the wall-
colouring of a suite of apartments in the Vatican, and his cartoons
were made for tapestries. Correggio's best doing is the decoration of
two small church cupolas at Parma; Michael Angelo's of a ceiling in the
Pope's private chapel; Tintoret's, of a ceiling and side wall belonging
to a charitable society at Venice; while Titian and Veronese threw out
their noblest thoughts, not even on the inside, but on the outside of
the common brick and plaster walls of Venice.
Get rid, then, at once of any idea of Decorative art being a degraded
or a separate kind of art. Its nature or essence is simply its being
fitted for a definite place; and, in that place, forming part of a
great and harmonious whole, in companionship with other art; and so far
from this being a degradation to it--so far from Decorative art being
inferior to other art because it is fixed to a spot--on the whole it
may be considered as rather a piece of degradation that it should be
portable. Portable art--independent of all place--is for the most part
ignoble art. Your little Dutch landscape, which you put over your
sideboard to-day, and between the windows tomorrow, is a far more
contemptible piece of work than the extents of field and forest with
which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once melancholy arcade
of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and the wild boar of silver which you use
for a seal, or lock into a velvet case, is little likely to be so noble
a beast as the bronze boar who foams forth the fountain from under his
tusks in the market-place of Florence. It is, indeed, possible that the
portable picture or image may be first-rate of its kind, but it is not
first-rate because it is portable; nor are Titian's frescoes less than
first-rate because they are fixed; nay, very frequently the highest
compliment you can pay to a cabinet picture is to say--"It is as grand
as a fresco."
Keeping, then, this fact fixed in our minds,--that all art _may_
be decorative, and that the greatest art yet produced has been
decorative,--we may proceed to distinguish the orders and dignities of
decorative art, thus:--
I. The first order of it is that which is meant for places where it
cannot be disturbed or injured, and where it can be perfectly seen; and
then the main parts of it should be, and have always been made, by the
great masters, as perfect, and as full of nature as possible.
You will every day hear it absurdly said that room decoration should be
by flat patterns--by dead colours--by conventional monotonies, and I
know not what. Now, just be assured of this--nobody ever yet used
conventional art to decorate with, when he could do anything better,
and knew that what he did would be safe. Nay, a great painter will
always give you the natural art, safe or not. Correggio gets a
commission to paint a room on the ground floor of a palace at Parma:
any of our people--bred on our fine modern principles--would have
covered it with a diaper, or with stripes or flourishes, or mosaic
patterns. Not so Correggio: he paints a thick trellis of vine-leaves,
with oval openings, and lovely children leaping through them into the
room; and lovely children, depend upon it, are rather more desirable
decorations than diaper, if you can do them--but they are not quite so
easily done. In like manner Tintoret has to paint the whole end of the
Council Hall at Venice. An orthodox decorator would have set himself to
make the wall look like a wall--Tintoret thinks it would be rather
better, if he can manage it, to make it look a little like Paradise;--
stretches his canvas right over the wall, and his clouds right over his
canvas; brings the light through his clouds--all blue and clear--zodiac
beyond zodiac; rolls away the vaporous flood from under the feet of
saints, leaving them at last in infinitudes of light--unorthodox in the
last degree, but, on the whole, pleasant.
And so in all other cases whatever, the greatest decorative art is
wholly unconventional--downright, pure, good painting and sculpture,
but always fitted for its place; and subordinated to the purpose it has
to serve in that place.
II. But if art is to be placed where it is liable to injury--to wear
and tear; or to alteration of its form; as, for instance, on domestic
utensils, and armour, and weapons, and dress; in which either the
ornament will be worn out by the usage of the thing, or will be cast
into altered shape by the play of its folds; then it is wrong to put
beautiful and perfect art to such uses, and you want forms of inferior
art, such as will be by their simplicity less liable to injury; or, by
reason of their complexity and continuousness, may show to advantage,
however distorted by the folds they are cast into.
And thus arise the various forms of inferior decorative art, respecting
which the general law is, that the lower the place and office of the
thing, the less of natural or perfect form you should have in it; a
zigzag or a chequer is thus a better, because a more consistent
ornament for a cup or platter than a landscape or portrait is: hence
the general definition of the true forms of conventional ornament is,
that they consist in the bestowal of as much beauty on the object as
shall be consistent with its Material, its Place, and its Office.
Let us consider these three modes of consistency a little.
(A.) Conventionalism by cause of inefficiency of material.
If, for instance, we are required to represent a human figure with
stone only, we cannot represent its colour; we reduce its colour to
whiteness. That is not elevating the human body, but degrading it; only
it would be a much greater degradation to give its colour falsely.
Diminish beauty as much as you will, but do not misrepresent it. So
again, when we are sculpturing a face, we can't carve its eyelashes.
The face is none the better for wanting its eyelashes--it is injured by
the want; but would be much more injured by a clumsy representation of
them.
Neither can we carve the hair. We must be content with the
conventionalism of vile solid knots and lumps of marble, instead of the
golden cloud that encompasses the fair human face with its waving
mystery. The lumps of marble are not an elevated representation of
hair--they are a degraded one; yet better than any attempt to imitate
hair with the incapable material.
In all cases in which such imitation is attempted, instant degradation
to a still lower level is the result. For the effort to imitate shows
that the workman has only a base and poor conception of the beauty of
the reality--else he would know his task to be hopeless, and give it up
at once; so that all endeavours to avoid conventionalism, when the
material demands it, result from insensibility to truth, and are among
the worst forms of vulgarity. Hence, in the greatest Greek statues, the
hair is very slightly indicated--not because the sculptor disdained
hair, but because he knew what it was too well to touch it insolently.
I do not doubt but that the Greek painters drew hair exactly as Titian
does. Modern attempts to produce finished pictures on glass result from
the same base vulgarism. No man who knows what painting means, can
endure a painted glass window which emulates painter's work. But he
rejoices in a glowing mosaic of broken colour: for that is what the
glass has the special gift and right of producing. [Footnote: See
Appendix II., Sir Joshua Reynolds's disappointment.]
(B.) Conventionalism by cause of inferiority of place.
When work is to be seen at a great distance, or in dark places, or in
some other imperfect way, it constantly becomes necessary to treat it
coarsely or severely, in order to make it effective. The statues on
cathedral fronts, in good times of design, are variously treated
according to their distances: no fine execution is put into the
features of the Madonna who rules the group of figures above the south
transept of Rouen at 150 feet above the ground; but in base modern
work, as Milan Cathedral, the sculpture is finished without any
reference to distance; and the merit of every statue is supposed to
consist in the visitor's being obliged to ascend three hundred steps
before he can see it.
(C.) Conventionalism by cause of inferiority of office.
When one piece of ornament is to be subordinated to another (as the
moulding is to the sculpture it encloses, or the fringe of a drapery to
the statue it veils), this inferior ornament needs to be degraded in
order to mark its lower office; and this is best done by refusing, more
or less, the introduction of natural form. The less of nature it
contains, the more degraded is the ornament, and the fitter for a
humble place; but, however far a great workman may go in refusing the
higher organisms of nature, he always takes care to retain the
magnificence of natural lines; that is to say, of the infinite curves,
such as I have analyzed in the fourth volume of "Modern Painters." His
copyists, fancying that they can follow him without nature, miss
precisely the essence of all the work; so that even the simplest piece
of Greek conventional ornament loses the whole of its value in any
modern imitation of it, the finer curves being always missed. Perhaps
one of the dullest and least justifiable mistakes which have yet been
made about my writing, is the supposition that I have attacked or
despised Greek work. I have attacked Palladian work, and modern
imitation of Greek work. Of Greek work itself I have never spoken but
with a reverence quite infinite: I name Phidias always in exactly the
same tone with which I speak of Michael Angelo, Titian, and Dante. My
first statement of this faith, now thirteen years ago, was surely clear
enough. "We shall see by this light three colossal images standing up
side by side, looming in their great rest of spirituality above the
whole world horizon. Phidias, Michael Angelo, and Dante,--from these we
may go down step by step among the mighty men of every age, securely
and certainly observant of diminished lustre in every appearance of
restlessness and effort, until the last trace of inspiration vanishes
in the tottering affectation or tortured insanities of modern times."
("Modern Painters," vol. ii., p. 253.) This was surely plain speaking
enough, and from that day to this my effort has been not less
continually to make the heart of Greek work known than the heart of
Gothic: namely, the nobleness of conception of form derived from
perpetual study of the figure; and my complaint of the modern architect
has been not that he followed the Greeks, but that he denied the first
laws of life in theirs as in all other art.
The fact is, that all good subordinate forms of ornamentation ever yet
existent in the world have been invented, and others as beautiful can
only be invented, by men primarily exercised in drawing or carving the
human figure. I will not repeat here what I have already twice insisted
upon, to the students of London and Manchester, respecting the
degradation of temper and intellect which follows the pursuit of art
without reference to natural form, as among the Asiatics: here, I will
only trespass on your patience so far as to mark the inseparable
connection between figure-drawing and good ornamental work, in the
great European schools, and all that are connected with them.
Tell me, then, first of all, what ornamental work is usually put before
our students as the type of decorative perfection? Raphael's
arabesques; are they not? Well, Raphael knew a little about the figure,
I suppose, before he drew them. I do not say that I like those
arabesques; but there are certain qualities in them which are
inimitable by modern designers; and those qualities are just the fruit
of the master's figure study. What is given the student as next to
Raphael's work? Cinquecento ornament generally. Well, cinquecento
generally, with its birds, and cherubs, and wreathed foliage, and
clustered fruit, was the amusement of men who habitually and easily
carved the figure, or painted it. All the truly fine specimens of it
have figures or animals as main parts of the design.