is beautiful; which seeks decorative value by other means than the
intrinsic excellence of form in the object represented, this kind of
realism is quite different in sort from the realisms of immature art,
which, aiming at nothing beyond a faithful copy, is content with
producing an ugly picture of an ugly thing. Now this latter kind of
realism endured in painting some time after decorative realism such as I
have described had reached perfection in sculpture. Nor was it till
later, and when the crude scholastic realism had completely come to an
end, that there became even partially possible in painting decorative
realism analogous to what we have noticed in sculpture; while it was not
till after the close of the Italian Renaissance period that the painters
arose in Spain and the Netherlands who were able to treat their subjects
with the uncompromising decorative realism of Desiderio or Rosellino or
Benedetto da Maiano. For the purely imitative realism of the painters of
the early Renaissance was succeeded in Italy by idealism, which matured
in the great art of intrinsically beautiful linear form of Michael
Angelo and Raphael, and the great art of intrinsically beautiful colour
form of Giorgione and Titian. These two schools were bound to be, each
in its degree, idealistic. Complete power of mere representation in
tint and colour having been obtained through the realistic drudgery of
the early Renaissance, selection in the objects thus to be represented
had naturally arisen; and the study of the antique had further hastened
and directed this movement of art no longer to study but to achieve, to
be decorative once more, decorative no longer in subservience to
architecture, but as the separate and self-sufficing art of painting.
Selection, therefore, which is the only practical kind of idealism, had
begun as soon as painting was possessed of the power of representing
objects in their relations of line and colour, with that amount of light
and shadow requisite to the just appreciation of the relations of form
and the just relations of colour. Now art which stops short at this
point of representation must inevitably be, if decorative at all,
idealistically decorative; it must be squeamish respecting the objects
represented, respecting their real structure, colour, position, and
grouping. For, of the visible impressions received from an object, some
are far more intrinsic than others. Suppose we see a woman, beautiful in
the structure of her body, and beautiful in the colour of her person and
her draperies, standing under a light which is such as we should call
beautiful and interesting: of these three qualities one will be
intrinsic in the woman, the second very considerably so, the third not
at all. For, let us call that woman away and replace her immediately by
another woman chosen at random. We shall immediately perceive that we
have lost one pleasurable impression, that of beautiful bodily
structure: the woman has taken away her well-shapen body. Next we shall
perceive a notable diminution in the second pleasurable impression: the
woman has taken with her, not indeed her well-tinted garments, which we
may have bestowed on her successor, but her beautifully coloured skin
and hair, so that of the pleasing colour-impression will remain only as
much as was due to, and may have been retained with, the original
woman's clothes. But if we look for our third pleasurable impression,
our beautiful light, we shall find that unchanged, whether it fall upon
a magnificently arrayed goddess or upon a sordid slut And, conversely,
the beautiful woman, when withdrawn from that light and placed in any
other, will be equally lovely in form, even if we cast her in plaster,
and lose the colour of her skin and hair; or if we leave her not only
the beautiful tints of her flesh and hair, but her own splendidly
coloured garments, we shall still have, in whatsoever light, a
magnificent piece of colour. But if we recall the poor ugly creature who
has succeeded her from out of that fine effect of light, we shall have
nothing but a hideous form invested in hideous colour.
This rough diagram will be sufficient to explain my thought respecting
the relative degree to which the art dealing with linear form, that
dealing with colour and that dealing with light, with the medium in
which form and colour are perceived; is each respectively bound to be
idealistically or realistically decorative. Now painting was
aesthetically mature, possessed the means to achieve great beauty, at a
time when of the three modes of representation there had as yet
developed only those of linear form and colour; and the very possibility
and necessity of immediately achieving all that could be achieved by
these means delayed for a long time the development of the third mode of
representation: the representation of objects as they appear with
reference to the light through which they are seen. A beginning had
indeed been made. Certain of Correggio's effects of light, even more an
occasional manner of treating the flesh and hair, reducing both form and
colour to a kind of vague boss and vague sheen, such as they really
present in given effects of light, a something which we define roughly
as eminently modern in the painting of his clustered cherubs; all this
is certainly a beginning of the school of Velasquez. Still more so is it
the case with Andrea del Sarto, the man of genius whom critics love to
despatch as a mediocrity, because his art, which is art altogether for
the eyes, and in which he innovated more than any of his contemporaries,
does not afford any excuse for the irrelevancies of ornamental
criticism; with him the appearance of form and colour, acted upon by
light, the relative values of which flesh and draperies consist with
reference to the surrounding medium, all this becomes so evident a
preoccupation and a basis for decorative effects, as to give certain of
his works an almost startling air of being modern. But this tendency
comes to nothing: the men of the sixteenth century appear scarcely to
have perceived wherein lay the true excellence of this "Andrea senza
errori," deeming him essentially the artist of linear perfection; while
the innovations of Correggio in the way of showing the relations of
flesh tones and light ended in the mere coarse gala illuminations in
which his successors made their seraphs plunge and sprawl. There was too
much to be done, good and bad, in the way of mere linear form and mere
colour; and as art of mere linear form and colour, indifferent of all
else, did the art of the Italian Renaissance run to seed.
I said at the beginning of this paper that the degree to which any art
is strictly idealistic, can be measured by the terms which it will make
with portrait. For as portrait is due to the desire to represent a
person quite apart from that person affording material for decoration,
it is evident that only the art which can call in the assistance of
decorative materials, independent of the represented individual, can
possibly make a beautiful picture out of an ugly man; while the art
which deals only with such visible peculiarities as are inherent in the
individual, has no kind of outlet, is cornered, and can make of a
repulsive original only a repulsive picture. The analogy to this we have
already noticed in sculpture: antique sculpture, considering only the
linear bosses which existed equally in the living man and in the statue,
could not afford to represent plain people; while Renaissance sculpture,
extracting a large amount of beauty out of combinations of surface and
light, was able, as long as it could arrange such an artificial
combination, to dispense with great perfection in the model. Nay, if we
except Renaissance statuary as a kind of separate art, we may say that
this independence of the object portrayed is a kind of analytic test,
enabling us to judge at a glance, and by the degree of independence from
the model, the degree to which any art is removed from the mere line and
boss of antique sculpture. In the statue standing free in any light that
may chance to come, every form must be beautiful from every point; but
in proportion as the new elements of painting enter, in proportion as
the actual linear form and boss is marked and helped out by grouping,
colour, and light and shade, does the actual perfection of the model
become less important; until, under the reign of light as the chief
factor, it becomes altogether indifferent. In this fact lies the only
rational foundation for the notion, made popular by Hegel, that painting
is an art in which beauty is of much less account than in sculpture;
failing to understand that the sum total of beauty remained the same,
whether dependent upon the concentration of a single element or obtained
by the co-operation of several consequently less singly important
elements.
But to return to the question of portrait art. From what we have seen,
it is clear that art which requires perfection of form will be reduced
to ugliness if cramped in the obtaining of such perfection, whereas art
which can obtain beauty by other means will still have a chance when
reduced to imitate ugly object? Hence it is that while the realistically
decorative art of the seventeenth century can make actually beautiful
things of the portraits of ugly people, the idealistically decorative
art of the Renaissance produces portraits which are cruelly ugly in
proportion as the art is purely idealistic. Yet even in idealism there
are degrees: the more the art is confined to mere linear form, to the
exclusion of colour, the uglier will be the portraits. With Michael
Angelo the difficulty was simplified to impossibility: he could not
paint portrait at all; and in his sculptured portraits of the two
Medicean dukes at S. Lorenzo he evaded all attempt at likeness, making
those two men into scarcely more than two architectural monsters,
half-human cousins of the fantastic creatures who keep watch on the
belfries and gurgoyles of a Gothic cathedral. It is almost impossible to
think of Michael Angelo attempting portrait: the man's genius cannot be
constrained to it, and what ought to be mere ugliness would come out
idealized into grandiose monstrosity. Men like Titian and Tintoret are
at the other end of the scale of ideal decoration: they are bordering
upon the domain of realism. Hence they can raise into interest, by the
mere power of colour, many an insignificant type; yet even they are
incapable of dealing with absolute ugliness, with absence of fine
colour, or, if they do deal with it, there is an immediate improvement
upon the model, and the appearance of truthfulness goes. Between the
absolute incapacity for dealing with ugliness of Michael Angelo, and the
power of compromising with it of Titian and Tintoret, Raphael stands
half-way: he can call in the assistance of colour just sufficiently to
create a setting of carefully harmonized draperies and accessories,
beautiful enough to allow of his filling it up with the most cruelly
ugly likeness which any painter ever painted. Far too much has been
written about Raphael in general, but not half enough about Raphael as a
portrait-painter; for by the side of the eclectic idealist, who combined
and balanced beauty almost into insipidity, is the most terribly,
inflexibly veracious portrait-painter that ever was. Compared with those
sternly straightforward portraits of his Florentine and Roman time,
where ugliness and baseness are never attenuated by one tittle, and
alloyed nobility or amiability, as with his finer models, like the two
Donis, husband and wife, and Bibbiena, is never purified of its
troubling element; compared with them the Venetian portraits are mere
insincere, enormously idealized pieces of colour-harmony; nay, the
portraits of Velasquez are mere hints--given rapidly by a sickened
painter striving to make those scrofulous Hapsburgs no longer mere men,
but keynotes of harmonies of light--of what the people really are. For
Velasquez seems to show us the temperament, the potentiality of his
people, and to leave us, with a kind of dignified and melancholy silence
as to all further, to find out what life, what feelings and actions,
such a temperament implies. But Raphael shows us all: the temperament
and the character, the real active creature, with all the marks of his
present temper and habits, with all the indications of his immediate
actions upon him: completely without humour or bitterness, without the
smallest tendency to twist the reality into caricature or monstrosity,
nay, perhaps without much psychologic analysis to tell him the exact
meaning of what he is painting, going straight to the point, and utterly
ruthless from sheer absence of all alternative of doing otherwise than
he does. There is nothing more cruelly realistic in the world, cruel not
only to the base originals but to the feelings of the spectator, than
the harmony of villainies, of various combinations of black and hog-like
bestiality, and fox and wolf-like cunning and ferocity with wicked human
thought and self-command, which Raphael has enshrined in that splendid
harmony of scarlet silk and crimson satin, and purple velvet and dull
white brocade, as the portraits of Leo X. and his cardinals Rossi and
Dei Medici.
The idealistic painter, accustomed to rely upon the intrinsic beauty
which he has hitherto been able to select or create; accustomed also to
think of form as something quite independent of the medium through which
it is seen, scarcely conscious of the existence of light and air in his
habit of concentrating all attention upon a figure placed, as it were,
in a sort of vacuum of indifference;--this idealistic artist is left
without any resources when bid to paint an ugly man or woman. With the
realistic artist, to whom the man or woman is utterly indifferent, to
whom the medium in which they are seen is everything, the case Is just
reversed: let him arrange his light, his atmospheric effect, and he will
work into their pattern no matter what plain or repulsive wretch. To
Velasquez the flaccid yellowish fair flesh, with its grey downy shadows,
the limp pale drab hair, which is grey in the light and scarcely
perceptibly blond in the shade, all this unhealthy, bloodless, feebly
living, effete mass of humanity called Philip IV. of Spain, shivering in
moral anaemia like some dog thorough bred into nothingness, becomes
merely the foundation for a splendid harmony of pale tints. Again, the
poor little baby princess, with scarce visible features, seemingly
kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and modelled) out of the wet ashes
of an _auto da fe_, in her black-and-white frock (how different from the
dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and gloomy enough for an
abbess or a cameriera major, this childish personification of courtly
dreariness, certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the principal
strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and ashy light, tinged
yellowish in the hair, bluish in the eyes and downy cheeks, pale red in
the lips and the rose in the hair; something to match which in beauty
you must think of some rarely seen veined and jaspered rainy twilight,
or opal-tinted hazy winter morning. Ugliness, nay, repulsiveness,
vanish, subdued into beauty, even as noxious gases may be subdued into
health-giving substances by some cunning chemist. The difference between
such portraits as these and the portraits by Raphael does not however
consist merely in the beauty: there is also the fact that if you take
one of Velasquez's portraits out of their frame, reconstitute the living
individual, and bid him walk forth in whatsoever light may fall upon
him, you will have something infinitely different from the portrait, and
of which your only distinct feeling will be that a fine portrait might
be made of the creature; whereas it is a matter of complete indifference
whether you see Raphael's Leo X. in the flesh or in his gilded frame.
Whatever may fairly be said respecting the relative value of idealistic
and realistic decorative art is really also connected with this latter
point. Considering that realistic art is merely obtaining beauty by
attention to other factors than those which preoccupy idealistic art,
that the one fulfils what the other neglects--taking the matter from
this point of view, it would seem as if the two kinds of arts were, so
to speak, morally equal; and that any vague sense of mysterious
superior dignity clinging to idealistic art was a mere shred of long
discarded pedantry. But it is not so. For realistic art does more than
merely bring into play powers unknown to idealistic art: it becomes, by
the possession of these powers, utterly indifferent to the intrinsic
value of the forms represented: it is so certain of making everything
lovely by its harmonies of light and atmosphere that it almost prefers
to choose inferior things for this purpose. I am thinking at present of
a picture by I forget what Dutchman in our National Gallery,
representing in separate compartments five besotten-looking creatures,
symbolical of the five senses: they are ugly, brutish, with I know not
what suggestion of detestable temperament in their bloodshot flesh and
vermilion lips, as if the whole man were saturated with his appetite.
Yet the Dutchman has found the means of making these degraded types into
something which we care to look at, and to look at on account of its
beauty; even as, in lesser degree, Rubens has always managed to make us
feel towards his flaccid, veal-complexioned, fish-eyed women, something
of what we feel towards the goddesses of the Parthenon; towards the
white-robed, long-gloved ladies, with meditative face beneath their
crimped auburn hair, of Titian.
Viewed in one way, there is a kind of nobility in the very fact that
such realistic art can make us pardon, can redeem, nay almost sanctify,
so much. But is it right thus to pardon, redeem, and sanctify; thus to
bring the inferior on to the level of the superior? Nay, is it not
rather wrong to teach us to endure so much meanness and ugliness in
creatures, on account of the nobility with which they are represented?
Is this not vitiating our feelings, blunting our desire for the better,
our repugnance for the worse?
A great and charitable art, this realistic art of the seventeenth
century, and to be respected for its very tenderness towards the scorned
and castaway things of reality; but accustoming us, perhaps too much,
like all charitable and reclaiming impulses, to certain unworthy
contacts: in strange contrast herein with that narrow but ascetic and
aristocratic art of idealism, which, isolated and impoverished though it
may be, has always the dignity of its immaculate purity, of its
unswerving judgment, of its obstinate determination to deal only with
the best. A hard task to judge between them. But be this as it may, it
is one of the singular richnesses of the Italian Renaissance that it
knew of both tendencies; that while in painting it gave the equivalent
of that rigid idealism of the Greeks which can make no compromise with
ugliness; in sculpture it possessed the equivalent of the realism of
Velasquez, which can make beauty out of ugly things, even as the chemist
can make sugar out of vitriol.
* * * * *
THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO.
"Le donne, i cavalieri, l' armi, gli amori."
I.
Throughout the tales of Charlemagne and his warriors, overtopping by far
the crowd of paladins and knights, move two colossal mailed and vizored
figures--Roland, whom the Italians call Orlando and the Spaniards
Roldan, the son of Milon d'Angers and of Charlemagne's sister; and
Renaud or Rinaldo, the lord of Montauban, and eldest of the famous four
sons of Aymon. These are the two representative heroes, equal but
opposed, the Achilles and Odysseus, the Siegfried and Dietrich, of the
Carolingian epic; and in each is personified, by the unconscious genius
of the early Middle Ages, one of the great political movements, of the
heroic struggles, of feudalism. For there existed in feudalism two
forces, a centripetal and a centrifugal--a force which made for the
supremacy of the kingly overlordship, and a force which made for the
independence of the great vassals. Hence, in the poetry which is the
poetry of feudalism, two distinct currents of feeling, two distinct
epics---the epic of the devoted loyalty of all the heroes of France to
their wise and mighty emperor Charlemagne, triumphant even in
misfortune; and the epic of the hopeless resistance against a craven and
capricious despot Charles of the most righteous and whole-hearted among
his feudatories: the epic of Roland, and the epic of Renaud. Of the
first there remains to us, in its inflexible and iron solemnity, an
original rhymed narrative, "The Chanson de Roland," which we may read
perhaps almost in the self-same words in which it was sung by the
Normans of William in their night watch before the great battle. The
centripetal force of feudalism gained the upper hand, and the song of
the great empire, of the great deeds of loyal prowess, was consecrated
in the feudal monarchy. The case was different with the tale of
resistance and rebellion. The story of Renaud soon became a dangerous
lesson for the great barons; it fell from the hands of the nobles to
those of humbler folk; and it is preserved to us no longer in mediaeval
verse, but in a prose version, doubtless of the fifteenth century, under
the name, familiar on the stalls of village fairs, of "The Quatre Fils
Aymon." But, as Renaud is the equal of Roland, so is this humble prose
tale nevertheless the equal of the great song of Roncevaux; and even
now, it would be a difficult task to decide which were the grander, the
tale of loyalty or the tale of resistance.
In each of these tales,"The Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils
Aymon," there is contained a picture of its respective hero, which sums
up, as it were, the whole noble character of the book; and which, the
picture of the dying Roland and the picture of the dying Renaud, I would
fain bring before you before speaking of the other Roland and the other
Renaud, the Orlando of Ariosto and the Rinaldo of Boiardo. The traitor
Ganelon has enabled King Marsile to overtake with all his heathenness
the rear-guard of Charlemagne between the granite walls of Roncevaux;
the Franks have been massacred, but the Saracens have been routed;
Roland has at last ceded to the prayers of Oliver and of Archbishop
Turpin; three times has he put to his mouth his oliphant and blown a
blast to call back Charlemagne to vengeance, till the blood has foamed
round his lips and his temple has burst. Oliver is dead, the archbishop
is dying, Roland himself is slowly bleeding to death. He goes down into
the defile, heaped with corpses, and seeks for the bodies of the
principal paladins, Ivon and Ivaire, the Gascon Engelier, Gerier and
Gerin, Berenger and Otho, Anseis and Salamon, and the old Gerard of
Rousillon; and one by one drags them to where the archbishop lies dying.
And then, when to these knights Roland has at last added his own beloved
comrade Oliver, he bids the archbishop bless all the dead, before he die
himself. Then, when he has reverently crossed Turpin's beautiful
priestly hands over his breast, he goes forth to shatter his sword
Durendal against the rocks; but the good sword has cut the rock without
shivering; and the coldness of death steals, over Roland. He stretches
himself upon a hillock looking towards Spain, and prays for the
forgiveness of his sins; then, with Durendal and his ivory horn by his
side, he stretches out the glove of his right hand to God. "He has
stretched forth to God the glove of his right hand; St. Gabriel has
received it... Then his head has sunk on his arm; he has gone, with
clasped hands, to his end. God sends him one of his cherubim and St.
Michael of Peril. St. Gabriel has come with them. They carry the soul of
the Count: up to paradise."