method of leaving the expression of grief to the imagination,
to be, as it was thought to be, the invention of the painter,
and that it deserves all the praise that has been given
it, still it is a trick that will serve but once; whoever
does it a second time, will not only want novelty, but be
justly suspected of using artifice to evade difficulties. If
difficulties overcome make a great part of the merit of Art,
difficulties evaded can deserve but little commendation.’
To this string of animadversions, I subjoin with diffidence the following
observations:
The subject of Timanthes was the immolation of Iphigenia; Iphigenia was
the principal figure, and her form, her resignation, or her anguish the
painter’s principal task; the figure of Agamemnon, however, important, is
merely accessory, and no more necessary to make the subject a completely
tragic one, than that of Clytemnestra the mother, no more than that
of Priam, to impress us with sympathy at the death of Polyxena. It is
therefore a misnomer of the French critic, to call Agamemnon ‘the hero’
of the subject.
Neither the French nor the English critic appear to me to have
comprehended the real motive of Timanthes, as contained in the words
‘_decere_, _pro dignitate_, and _digne_,’ in the passages of Tully,
Quintilian, and Pliny[17]; they ascribe to impotence what was the
forbearance of judgment; Timanthes felt like a father: he did not
hide the face of Agamemnon, because it was beyond the power of his
art, not because it was beyond the _possibility_, but because it was
beyond the _dignity_ of expression, because the inspiring feature of
paternal affection at that moment, and the action which of necessity
must have accompanied it, would either have destroyed the grandeur of
the character and the solemnity of the scene, or subjected the painter
with the majority of his judges to the imputation of insensibility. He
must either have represented him in tears, or convulsed at the flash
of the raised dagger, forgetting the chief in the father, or shown him
absorbed by despair, and in that state of stupefaction, which levels all
features and deadens expression; he might indeed have chosen a fourth
mode, he might have exhibited him fainting and palsied in the arms of his
attendants, and by this confusion of male and female character, merited
the applause of every theatre at Paris. But Timanthes had too true a
sense of nature to expose a father’s feelings or to tear a passion to
rags; nor had the Greeks yet learnt of Rome to steel the face. If he
made Agamemnon bear his calamity as a man, he made him also feel it as
a man. It became the leader of Greece to sanction the ceremony with his
presence, it did not become the father to see his daughter beneath the
dagger’s point: the same nature that threw a real mantle over the face
of Timoleon, when he assisted at the punishment of his brother, taught
Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither
height nor depth, _propriety_ of expression was his aim.
The critic grants that the expedient of Timanthes may be allowed in
‘instances of blood,’ the supported aspect of which would change a scene
of commiseration and terror into one of abomination and horror, which
ought for ever to be excluded from the province of art, of poetry as
well as painting: and would not the face of Agamemnon, uncovered, have
had this effect? was not the scene he must have witnessed a scene of
blood? and whose blood was to be shed? that of his own daughter—and what
daughter? young, beautiful, helpless, innocent, resigned—the very idea
of resignation in such a victim, must either have acted irresistibly to
procure her relief, or thrown a veil over a father’s face. A man who is
determined to sport wit at the expence of heart alone could call such
an expedient ridiculous—‘as ridiculous,’ Mr. Falconet continues, ‘as
a poet would be, who in a pathetic situation, instead of satisfying
my expectation, to rid himself of the business, should say, that the
sentiments of his hero are so far above whatever can be said on the
occasion, that he shall say nothing.’ And has not Homer, though he does
not tell us this, acted upon a similar principle? has he not, when
Ulysses addresses Ajax in Hades, in the most pathetic and conciliatory
manner, instead of furnishing him with an answer, made him remain in
indignant silence during the address, then turn his step and stalk away?
has not the universal voice of genuine criticism with Longinus told us,
and if it had not, would not Nature’s own voice tell us, that that
silence was characteristic, that it precluded, included, and soaring
above all answer, consigned Ulysses for ever to a sense of inferiority?
Nor is it necessary to render such criticism contemptible to mention the
silence of Dido in Virgil, or the Niobe of Æschylus, who was introduced
veiled, and continued mute during her presence on the stage.
But in hiding Agamemnon’s face Timanthes loses the honour of invention,
as he is merely the imitator of Euripides, who did it before him[18]? I
am not prepared with chronologic proofs to decide whether Euripides or
Timanthes, who were contemporaries, about the period of the Peloponnesian
war, fell first on this expedient; though the silence of Pliny and
Quintilian on that head, seems to be in favour of the painter, neither
of whom could be ignorant of the celebrated drama of Euripides, and
would not willingly have suffered the honour of this master-stroke of
an art they were so much better acquainted with than painting, to be
transferred to another from its real author, had the poet’s claim been
prior: nor shall I urge that the picture of Timanthes was crowned with
victory by those who were in daily habits of assisting at the dramas
of Euripides, without having their verdict impeached by Colotes or his
friends, who would not have failed to avail themselves of so flagrant
a proof of inferiority as the want of invention, in the work of his
rival:—I shall only ask, what is invention? if it be the combination of
the most important moment of a fact with the most varied effects of the
reigning passion on the characters introduced—the invention of Timanthes
consisted in shewing, by the gradation of that passion in the faces of
the assistant mourners, the _reason why that of the principal_ one, _was
hid_. This he performed, and this the poet, whether prior or subsequent,
did not and could not do, but left it with a silent appeal to our own
mind and fancy.
In presuming to differ on the propriety of this mode of expression in
the picture of Timanthes from the respectable authority I have quoted, I
am far from a wish to invalidate the equally pertinent and acute remarks
made on the danger of its imitation, though I am decidedly of opinion
that it is strictly within the limits of our art. If it be a ‘trick,’ it
is certainly one that ‘has served more than once.’ We find it adopted
to express the grief of a beautiful female figure on a bassorelievo
formerly in the palace Valle at Rome, and preserved in the Admiranda
of S. Bartoli; it is used, though with his own originality, by Michael
Angelo in the figure of Abijam, to mark unutterable woe; Raphael, to shew
that he thought it the best possible mode of expressing remorse and the
deepest sense of repentance, borrowed it in the expulsion from Paradise,
without any alteration, from Masaccio; and like him, turned Adam out
with both his hands before his face. And how has he represented Moses at
the burning bush, to express the astonished awe of human in the visible
presence of divine nature? by a double repetition of the same expedient;
once in the ceiling of a Stanza, and again in the loggia of the Vatican,
with both his hands before his face, or rather with his face immersed in
his hands. As we cannot suspect in the master of expression the unworthy
motive of making use of this mode merely to avoid a difficulty, or to
denote the insupportable splendour of the vision, which was so far from
being the case, that, according to the sacred record, Moses stept out of
his way to examine the ineffectual blaze: we must conclude that nature
herself dictated to him this method as superior to all he could express
by features; and that he recognized the same dictate in Masaccio, who
can no more be supposed to have been acquainted with the precedent of
Timanthes, than Shakspeare with that of Euripides, when he made Macduff
draw his hat over his face.
Masaccio and Raphael proceeded on the principle, Gherard Lairesse copied
only the image of Timanthes, and has perhaps incurred by it the charge
of what Longinus calls _parenthyrsos_, in the ill-timed application of
supreme pathos, to an inadequate call. Agamemnon is introduced covering
his face with his mantle, at the death of Polyxena, the captive daughter
of Priam, sacrificed to the manes of Achilles, her betrothed lover,
treacherously slain in the midst of the nuptial ceremony, by her brother
Paris. The death of Polyxena, whose charms had been productive of the
greatest disaster that could befal the Grecian army, could not perhaps
provoke in its leader emotions similar to those which he felt at that of
his own daughter: it must however be owned that the figure of the chief
is equally dignified and pathetic; and that, by the introduction of the
spectre of Achilles at the immolation of the damsel to his manes, the
artist’s fancy has in some degree atoned for the want of discrimination
in the professor.
Such were the artists, who according to the most corresponding data
formed the style of that second period, which fixed the end and
established the limits of art, on whose firm basis arose the luxuriant
fabric of the third or the period of refinement, which added grace and
polish to the forms it could not surpass; amenity or truth to the tones
it could not invigourate; magic and imperceptible transition to the
abrupt division of masses; gave depth and roundness to composition;
at the breast of nature herself caught the passions as they rose, and
familiarized expression: The period of Apelles, Protogenes, Aristides,
Euphranor, Pausias, the pupils of Pamphilus and his master Eupompus,
whose authority obtained what had not been granted to his great
predecessor and countryman Polycletus, the new establishment of the
school of Sicyon.[19]
The leading principle of Eupompus may be traced in the advice which
he gave to Lysippus, (as preserved by Pliny,) whom, when consulted on
a standard of imitation, he directed to the contemplation of human
variety in the multitude of the characters that were passing by, with
the axiom, ‘that nature herself was to be imitated, not an artist.’
Excellence, said Eupompus, is thy aim, such excellence as that of Phidias
and Polycletus; but it is not obtained by the servile imitation of
works, however perfect, without mounting to the principle which raised
them to that height; that principle apply to thy purpose, there fix thy
aim. He who, with the same freedom of access to nature as another man,
contents himself to approach her only through his medium, has resigned
his birth-right and originality together; his master’s manner will be
his style. If Phidias and Polycletus have discovered the substance and
established the permanent principle of the human frame, they have not
exhausted the variety of human appearances and human character; if they
have abstracted the forms of majesty and those of beauty, nature compared
with their works will point out a grace that has been left for thee; if
they have pre-occupied man as he _is_, be thine to give him that air with
which he actually _appears_.[20]
Such was the advice of Eupompus: less lofty, less ambitious than what
the departed epoch of genius would have dictated, but better suited to
the times, and better to his pupil’s mind. When the spirit of liberty
forsook the public, grandeur had left the private mind of Greece: subdued
by Philip, the gods of Athens and Olympia had migrated to Pella, and
Alexander was become the representative of Jupiter; still those who had
lost the substance fondled the shadow of liberty; rhetoric mimicked the
thunders of oratory, sophistry and metaphysic debate that philosophy,
which had guided life, and the grand taste that had dictated to art the
monumental style, invested gods with human form and raised individuals to
heroes, began to give way to refinements in appreciating the degrees of
elegance or of resemblance in imitation: the advice of Eupompus however,
far from implying the abolition of the old system, recalled his pupil
to the examen of the great principle on which it had established its
excellence, and to the resources which its inexhaustible variety offered
for new combinations.
That Lysippus considered it in that light, his devotion to the Doryphorus
of Polycletus, known even to Tully, sufficiently proved. That figure
which comprised the pure proportions of juvenile vigour, furnished
the readiest application for those additional refinements of variety,
character, and fleshy charms, that made the base of his invention: its
symmetry directing his researches amid the insidious play of accidental
charms, and the claims of inherent grace, never suffered imitation to
deviate into incorrectness; whilst its squareness and elemental beauty
melted in more familiar forms on the eye, and from an object of cold
admiration became the glowing one of sympathy. Such was probably the
method formed by Lysippus on the advice of Eupompus, more perplexed than
explained by the superficial extract and the rapid phrase of Pliny.
From the statuary’s we may form our idea of the painter’s method. The
doctrine of Eupompus was adopted by Pamphilus the Amphipolitan, the most
scientific artist of his time, and by him communicated to Apelles of Cos,
or as Lucian will have it, of Ephesus[21], his pupil; in whom, if we
believe tradition, nature exhibited, _once_, a specimen what her union
with education and circumstances could produce.
The name of Apelles in Pliny is the synonime of unrivalled and
unattainable excellence, but the enumeration of his works points out the
modification which we ought to apply to that superiority; it neither
comprises exclusive sublimity of invention, the most acute discrimination
of character, the widest sphere of comprehension, the most judicious and
best balanced composition, nor the deepest pathos of expression: his
great prerogative consisted more in the unison than in the extent of his
powers; he knew better what he could do, what ought to be done, at what
point he could arrive, and what lay beyond his reach, than any other
artist. Grace of conception and refinement of taste were his elements,
and went hand in hand with grace of execution and taste in finish,
powerful and seldom possessed singly, irresistible when united: that he
built both on the firm basis of the former system, not on its subversion,
his well-known contest of lines with Protogenes, not a legendary tale,
but a well-attested fact, irrefragably proves: what those lines were,
drawn with nearly miraculous subtlety in different colours, one upon the
other or rather within each other, it would be equally unavailing and
useless to inquire; but the corollaries we may deduce from the contest,
are obviously these, that the schools of Greece recognized all one
elemental principle: that acuteness and fidelity of eye and obedience
of hand form precision; precision, proportion; proportion, beauty:
that it is the ‘little more or less,’ imperceptible to vulgar eyes,
which constitutes grace and establishes the superiority of one artist
over another: that the knowledge of the degrees of things, or taste,
presupposes a perfect knowledge of the things themselves: that colour,
grace, and taste are ornaments not substitutes of form, expression and
character, and when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid
faults.
Such were the principles on which Apelles formed his Venus, or rather
the personification of Female Grace, the wonder of art, the despair
of artists; whose outline baffled every attempt at emendation, whilst
imitation shrunk from the purity, the force, the brilliancy, the
evanescent gradations of her tints.[22]
The refinements of the art were by Aristides of Thebes applied to the
mind. The passions which tradition had organized for Timanthes, Aristides
caught as they rose from the breast or escaped from the lips of Nature
herself; his volume was man, his scene society: he drew the subtle
discriminations of mind in every stage of life, the whispers, the simple
cry of passion and its most complex accents. Such, as history informs
us, was the suppliant whose voice you seemed to hear, such his sick
man’s half-extinguished eye and labouring breast, such Byblis expiring
in the pangs of love, and above all the half-slain mother shuddering
lest the eager babe should suck the blood from her palsied nipple. This
picture was probably at Thebes, when Alexander sacked that town; what his
feelings were when he saw it, we may guess from his sending it to Pella.
Its expression, poised between the anguish of maternal affection and
the pangs of death, gives to commiseration an image, which neither the
infant piteously caressing his slain mother in the group of Epigonus[23],
nor the absorbed feature of the Niobe, nor the struggle of the Laocoon
excite. Timanthes had marked the limits that discriminate terrour from
the excess of horrour; Aristides drew the line that separates it from
disgust. His subject is one of those that touch the ambiguous line of a
squeamish sense.—Taste and smell, as sources of tragic emotion, and in
consequence of their power, commanding gesture, seem scarcely admissible
in art or on the theatre, because their extremes are nearer allied to
disgust, and loathsome or risible ideas, than to terrour. The prophetic
trance of Cassandra, who scents the prepared murder of Agamemnon at the
threshold of the ominous hall; the desperate moan of Macbeth’s queen on
seeing the visionary spot still uneffaced infect her hand—are images
snatched from the lap of terrour—but soon would cease to be so, were
the artist or the actress to inforce the dreadful hint with indiscreet
expression or gesture. This, completely understood by Aristides, was as
completely missed by his imitators, Raphael[24] in the _Morbetto_, and
Poussin in his plague of the Philistines. In the group of Aristides, our
sympathy is immediately interested by the mother, still alive though
mortally wounded, helpless, beautiful, and forgetting herself in the
anguish for her child, whose situation still suffers hope to mingle with
our fears; he is only approaching the nipple of the mother. In the group
of Raphael, the mother dead of the plague, herself an object of apathy,
becomes one of disgust, by the action of the man, who bending over her,
at his utmost reach of arm, with one hand removes the child from the
breast, whilst the other, applied to his nostrils, bars the effluvia
of death. Our feelings alienated from the mother, come too late even
for the child, who by his languor already betrays the mortal symptoms
of the poison he imbibed at the parent corpse. It is curious to observe
the permutation of ideas which takes place, as imitation is removed from
the sources of nature: Poussin, not content with adopting the group of
Raphael, once more repeats the loathsome attitude in the same scene;
he forgot, in his eagerness to render the idea of contagion still more
intuitive, that he was averting our feelings with ideas of disgust.
The refinements of expression were carried still farther by the disciple
of Aristides, Euphranor the Isthmian, who excelled equally as painter
and statuary, if we may form our judgment from the Theseus he opposed
to that of Parrhasius and the bronze figure of Alexander Paris, in
whom, says Pliny[25], the umpire of the goddesses, the lover of Helen,
and yet the murderer of Achilles might be traced. This account, which
is evidently a quotation of Pliny’s, and not the assumed verdict of a
connoisseur, has been translated with an emphasis it does not admit of,
to prove that an attempt to express different qualities or passions at
once in the same object, must naturally tend to obliterate the effect
of each. ‘Pliny,’ says our critic, ‘observes, that in a statue of Paris
by Euphranor, you might discover at the same time, three different
characters: the dignity of a judge of the goddesses, the lover of Helen,
and the conqueror of Achilles. A statue in which you endeavour to unite
stately dignity, youthful elegance, and stern valour, must surely possess
none of these to any eminent degree.’ The paraphrase, it is first to
be observed, lends itself the mixtures to Pliny it disapproves of; we
look in vain for the coalition of ‘stately dignity, stern valour, and
youthful elegance,’ in the Paris _he_ describes: the murderer of Achilles
was not his conqueror. But may not dignity, elegance, and valour, or
any other not irreconcileable qualities, be visible at once in a figure
without destroying the primary feature of its character, or impairing its
expression? Let us appeal to the Apollo. Is he not a figure of character
and expression, and does he not possess all three in a supreme degree?
Will it imply mediocrity of conception or confusion of character, if we
were to say that his countenance, attitude, and form combines divine
majesty, enchanting grace, and lofty indignation? Yet not all three,
one ideal whole irradiated the mind of the artist who conceived the
divine semblance. He gave, no doubt, the preference of expression to the
action in which the god is engaged, or rather, from the accomplishment
of which he recedes with lofty and contemptuous ease.—This was the first
impression which he meant to make upon us: but what contemplation stops
here? what hinders us when we consider the beauty of these features,
the harmony of these forms, to find in them the abstract of all his
other qualities, to roam over the whole history of his atchievements? we
see him enter the celestial synod, and all the gods rise at his august
appearance[26]; we see him sweep the plain after Daphne; precede Hector
with the ægis and disperse the Greeks; strike Patroclus with his palm
and decide his destiny.—And is the figure frigid because its great idea
is inexhaustible? might we not say the same of the infant Hercules of
Zeuxis or of Reynolds? did not the idea of the man inspire the hand that
framed the mighty child? his magnitude, his crushing grasp, his energy
of will, are only the germ, the prelude of the power that rid the earth
of monsters, and which our mind pursues. Such was no doubt the Paris of
Euphranor: he made his character so pregnant, that those who knew his
history might trace in it the origin of all his future feats, though
first impressed by the expression allotted to the predominant quality
and moment. The acute inspector, the elegant umpire of female form
receiving the contested pledge with a dignified pause, or with enamoured
eagerness presenting it to the arbitress of his destiny, was probably
the predominant idea of the figure: whilst the deserter of Oenone, the
seducer of Helen, the subtle archer, that future murderer of Achilles,
lurked under the insidious eyebrow, and in the penetrating glance of
beauty’s chosen minion. Such appeared to me the character and expression
of the sitting Paris in the voluptuous Phrygian dress, formerly in the
cortile of the palace Altheims, at Rome. A figure nearly colossal, which
many of you may remember, and a faint idea of whom may be gathered
from the print among those in the collection published of the Museum
Clementinum. A work, in my opinion, of the highest style and worthy of
Euphranor, though I shall not venture to call it a repetition in marble
of his bronze.