which must branch out from the primary expression of every great idea,
it will not, I hope, be suspected, that I mean to invalidate the
necessity of its unity, or to be the advocate of pedantic subdivision.
All such division diminishes, all such mixtures impair the simplicity
and clearness of expression: in the group of the Laocoon, the frigid
ecstasies of German criticism have discovered pity like a vapour swimming
on the father’s eyes; he is seen to suppress in the groan for his
children the shriek for himself—his nostrils are drawn upward to express
indignation at unworthy sufferings, whilst he is said at the same time
to implore celestial help. To these are added the winged effects of the
serpent-poison, the writhings of the body, the spasms of the extremities:
to the miraculous organization of such expression, Agesander, the
sculptor of the Laocoon, was too wise to lay claim. His figure is a
class, it characterizes every beauty of virility verging on age; the
prince, the priest, the father are visible, but absorbed in the man serve
only to dignify the victim of one great expression; though poised by
the artist, for us to apply the compass to the face of the Laocoon, is
to measure the wave fluctuating in the storm: this tempestuous front,
this contracted nose, the immersion of these eyes, and above all that
long-drawn mouth, are, separate and united, seats of convulsion, features
of nature struggling within the jaws of death.
SECOND LECTURE.
ART OF THE MODERNS.
ὉΙ ΤΙΝΕΣ ΗΓΕΜΟΝΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΚΟΙΡΑΝΟΙ ΗΣΑΝ.
ΠΛΗΘΥΝ Δ’ ΟΥΚ ΑΝ ΕΓΩ ΜΥΘΗΣΟΜΑΙ ΟΥΔ’ ΟΝΟΜΗΝΩ
ΟΥΔ’ ΕΙ ΜΟΙ ΔΕΚΑ ΜΕΝ ΓΛΩΣΣΑΙ, ΔΕΚΑ ΔΕ ΣΤΟΜΑΤ’ ΕΙΕΝ,
ΦΩΝΗ Δ’ ΑΡΡΗΚΤΟΣ.
Homer. Iliad. B. 487.
ARGUMENT.
Introduction—different direction of the art. Preparative
style—Masaccio—Lionardo da Vinci. Style of establishment—Michael Angelo,
Raphael, Titiano, Correggio. Style of refinement, and depravation.
Schools—of Tuscany, Rome, Venice, Lombardy. The Ecclectic school.
Machinists. The German school—Albert Durer. The Flemish school—Rubens.
The Dutch school—Rembrandt. Observations on art in Switzerland. The
French school. The Spanish school. England—Conclusion.
SECOND LECTURE
In the preceding discourse I have endeavoured to impress you with the
general features of ancient art in its different periods of preparation,
establishment, and refinement. We are now arrived at the epoch of its
restoration in the fifteenth century of our æra, when religion and wealth
rousing emulation, reproduced its powers, but gave to their exertion a
very different direction. The reigning church found itself indeed under
the necessity of giving more splendour to the temples and mansions
destined to receive its votaries, of subduing their senses with the
charm of appropriate images and the exhibition of events and actions,
which might stimulate their zeal and inflame their hearts: but the
sacred mysteries of divine Being, the method adopted by Revelation, the
duties its doctrine imposed, the virtues it demanded from its followers,
faith, resignation, humility, sufferings, substituted a medium of art
as much inferior to the resources of Paganism in a physical sense
as incomparably superior in a spiritual one. Those public customs,
that perhaps as much tended to spread the infections of vice as they
facilitated the means of art, were no more; the heroism of the Christian
and his beauty were internal, and powerful or exquisite forms allied him
no longer exclusively to his God. The chief repertory of the artist,
the sacred records, furnished indeed a sublime cosmogony, scenes of
patriarchal simplicity and a poetic race, which left nothing to regret
in the loss of heathen mythology; but the stem of the nation whose
history is its exclusive theme, if it abounded in characters and powers
fit for the exhibition of passions, did not teem with forms sufficiently
exalted, to inform the artist and elevate the art. Ingredients of a
baser cast mingled their alloy with the materials of grandeur and of
beauty. Monastic legend and the rubric of martyrology claimed more than
a legitimate share from the labours of the pencil and the chisel, made
nudity the exclusive property of emaciated hermits or decrepit age, and
if the breast of manhood was allowed to bare its vigour, or beauty to
expand her bosom, the antidotes of terrour and of horrour were ready at
their side to check the apprehended infection of their charms. When we
add to this the heterogeneous stock on which the reviving system of arts
was grafted, a race indeed inhabiting a genial climate, but itself the
fœces of barbarity, the remnants of Gothic adventurers, humanised only by
the cross, mouldering amid the ruins of the temples they had demolished,
the battered fragments of the images their rage had crushed—when we
add this, I say, we shall less wonder at the languor of modern art in
its rise and progress, than be astonished at the vigour by which it
adapted and raised materials partly so unfit and defective, partly so
contaminated, to the magnificent system which we are to contemplate.
Sculpture had already produced respectable specimens of its reviving
powers in the bassorelievos of Lorenzo Ghiberti, some works of Donato,
and the Christ of Philippo Brunelleschi[27], when the first symptoms of
imitation appeared in the frescos of Tommaso da St. Giovanni, commonly
called Masaccio, from the total neglect of his appearance and person[28]:
Masaccio first conceived that parts are to constitute a whole; that
composition ought to have a centre; expression, truth; and execution,
unity: his line deserves attention, though his subjects led him not
to investigation of form, and the shortness of his life forbade his
extending those elements which Raphael, nearly a century afterward,
carried to perfection—it is sufficiently glorious for him to have been
more than once copied by that great master of expression, and in some
degree to have been the herald of his style: Masaccio lives more in the
figure of Paul preaching on the areopagus, of the celebrated cartoon in
our possession, and in the borrowed figure of Adam expelled from paradise
in the loggia of the Vatican, than in his own mutilated or retouched
remains.
The essays of Masaccio in imitation and expression, Andrea Mantegna[29]
attempted to unite with form; led by the contemplation of the antique,
fragments of which he ambitiously scattered over his works: though a
Lombard, and born prior to the discovery of the best ancient statues,
he seems to have been acquainted with a variety of characters, from
forms that remind us of the Apollo, Mercury or Meleager, down to the
fauns and satyrs: but his taste was too crude, his fancy too grotesque,
and his comprehension too weak to advert from the parts that remained
to the whole that inspired them: hence in his figures of dignity or
beauty we see not only the meagre forms of common models, but even their
defects tacked to ideal Torso’s; and his fauns and satyrs, instead of
native luxuriance of growth and the sportive appendages of mixed being,
are decorated with heraldic excrescences and arabesque absurdity. His
triumphs are known to you all; they are a copious inventory of classic
lumber, swept together with more industry than taste, but full of
valuable materials. Of expression he was not ignorant: his burial of
Christ furnished Raphael with the composition, and some of the features
and attitudes in his picture on the same subject in the palace of the
Borghese’s—the figure of St. John, however, left out by Raphael, proves
that Mantegna sometimes mistook grimace for the highest degree of
grief. His oil-pictures exhibit little more than the elaborate anguish
of missal-painting; his frescoes destroyed at the construction of the
Clementine museum, had freshness, freedom and imitation.
To Luca Signorelli, of Cortona[30], nature more than atoned for the
want of those advantages which the study of the antique had offered to
Andrea Mantegna. He seems to have been the first who contemplated with a
discriminating eye his object, saw what was accident and what essential;
balanced light and shade, and decided the motion of his figures. He
foreshortened with equal boldness and intelligence, and thence it is,
probably, that Vasari fancies to have discovered in the last judgment of
Michael Angelo traces of imitation from the Lunetta, painted by Luca, in
the church of the Madonna, at Orvieto; but the powers which animated him
there, and before at Arezzo, are no longer visible in the Gothic medley
with which he filled two compartments in the chapel of Sixtus IV. at Rome.
Such was the dawn of modern art, when Lionardo da Vinci[31] broke forth
with a splendour which distanced former excellence: made up of all the
elements that constitute the essence of genius, favoured by education
and circumstances, all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor,
anatomist, architect, engineer, chemist, machinist, musician, man of
science, and sometimes empiric[32], he laid hold of every beauty in the
enchanted circle, but without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed
in her turn each. Fitter to scatter hints than to teach by example,
he wasted life, insatiate, in experiment. To a capacity which at once
penetrated the principle and real aim of the art, he joined an inequality
of fancy that at one moment lent him wings for the pursuit of beauty,
and the next, flung him on the ground to crawl after deformity: we owe
him chiaroscuro with all its magic, we owe him caricature with all its
incongruities. His notions of the most elaborate finish and his want
of perseverance were at least equal:—want of perseverance alone could
make him abandon his cartoon destined for the great council-chamber at
Florence, of which the celebrated contest of horsemen was but one group;
for to him who could organize that composition, Michael Angelo himself
ought rather to have been an object of emulation than of fear: and
that he was able to organize it, we may be certain from the remaining
imperfect sketch in the ‘Etruria Pittrice;’ but still more from the
admirable print of it by Edelinck, after a drawing of Rubens, who was
Lionardo’s great admirer, and has said much to impress us with the
beauties of his last supper in the refectory of the Dominicans at Milano,
the only one of his great works which he carried to ultimate finish,
through all its parts, from the head of Christ to the least important
one: it perished soon after him, and we can estimate the loss only from
the copies that survive.
Bartolomeo della Porta, or di S. Marco, the last master of this
period[33], first gave gradation to colour, form and masses to drapery,
and a grave dignity, till then unknown, to execution. If he was not
endowed with the versatility and comprehension of Lionardo, his
principles were less mixed with base matter and less apt to mislead
him. As a member of a religious order, he confined himself to subjects
and characters of piety, but the few nudities which he allowed himself
to exhibit, show sufficient intelligence and still more style: he
foreshortened with truth and boldness, and whenever the figure did admit
of it, made his drapery the vehicle of the limb it invests. He was the
true master of Raphael, whom his tuition weaned from the meanness of
Pietro Perugino, and prepared for the mighty style of Michael Angelo
Buonarroti.
Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner are
the elements of Michael Angelo’s style.[34] By these principles he
selected or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter, as sculptor,
as architect, he attempted, and above any other man succeeded to unite
magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts with the
utmost simplicity and breadth. His line is uniformly grand: character
and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient
to grandeur. The child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him
indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the
patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity;
his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man;
his men are a race of giants. This is the ‘terribil via’ hinted at by
Agostino Carracci, though perhaps as little understood by the Bolognese
as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To
give the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty,
was the exclusive power of Michael Angelo. He is the inventor of epic
painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine chapel, which exhibits
the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He
has personified motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; embodied
sentiment on the monuments of St. Lorenzo, unravelled the features of
meditation in the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine chapel; and in the
last judgment, with every attitude that varies the human body, traced
the master-trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though as
sculptor, he expressed the character of flesh more perfectly than all
who went before or came after him, yet he never submitted to copy an
individual; Julio the second only excepted, and in him he represented
the reigning passion rather than the man.[35] In painting he contented
himself with a negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected
all meretricious ornament.[36] The fabric of St. Peter, scattered
into infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he
concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex gave the air
of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him all in all, was M. Angelo,
the salt of art: sometimes he no doubt had his moments of dereliction,
deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his forms with futile
and ostentatious anatomy: both met with armies of copyists, and it has
been his fate to have been censured for their folly.
The inspiration of Michael Angelo was followed by the milder genius
of Raphael Sanzio[37], the father of dramatic painting, the painter
of humanity; less elevated, less vigorous, but more insinuating, more
pressing on our hearts, the warm master of our sympathies. What effect
of human connexion, what feature of the mind, from the gentlest emotion
to the most fervid burst of passion, has been left unobserved, has not
received a characteristic stamp from that examiner of man? M. Angelo
came to nature, nature came to Raphael—he transmitted her features like
a lucid glass unstained, unmodified. We stand with awe before M. Angelo,
and tremble at the height to which he elevates us—we embrace Raphael,
and follow him wherever he leads us. Energy, with propriety of character
and modest grace poise his line and determine his correctness. Perfect
human beauty he has not represented; no face of Raphael’s is perfectly
beautiful; no figure of his, in the abstract, possesses the proportions
that could raise it to a standard of imitation: form to him was only a
vehicle of character or pathos, and to those he adapted it in a mode
and with a truth which leaves all attempts at emendation hopeless. His
invention connects the utmost stretch of possibility, with the most
plausible degree of probability, in a manner that equally surprizes our
fancy, persuades our judgment, and affects our heart. His composition
always hastens to the most necessary point as its centre, and from that
disseminates, to that leads back as rays, all secondary ones. Group,
form, and contrast are subordinate to the event, and common-place ever
excluded. His expression, in strict unison with and decided by character,
whether calm, animated, agitated, convulsed, or absorbed by the inspiring
passion, unmixed and pure, never contradicts its cause, equally remote
from tameness and grimace: the moment of his choice never suffers the
action to stagnate or to expire; it is the moment of transition, the
crisis big with the past and pregnant with the future.—If, separately
taken, the line of Raphael has been excelled in correctness, elegance,
and energy; his colour far surpassed in tone and truth, and harmony;
his masses in roundness, and his chiaroscuro in effect—considered as
instruments of pathos, they have never been equalled; and in composition,
invention, expression, and the power of telling a story, he has never
been approached.
Whilst the superiour principles of the art were receiving the homage of
Tuscany and Rome, the inferiour but more alluring charm of colour began
to spread its fascination at Venice, from the pallet of Giorgione da
Castel Franco[38], and irresistibly entranced every eye that approached
the magic of Titiano Vecelli of Cador.[39] To no colourist before or
after him, did nature unveil herself with that dignified familiarity
in which she appeared to Titiano. His organ, universal and equally fit
for all her exhibitions, rendered her simplest to her most compound
appearances with equal purity and truth. He penetrated the essence
and the general principle of the substances before him, and on these
established his theory of colour. He invented that breadth of local tint
which no imitation has attained; and first expressed the negative nature
of shade: his are the charms of glazing, and the mystery of reflexes,
by which he detached, rounded, connected, or enriched his objects.
His harmony is less indebted to the force of light and shade, or the
artifices of contrast, than to a due balance of colour, equally remote
from monotony and spots. His backgrounds seem to be dictated by nature.
Landscape, whether it be considered as the transcript of a spot, or the
rich combination of congenial objects, or as the scene of a phœnomenon,
dates its origin from him: he is the father of portrait painting,
of resemblance with form, character with dignity, and costume with
subordination.
Another charm was yet wanting to complete the round of art—harmony: it
appeared with Antonio Læti[40] called Correggio, whose works it attended
like an enchanted spirit. The harmony and the grace of Correggio are
proverbial: the medium which by breadth of gradation unites two opposite
principles, the coalition of light and darkness by imperceptible
transition, are the element of his style.—This inspires his figures with
grace, to this their grace is subordinate: the most appropriate, the
most elegant attitudes were adopted, rejected, perhaps sacrificed to the
most awkward ones, in compliance with this imperious principle: parts
vanished, were absorbed, or emerged in obedience to it. This unison of
a whole, predominates over all that remains of him, from the vastness
of his cupolas to the smallest of his oil-pictures.—The harmony of
Correggio, though assisted by exquisite hues, was entirely independent
of colour: his great organ was chiaroscuro in its most extensive sense;
compared with the expanse in which he floats, the effects of Lionardo da
Vinci are little more than the dying ray of evening, and the concentrated
flash of Giorgione discordant abruptness. The bland central light of a
globe, imperceptibly gliding through lucid demi-tints into rich reflected
shades, composes the spell of Correggio, and affects us with the soft
emotions of a delicious dream.
Such was the ingenuity that prepared, and such the genius that raised to
its height the fabric of modern art. Before we proceed to the next epoch,
let us make an observation:
Form not your judgment of an artist from the exceptions which his conduct
may furnish, from the exertions of accidental vigour, some deviations
into other walks, or some unpremeditated flights of fancy, but from the
predominant rule of his system, the general principle of his works. The
line and style of Titian’s design, sometimes expand themselves like
those of Michael Angelo. His Abraham prevented from sacrificing Isaac;
his David adoring over the giant-trunk of Goliah; the Friar escaping
from the murderer of his companion in the forest, equal in loftiness of
conception and style of design, their mighty tone of colour and daring
execution: the heads and groups of Raphael’s frescos and portraits
sometimes glow and palpitate with the tints of Titian, or coalesce
in masses of harmony, and undulate with graces superior to those of
Correggio; who in his turn once reached the highest summit of invention,
when he embodied silence and personified the mysteries of love in the
voluptuous group of Jupiter and Io; and again exceeded all competition
of expression in the divine features of his Ecce-Homo. But these sudden
irradiations, these flashes of power are only exceptions from their
wonted principles; pathos and character own Raphael for their master,
colour remains the domain of Titian, and harmony the sovereign mistress
of Correggio.