LECTURES
ON
PAINTING.
Printed by A. and R. Spottiswoode,
Printers-Street, London.
[Illustration: HENRY FUSELI ESQR. R.A.
_Engraved by R. W. Sievier, from a Miniature by Moses Haughton._
_Published May 1, 1820, by T. Cadell & W. Davies, Strand, London._]
LECTURES
ON
PAINTING,
DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY,
BY HENRY FUSELI, P.P.
WITH ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS AND NOTES.
[Illustration]
LONDON:
PRINTED FOR T. CADELL AND W. DAVIES, IN THE STRAND,
BOOKSELLERS TO THE ROYAL ACADEMY
AND W. BLACKWOOD, EDINBURGH.
1820.
INTRODUCTION.
It cannot be considered as superfluous or assuming to present the
reader of the following lectures, with a succinct characteristic sketch
of the principal technic instruction, ancient and modern, which we
possess: I say, a sketch, for an elaborate and methodical survey, or a
plan well digested and strictly followed, would demand a volume. These
observations, less written for the man of letters and cultivated taste,
than for the student who wishes to inform himself of the history and
progress of his art, are to direct him to the sources from which my
principles are deduced, to enable him, by comparing my authors with
myself, to judge how far the theory which I deliver, may be depended on
as genuine, or ought to be rejected as erroneous or false.
The works or fragments of works which we possess, are either purely
elementary, critically historical, biographic, or mixed up of all three.
On the books purely elementary, the van of which is led by Lionardo
da Vinci and Albert Durer, and the rear by Gherard Lairesse, as the
principles which they detail must be supposed to be already in the
student’s possession, or are occasionally interwoven with the topics
of the Lectures, I shall not expatiate, but immediately proceed to the
historically critical writers; who consist of all the antients yet
remaining, Pausanias excepted.
We may thank Destiny that, in the general wreck of antient art, a
sufficient number of entire and mutilated monuments have escaped the
savage rage of barbarous conquest, and the still more savage hand of
superstition, not only to prove that the principles which we deliver,
formed the body of antient art, but to furnish us with their standard
of style. For if we had nothing to rely on to prove its existence than
the historic and critical information left us, such is the chaos
of assertion and contradiction, such the chronologic confusion, and
dissonance of dates, that nothing short of a miracle could guide us
through the labyrinth, and the whole would assume a fabulous aspect.
Add to this the occupation and character of the writers, none of them a
professional man. For the rules of Parrhasius, the volumes of Pamphilus,
Apelles, Metrodorus, all irrecoverably lost, we must rely on the hasty
compilations of a warrior, or the incidental remarks of an orator,
Pliny and Quintilian. Pliny, authoritative in his verdicts, a Roman in
decision, was rather desirous of knowing much, than of knowing well;
the other, though, as appears, a man of exquisite taste, was too much
occupied by his own art to allow ours more than a rapid glance. In Pliny,
it is necessary, and for an artist not very difficult, to distinguish
when he speaks from himself and when he delivers an extract, however
short; whenever he does the first, he is seldom able to separate the
kernel from the husk; he is credulous, irrelevant, ludicrous. The Jupiter
of Phidias, the Doryphorus of Polycletus, the Aphrodite of Praxiteles,
the Demos of Parrhasius, the Venus of Apelles, provoke his admiration
in no greater degree than the cord drawn over the horns and muzzle of
the bull in the group of Amphion Zetus and Antiopa; the spires and
windings of the serpents in that of the Laocoon, the effect of the foam
from the sponge of Protogenes, the partridge in his Jalysus, the grapes
that imposed on the birds, and the curtain which deceived Zeuxis. Such
is Pliny when he speaks from himself, or perhaps from the hints of some
Dilettante; but when he delivers an extract, his information is not
only essential and important, but expressed by the most appropriate
words. Such is his account of the glazing-method of Apelles, in which,
as Reynolds has observed, he speaks the language of an artist; such is
what he says of the manner in which Protogenes embodied his colours,
though it may require the practice of an artist to penetrate his meaning.
No sculptor could describe better in many words than he does in one,
the manœuvre by which Nicias gave the decided line of correctness to
the models of Praxiteles; the word _circumlitio_, shaping, rounding
the moist clay with the finger is evidently a term of art. Thus when
he describes the method of Pausias, who, in painting a sacrifice,
foreshortened the bull and threw his shade on part of the surrounding
crowd, he throws before us the depth of the scenery and its forcible
chiaroscuro; nor is he less happy, at least in my opinion, when he
translates the deep aphorism by which Eupompus directed Lysippus to recur
to Nature, and to animate the rigid form with the air of life.
In his dates he seldom errs, and sometimes adjusts or corrects the
errours of Greek chronology, though not with equal attention; for
whilst he exposes the impropriety of ascribing to Polycletus a statue
of Hephestion, the friend of Alexander, who lived a century after him,
he thinks it worth his while to repeat that Erynna, the contemporary of
Sappho, who lived nearly as many years before him, celebrated in her
poems a work of his friend and fellow-scholar Myron of Eleutheræ. His
text is at the same time so deplorably mutilated that it often equally
defies conjecture and interpretation. Still, from what is genuine it must
be confessed that he condenses in a few chapters the contents of volumes,
and fills the whole atmosphere of art. Whatever he tells, whether the
most puerile legend, or the best attested fact, he tells with dignity.
Of Quintilian, whose information is all relative to style, the tenth
chapter of the twelfth book, a passage on Expression in the eleventh,
and scattered fragments of observations analogous to the process of his
own art, is all that we possess; but what he says, though comparatively
small in bulk with what we have of Pliny, leaves us to wish for more.
His review of the revolutions of style in painting, from Polygnotus
to Apelles, and in sculpture from Phidias to Lysippus, is succinct
and rapid; but though so rapid and succinct, every word is poised
by characteristic precision, and can only be the result of long and
judicious inquiry, and perhaps even minute examination. His theory and
taste savour neither of the antiquary nor the mere Dilettante; he
neither dwells on the infancy of art with doating fondness, nor melts
its essential and solid principles in the crucibles of merely curious or
voluptuous execution.
Still less in volume, and still less intentional are the short but
important observations on the principles of art and the epochs of style,
scattered over nearly all the works of Cicero, but chiefly his Orator
and Rhetoric Institutions. Some of his introductions to these books
might furnish the classic scenery of Poussin with figures; and though he
seems to have had as little native taste for painting and sculpture, and
even less than he had taste for poetry, he had a conception of nature;
and, with his usual acumen, comparing the principles of one art with
those of another, frequently scattered useful hints, or made pertinent
observations. For many of these he might probably be indebted to
Hortensius, with whom, though his rival in eloquence, he lived on terms
of familiarity, and who was a man of declared taste and one of the first
collectors of the time.
Pausanias, the Cappadocian, was certainly no critic, and his credulity
is at least equal to his curiosity; he is often little more than a
nomenclator, and the indiscriminate chronicler of legitimate tradition
and legendary trash; but the minute and scrupulous diligence with which
he examined what fell under his own eye, amply makes up for what he
may want of method or of judgment. His description of the pictures of
Polygnotus at Delphi, and of the Jupiter of Phidias at Olympia, are
perhaps superiour to all that might have been given by men of more
assuming powers, mines of information, and inestimable legacies to our
arts.
The Heroics of the elder, and the Eicones or Picture Galleries of the
elder and younger Philostratus, though perhaps not expressly written for
the artist, and rather to amuse than to instruct, cannot be sufficiently
consulted by the epic or dramatic artist. The Heroics furnish the
standard of form and habits for the Grecian and Troic warriours, from
Protesilaus to Paris and Euphorbus; and he who wishes to acquaint
himself with the limits the ancients prescribed to invention, and the
latitude they allowed to expression, will find no better guide than an
attentive survey of the subjects displayed in their galleries.
Such are the most prominent features of antient criticism, and those
which we wish the artist to be familiar with; the innumerable hints,
maxims, anecdotes, descriptions, scattered over Lucian, Ælian, Athenæus,
Achilles Tatius, Tatian, Pollux, and many more, may be consulted to
advantage by the man of taste and letters, and probably may be neglected
without much loss by the student.
Of modern writers on art, Vasari leads the van; theorist, artist,
critic, and biographer in one. The history of modern art owes no doubt
much to Vasari; he leads us from its cradle, to its maturity, with the
anxious diligence of a nurse, but he likewise has her derelictions; for
more loquacious than ample, and less discriminating styles than eager
to accumulate descriptions, he is at an early period exhausted by
the superlatives lavished on inferiour claims, and forced into frigid
rhapsodies and astrologic nonsense to do justice to the greater. He
swears by the divinity of M. Agnolo. He tells us himself that he copied
every figure of the Capella Sistina and the Stanze of Raffaello; yet
his memory was either so treacherous[1], or his rapidity in writing so
inconsiderate, that his account of both is a mere heap of errours and
unpardonable confusion; and one might almost fancy that he had never
entered the Vatican. Of Correggio he leaves us less informed than of
Apelles. Even Bottari, the learned editor of his work, his countryman
and advocate against the complaints of Agostino Carracci and Federigo
Zucchero, though ever ready to fight his battles, is at a loss to account
for his mistakes. He has been called the Herodotus of our art, and if the
main simplicity of his narrative, and the desire of heaping anecdote
on anecdote, entitle him in some degree to that appellation, we ought
not to forget, that the information of every day adds something to the
authenticity of the Greek historian, whilst every day furnishes matter to
question the credibility of the Tuscan.
What we find not in Vasari it is useless to search for amid the rubbish
of his contemporaries or followers, from Condivi to Ridolfi, and on to
Malvasia, whose criticism on the style of Lodovico Carracci and his
pupils in the cloisters of St. Michele in Bosco, near Bologna, amount to
little more than a sonorous rhapsody of ill applied or empty metaphors
and extravagant praise; till the appearance of Lanzi, who in his ‘Storia
Pittorica della Italia,’ has availed himself of all the information
existing in his time, has corrected most of those who wrote before
him, and though perhaps not possessed of great discriminative powers,
has accumulated more instructive anecdotes, rescued more deserving
names from oblivion, and opened a wider prospect of art than all his
predecessors.[2]
The French critics composed a complete system of rules. Du Fresnoy spent
his life in composing and revising general aphorisms in Latin classic
verse; some on granted, some on disputable, some on false principles.
Though Horace was his model, neither the Poet’s language nor method
have been imitated by him. From Du Fresnoy himself, we learn not
what is essential, what accidental, what superinduced, in style; from
his text none ever rose practically wiser than he sat down to study
it: if he be useful, he owes his usefulness to the penetration of his
English commentator; the notes of Reynolds, treasures of practical
observation, place him among those whom we may read with profit. What
can be learnt from precept, founded on prescriptive authority, more
than on the verdicts of nature, is displayed in the volumes of De Piles
and Felibien; a system, as it has been followed by the former students
of their academy, and sent out with the successful combatants for the
premium to their academic establishment at Rome, to have its efficiency
proved by the contemplation of Italian style and execution. The timorous
candidates for fame, knowing its rules to be the only road to success at
their return, whatever be their individual bent of character, implicitly
adopt them, and the consequence is, as may be supposed, that technical
equality, which borders on mediocrity. After an exulting and eager survey
of the wonders the place exhibits, they all undergo a similar course
of study. Six months are allotted to the Vatican, and in equal portions
divided between the Fierté of M. Agnolo, and the more correct graces of
Raffaello; the next six months are in equal intervals devoted to the
academic powers of Annibale Carracci, and the purity of the antique.
About the middle of the last century the German critics, established at
Rome, began to claim the exclusive privilege of teaching the art, and
to form a complete system of antique style. The verdicts of Mengs and
Winkelmann became the oracles of Antiquaries, dilettanti, and artists
from the Pyrenees to the utmost North of Europe, have been detailed, and
are not without their influence here. Winkelmann was the parasite of
the fragments that fell from the conversation or the tablets of Mengs,
a deep scholar, and better fitted to comment a classic than to give
lessons on art and style, he reasoned himself into frigid reveries and
Platonic dreams on beauty. As far as the taste or the instructions of
his tutor directed him, he is right, whenever they are, and between his
own learning and the tuition of the other, his history of art delivers
a specious system and a prodigious number of useful observations. He
has not, however, in his regulation of epochs, discriminated styles,
and masters, with the precision, attention, and acumen, which from
the advantages of his situation and habits might have been expected;
and disappoints us as often by meagreness, neglect, and confusion, as
he offends by laboured and inflated rhapsodies on the most celebrated
monuments of art. To him Germany owes the shackles of her artists, and
the narrow limits of their aim; from him they have learnt to substitute
the means for the end, and by a hopeless chace after what they call
beauty, to lose what alone can make beauty interesting, expression and
mind. The works of Mengs himself are no doubt full of the most useful
information, deep observation, and often consummate criticism. He has
traced and distinguished the principles of the moderns from those
of the ancients; and in his comparative view of the design, colour,
composition, and expression of Raffaello Correggio and Tiziano, with
luminous perspicuity and deep precision, pointed out the prerogative or
inferiority of each. As an artist he is an instance of what perseverance,
study, experience and encouragement can atchieve to supply the place of
genius.
Of English critics, whose writings preceded the present century, whether
we consider solidity of theory or practical usefulness, the last is
undoubtedly the first. To compare Reynolds with his predecessors would
equally disgrace our judgment and impeach our gratitude. His volumes can
never be consulted without profit, and should never be quitted by the
student’s hand, but to embody by exercise the precepts he gives and the
means he points out.
ERRATA.
Transcriber’s Note: The errata have been corrected.
Page 159. line 4. put a comma after “life,” instead of a semicolon.
160. line 9. put a comma after “genus.”
182. line 5. put a comma after “friend,” instead of a full point.
206. last line, for “alternately,” read “alternates.”
212. line 11. for “humorous,” read “numerous.”
214. line 12. dele the comma after “lower.”
224. line 3. put a comma after “one.”
FIRST LECTURE.
ANCIENT ART.
Ταυτα μεν ὀυν πλαστων και γραφεων και ποιητων παιδες ὀργασονται. ὁ δε
πασιν ἐπανθει τουτοις, ἡ χαρις, μαλλον δε ἁπασαι ἁμα, ὁποσαι χαριτες, και
ὁποσοι ἐρωτες περίχορευοντες, τις ἀν μιμησασθαι δυναιτο?
ΛΟΥΚΙΑΝΟΥ Σαμ. ἐικονες.
ARGUMENT.
Introduction. Greece the legitimate parent of the Art.—Summary
of the local and political causes. Conjectures on the mechanic
process of the Art. Period of preparation—Polygnotus—essential
style—Apollodorus—characteristic style. Period of establishment—Zeuxis,
Parrhasius, Timanthes. Period of refinement—Eupompus—Apelles, Aristides,
Euphranor.
FIRST LECTURE.
The difficulties of the task prescribed to me, if they do not
preponderate are at least equal to the honour of the situation. If, to
discourse on any topic with truth, precision, and clearness, before
a mixed or fortuitous audience, before men neither initiated in the
subject, nor rendered minutely attentive by expectation, be no easy task,
how much more arduous must it be to speak systematically on an art,
before a select assembly, composed of _Professors_ whose life has been
divided between theory and practice, of _Critics_ whose taste has been
refined by contemplation and comparison, and of _Students_, who bent on
the same pursuit, look for the best and always most compendious method of
mastering the principles, to arrive at its emoluments and honours. Your
lecturer is to instruct _them_ in the principles of ‘composition; to form
their taste for design and colouring; to strengthen their judgment; to
point out to them the beauties and imperfections of celebrated works of
art; and the particular excellencies and defects of great masters; and
finally, to lead them into the readiest and most efficacious paths of
study.’[3]—If, Gentlemen, these directions presuppose in the student a
sufficient stock of elementary knowledge, an expertness in the rudiments,
not mere wishes but a peremptory will of improvement, and judgment with
docility; how much more do they imply in the person selected to address
them—knowledge founded on theory, substantiated and matured by practice,
a mass of select and well digested materials, perspicuity of method and
command of words, imagination to place things in such views as they are
not commonly seen in, presence of mind, and that resolution, the result
of conscious vigour, which in daring to correct errours, cannot be easily
discountenanced.—As conditions like these would discourage abilities far
superior to mine, my hopes of approbation, moderate as they are, must in
a great measure depend on that indulgence which may grant to my will what
it would refuse to my powers.
Before I proceed to the history of style itself, it seems to be necessary
that we should agree about the terms which denote its object and
perpetually recur in treating of it; that my vocabulary of technic
expression should not clash with the dictionary of my audience: mine is
nearly that of your late president. I shall confine myself at present
to a few of the most important; the words nature, beauty, grace, taste,
copy, imitation, genius, talent. Thus, by _nature_ I understand the
general and permanent principles of visible objects, not disfigured by
accident, or distempered by disease, not modified by fashion or local
habits. Nature is a collective idea, and though its essence exist in
each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a
single object. On _beauty_ I do not mean to perplex you or myself with
abstract ideas, and the romantic reveries of platonic philosophy, or to
inquire whether it be the result of a simple or complex principle. As a
local idea, beauty is a despotic princess, and subject to the anarchies
of despotism, enthroned to-day, dethroned to-morrow. The beauty we
acknowledge is that harmonious whole of the human frame, that unison
of parts to one end, which enchants us; the result of the standard
set by the great masters of our art, the ancients, and confirmed by
the submissive verdict of modern imitation. By _grace_ I mean that
artless balance of motion and repose sprung from character, founded on
propriety, which neither falls short of the demands nor overleaps the
modesty of nature. Applied to execution, it means that dextrous power
which hides the means by which it was attained, the difficulties it has
conquered. When we say _taste_, we mean not crudely the knowledge of
what is right in art: taste estimates the degrees of excellence, and by
comparison proceeds from justness to refinement. Our language, or rather
those who use it, generally confound, when speaking of the art, _copy_
with _imitation_, though essentially different in operation and meaning.
Precision of eye and obedience of hand are the requisites of the former,
without the least pretence to choice, what to select, what to reject;
whilst choice directed by judgment or taste constitutes the essence of
imitation, and alone can raise the most dextrous copyist to the noble
rank of an artist. The imitation of the ancients was, _essential_,
_characteristic_, _ideal_. The first cleared nature of accident, defect,
excrescence; the second found the stamen which connects character with
the central form; the third raised the whole and the parts to the highest
degree of unison. Of _genius_ I shall speak with reserve, for no word has
been more indiscriminately confounded; by genius I mean that power which
enlarges the circle of human knowledge, which discovers new materials of
nature, or combines the known with novelty, whilst _talent_ arranges,
cultivates, polishes the discoveries of genius.
Guided by these preliminaries we now approach that happy coast, where,
from an arbitrary hieroglyph, the palliative of ignorance, from a tool
of despotism, or a ponderous monument of eternal sleep, art emerged into
life, motion and liberty; where situation, climate, national character,
religion, manners and government conspired to raise it on that permanent
basis, which after the ruins of the fabric itself, still subsists and
bids defiance to the ravages of time; as uniform in the principle as
various in its applications, the art of the Greeks possessed in itself
and propagated, like its chief object Man, the germs of immortality.
I shall not detail here the reasons and the coincidence of fortunate
circumstances which raised the Greeks to be the arbiters of form.[4] The
standard they erected, the canon they framed, fell not from Heaven: but
as they fancied themselves of divine origin, and _Religion_ was the first
mover of their art, it followed that they should endeavour to invest
their authors with the most perfect form; and as Man possesses that
exclusively, they were led to a complete and intellectual study of his
elements and constitution; this, with their _climate_, which allowed that
form to grow, and to shew itself to the greatest advantage; with their
_civil_ and _political_ institutions, which established and encouraged
exercises and manners best calculated to develop its powers; and above
all that simplicity of their end, that uniformity of pursuit which in
all its derivations retraced the great principle from which it sprang,
and like a central stamen drew it out into one immense connected web of
congenial imitation; these, I say, are the reasons why the Greeks carried
the art to a height which no subsequent time or race has been able to
rival or even to approach.
Great as these advantages were, it is not to be supposed that Nature
deviated from her gradual progress in the development of human faculties,
in favour of the Greeks. Greek Art had her infancy, but the Graces rocked
the cradle, and Love taught her to speak. If ever legend deserved our
belief, the amorous tale of the Corinthian maid, who traced the shade
of her departing lover by the secret lamp, appeals to our sympathy, to
grant it; and leads us at the same time to some observations on the first
mechanical essays of Painting, and that _linear method_ which, though
passed nearly unnoticed by _Winkelmann_, seems to have continued as the
basis of execution, even when the instrument for which it was chiefly
adapted, had long been laid aside.
The etymology of the word used by the Greeks to express _Painting_ being
the same with that which they employ for _Writing_, makes the similarity
of tool, materials, method, almost certain. The tool was a style or pen
of wood or metal; the materials a board, or a levigated plane of wood,
metal, stone, or some prepared compound; the method, letters or lines.
The first essays of the art were _Skiagrams_, simple outlines of a shade,
similar to those which have been introduced to vulgar use by the students
and parasites of Physiognomy, under the name of Silhouettes; without any
other addition of character or feature but what the profile of the object
thus delineated, could afford.
The next step of the art was the _Monogram_, outlines of figures without
light or shade, but with some addition of the parts within the outline,
and from that to the _Monochrom_, or paintings of a single colour on
a plane or tablet, primed with white, and then covered with what they
called punic wax, first amalgamated with a tough resinous pigment,
generally of a red, sometimes dark brown, or black colour. _In_, or
rather _through_ this thin inky ground, the outlines were traced with a
firm but pliant style, which they called _Cestrum_; if the traced line
happened to be incorrect or wrong, it was gently effaced with the finger
or with a sponge, and easily replaced by a fresh one. When the whole
design was settled, and no farther alteration intended, it was suffered
to dry, was covered, to make it permanent, with a brown encaustic
varnish, the lights were worked over again, and rendered more brilliant
with a point still more delicate, according to the gradual advance from
mere outlines to some indications, and at last to masses of light and
shade, and from those to the superinduction of different colours, or
the invention of the _Polychrom_, which by the addition of the _pencil_
to the style, raised the mezzotinto or stained drawing to a legitimate
picture, and at length produced that vaunted _harmony_, the magic scale
of Grecian colour.[5]
If this conjecture, for it is not more, on the process of linear
painting, formed on the evidence and comparison of passages always
unconnected, and frequently contradictory, be founded in fact, the
rapturous astonishment at the supposed momentaneous production of the
Herculanean dancers and the figures on the earthen vases of the ancients,
will cease; or rather, we shall no longer suffer ourselves to be deluded
by palpable impossibility of execution: on a ground of levigated lime or
on potters ware, no velocity or certainty attainable by human hands can
conduct a full pencil with that degree of evenness equal from beginning
to end with which we see those figures executed, or if it could, would
ever be able to fix the line on the glassy surface without its flowing:
to make the appearances we see, possible, we must have recourse to the
linear process that has been described, and transfer our admiration,
to the perseverance, the correctness of principle, the elegance of
taste that conducted the artist’s hand, without presuming to arm it
with contradictory powers: the figures he drew and we admire, are not
the magic produce of a winged pencil, they are the result of gradual
improvement, exquisitely finished _monochroms_.
How long the pencil continued only to assist, when it began to engross
and when it at last entirely supplanted the cestrum, cannot in the
perplexity of accidental report be ascertained. Apollodorus in the 93d
Olymp. and Zeuxis in the 94th, are said to have used it with freedom
and with power. The battle of the Lapithæ and the Centaurs, which
according to Pausanias, Parrhasius painted on the shield of the Minerva
of Phidias, to be chased by Mys, could be nothing but a monochrom, and
was probably designed with the cestrum, as an instrument of greater
accuracy.[6] Apelles and Protogenes, nearly a century afterwards, drew
their contested lines with the pencil; and that alone, as delicacy
and evanescent subtlety were the characteristic of those lines, may
give an idea of their mechanic excellence. And yet in their time the
_diagraphic_ process[7], which is the very same with the _linear_ one
we have described, made a part of liberal education. And Pausias of
Sicyon, the contemporary of Apelles, and perhaps the greatest master of
composition amongst the ancients, when employed to repair the decayed
pictures of Polygnotus at Thespiæ, was adjudged by general opinion to
have egregiously failed in the attempt, because he had substituted the
pencil to the cestrum, and entered a contest of superiority with weapons
not his own.
Here it might seem in its place to say something on the Encaustic method
used by the ancients; were it not a subject by ambiguity of expression
and conjectural dispute so involved in obscurity that a true account of
its process must be despaired of: the most probable idea we can form of
it is, that it bore some resemblance to our oil-painting, and that the
name was adopted to denote the use of materials, inflammable or prepared
by fire, the supposed durability of which, whether applied hot or cold,
authorised the terms ἐνεκαυσε and _inussit_.
The first great name of that epoch of the preparatory period when facts
appear to overbalance conjecture, is that of Polygnotus of Thasos, who
painted the poecile at Athens, and the lesche or public hall at Delphi.
Of these works, but chiefly of the two large pictures at Delphi, which
represented scenes subsequent to the eversion of Troy, and Ulysses
consulting the spirit of Tiresias in Hades, Pausanias[8] gives a minute
and circumstantial detail; by which we are led to surmise, that what is
now called composition was totally wanting in them as a whole: for he
begins his description at one end of the picture, and finishes it at
the opposite extremity, a senseless method if we suppose that a central
group, or a principal figure to which the rest were in a certain degree
subordinate, attracted the eye; it appears as plain that they had no
perspective, the series of figures on the second or middle ground being
described as placed above those on the fore-ground, and the figures in
the distance above the whole: the honest method too which the painter
chose of annexing to many of his figures, their names in writing, savours
much of the infancy of painting.—We should however be cautious to impute
solely to ignorance or imbecility, what might rest on the firm base of
permanent principle. The genius of Polygnotus was more than that of any
other artist before or after, Phidias perhaps alone excepted, a public
genius, his works monumental works, and these very pictures the votive
offerings of the Gnidians. The art at that summit, when exerting its
powers to record the feats, consecrate the acts, perpetuate the rites,
propagate the religion, or to disseminate the peculiar doctrines of a
nation, heedless of the rules prescribed to inferior excellence and
humbler pursuits, returns to its elements, leaps strict possibility,
combines remote causes with present effects, connects local distance and
unites separate moments.—Simplicity, parallelism, apposition, take place
of variety, contrast and composition.—Such was the Lesche painted by
Polygnotus, and if we consider the variety of powers that distinguished
many of the parts, we must incline to ascribe the primitive arrangement
of the whole rather to the artist’s choice and lofty simplicity, than
want of comprehension: nature had endowed him with that rectitude of
taste which in the individuum discovers the stamen of the genus, hence
his style of design was essential with glimpses of _grandeur_[9] and
ideal beauty. Polygnotus, says Aristotle, _improves_ the model. His
invention reached the conception of undescribed being, in the dæmon
Eurynomus; filled the chasm of description in Theseus and Pirithous, in
Ariadne and Phædra; and improved its terrours in the spectre of Tityus;
whilst colour to assist it, became in his hand an organ of expression;
such was the prophetic glow which still _crimsoned_ the cheeks of his
Cassandra in the time of Lucian.[10] The improvements in painting which
Pliny ascribes to him, of having dressed the heads of his females in
variegated veils and _bandeaus_, and robed them in lucid drapery, of
having gently opened the lips, given a glimpse of the teeth, and lessened
the former monotony of face, such improvements I say were surely the
most trifling part of a power to which the age of Apelles and that of
Quintilian paid equal homage: nor can it add much to our esteem for him,
to be told by Pliny that there existed, in the portico of Pompey, a
picture of his with the figure of a warrior in an attitude so ambiguous
as to make it a question whether he were ascending or descending. Such
a figure could only be the offspring of mental or technic imbecility,
even if it resembled the celebrated one of a Diomede carrying off the
palladium with one and holding a sword in the other hand, on the intaglio
inscribed, I think, with the name of Dioscorides.
With this simplicity of manner and materials the art seems to have
proceeded from Polygnotus, Aglaophon, Phidias, Panænus, Colotes, and
Evenor, the father of Parrhasius, during a period of more or less
disputed olympiads, to the appearance of Apollodorus the Athenian, who
applied the essential principles of Polygnotus to the delineation of
the species, by investigating the leading forms that discriminate the
various classes of human qualities and passions. The acuteness of his
taste led him to discover that as all men were connected by one general
form, so they were separated each by some predominant power, which fixed
character and bound them to a class: that in proportion as this specific
power partook of individual peculiarities, the farther it was removed
from a share in that harmonious system which constitutes nature, and
consists in a due balance of all its parts; thence he drew his line of
imitation, and personified the central form of the class, to which his
object belonged; and to which the rest of its qualities administered
without being absorbed: agility was not suffered to destroy firmness,
solidity or weight; nor strength and weight agility; elegance did not
degenerate to effeminacy, or grandeur swell to hugeness; such were his
principles of style: his expression extended them to the mind, if we may
judge from the two subjects mentioned by Pliny, in which he seems to
have personified the characters of devotion and impiety; _that_, in the
adoring figure of a priest, perhaps of Chryses, expanding his gratitude
at the shrine of the God whose arrows avenged his wrongs and restored
his daughter: and _this_, in the figure of Ajax wrecked, and from the
sea-swept rock hurling defiance unto the murky sky. As neither of these
subjects can present themselves to a painters mind without a contrast of
the most awful and terrific tones of colour, magic of light and shade,
and unlimited command over the tools of art, we may with Pliny and with
Plutarch consider Apollodorus as the first assertor of the pencil’s
honours, as the first colourist of his age, and the man who opened the
gates of art which the Heracleot Zeuxis entered.[11]
From the essential style of Polygnotus and the specific discrimination
of Apollodorus, Zeuxis, by comparison of what belonged to the genus and
what to the class, framed at last that ideal form, which in his opinion,
constituted the supreme degree of human beauty, or in other words,
embodied possibility, by uniting the various but homogeneous powers
scattered among many, in one object, to one end. Such a system, if it
originated in genius, was the considerate result of taste refined by the
unremitting perseverance with which he observed, consulted, compared,
selected the congenial but scattered forms of nature. Our ideas are
the offspring of our senses, we are not more able create the form of a
being, we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are
able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the
most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence, and
he alone can comprehend what one degree of beauty wants to become equal
to another, and at last superlative. He who thinks the pretty handsome,
will think the handsome a beauty, and fancy he has met an ideal form in a
merely handsome one, whilst he who has compared beauty with beauty, will
at last improve form upon form to a perfect image; this was the method of
Zeuxis, and this he learnt from Homer, whose mode of ideal composition,
according to Quintilian, he considered as his model. Each individual of
Homer forms a class, expresses and is circumscribed by one quality of
heroic power; Achilles alone unites their various but congenial energies.
The grace of Nireus, the dignity of Agamemnon, the impetuosity of Hector,
the magnitude, the steady prowess of the great, the velocity of the
lesser Ajax, the perseverance of Ulysses, the intrepidity of Diomede,
are emanations of energy that reunite in one splendid centre fixed in
Achilles. This standard of the unison of homogeneous powers exhibited in
_successive action_ by the poet, the painter, invigorated no doubt by
the contemplation of the works of Phidias, transferred to his own art
and substantiated by _form_, when he selected the congenial beauties
of Croton to compose a perfect female. Like Phidias too, he appears to
have been less pathetic than sublime, and even in his female forms more
ample and august than elegant or captivating: his principle was epic,
and this Aristotle either considered not or did not comprehend, when he
refuses him the expression of character in action and feature: Jupiter
on his throne encircled by the celestial synod, and Helen, the arbitress
of Troy, contained probably the principal elements of his style; but he
could trace the mother’s agitation in Alcmena, and in Penelope the pangs
of wedded love.
On those powers of his invention which Lucian relates in the memoir
inscribed with the name of Zeuxis, I shall reserve my observations for a
fitter moment. Of his colour we know little, but it is not unreasonable
to suppose that it emulated the beauties and the grandeur of his design;
and that he extended light and shade to masses, may be implied from his
peculiar method of painting monochroms on a black ground, adding the
lights in white.[12]
The correctness of Parrhasius succeeded to the genius of Zeuxis. He
circumscribed his ample style, and by subtle examination of outline
established that standard of divine and heroic form which raised him
to the authority of a legislator from whose decisions there was no
appeal. He gave to the divine and heroic character in painting, what
Polycletus had given to the human in sculpture, by his Doryphorus, a
canon of proportion. Phidias had discovered in the nod of the Homeric
Jupiter the characteristic of majesty, _inclination of the head_: this
hinted to him a higher elevation of the neck behind, a bolder protrusion
of the front, and the increased perpendicular of the profile. To this
conception Parrhasius fixed a maximum; that point from which descends
the ultimate line of celestial beauty, the angle within which moves what
is inferior, beyond which what is portentous. From the head conclude
to the proportions of the neck, the limbs, the extremities; from the
father to the race of gods; all, the sons of one, Zeus; derived from
one source of tradition, Homer; formed by one artist, Phidias: on him
measured and decided by Parrhasius. In the simplicity of this principle,
adhered to by the succeeding periods, lies the uninterrupted progress
and the unattainable superiority of Grecian art. With this prerogative,
which evidently implies a profound as well as general knowledge of the
parts, how are we to reconcile the criticism passed on the intermediate
parts of his forms as inferior to their outline? or how could Winkelmann,
in contradiction with his own principles, explain it, by a want of
anatomic knowledge[13]? how is it possible to suppose that he who
decided his outline with such intelligence that it appeared ambient, and
pronounced the parts that escaped the eye, should have been uninformed
of its contents? let us rather suppose that the defect ascribed to the
intermediate forms of his bodies, if such a fault there was, consisted
in an affectation of smoothness bordering on insipidity, in something
effeminately voluptuous, which absorbed their character and the idea
of elastic vigour; and this Euphranor seems to have hinted at, when in
comparing his own Theseus with that of Parrhasius, he pronounced the
Ionian’s to have fed on roses, his own on flesh[14]: emasculate softness
was not in his opinion, the proper companion of the contour, or flowery
freshness of colour an adequate substitute for the sterner tints of
heroic form.
None of the ancients seem to have united or wished to combine as man
and artist, more qualities seemingly incompatible than Parrhasius.—The
volubility and ostentatious insolence of an Asiatic with Athenian
simplicity and urbanity of manners; punctilious correctness with
blandishments of handling and luxurious colour, and with sublime and
pathetic conception, a fancy libidinously sportive[15]. If he was not the
inventor, he surely was the greatest master of allegory, supposing that
he really embodied by signs universally comprehended that image of the
Athenian ΔΗΜΟΣ or people, which was to combine and to express at once its
contradictory qualities. Perhaps he traced the jarring branches to their
source, the aboriginal moral principle of the Athenian character, which
he made intuitive. This supposition alone can shed a dawn of possibility
on what else appears impossible. We know that the personification of the
Athenian Δημος was an object of sculpture, and that its images by Lyson
and Leochares[16] were publicly set up; but there is no clue to decide
whether they preceded or followed the conceit of Parrhasius. It was
repeated by Aristolaus, the son of Pausias.
The decided forms of Parrhasius, Timanthes the Cythnian, his competitor
for fame, attempted to inspire with mind and to animate with passions. No
picture of antiquity is more celebrated than his immolation of Iphigenia
in Aulis, painted, as Quintilian informs us, in contest with Colotes of
Teos, a painter and sculptor from the school of Phidias; crowned with
victory at its rival exhibition, and since, the theme of unlimited praise
from the orators and historians of antiquity, though the solidity or
justice of their praise relatively to our art, has been questioned by
modern criticism. On this subject, which not only contains the gradations
of affection from the most remote to the closest link of humanity, but
appears to me to offer the fairest specimen of the limits which the
theory of the ancients had prescribed to the expression of pathos, I
think it my duty the more circumstantially to expatiate, as the censure
passed on the method of Timanthes, has been sanctioned by the highest
authority in matters of art, that of your late President, in his eighth
discourse at the delivery of the academic prize for the best picture
painted from this very subject.
How did Timanthes treat it? Iphigenia, the victim ordained by the oracle,
to be offered for the success of the Greek expedition against Troy, was
represented standing ready for immolation at the altar, the priest,
the instruments of death at her side; and around her, an assembly of
the most important agents or witnesses of the terrible solemnity, from
Ulysses, who had disengaged her from the embraces of her mother at
Mycenæ, to her nearest male relations, her uncle Menelaus, and her own
father, Agamemnon. Timanthes, say Pliny and Quintilian with surprising
similarity of phrase, when, in gradation he had consumed every image of
grief within the reach of art, from the unhappy priest, to the deeper
grief of Ulysses, and from that to the pangs of kindred sympathy in
Menelaus, unable to express _with dignity_ the father’s woe, threw a
veil, or if you will, a mantle over his face.——This mantle, the pivot of
objection, indiscriminately borrowed, as might easily be supposed, by
all the concurrents for the prize, gave rise to the following series of
criticisms:
‘Before I conclude, I cannot avoid making one observation
on the pictures now before us. I have observed, that every
candidate has copied the celebrated invention of Timanthes in
hiding the face of Agamemnon in his mantle; indeed such lavish
encomiums have been bestowed on this thought, and that too by
men of the highest character in critical knowledge,—Cicero,
Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, and Pliny,—and have been since
re-echoed by almost every modern that has written on the Arts,
that your adopting it can neither be wondered at, nor blamed.
It appears now to be so much connected with the subject, that
the spectator would perhaps be disappointed in not finding
united in the picture what he always united in his mind, and
considered as indispensably belonging to the subject. But it
may be observed, that those who praise this circumstance were
not painters. They use it as an illustration only of their
own art; it served their purpose, and it was certainly not
their business to enter into the objections that lie against
it in another Art. I fear _we_ have but very scanty means of
exciting those powers over the imagination, which make so very
considerable and refined a part of poetry. It is a doubt with
me, whether we should even make the attempt. The chief, if not
the only occasion which the painter has for this artifice, is,
when the subject is improper to be more fully represented,
either for the sake of decency, or to avoid what would be
disagreeable to be seen; and this is not to raise or increase
the passions, which is the reason that is given for this
practice, but on the contrary to diminish their effect.
‘Mr. Falconet has observed, in a note on this passage in his
translation of Pliny, that the circumstance of covering the
face of Agamemnon was probably not in consequence of any fine
imagination of the painter,—which he considers as a discovery
of the critics,—but merely copied from the description of the
sacrifice, as it is found in Euripides.
‘The words from which the picture is supposed to be taken,
are these: _Agamemnon saw Iphigenia advance towards the fatal
altar; he groaned, he turned aside his head, he shed tears, and
covered his face with his robe_.
‘Falconet does not at all acquiesce in the praise that
is bestowed on Timanthes; not only because it is not his
invention, but because he thinks meanly of this trick of
concealing, except in instances of blood, where the objects
would be too horrible to be seen; but, says he, “in an
afflicted Father, in a King, in Agamemnon, you, who are a
painter, conceal from me the most interesting circumstance, and
then put me off with sophistry and a veil. You are (he adds) a
feeble painter, without resources: you do not know even those
of your Art. I care not what veil it is, whether closed hands,
arms raised, or any other action that conceals from me the
countenance of the Hero. You think of veiling Agamemnon; you
have unveiled your own ignorance.”