doctrine useful to mankind in the _whole_ of an epic performance,
admitted, are we therefore to sacrifice the uniformity of its parts,
and thus to lose that credibility which _alone_ can impress us with the
importance of the maxim that dictated to the poet narration and to the
artist imagery? Are the agents sometimes to be real beings, and sometimes
abstract ideas? Is the Zeus of Homer, of whose almighty will the bard,
at the very threshold of his poem, proclaims himself only the herald,
by the purblind acuteness of a commentator, to be turned into Æther;
and Juno, just arriving from her celestial toilet, changed into air, to
procure from their mystic embraces the allegoric offspring of vernal
impregnation? When Minerva, by her weight, makes the chariot of Diomede
groan, and Mars wounded, roars with the voice of ten thousand, are they
nothing but the symbol of military discipline, and the sound of the
battle’s roar? or Ate, seized by her hair, and by Zeus dashed from the
battlements of heaven, is she only a metaphysic idea? Forbid it, Sense!
As well might we say, that Milton, when he called the porteress of hell,
Satan’s daughter, _Sin_, and his son and dread antagonist, _Death_, meant
only to impress us with ideas of privation and nonentity, and sacrificed
the real agents of his poem to an unskilful choice of names? Yet it
is their name that has bewildered his commentator and biographer in
criticisms equally cold, repugnant and incongruous, on the admissibility
and inadmissibility of allegory in poems of supposed reality. What
becomes of the interest the poet and the artist mean to excite in us, if,
in the moment of reading or contemplating, we do not believe what the one
tells and the other shews? It is that magic which places on the same
basis of existence, and amalgamates the mythic or superhuman, and the
human parts of the Ilias, of Paradise Lost, and of the Sistine chapel,
that enraptures, agitates, and whirls us along as readers or spectators.
When Poussin represented Coriolanus in the Volscian camp, he placed
before him in suppliant attitudes his mother, wife, and children, with a
train of Roman matrons kneeling, and behind them the erect and frowning
form of an armed female, accompanied by another with streaming hair,
recumbent on a wheel. On these two, unseen to all else, Coriolanus,
perplexed in the extreme, in an attitude of despair, his sword half
drawn, as if to slay himself, fixes his scared eyes: who discovers
not that he is in a trance, and in the female warriour recognises the
tutelary genius of Rome, and her attendant Fortune, to terrify him into
compliance? Shall we disgrace with the frigid conceit of an allegory the
powerful invention which disclosed to the painter’s eye the agitation in
the Roman’s breast and the proper moment for fiction? Who is not struck
by the sublimity of a vision which, without diminishing the credibility
of the fact, adds to its importance, and raises the hero, by making him
submit not to the impulse of private ties, but to the imperious destiny
of his country?
Among the paltry subterfuges contrived by dullness to palliate the want
of invention, the laborious pedantry of emblems ranks foremost, by which
arbitrary and conventional signs have been substituted for character and
expression. If the assertion of S. Johnson, that the plastic arts ‘can
illustrate, but cannot inform,’ be false as a general maxim, it gains
an air of truth with regard to this hieroglyphic mode of exchanging
substance for signs; and the story which he adds in proof, of a young
girl’s mistaking the usual figure of Justice with a steel-yard for a
cherry-woman, becomes here appropriate. The child had seen many stall
and market-women, and always with a steel-yard or a pair of scales, but
never a figure of Justice; and it might as well be pretended that one not
initiated in the Egyptian mysteries, should discover in the Scarabæus of
an obelisk the summer solstice, as that a child, a girl, or a man not
acquainted with Cæsar Ripa, or some other emblem-coyner, should find in a
female holding a balance over her eyes, in another with a bridle in her
hand, in a third leaning on a broken pillar, and in a fourth loaded with
children, the symbols of Justice, Temperance, Fortitude and Charity. If
these signs be at all admissible, they ought, at least, to receive as
much light from the form, the character, and expression of the figures
they accompany, as they reflect on them, else they become burlesque,
instead of being attributes. Though this rage for emblem did not become
epidemic before the lapse of the sixteenth century, when the Cavalieri of
the art, the Zucchari, Vasari and Porta’s undertook to deliver more work
than their brains could furnish with thought, yet even the philosophers
of the art, in the classic days of Julio and Leo, cannot be said to have
been entirely free from it. What analogy is there between an ostrich at
the side of a female with a balance in her hand, and the idea of Justice?
Yet thus has Raphael represented her in a stanza of the Vatican. Nor has
he been constant to the same emblem, as on the ceiling of another stanza,
he has introduced her with a scale, and armed with a sword. The _Night_
of M. Agnolo, on the Medicean tombs, might certainly be taken for what
she professes to be, without the assistance of the mask, the poppies,
and the owl at her feet, for the dominion of sleep is personified in
her expression and posture: perhaps even her beautiful companion, whose
faintly stretching attitude and half-opened eyes, express the symptoms
of approaching _morn_, might be conceived for its representative[80];
but no stretch of fancy can, in their male associates, reach the symbols
of _full day_ and _eve_, or in the females of the monument of Julio II.
the ideas of _contemplative_ and _active life_.
To means so arbitrary, confused and precarious, the ancients never
descended: their general ideas had an uniform and general typus, which
invention never presumed to alter or to transgress; but this typus lay
less in the attributes than in the character and form. The inverted
torch and moon-flower were the accompaniments, and not the substitutes,
of _Death_ and _Sleep_; neither _Psyche_ nor _Victory_ depended on her
wings. Mercury was recognized without the caduceus or purse, and Apollo
without his bow or lyre; various and similar, the branches of one family,
their leading lines descended from that full type of majesty which
Phidias, the architect of gods, had stamped on his Jupiter. Whether we
ought to consider the son of Charmidas as the inventor or the regulator
of this supreme and irremovable standard, matters not, from _him_ the
ancient writers date the epoch of mythic invention; no revolutions of
style changed the character of his forms, talent only polished with more
or less success what his laws had established. Phidias, says Quintilian,
was framed to form gods; Phidias, says Pliny, gave in his Jupiter a new
motive to religion.
Whether or not, after the restoration of art, the Supreme Being, the
eternal essence of incomprehensible perfection, ought ever to have been
approached by the feeble efforts of human conception, it is not my office
to discuss, perhaps it ought not—but since it has, as the Roman church
has embodied divine substance, and called on our arts for an auxiliary,
it was to be expected that, to make assistance effectual, a full type,
a supreme standard of form, should have been established for the author
and the agents of the sacred circle: but, be it from the tyranny of
religious barbarians, or inability, or to avoid the imputation of copying
each other, painters and sculptors, widely differing among themselves
in the conception of divine or sainted form and character, agree in
nothing but attributes and symbols: triangular glories, angelic ministry
and minstrelsy, the colours of the drapery; the cross, the spear, the
stigmata; the descending dove; in implements of ecclesiastic power or
instruments of martyrdom.
The Biblic expression, as it is translated, ‘of the Ancient of
Days’—which means ‘He that existed before time,’ furnished the primitive
artists, instead of an image of supreme majesty, only with the hoary
image of age: and such a figure borne along by a globe of angels, and
crowned with a kind of episcopal mitre, recurs on the bronzes of Lorenzo
Ghiberti. The sublime mind of M. Agnolo, soaring beyond the idea of
decrepitude and puny formality, strove to form a type in the elemental
energy of the Creator of Adam, and darted life from His extended hand,
but in the Creator of Eve sunk again to the idea of age. Raphael strove
to compound a form from M. Angelo and his predecessors, to combine energy
and rapidity with age: in the Loggia he follows M. Agnolo, in the Stanza
the prior artists; here his gods are affable and mild, there rapid, and
perhaps more violent than energetic. After these two great names, it were
profanation to name the attempts of their successors.
The same fluctuation perplexes the effigy of the Saviour. Lionardo da
Vinci attempted to unite power with calm serenity, but in the Last Supper
alone presses on our hearts by humanity of countenance. The Infant Christ
of M. Agnolo is a superhuman conception, but as Man and Redeemer with his
cross, in the Minerva, he is a figure as mannered in form and attitude,
as averting by stern severity; and, as the Judge of Mankind in the Last
Judgment, he seems to me as unworthy of the artist’s mind as of his
master-hand. The Christs of Raphael, as infants, are seldom more than
lovely children; as a man, the painter has poised His form between church
tradition and the dignified mildness of his own character.
Two extremes appear to have co-operated to impede the establishment of
a type in the formation of the Saviour: by one He is converted into a
character of mythology, the other debases Him to the dregs of mankind.
‘The character corresponding with that of Christ,’ says Mengs[81], ‘ought
to be a compound of the characters of Jupiter and of Apollo, allowing
only for the accidental expression of the moment.’ What magic shall
amalgamate the superhuman airs of Rhea’s and Latona’s sons, with patience
in suffering and resignation? The critic in his exultation forgot the
leading feature of his Master—condescending humility. In the race of
Jupiter majesty is often tempered by emanations of beauty and of grace,
but never softened to warm humanity. Here lies the knot:
The Saviour of mankind extending his arm to relieve, without visible
means, the afflicted, the hopeless, the dying, the dead, is a subject
that visits with awe the breast of every one who calls himself after His
name; the artist is in the sphere of adoration.
An exalted sage descending to every beneficent office of humanity,
instructing ignorance, not only forgiving but excusing outrage, pressing
his enemy to his breast, commands the sympathy of every man, though he be
no believer; the artist is in the sphere of sentiment.
But a mean man, marked with the features of a mean race, surrounded by
a beggarly, ill-shaped rabble and stupid crowds—may be mistaken for a
juggler, that claims the attention of no man. Of this let Art beware.
From these observations on positive we now proceed to the class of
_negative_ subjects. Negative we call those which in themselves possess
little that is significant, historically true or attractive, pathetic or
sublime, which leave our heart and fancy listless and in apathy, though
by the art with which they are executed they allure and retain the eye:
here, if ever, the artist creates his own work, in raising, by ingenious
combination, that to a positive subject which in its parts is none, or
merely passive.
The first rank among these claims that mystic class of monumental
pictures, allusive to mysteries of religion and religious institutions,
asylums, charities; or votive pictures of those who dedicate offerings
of gratitude for life saved or happiness conferred: in these the male
and female patrons of such creeds, societies and persons, prophets,
apostles, saints, warriours and doctors, with and without the donor or
the suppliant, combine in apposition or groups, and are suffered to flank
each other without incurring the indignation due to Anachronism, as they
are always placed in the presence of the Divine Being, before whom the
distance of epochs, place, and races; the customs, dress, and habits of
different nations, are supposed to vanish; and the present, past, and
future to exist in the same moment.
These, which the simplicity of primitive art dismissed without more
invention than elevating the Madonna with the infant Saviour, and
arranging the saints and suppliants in formal parallels beneath, the
genius of greater masters often, though not always, transformed to organs
of sublimity, or connected in an assemblage of interesting and highly
pleasing groups, by inventing a congruous action or scenery, which spread
warmth over a subject that, simply considered, threatened to freeze the
beholder. Let us give an instance.
The Madonna, called Dell’ Impannato by Raphael, is one of these: it is so
called because he introduced, in the back-ground, the old Italian linen
or paper window. Maria is represented standing or raising herself to
offer the Infant to St. Elizabeth, who stretches out her arms to receive
him. Mary Magdalen behind, and bending over her, points to St. John, and
caresses the child; he with infantine joy escapes from her touch, and
looking at her, leaps up to his mother’s neck. St. John, as the principal
figure, is placed in the fore-ground on a leopard’s skin, and with
raised hand seems to prophesy of Christ; he appears to have eight or ten
years, Christ scarcely two. At this anachronism, or the much bolder one
committed in the admission of M. Magdalen, who was probably younger than
Christ, those only will be shocked who have not considered the nature of
a votive picture: this was dedicated to St. John, as the tutelary saint
of Florence, and before it was transferred to the Pitti Gallery, was the
altar-piece in a domestic chapel of the Medicean family.[82]
The greater part of this audience are acquainted, some are familiar
with the celebrated painting of Correggio, formerly treasured in the
Pilotta of Parma; transported to the Louvre and again replaced. In
the invention of this work, which exhibits St. Jerome, to whom it was
dedicated, presenting his translation of the Scriptures, by the hand of
an angel, to the infant seated in the lap of the Madonna, the patron
of the piece, is sacrificed in place to the female and angelic group
which occupies the middle. The figure that chiefly attracts, has, by
its suavity, for centuries, attracted, and still absorbs the general
eye, is that charming one of the Magdalen, in a half kneeling, half
recumbent posture, pressing the foot of Jesus to her lips. By doing
this, the painter has, undoubtedly, offered to the Graces the boldest
and most enamoured sacrifice which they ever received from art. He has
been rewarded, accordingly, for the impropriety of her usurping the first
glance which ought to fix itself on the Divinity, and the Saint vanishes
in the amorous gaze on her charms. If the Magdalen has long possessed the
right of being present where the Madonna presides, she ought to assist
the purpose of the picture in subordinate entreaty; her action should
have been that of supplication; as it is, it is the effusion of fondling,
unmixed love.
The true medium between dry apposition and exuberant contrast, appears to
have been kept by Titian, in an altar-piece of the Franciscans, or Frari,
in spite of French selection, still at Venice; and of which the simple
grandeur has been balanced by Reynolds against the artificial splendour
of Rubens in a similar subject. It probably was what it represents, the
thanks-offering of a noble family, for some victory obtained, or conquest
made in the Morea. The heads of the family, male and female, presented
by St. Francis, occupy the two wings of the composition, kneeling, and
with hands joined in prayer, in attitudes nearly parallel. Elevated in
the centre, St. Peter stands at the altar, between two columns, his hand
in the Gospel-book, the keys before him, addressing the suppliants.
Above him, to the right, appears the Madonna, holding the infant, and
with benign countenance, seems to sanction the ceremony. Two stripling
cherubs on an airy cloud, right over the centre, rear the cross; an armed
warriour with the standard of victory, and behind him a turbaned Turk or
Moor, approach from the left and round the whole.
Such is the invention of a work, which, whilst it fills the mind, refuses
utterance to words; of which it is difficult to say, whether it subdue
more by simplicity, command by dignity, persuade by propriety, assuage by
repose, or charm by contrast. A great part of these groups consists of
portraits in habiliments of the time, deep, vivid, brilliant; but all are
completely subject to the tone of gravity that emanates from the centre,
a sacred silence enwraps the whole; all gleams and nothing flashes.
Steady to his purpose, and penetrated by his motive, though brooding over
every part of his work, the artist appears no where.[83]
Next to this higher class of negative subjects, though much lower, may
be placed the magnificence of ornamental painting, the pompous machinery
of Paolo Veronese, Pietro da Cortona, and Rubens. Splendour, contrast,
and profusion, are the springs of its invention. The painter, not the
story, is the principal subject here. Dazzled by piles of Palladian
architecture, tables set out with regal luxury, terrasses of plate,
crowds of Venetian nobles, pages, dwarfs, gold-collared Moors, and choirs
of vocal and instrumental music, embrowned and tuned by meridian skies,
what eye has time to discover, in the brilliant chaos, the visit of
Christ to Simon the Pharisee, or the sober nuptials of Canah? but when
the charm dissolves, though avowedly wonders of disposition, colour, and
unlimited powers of all-grasping execution, if considered in any other
light than as the luxurious trappings of ostentatious wealth, judgment
must pronounce them ominous pledges of irreclaimable depravity of taste,
glittering masses of portentous incongruities and colossal baubles.
The next place to representation of pomp among negative subjects, but far
below, we assign to Portrait. Not that characteristic portrait by which
Silanion, in the face of Apollodorus, personified habitual indignation;
Apelles in Alexander superhuman ambition; Raphael in Julio the IId.
pontifical fierceness; Titian in Paul IIId. testy age with priestly
subtlety; and in Machiavelli and Cæsar Borgia the wily features of
conspiracy and treason.—Not that portrait by which Rubens contrasted the
physiognomy of philosophic and classic acuteness with that of genius in
the conversation-piece of Grotius, Meursius, Lipsius, and himself; not
the nice and delicate discriminations of Vandyk, nor that power which,
in our days, substantiated humour in Sterne, comedy in Garrick, and
mental and corporeal strife, to use his own words, in Samuel Johnson. On
that broad basis, portrait takes its exalted place between history and
the drama. The portrait I mean is that common one as widely spread as
confined in its principle; the remembrancer of insignificance, mere human
resemblance, in attitude without action, features without meaning, dress
without drapery, and situation without propriety. The aim of the artist
and the sitter’s wish are confined to external likeness; that deeper,
nobler aim, the personification of character, is neither required, nor,
if obtained, recognised. The better artist, condemned to this task, can
here only distinguish himself from his duller brother by execution, by
invoking the assistance of back-ground, chiaroscuro and picturesque
effects, and thus, sometimes produces a work which delights the eye and
leaves us, whilst we lament the misapplication, with a strong impression
of his power; him we see, not the insignificant individual that usurps
the centre, one we never saw, care not if we never see, and if we do,
remember not, for his head can personify nothing but his opulence or his
pretence; it is furniture.
If any branch of art be once debased to a mere article of fashionable
furniture, it will seldom elevate itself above the taste and the caprice
of the owner, or the dictates of fashion; for its success depends on
both; and though there be not a bauble thrown by the sportive hand of
fashion which taste may not catch to advantage, it will seldom be allowed
to do it, if fashion dictate the mode. Since liberty and commerce have
more levelled the ranks of society, and more equally diffused opulence,
private importance has been increased, family connections and attachments
have been more numerously formed, and hence portrait painting, which
formerly was the exclusive property of princes, or a tribute to beauty,
prowess, genius, talent, and distinguished character, is now become a
kind of family calendar, engrossed by the mutual charities of parents,
children, brothers, nephews, cousins, and relatives of all colours.
To portrait painting, thus circumstanced, we subjoin, as the last branch
of uninteresting subjects, that kind of landscape which is entirely
occupied with the tame delineation of a given spot; an enumeration of
hill and dale, clumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and
houses, what is commonly called Views. These, if not assisted by nature,
dictated by taste, or chosen for character, may delight the owner
of the acres they enclose, the inhabitants of the spot, perhaps the
antiquary or the traveller, but to every other eye they are little more
than topography. The landscape of Titian, of Mola, of Salvator, of the
Poussins, Claude, Rubens, Elzheimer, Rembrandt and Wilson, spurns all
relation with this kind of mapwork. To them nature disclosed her bosom in
the varied light of rising, meridian, setting suns; in twilight, night
and dawn. Height, depth, solitude, strike, terrify, absorb, bewilder in
their scenery. We tread on classic or romantic ground, or wander through
the characteristic groups of rich congenial objects. The usual choice of
the Dutch school, which frequently exhibits no more than the transcript
of a spot, borders, indeed, nearer on the negative kind of landscape;
but imitation will not be entitled to the pleasure we receive, or the
admiration we bestow, on their genial works, till it has learnt to
give an air of choice to necessity, to imitate their hues, spread their
masses, and to rival the touch of their pencil.
Subjects which cannot, in their whole compass, be brought before the eye,
which appeal for the best part of their meaning, to the erudition of the
spectator, and the refinements of sentimental enthusiasm, seem equally
to defy the powers of invention. The labour of disentangling the former,
dissolves the momentary magic of the first impression, and leaves us
cold: the second evaporates under the grosser touch of sensual art. It
may be more than doubted whether the resignation of Alcestis can ever be
made intuitive; the pathos of the story consists in the heroic resolution
of Alcestis to save her husband’s life by resigning her own. Now the
art can shew no more than Alcestis dying: the cause of her death, her
elevation of mind, the disinterested heroism of her resolution to die,
are beyond its power.
Raffaelle’s celebrated donation of the keys to St. Peter in the cartoon
before us, as ineffectually struggles with more than the irremovable
obscurity, with the ambiguity of the subject: a numerous group of
grave and devout characters, in attitudes of anxious debate and eager
curiosity, press forward to witness the behests of a person who, with one
hand, seems to have consigned two massy keys to their foremost companion
on his knees, and with the other hand points to a flock of sheep,
grazing behind. What associating power can find the connexion between
those keys and the pasturing herd? or discover in an obtrusive allegory
the only real motive of the emotions that inspire the apostolic group?
the artist’s most determined admirer, if not the slave of pontifical
authority, ready to transubstantiate whatever comes before him, must
confine his homage to the power that interests us in a composition
without a subject.