art, vanishes altogether as we extend our view to the consideration
of the third, or that of refinement, and the origin of schools. The
pre-eminence of ancient art, as we have observed, was less the result
of superiour powers, than of simplicity of aim and uniformity of
pursuit. The Helladic and the Ionian schools appear to have concurred
in directing their instruction to the grand principles of form and
expression: this was the stamen which they drew out into one immense
connected web. The talents that succeeded genius, applied and directed
their industry and polish to decorate the established system, the
refinements of taste, grace, sentiment, colour, adorned beauty, grandeur
and expression. The Tuscan, the Roman, the Venetian, and the Lombard
schools, whether from incapacity, want of education, of adequate or
dignified encouragement, meanness of conception, or all these together,
separated, and in a short time substituted the medium for the end.
Michael Angelo lived to see the electric shock which his design and style
had given to art, propagated by the Tuscan and Venetian schools, as the
ostentatious vehicle of puny conceits and emblematic quibbles, or the
palliative of empty pomp and degraded luxuriance of colour. He had been
copied but was not imitated by Andrea Vannucchi, surnamed del Sarto, who
in his series of pictures on the life of John the Baptist, in preference
adopted the meagre style of Albert Durer. The artist who appears to have
penetrated deepest to his mind, was Pelegrino Tibaldi, of Bologna[41];
celebrated as the painter of the frescos in the academic institute of
that city, and as the architect of the Escurial under Philip II. The
compositions, groups, and single figures of the institute exhibit a
singular mixture of extraordinary vigour and puerile imbecility of
conception, of character and caricature, of style and manner. Polypheme
groping at the mouth of his cave for Ulysses, and Æolus granting him
favourable winds, are striking instances of both: than the cyclops,
Michael Angelo himself never conceived a form of savage energy, with
attitude and limbs more in unison; whilst the god of winds is degraded
to a scanty and ludicrous semblance of Thersites, and Ulysses with his
companions travestied by the semibarbarous look and costume of the age
of Constantine or Attila; the manner of Michael Angelo is the style of
Pelegrino Tibaldi; from him Golzius, Hemskerk, and Spranger borrowed
the compendium of the Tuscan’s peculiarities. With this mighty talent,
however, Michael Angelo seems not to have been acquainted, but by that
unaccountable weakness incident to the greatest powers, and the severe
remembrancer of their vanity, he became the superintendant and assistant
tutor of the Venetian Sebastiano[42], and of Daniel Ricciarelli, of
Volterra[43]; the first of whom, with an exquisite eye for individual,
had no sense for ideal colour, whilst the other rendered great diligence
and much anatomical erudition, useless by meagreness of line and
sterility of ideas: how far Michael Angelo succeeded in initiating
either in his principles, the far-famed pictures of the resuscitation
of Lazarus, by the first, once in the cathedral of Narbonne, and
since inspected by us all at the Lyceum here[44], and the fresco of
the descent from the cross, in the church of La Trinità del Monte, at
Rome, by the second, sufficiently evince: pictures which combine the
most heterogeneous principles. The group of Lazarus in Sebastian del
Piombo’s and that of the women, with the figure of Christ, in Daniel
Ricciarelli’s, not only breathe the sublime conception that inspired,
but the master-hand that shaped them: offsprings of Michael Angelo
himself, models of expression, style, and breadth, they cast on all the
rest an air of inferiority, and only serve to prove the incongruity
of partnership between unequal powers; this inferiority however is
respectable, when compared with the depravations of Michael Angelo’s
style by the remainder of the Tuscan school, especially those of Giorgio
Vasari[45], the most superficial artist and the most abandoned mannerist
of his time, but the most acute observer of men and the most dextrous
flatterer of princes. He overwhelmed the palaces of the Medici and of the
popes, the convents and churches of Italy, with a deluge of mediocrity,
commended by rapidity and shameless ‘bravura’ of hand: he alone did more
work than all the artists of Tuscany together, and to him may be truly
applied, what he had the insolence to say of Tintoretto, that he turned
the art into a boy’s toy.
Whilst Michael Angelo was doomed to lament the perversion of his style,
death prevented Raphael from witnessing the gradual decay of his. The
exuberant fertility of Julio Pipi called Romano[46], and the less
extensive but classic taste of Polydoro da Caravaggio deserted indeed the
standard of their master, but with a dignity and magnitude of compass
which command respect. It is less from his tutored works in the Vatican,
than from the colossal conceptions, the pathetic or sublime allegories,
and the voluptuous reveries which enchant the palace del T, near Mantoua,
that we must form our estimate of Julio’s powers; they were of a size to
challenge all competition, had he united purity of taste and delicacy
of mind with energy and loftiness of thought; as they are, they resemble
a mighty stream, sometimes flowing in a full and limpid vein, but
oftener turbid with rubbish. He has left specimens of composition from
the most sublime to the most extravagant; to a primeval simplicity of
conception in his mythologic subjects, which transports us to the golden
age of Hesiod, he joined a rage for the grotesque; to uncommon powers
of expression a decided attachment to deformity and grimace, and to the
warmest and most genial imagery, the most ungenial colour.
With nearly equal, but still more mixed fertility, Francesco
Primaticcio[47] propagated the style and the conceptions of his master
Julio on the gallic side of the Alps, and with the assistance of Nicolo,
commonly called Dell’ Abbate after him, filled the palaces of Francis
I. with mythologic and allegoric works, in frescos of an energy and
depth of tone till then unknown. Theirs was the cyclus of pictures from
the Odyssea of Homer at Fontainbleau, a mine of classic and picturesque
materials: they are destroyed, and we may estimate their loss, even
through the disguise of the mannered and feeble etchings of Theodore Van
Tulden.
The compact style of Polydoro[48], formed on the antique, such as it is
exhibited in the best series of the Roman military bassorelievos, is more
monumental, than imitative or characteristic. But the virility of his
taste, the impassioned motion of his groups, the simplicity, breadth, and
never excelled elegance and probability of his drapery, with the forcible
chiaroscuro of his compositions, make us regret the narrowness of the
walk, to which he confined his powers.
No painter ever painted his own mind so forcibly as Michael Angelo
Amerigi, surnamed Il Caravaggi.[49] To none nature ever set limits with
a more decided hand. Darkness gave him light; into his melancholy cell
light stole only with a pale reluctant ray, or broke on it, as flashes on
a stormy night. The most vulgar forms he recommended by ideal light and
shade, and a tremendous breadth of manner.
The aim and style of the Roman school deserve little further notice
here, till the appearance of Nicolas Poussin[50] a Frenchman, but
grafted on the Roman stock. Bred under Quintin Varin a French painter
of mediocrity, he found on his arrival in Italy that he had more to
unlearn than to follow of his master’s principles, renounced the national
character, and not only with the utmost ardour adopted, but suffered
himself to be wholly absorbed by the antique. Such was his attachment
to the ancients, that it may be said he less imitated their spirit than
copied their relics and painted sculpture; the costume, the mythology,
the rites of antiquity were his element; his scenery, his landscape are
pure classic ground. He has left specimens to shew that he was sometimes
sublime, and often in the highest degree pathetic, but history in the
strictest sense, was his property, and in that he ought to be followed.
His agents only appear, to tell the fact, they are subordinate to the
story. Sometimes he attempted to tell a story that cannot be told: of his
historic dignity the celebrated series of Sacraments; of his sublimity,
the vision he gave to Coriolanus; of his pathetic power, the infant
Pyrrhus; and of the vain attempt to tell by figures what words alone
can tell, the testament of Eudamidas, are striking instances. His eye,
though impressed with the tint, and breadth, and imitation of Titiano,
seldom inspired him to charm with colour, crudity and patches frequently
deform his effects. He is unequal in his style of design; sometimes his
comprehension fails him, he supplies, like Pietro Testa, ideal heads and
torso’s with limbs and extremities transcribed from the model. Whether
from choice or want of power he has seldom executed his conceptions on
a larger scale than that which bears his name, and which has perhaps as
much contributed to make him the darling of this country, as his merit.
The wildness of Salvator Rosa[51] opposes a powerful contrast to the
classic regularity of Poussin. Terrific and grand in his conceptions of
inanimate nature, he was reduced to attempts of hiding by boldness of
hand, his inability of exhibiting her impassioned, or in the dignity
of character: his line is vulgar: his magic visions less founded on
principles of terrour than on mythologic trash and caprice, are to the
probable combinations of nature, what the paroxysms of a fever are to the
flights of vigorous fancy. Though so much extolled and so ambitiously
imitated, his banditti are a medley made up of starveling models, shreds
and bits of armour from his lumber-room, brushed into notice by a daring
pencil. Salvator was a satyrist and a critic, but the rod which he had
the insolence to lift against the nudities of Michael Angelo, and the
anachronism of Raphael, would have been better employed in chastising his
own misconceptions.
The principle of Titiano, less pure in itself and less decided in its
object of imitation, did not suffer so much from its more or less
appropriate application by his successors, as the former two. Colour once
in a very high degree attained, disdains subordination and engrosses the
whole. Mutual similarity attracts, body tends to body, as mind to mind,
and he, who has once gained supreme dominion over the eye, will hardly
resign it to court the more coy approbation of mind, of a few opposed to
nearly all. Add to this the character of the place and the nature of the
encouragement held out to the Venetian artists. Venice was the centre
of commerce, the repository of the riches of the globe, the splendid
toy-shop of the time: its chief inhabitants princely merchants, or a
patrician race elevated to rank by accumulations from trade, or naval
prowess; the bulk of the people mechanics or artisans, administering
the means, and in their turn fed by the produce of luxury. Of such a
system, what could the art be more than the parasite? Religion itself
had exchanged its gravity for the allurements of ear and eye, and even
sanctity disgusted, unless arrayed by the gorgeous hand of fashion.—Such
was, such will always be the birth-place and the theatre of colour: and
hence it is more matter of wonder that the first and greatest colourists
should so long have forborne to overstep the modesty of nature in the use
of that alluring medium, than that they yielded by degrees to its golden
solicitations.[52]
The principle of Correggio vanished with its author, though it found
numerous imitators of its parts. Since him, no eye has conceived that
expanse of harmony with which the voluptuous sensibility of his mind
arranged and enchanted all visible nature. His grace, so much vaunted and
so little understood, was adopted and improved to elegance by Francesco
Mazzuoli, called il Parmegiano[53], but instead of making her the measure
of propriety he degraded her to affectation: in Parmegiano’s figures
action is the adjective of the posture; the accident of attitude; they
‘make themselves air, into which they vanish.’ That disengaged play of
delicate forms, the ‘Sueltezza’ of the Italians, is the prerogative of
Parmegiano, though nearly always obtained at the expence of proportion.
His grandeur as conscious as his grace, sacrifices the motive to the
mode, simplicity to contrast: his St. John loses the fervour of the
apostle in the orator; his Moses the dignity of the lawgiver in the
savage. With incredible force of chiaroscuro, he united bland effects and
fascinating hues, but their frequent ruins teach the important lesson,
that the mixtures which anticipate the beauties of time, are big with the
seeds of premature decay.
Such was the state of the art, when, towards the decline of the sixteenth
century, Lodovico Carracci[54], with his cousins Agostino and Annibale,
founded at Bologna that ecclectic school, which by selecting the
beauties, correcting the faults, supplying the defects and avoiding the
extremes of the different styles, attempted to form a perfect system.
But as the mechanic part was their only object, they did not perceive
that the projected union was incompatible with the leading principle of
each master. Let us hear this plan from Agostino Carracci himself, as
it is laid down in his sonnet[55] on the ingredients required to form
a perfect painter, if that may be called a sonnet, which has more the
air of medical prescription. ‘Take,’ says Agostino, ‘the design of Rome,
Venetian motion and shade, the dignified tone of Lombardy’s colour,
the terrible manner of Michael Angelo, the just symmetry of Raphael,
Titiano’s truth of nature, and the sovereign purity of Correggio’s
style: add to these the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, the learned
invention of Primaticcio, and a little of Parmegiano’s grace: but to save
so much study, such weary labour, apply your imitation to the works which
our dear Nicolo has left us here.’ Of such advice, balanced between the
tone of regular breeding and the cant of an empiric, what could be the
result? excellence or mediocrity? who ever imagined that a multitude of
dissimilar threads could compose an uniform texture, that dissemination
of spots would make masses, or a little of many things produce a
legitimate whole? indiscriminate imitation must end in the extinction of
character, and that in mediocrity—the cypher of art.
And were the Carracci such? separate the precept from the practice,
the artist from the teacher; and the Carracci are in possession of
my submissive homage. Lodovico, far from implicitly subscribing to a
master’s dictates, was the sworn pupil of nature. To a modest style of
form, to a simplicity eminently fitted for those subjects of religious
gravity which his taste preferred, he joined that solemnity of hue,
that sober twilight, the air of cloistered meditation, which you have
so often heard recommended as the proper tone of historic colour. Too
often content to rear the humbler graces of his subject, he seldom
courted elegance, but always, when he did, with enviable success. Even
now, though nearly in a state of evanescence, the three nymphs in the
garden scene of St. Michele in Bosco, seem moulded by the hand, inspired
by the breath of love. Agostino, with a singular modesty which prompted
him rather to propagate the fame of others by his graver, than by steady
exertion to rely on his own power for perpetuity of name, combined with
some learning a cultivated taste, correctness, though not elegance of
form, and a corregiesque colour. Annibale, superior to both in power
of execution and academic prowess, was inferior to either in taste and
sensibility and judgment; for the most striking proof of this inferiority
I appeal to his master-work, the work on which he rests his fame, the
gallery of the Farnese palace: a work whose uniform vigour of execution,
nothing can equal but its imbecility and incongruity of conception. If
impropriety of ornament were to be fixed by definition, the subjects
of the Farnese gallery might be quoted as the most decisive instances.
Criticism has attempted to dismiss Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto from
the province of legitimate history with the contemptuous appellation
of ornamental painters, not for having painted subjects inapplicable
to the public and private palaces, the churches and convents, which
they were employed to decorate, but because they treated them sometimes
without regard to costume, or the simplicity due to sacred, heroic or
allegoric subjects: if this be just, where shall we class him, who with
the Capella Sistina, and the Vatican before his eye, fills the mansion
of religious austerity and episcopal dignity, with a chaotic series of
trite fable and bacchanalian revelry, without allegory, void of allusion,
merely to gratify the puerile ostentation of dauntless execution
and academic vigour? if the praise given to a work be not always
transferable to its master; if, as Milton says, ‘the work some praise
and some the architect,’ let us admire the splendour, the exuberance,
the concentration of powers displayed in the Farnese gallery, whilst we
lament their misapplication by Annibale Carracci.
The heterogeneous principle of the ecclectic school soon operated its own
dissolution: the great talents which the Carracci had tutored, soon found
their own bias, and abandoned themselves to their own peculiar taste. B.
Schidone died young in 1615. Barto. Schidone, Guido Reni[56], Giovanni
Lanfranco, Francesco Albani, Domenico Zampieri, and Francesco Barbieri,
called Guercino, differed as much in their objects of imitation as their
names. Schidone, all of whose mind was in his eye, embraced, and often
to meaner subjects applied the harmony and colour of Correggio, whilst
Lanfranco strove, but strove without success, to follow him through
the expanse of his creation and masses. Grace attracted Guido, but it
was the studied grace of theatres: his female forms are abstracts of
antique beauty, attended by languishing attitudes, arrayed by voluptuous
fashions. His male forms, transcripts of models, such as are found in
a genial climate, are sometimes highly characteristic of dignified
manhood or apostolic fervour, like his Peter and Paul, formerly in the
Zampieri at Bologna: sometimes stately, courteous, insipid, like his
Paris attending Helen, more with the air of an ambassadour, by proxy,
than carrying her off with a lover’s fervour. His Aurora deserved to
precede a more majestic sun, and hours less clumsy: his colour varies
with his style, sometimes bland and harmonious, sometimes vigorous
and stern, sometimes flat and insipid. Albani, chiefly attracted by
soft mythologic conceits, formed nereids and oreads on plump Venetian
models, and contrasted their pearly hues with the rosy tints of loves,
the juicy brown of fauns and satyrs, and rich marine or sylvan scenery.
Domenichino, more obedient than the rest to his masters, aimed at the
beauty of the antique, the expression of Raphael, the vigour of Annibale,
the colour of Lodovico, and mixing something of each, fell short of all;
whilst Guercino broke like a torrent over all academic rules, and with an
ungovernable itch of copying whatever lay in his way, sacrificed mind,
form and costume, to effects of colour, fierceness of chiaroscuro, and
intrepidity of hand.
Such was the state of art, when the spirit of machinery, in submission
to the vanities and upstart pride of papal nepotism, destroyed what yet
was left of meaning; when equilibration, contrast, grouping, engrossed
composition, and poured a deluge of gay common-place over the platfonds,
pannels, and cupolas of palaces and temples. Those who could not conceive
a figure singly, scattered multitudes; to count, was to be poor. The
rainbow and the seasons were ransacked for their hues, and every eye
became the tributary of the great, but abused talents of Pietro da
Cortona, and the fascinating but debauched and empty facility of Luca
Giordano.[57]
The same revolution of mind that had organized the arts of Italy, spread,
without visible communication, to Germany, and towards the decline of
the fifteenth century, the uncouth essays of Martin Schön, Michael
Wolgemuth, and Albrecht Altorfer, were succeeded by the finer polish and
the more dextrous method of Albert Durer. The indiscriminate use of the
words genius and talent has perhaps no where caused more confusion than
in the classification of artists. Albert Durer was in my opinion a man
of great ingenuity, without being a genius. He studied, and, as far as
his penetration reached, established certain proportions of the human
frame, but he did not invent a style: every work of his is a proof that
he wanted the power of imitation, of concluding from what he saw, to
what he did not see, that he copied rather than selected the forms that
surrounded him, and sans remorse tacked deformity and meagreness to
fulness, and sometimes to beauty.[58] Such is his design; in composition
copious without taste, anxiously precise in parts, and unmindful of
the whole, he has rather shewn us what to avoid than what to follow.
He sometimes had a glimpse of the sublime, but it was only a glimpse:
the expanded agony of Christ on the mount of Olives, and the mystic
conception of his figure of Melancholy, are thoughts of sublimity, though
the expression of the last is weakened by the rubbish he has thrown about
her. His Knight, attended by Death and the Fiend, is more capricious
than terrible; and his Adam and Eve are two common models shut up in a
rocky dungeon. If he approached genius in any part of art, it was in
colour. His colour went beyond his age, and as far excelled in truth and
breadth and handling the oil colour of Raphael, as Raphael excels him
in every other quality. I speak of easel-pictures—his drapery is broad
though much too angular, and rather snapt than folded. Albert is called
the father of the German school, though he neither reared scholars, nor
was imitated by the German artists of his or the succeeding century. That
the exportation of his works to Italy should have effected a temporary
change in the principles of some Tuscans who had studied Michael Angelo,
of Andrea del Sarto, and Jacopo da Pontormo, is a fact which proves that
minds at certain periods may be subject to epidemic influence as well as
bodies.
Lucas of Leyden[59] was the Dutch imitator of Albert; but the forms of
Aldegraver, Sebald Beheim, and George Pentz, appear to have been the
result of careful inspection of Marc Antonio’s prints from Raphael, of
whom Pentz was probably a scholar; and ere long the style of Michael
Angelo, as adopted by Pelegrino Tibaldi, and spread by the graver of
Giorgio Mantuano, provoked those caravans of German, Dutch and Flemish
students, who on their return from Italy, at the courts of Prague and
Munich, in Flanders and the Netherlands, introduced that preposterous
manner, the bloated excrescence of diseased brains, which in the form of
man left nothing human, distorted action and gesture with insanity of
affectation, and dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes; the
style of Golzius and Spranger, Heynz and ab Ach: but though content to
feed on the husks of Tuscan design, they imbibed the colour of Venice,
and spread the elements of that excellence which distinguished the
succeeding schools of Flanders and of Holland.
This frantic pilgrimage to Italy ceased at the apparition of the two
meteors of art, Peter Paul Rubens[60], and Rembrandt Van Rhyn; both of
whom disdaining to acknowledge the usual laws of admission to the temple
of fame, boldly forged their own keys, entered and took possession,
each, of a most conspicuous place by his own power. Rubens, born at
Cologne, in Germany, but brought up at Antwerp, then the depository of
western commerce, a school of religious and classic learning, and the
pompous seat of Austrian and Spanish superstition, met these advantages
with an ardour and success of which ordinary minds can form no idea,
if we compare the period at which he is said to have seriously applied
himself to painting, under the tuition of Otho Van Veen, with the
unbounded power he had acquired over the instruments of art when he set
out for Italy; where we instantly discover him not as the pupil, but
as the successful rival of the masters whose works he had selected for
the objects of his emulation. Endowed with a full comprehension of his
own character, he wasted not a moment on the acquisition of excellence
incompatible with its fervour, but flew to the centre of his ambition,
Venice, and soon compounded from the splendour of Paolo Veronese and the
glow of Tintoretto, that florid system of mannered magnificence which
is the element of his art and the principle of his school. He first
spread that ideal pallet, which reduced to its standard the variety of
nature, and once methodized, whilst his mind tuned the method, shortened
or superseded individual imitation. His scholars, however dissimilar in
themselves, saw with the eye of their master; the eye of Rubens was
become the substitute of nature: still the mind alone that had balanced
these tints, and weighed their powers, could apply them to their objects,
and determine their use in the pompous display of historic and allegoric
magnificence; for _that_ they were selected, for _that_ the gorgeous
nosegay swelled: but when in the progress of depraved practice they
became the mere palliatives of mental impotence, empty representatives
of themselves, the supporters of nothing but clumsy forms and clumsier
conceits, they can only be considered as splendid improprieties, as the
substitutes for wants which no colour can palliate and no tint supply.
In this censure I am under no apprehension of being suspected to
include either the illustrious name of Vandyck[61], or that of Abraham
Diepenbeck. Vandyck, more elegant, more refined, to graces, which the
genius of Rubens disdained to court, joined that exquisite taste which,
in following the general principle of his master, moderated, and adapted
its application to his own pursuits. His sphere was portrait, and the
imitation of Titiano insured him the second place in that. The fancy
of Diepenbeck, though not so exuberant, if I be not mistaken, excelled
in sublimity the imagination of Rubens: his Bellerophon, Dioscuri,
Hippolytus, Ixion, Sisyphus, fear no competitor among the productions of
his master.