intuitive faculty among the principal organs of invention, is that
celebrated performance, which by the united testimony of cotemporary
writers, and the evident traces of its imitation, scattered over the
works of cotemporary artists, contributed alone more to the restoration
of art and the revolution of style, than the united effort of the two
centuries that preceded it: I mean the astonishing design commonly
called the cartoon of Pisa, the work of Michael Agnolo Buonarrotti, begun
in competition with Lionardo da Vinci, and at intervals finished at
Florence. This work, whose celebrity subjected those who had not seen it
to the supercilious contempt of the luckier ones who had; which was the
common centre of attraction to all the students of Tuscany and Romagna,
from Raphael Sanzio to Bastian da St. Gallo, called Aristotile, from
his loquacious descants on its beauties; this inestimable work itself
is lost, and its destruction is with too much appearance of truth fixed
on the mean villany of Baccio Bandinelli, who, in possession of the key
to the apartment where it was kept, during the revolutionary troubles
of the Florentine republic, after making what use he thought proper of
it, is said to have torn it in pieces. Still we may form an idea of
its principal groups from some ancient prints and drawings; and of its
composition from a small copy now existing at Holkham, the outlines of
which have been lately etched. Crude, disguised, or feeble, as these
specimens are, they will prove better guides than the half-informed
rhapsodies of Vasari, the meagre account of Ascanio Condivi, better than
the mere anatomic verdict of Benvenuto Cellini, who denies that the
powers afterward exerted in the Capella Sistina, arrive at ‘half its
excellence.’[72]
It represents an imaginary moment relative to the war carried on by the
Florentines against Pisa: and exhibits a numerous group of warriours,
roused from their bathing in the Arno, by the sudden signal of a trumpet
and rushing to arms. This composition may without exaggeration be said to
personify with unexampled variety that motion, which Agasias and Theon
embodied in single figures: in imagining this transient moment from a
state of relaxation to a state of energy, the ideas of motion, to use the
bold figure of Dante, seem to have showered into the artist’s mind. From
the chief, nearly placed in the centre, who precedes, and whose voice
accompanies the trumpet, every age of human agility, every attitude,
every feature of alarm, haste, hurry, exertion, eagerness, burst into
so many rays, like sparks flying from the hammer. Many have reached,
some boldly step, some have leaped on the rocky shore; here two arms
emerging from the water grapple with the rock, there two hands cry for
help, and their companions bend over or rush on to assist them; often
imitated, but inimitable is the ardent feature of the grim veteran whose
every sinew labours to force over the dripping limbs his cloaths, whilst
gnashing he pushes the foot through the rending garment. He is contrasted
by the slender elegance of a half averted youth, who, though eagerly
buckling the armour to his thigh, methodizes haste; another swings the
high-raised hauberk on his shoulder, whilst one who seems a leader,
mindless of dress, ready for combat, and with brandished spear, overturns
a third, who crouched to grasp a weapon—one naked himself buckles on
the mail of his companion, and he, turned toward the enemy, seems to
stamp impatiently the ground.—Experience and rage, old vigour, young
velocity, expanded or contracted, vie in exertions of energy. Yet in this
scene of tumult one motive animates the whole, eagerness to engage with
subordination to command; this preserves the dignity of action, and from
a straggling rabble changes the figures to men whose legitimate contest
interests our wishes.
This intuition into the pure emanations of nature, Raphael Sanzio
possessed in the most enviable degree, from the utmost conflict of
passions, to the enchanting round of gentler emotion, and the nearly
silent hints of mind and character. To this he devoted the tremendous
scenery of that magnificent fresco, known to you all under the name
of the _Incendio del Borgo_, in which he sacrificed the historic and
mystic part of his subject to the effusion of the various passions
roused by the sudden terrours of nocturnal conflagration. It is not for
the faint appearance of the miracle which approaches with the pontiff
and his train in the back-ground, that Raphael invites our eyes; the
perturbation, necessity, hope, fear, danger, the pangs and efforts of
affection grappling with the enraged elements of wind and fire, displayed
on the fore-ground, furnish the pathetic motives that press on our
hearts. That mother, who but half awake or rather in a waking trance,
drives her children instinctively before her; that prostrate female half
covered by her streaming hair, with elevated arms imploring heaven;
that other who over the flaming tenement, heedless of her own danger,
absorbed in maternal agony, boldly reaches over to drop the babe into the
outstretched arms of its father; that common son of nature, who careless
of another’s woe, intent only on his own safety, librates a leap from the
burning wall; the vigorous youth who followed by an aged mother bears the
palsied father on his shoulder from the rushing wreck; the nimble grace
of those helpless females that vainly strive to administer relief—these
are the real objects of the painter’s aim, and leave the pontiff and the
miracle, with taper, bell and clergy—unheeded in the distance.
I shall not at present expatiate in tracing from this source the novel
combinations of affection by which Raphael contrived to interest us in
his numerous repetitions of Madonnas and holy Families, selected from
the warmest effusions of domestic endearment, or in Milton’s phrase,
from ‘all the charities of father, son, and mother.’ Nor shall I follow
it in its more contaminated descent, to those representations of local
manners and national modifications of society, whose characteristic
discrimination and humorous exuberance, for instance, we admire in
Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passions of the day, every hour
contributes something to obliterate, which soon become unintelligible
by time, or degenerate into caricature, the chronicle of scandal, the
history-book of the vulgar.
Invention in its more specific sense receives its subjects from poetry
or authenticated tradition; they are _epic_ or sublime, _dramatic_
or impassioned, _historic_ or circumscribed by truth. The first
_astonishes_; the second _moves_; the third _informs_.
The aim of the epic painter is to impress one general idea, one great
quality of nature or mode of society, some great maxim, without
descending to those subdivisions, which the detail of character
prescribes: he paints the elements with their own simplicity, height,
depth, the vast, the grand, darkness, light; life, death; the past,
the future; man, pity, love, joy, fear, terrour, peace, war, religion,
government: and the visible agents are only engines to force _one_
irresistible idea upon the mind and fancy, as the machinery of
Archimedes served only to convey _destruction_, and the wheels of a watch
serve only to tell _time_.
Such is the first and general sense of what is called the _sublime_,
epic, allegoric, lyric substance. Homer, to impress one forcible idea of
_war_, its origin, its progress, and its end, set to work innumerable
engines of various magnitude, yet none but what uniformly tends to
enforce this and only this idea; gods and demigods are only actors, and
nature but the scene of war; no character is discriminated but where
discrimination discovers a new look of war; no passion is raised but what
is blown up by the breath of war, and as soon absorbed in its universal
blaze:—As in a conflagration we see turrets, spires, and temples
illuminated only to propagate the honours of destruction, so through the
stormy page of Homer, we see his heroines and heroes, but by the light
that blasts them.
This is the principle of that divine series of frescoes, with which under
the pontificates of Julius II. and Paul III. Michael Angelo adorned the
lofty compartments of the _Capella Sistina_, and from a modesty or a
pride for ever to be lamented, only not occupied the _whole_ of its ample
sides. Its subject is _theocracy_ or the empire of religion, considered
as the parent and queen of man; the origin, the progress, and final
dispensation of Providence, as taught by the sacred records. Amid this
imagery of primeval simplicity, whose sole object is the relation of the
race to its Founder, to look for minute discrimination of character,
is to invert the principle of the artist’s invention: here is only God
with man. The veil of eternity is rent; time, space, and matter teem
in the creation of the elements and of earth; life issues from God and
adoration from man, in the creation of Adam and his mate; transgression
of the precept at the tree of knowledge proves the origin of evil, and
of expulsion from the immediate intercourse with God; the œconomy of
justice and grace commences in the revolutions of the deluge, and the
covenant made with Noah; and the germs of social character are traced
in the subsequent scene between him and his sons; the awful synod of
prophets and sibyls are the heralds of the Redeemer, and the host of
patriarchs the pedigree of the Son of Man; the brazen serpent and the
fall of Haman, the giant subdued by the stripling in Goliah and David,
and the conquerour destroyed by female weakness in Judith, are types of
his mysterious progress, till Jonah pronounces him immortal; and the
magnificence of the last judgment by shewing the Saviour in the judge of
man, sums up the whole, and reunites the founder and the race.
Such is the spirit of the Sistine chapel, and the outline of its
_general_ invention, with regard to the cycle of its subjects—as in
their choice they lead to each other without intermediate chasms in the
transition; as each preceding one prepares and directs the conduct of the
next, this the following; and as the intrinsic variety of all, conspires
to the simplicity of one great end. The _specific_ invention of the
pictures separate, as each constitutes an independent whole, deserves our
consideration next: each has its centre, from which it disseminates, to
which it leads back all secondary points; arranged, hid, or displayed, as
they are more or less organs of the inspiring plan: each rigorously is
circumscribed by its generic character, no inferiour merely conventional,
temporary, local, or disparate beauty, however in itself alluring, is
admitted; each finally turns upon that transient moment, the moment of
suspense, big with the past, and pregnant with the future; the action
no where expires, for action and interest terminate together. Thus in
the creation of Adam, the Creator borne on a group of attendant spirits,
the personified powers of omnipotence, moves on toward his last, best
work, the lord of his creation: the immortal spark, issuing from his
extended arm, electrifies the new-formed being, who tremblingly alive,
half raised half reclined, hastens to meet his Maker. In the formation of
Eve the astonishment of life, just organised, is absorbed in the sublimer
sentiment of adoration; perfect, though not all disengaged from the side
of her dreaming mate, she moves with folded hands and humble dignity
towards the majestic Form whose half raised hand attracts her—what
words can express the equally bland and irresistible velocity of that
mysterious Being, who forms the sun and moon, and already past, leaves
the earth, compleatly formed, behind him? Here apposition is the symbol
of immensity.[73]
From these specimens of invention exerted in the more numerous
compositions of this _sublime_ cycle, let me fix your attention for a few
moments on the powers it displays in the single figures of the Prophets,
those organs of embodied sentiment: their expression and attitude,
whilst it exhibits the unequivocal marks of inspired contemplation in
all; and with equal variety, energy, and delicacy, stamps character on
each; exhibits in the occupation of the present moment the traces of
the past and hints of the future. Esaiah, the image of _inspiration_,
sublime and lofty, with an attitude expressive of the sacred trance
in which meditation on the Messiah had immersed him, starts at the
voice of an attendant genius, who seems to pronounce the words, ‘to us
a child is born, to us a son is given.’ Daniel, the humbler image of
eager _diligence_, transcribes from a volume held by a stripling, with a
gesture natural to those who, absorbed in the progress of their subject,
are heedless of convenience; his posture shews that he had inspected the
volume from which now he is turned, and shall return to it immediately.
Zachariah personifies _consideration_, he has read, and ponders on what
he reads. _Inquiry_ moves in the dignified activity of Joel; hastening
to open a sacred scrowl, and to compare the scriptures with each other.
Ezechiel, the fervid feature of _fancy_, the seer of resurrection,
represented as on the field strewn with bones of the dead, points
downward and asks, ‘can these bones live?’ the attendant angel, borne on
the wind that agitates his locks and the prophet’s vestments, with raised
arm and finger, pronounces, they shall rise; last, Jeremiah, subdued by
_grief_ and exhausted by lamentation, sinks in silent woe over the ruins
of Jerusalem. Nor are the sibyls, those female oracles, less expressive,
less individually marked—they are the echo, the counterpart of the
prophets; Vigilance, Meditation, Instruction, Divination are personified.
If the artist, who absorbed by the uniform power and magnitude of
execution, saw only breadth and nature in their figures, must be told
that he has discovered the least part of their excellence; the critic who
charges them with affectation, can only be dismissed with our contempt.
On the immense plain of the last judgment, Michael Angelo has wound
up the destiny of man, simply considered as the subject of religion,
faithful or rebellious; and in one generic manner has distributed
happiness and misery, the general feature of passions is given, and
no more.—But had Raphael meditated that subject, he would undoubtedly
have applied to our sympathies for his choice of imagery; he would have
combined all possible emotions with the utmost variety of probable
or real character: a father meeting his son, a mother torn from her
daughter, lovers flying into each others arms, friends for ever
separated, children accusing their parents, enemies reconciled; tyrants
dragged before the tribunal by their subjects, conquerors hiding
themselves from their victims of carnage; innocence declared, hypocrisy
unmasked, atheism confounded, detected fraud, triumphant resignation; the
most prominent features of connubial, fraternal, kindred connexion.—In
a word, the heads of that infinite variety which Dante has minutely
scattered over his poem—all domestic, politic, religious relations;
whatever is not local in virtue and in vice: and the sublimity of the
greatest of all events, would have been merely the minister of sympathies
and passions[74].
If opinions be divided on the respective advantages and disadvantages of
these two modes; if to some it should appear, though from consideration
of the plan which guided Michael Angelo, I am far from subscribing to
their notions, that the scenery of the last judgment, might have gained
more by the dramatic introduction of varied pathos, than it would
have lost by the dereliction of its generic simplicity: there can,
I believe, be but one opinion with regard to the methods adopted by
him and Raphael in the invention of the moment that characterises the
creation of Eve: both artists applied for it to their own minds, but
with very different success: the elevation of Michael Angelo’s soul,
inspired by the operation of creation itself, furnished him at once with
the feature that stamps on human nature its most glorious prerogative:
whilst the characteristic subtilty, rather than sensibility of Raphael’s
mind, in this instance, offered nothing but a frigid succedaneum; a
symptom incident to all, when after the subsided astonishment on a
great and sudden event, the mind recollecting itself, ponders on it
with inquisitive surmise. In Michael Angelo, all self-consideration is
absorbed in the sublimity of the sentiment which issues from the august
Presence that attracts Eve; ‘her earthly,’ in Milton’s expression,
‘by his heavenly overpowered,’ pours itself in _adoration_: whilst in
the inimitable cast of Adam’s figure, we trace the hint of that half
conscious moment when sleep began to give way to the vivacity of the
dream inspired. In Raphael, creation is complete—Eve is presented to
Adam, now awake: but neither the new-born charms, the submissive grace
and virgin purity of the beauteous image; nor the awful presence of her
Introductor, draw him from his mental trance into effusions of love or
gratitude; at ease reclined, with fingers pointing at himself and his new
mate, he seems to methodize the surprising event that took place during
his sleep, and to whisper the words ‘flesh of my flesh.’
Thus, but far better adapted, has Raphael personified _Dialogue_, moved
the lips of _Soliloquy_, unbent or wrinkled the features, and arranged
the limbs and gesture of _Meditation_, in the pictures of the Parnassus
and of the school of Athens, parts of the immense allegoric drama that
fills the stanzas, and displays the brightest ornament of the Vatican;
the immortal monument of the towering ambition, unlimited patronage,
and refined taste of Julius II. and Leo X., its cycle represents the
origin, the progress, extent, and final triumph of _church empire_, or
ecclesiastic government; in the first subject, of the Parnassus, Poetry
led back to its origin and first duty, the herald and interpreter of
a first Cause, in the universal language of imagery addressed to the
senses, unites man, scattered and savage, in social and religious bands.
What was the surmise of the eye and the wish of hearts, is gradually
made the result of reason, in the characters of the school of Athens, by
the researches of philosophy, which from bodies to mind, from corporeal
harmony to moral fitness, and from the duties of society, ascends to
the doctrine of God and hopes of immortality. Here revelation in its
stricter sense commences, and conjecture becomes a glorious reality:
in the composition of the dispute on the sacrament, the Saviour after
ascension seated on his throne, the attested son of God and Man,
surrounded by his types, the prophets, patriarchs, apostles and the
hosts of heaven, institutes the mysteries and initiates in his sacrament
the heads and presbyters of the church militant, who in the awful
presence of their Master and the celestial synod, discuss, explain,
propound his doctrine. That the sacred mystery shall clear all doubt
and subdue all heresy, is taught in the miracle of the blood-stained
wafer; that without arms, by the arm of Heaven itself, it shall release
its votaries, and defeat its enemies, the deliverance of Peter, the
overthrow of Heliodorus, the flight of Attila, the captive Saracens, bear
testimony; that nature itself shall submit to its power and the elements
obey its mandates, the checked conflagration of the Borgo, declares:
till hastening to its ultimate triumphs, its union with the state, it
is proclaimed by the vision of Constantine, confirmed by the rout of
Maxentius, established by the imperial pupils receiving baptism, and
submitting to accept his crown at the feet of the mitred pontiff.
Such is the rapid outline of the cycle painted or designed by Raphael
on the compartments of the stanzas sacred to his name. Here is the
mass of his powers in poetic conception and execution, here is every
period of his style, his emancipation from the narrow shackles of Pietro
Perugino, his discriminations of characteristic form, on to the heroic
grandeur of his line. Here is that master-tone of fresco painting, the
real instrument of history, which with its silver purity and breadth
unites the glow of Titiano and Correggio’s tints. Every where we meet the
superiority of genius, but more or less impressive, with more or less
felicity in proportion as each subject was more or less susceptible of
dramatic treatment. From the bland enthusiasm of the Parnassus, and the
sedate or eager features of meditation in the school of Athens, to the
sterner traits of dogmatic controversy in the dispute of the sacrament,
and the symptoms of religious conviction or inflamed zeal at the mass of
Bolsena. Not the miracle, as we have observed, the fears and terrours
of humanity inspire and seize us at the conflagration of the Borgo: if
in the Heliodorus the sublimity of the vision balances sympathy with
astonishment, we follow the rapid ministers of grace to their revenge,
less to rescue the temple from the gripe of sacrilege, than inspired by
the palpitating graces, the helpless innocence, the defenceless beauty
of the females and children scattered around; and thus we forget the
vision of the labarum, the angels and Constantine in the battle, to
plunge in the wave with Maxentius, or to share the agonies of the father
who recognizes his own son in the enemy he slew.
With what propriety Raphael introduced portrait, though in its most
dignified and elevated sense, into some compositions of the great work
which we are contemplating, I shall not now discuss; the allegoric part
of the work may account for it: he has, however, by its admission,
stamped that branch of painting at once with its essential feature,
character, and has assigned it its place and rank: ennobled by character,
it rises to dramatic dignity, destitute of that, it sinks to mere
mechanic dexterity, or floats, a bubble of fashion. Portrait is to
historic painting in art, what physiognomy is to pathognomy in science;
_that_ shews the character and powers of the being which it delineates,
in its formation and at rest: _this_ shews it in exertion. Bembo,
Bramante, Dante, Gonzaga, Savonarola, Raphael himself may be considered
in the inferior light of mere characteristic ornament; but Julius the
second authenticating the miracle at the mass of Bolsena, or borne into
the temple, rather to authorize than to witness the punishment inflicted
on its spoiler; Leo with his train calmly facing Attila, or deciding on
his tribunal the fate of the captive Saracens, tell us by their presence
that they are the heroes of the drama, that the action has been contrived
for them, is subordinate to them, and has been composed to illustrate
their character. For as in the epic, act and agent are subordinate to
the maxim, and in pure history are mere organs of the fact; so the drama
subordinates both fact and maxim to the agent, his character and passion:
what in them was end is but the medium here.
Such were the principles on which he treated the beautiful tale of Amor
and Psyche: the allegory of Apuleius became a drama under the hand
of Raphael, though it must be owned, that with every charm of scenic
gradation and lyric imagery, its characters, as exquisitely chosen as
acutely discriminated, exhibit less the obstacles and real object of
affection, and its final triumph over mere appetite and sexual instinct,
than the voluptuous history of his own favourite passion. The faint light
of the maxim vanishes in the splendour which expands before our fancy
the enchanted circle of wanton dalliance and amorous attachment.