proof of the inefficacy to represent the enthusiasm of sentiment by the
efforts of art. The figures have simplicity, the expression energy,
it is well composed, in short, it possesses every requisite but that
which alone could make it what it pretends to be:—you see an elderly
man on his death-bed; a physician, pensive, with his hand on the man’s
breast, his wife and daughter desolate at the foot of the bed; one, who
resembles a notary, eagerly writing; a buckler and a lance on the wall;
and the simple implements of the scene, tell us the former occupation
and the circumstances of Eudamidas—but his legacy—the secure reliance on
the friend to whom he bequeaths his daughter—the noble acceptance and
magnanimity of that friend, these we ought to see, and seek in vain for
them; what is represented in the picture may be as well applied to any
other man who died, made a will, and left a daughter and a wife, as to
the Corinthian Eudamidas.
This is not the only instance in which Poussin has mistaken erudition and
detail of circumstances for evidence. The exposition of Infant Moses on
the Nile, is a picture as much celebrated as the former: a woman shoves
a child placed in a basket from the shore. A man mournfully pensive
walks off followed by a boy who turns towards the woman and connects
the groups; a girl in the back-ground, points to a distance, where we
discover the Egyptian princess, and thus anticipate the fate of the
child. The statue of a river god recumbent on the sphinx, a town with
lofty temples, pyramids and obelisks tell Memphis and the Nile; and
smoaking brick-kilns still nearer allude to the servitude and toil of
Israel in Egypt: not one circumstance is omitted that could contribute to
explain the meaning of the whole; but the repulsive subject completely
baffled the painter’s endeavour to shew the _real_ motive of the action.
We cannot penetrate the _cause_ that forces these people to expose the
child on the river, and hence our sympathy and participation languish,
we turn from a subject that gives us danger without fear, to admire the
expression of the parts, the classic elegance, the harmony of colours,
the mastery of execution.
* * * * *
The importance of some secondary points of invention, of scenery,
back-ground, drapery, ornament, is frequently such, that, independent
of the want of more essential parts, if possessed in a very eminent
degree, they have singly raised from insignificance to esteem, names
that had few other rights to consideration; and neglected, in spite of
superiour comprehension, in the choice or conception of a subject, in
defiance of style and perhaps of colour, of expression, and sometimes
composition, often have left little but apathy to the contemplation of
works produced by men of superiour grasp and essential excellence. Fewer
would admire Poussin were he deprived of his scenery, though I shall
not assert with Mengs, that in his works the subject is more frequently
the appendix than the principle of the back-ground; what right could
the greater part of Andrea del Sarto’s historic compositions claim to
our attention, if deprived of the parallelism, the repose and space
in which his figures are arranged, or the ample draperies that invest
them, and hide with solemn simplicity their vulgarity of character and
limbs: it often requires no inconsiderable degree of mental power and
technic discrimination to separate the sublimity of Michael Agnolo, and
the pathos of Raffaelle from the total neglect or the incongruities
of scenery and back-ground, which frequently involve or clog their
conceptions, to add by fancy the place on which their figures ought
to stand, the horizon that ought to elevate or surround them, and the
masses of light and shade indolently neglected or sacrificed to higher
principles. How deeply the importance of scenery and situation, with
their proper degree of finish, were felt by Tiziano, before and after
his emancipation from the shackles of Giov. Bellino, every work of his
during the course of nearly a centenary practice proves: to select two
from all, the Martyrdom of the Dominican Peter, that summary of his
accumulated powers, and the presentation of the Virgin, one of his first
historic essays, owe, if not all, their greatest effect, to scenery:
loftiness and solitude of site, assist the sublimity of the descending
vision to consecrate the actors beyond what their characters and style
of limbs could claim, and render the first an object of submissive
admiration, whilst its simple grandeur renders the second one of
cheerful and indulgent acquiescence; and reconciles us to a detail of
portrait-painting, and the impropriety of associating domestic and vulgar
imagery with a consecrated subject.
It is for these reasons that the importance of scenery and back-ground
has been so much insisted on by Reynolds; who frequently declared, that
whatever preparatory assistance he might admit in the draperies or other
parts of his figures, he always made it a point to keep the arrangement
of the scenery, the disposition and ultimate finish of the back-ground to
himself.
By the choice and scenery of the back-ground we are frequently enabled to
judge how far a painter entered into his subject, whether he understood
its nature, to what class it belonged, what impression it was capable
of making, what passion it was calculated to rouse: the sedate, the
solemn, the severe, the awful, the terrible, the sublime, the placid, the
solitary, the pleasing, the gay, are stamped by it. Sometimes it ought
to be negative, entirely subordinate, receding or shrinking into itself,
sometimes more positive, it acts, invigourates, assists the subject,
and claims attention; sometimes its forms, sometimes its colour ought to
command.—A subject in itself bordering on the usual or common, may become
sublime or pathetic by the back-ground alone, and a sublime or pathetic
one may become trivial and uninteresting by it: a female leaning her
head on her hand on a rock might easily suggest itself to any painter
of portrait, but the means of making this figure interesting to those
who are not concerned in the likeness, were not to be picked from the
mixtures of the palette, Reynolds found the secret in contrasting the
tranquillity and repose of the person by a tempestuous sea and a stormy
shore in the distance; and in another female contemplating a tremulous
sea by a placid moonlight, he connected elegance with sympathy and desire.
Whatever connects the individual with the elements, whether by abrupt or
imperceptible means, is an instrument of sublimity, as, whatever connects
it in the same manner with, or tears it from the species, may become an
organ of pathos: in this discrimination lies the rule by which our art,
to astonish or move, ought to choose the scenery of its subjects. It
is not by the accumulation of infernal or magic machinery, distinctly
seen, by the introduction of Hecate and a chorus of female dæmons and
witches, by surrounding him with successive apparitions at once, and a
range of shadows moving above or before him, that Macbeth can be made an
object of terrour,—to render him so you must place him on a ridge, his
down-dashed eye absorbed by the murky abyss; surround the horrid vision
with darkness, exclude its limits, and shear its light to glimpses.
This art of giving to the principal figure the command of the horizon,
is perhaps the only principle by which modern art might have gained
an advantage over that of the antients, and improved the dignity of
composition, had it been steadily pursued by its great restorers, the
painters of Julio II. and Leone X. though we find it more attended to in
the monumental imagery of the Capella Sistina, than in the Stanze and the
cartoons of Raffaello, which being oftener pathetic or intellectual than
sublime, suffered less by neglecting it.
The same principle which has developed in the cone, the form generally
most proper for composing a single figure or a group, contains the reason
why the principal figure or group should be the most elevated object of
a composition, and locally command the accidents of scenery and place.
The Apollo of Belvedere, singly or in a group, was surely not composed
to move at the bottom of a valley, nor the Zeus of Phidias to be covered
with a roof.
The improprieties attendant on the neglect of this principle are,
perhaps, in no work of eminence more offensively evident than in the
celebrated resuscitation of Lazarus by Sebastian del Piombo, whose
composition, if composition it deserve to be called, seems to have been
dictated by the back-ground. It usurps the first glance; it partly
buries, every where throngs, and in the most important place squeezes
the subject into a corner. The horizon is at the top, Jesus, Maria, and
Lazarus at the bottom of the scene. Though its plan and groups recede
in diminished forms, they advance in glaring opaque colour, nor can it
avail in excuse of the artist, to say that the multitude of figures
admitted are characters chosen to shew in different modes of expression
the effect of the miracle, whilst their number gives celebrity to it and
discriminates it from the obscure trick of a juggler: all this, if it had
been done, though perhaps it has not, for by far the greater part are not
spectators, might have been done with subordination: the most authentic
proof of the reality of the miracle ought to have beamed from the
countenance of Him who performed it, and of the restored man’s sister.—In
every work something must be first, something last; that is essential,
this optional; that is present by its own right, this by courtesy and
convenience.[84]
The rival picture of the resuscitation of Lazarus, the Transfiguration of
Christ by Raffaello, avoids the inconvenience of indiscriminate crowding,
and the impertinent _luxuriance_ of scenery which we have censured, by
the artifice of escaping from what is strictly called back-ground, and
excluding it altogether: the action on the fore-ground is the basis
and Christ the apex of the cone, and what they might have suffered
from diminution of size is compensated by elevation and splendour. In
sacrificing to this principle the rules of a perspective which he was so
well acquainted with, Raffaello succeeded to unite the beginning, the
middle, and the end of the event which he represented in one moment; he
escaped every atom of common-place or unnecessary embellishment, with a
simplicity and so artless an air, that few but the dull, the petulant,
and the pedant, can refuse him their assent, admiration and sympathy; if
he has not, strictly speaking, embodied possibility, he has perhaps done
more, he has done what Homer did, by hiding the unmanageable but less
essential part of his materials, he has transformed it to probability.
I have said that by the choice of scenery alone, we may often, if not
always, judge how far an artist has penetrated his subject, what emotion
in treating it he meant to excite. No subjects can elucidate this with
so much perspicuity, as those generally distinguished by the name of
Madonnas: subjects stamped with a mystery of religion, and originally
contrived under the bland images of maternal fondness to subdue the
heart. In examining the considerable number of those by Raffaello, we
find generally some reciprocal feature of filial and parental love,
‘the charities of father, son, and mother,’ sometimes varied by infant
play and female caresses, sometimes dignified by celestial ministry and
homage; the endearments of the nursery selected and embodied by forms
more charming than exalted, less beautiful than genial—accordingly the
choice of scenery consists seldom in more than a pleasing accompaniment:
the flower and the shrub, the rivulet and grove, enamel the seat or
embower the repose of the sacred pilgrims under the serenity of a placid
sky, expanded or breaking through trees, or sheltering rains; whilst in
those surrounded by domestic scenery, a warm recess veils the mother,
now hiding her darling from profane aspect, now pressing him to her
bosom, or contemplating in silent rapture his charms displayed on her
lap—accompaniments and actions, though appropriate, without allusion
to the mysterious personages they profess to exhibit—to discriminate
them the chair, the window, the saddle on which Joseph sits in one, the
flowers which he kneeling presents in another, the cradle, the bath, are
called on. Raffaello was less penetrated by a devout than by an amorous
principle; his design was less to stamp maternal affection with the seal
of religion than to consecrate the face he adored; his Holy Families,
with one exception, are the apotheosis of his Fornarina.
This exception, as it proves what had been advanced of the rest, so it
proves, likewise, that the omission of its beauties in them was more a
matter of choice than want of comprehension. Than the face and attitude
of the Madonna of Versailles, known from a print by Edelinck, copied
by Giac. Frey, nature and art combined never offered to the sense and
heart a more exalted sentiment, or more correspondent forms. The face
still, indeed, offers his favourite lines, lines not of supreme beauty,
but they have assumed a sanctity which is in vain looked for in all its
sister faces; serious without severity, pure without insipidity, humble
though majestic, charming and modest at once, and without affectation
graceful; face and figure unite what we can conceive of maternal beauty,
equally poised between effusion of affection and the mysterious sentiment
of superiority in the awful Infant, whom she bends to receive from his
slumbers.
The bland imagery of Raffaello was exalted to a type of devotion by M.
Angelo, and place and scenery are adjusted with allegoric or prophetic
ornament: thus in the picture painted for Angelo Doni, where the
enraptured mother receives the Infant from the hands of Joseph, the scene
behind exhibits the new sacrament in varied groups of Baptists, immersing
themselves or issuing from the fount. In another, representing the
annunciation, we discover in the awful twilight of a recess, the figure
of Moses breaking the tables he received on Sinai, an allusion to the
abolition of the old law—an infringement of Jewish habits, for the figure
is not an apparition, but a statue, readily forgiven to its allegoric
beauty. Even in those subjects relating to Christ and his family, where
the back-ground is destitute of allusive ornament, it appears the seat
of meditation or virgin purity, and consecrates the sentiment or action
of the figures, as in the salutation of St. Giovanni in Laterano, and in
that where Maria contemplates her son spread in her lap, and seems to
bend under the presentiment of the terrible moment which shall spread
him at her feet, under the cross; but in that monumental image of Jesus
expired on the cross, with the Madonna and John on each side, what is the
scenery but the echo of the subject? The surrounding element sympathises
with the woe of the sufferers in the two mourning Genii emerging from
the air—a sublime conception, which Vasari fancied to have successfully
imitated and perhaps improved, when in a repetition of the same subject,
he travestied them to Phœbus and Diana extinguishing their orbs, as
symbols of sun and moon eclipsed.[85]
What has been said of the luxuriance of Poussin’s scenery, leads to that
intemperate abuse which allots it a greater space, a more conspicuous
situation, a higher finish and effect than the importance of the subject
itself permits—by which, unity is destroyed, and it becomes doubtful
to what class a work belongs, whether it be a mixture of two or more,
or all, where portrait with architecture, landscape with history, for
‘mastery striving, each rules a moment.’ It cannot be denied that some
of the noblest works of art are liable to this imputation, and that the
fond admiration of the detailed beauties in the scenery of the Pietro
Martire of Titian, if it does not detract from the main purpose for
which the picture was or ought to have been painted, certainly adds
nothing to its real interest—nature finishes all, but an attempt to mimic
nature’s universality palsies the hand of art; the celebrated ‘Cene,’ or
Supper-Scenes of Paolo Cagliari can escape this imputation only by being
classed as models of ornamental painting; and were it not known, that
notwithstanding their grandeur propriety, and pathos of composition,
the Cartoons of Raffaello had been originally destined, still more for
popular amusement, than the poised admiration of select judges, it would
be difficult to excuse or to account for the exuberance, not seldom
the impropriety of accompaniment and of scenery, with which some of
them are loaded: in the Cartoon of the miraculous draught of fishes,
perhaps Giovanni d’ Udine would not have been allowed to treat us with
fac-similes of the herons of the lake on its fore-ground; in that of Paul
on the Areopagus, there would probably have been less agglomeration of
finished, unfinished, or half-demolished buildings; in the miracle of
Peter and John, the principal agents would scarcely have been hemmed in
by a barbaric colonnade, loaded with profane ornament; or in the Massacre
of the Infants, the humble cottages of Bethlehem been transformed to
piles of Ionian architecture, girt with gods in inter-columnar niches,
and the metropolitan pomp of Rome.
FIFTH LECTURE.
COMPOSITION, EXPRESSION.
ΠΟΛΛΑ Δ’ ΕΝ
ΚΑΡΔΙΑΙΣ ΑΝΔΡΩΝ ΕΒΑΛΟΝ
ὩΡΑΙ ΠΟΛΥΑΝΘΕΜΟΙ ΑΡΧΑΙΑ
ΣΟΦΙΣΜΑΘ’. ἉΠΑΝ Δ’ ΕΥΡΟΝΤΟΣ ΕΡΓΟΝ.
ΠΙΝΔΑΡ. ΟΛΥΜΠ. Π.
ARGUMENT.
Elements of Composition; Grouping; M. Agnolo; Correggio; Raffaello;
Breadth;—Expression; its Classes, its Limits.
FIFTH LECTURE.
Invention is followed by Composition. Composition, in its stricter sense,
is the dresser of Invention, it superintends the disposition of its
materials.
Composition has physical and moral elements: those are Perspective and
Light with shade; these, Unity, Propriety and Perspicuity; without Unity
it cannot span its subject; without Propriety it cannot tell the story;
without Perspicuity it clouds the fact with confusion; destitute of light
and shade it misses the effect, and heedless of perspective it cannot
find a place.
Composition, like all other parts of style, had a gradual progress;
it began in monotony and apposition, emerged to centre and depth,
established itself on harmony and masses, was debauched by contrast and
by grouping, and finally supplanted by machinery, common-place, and
manner.
Of sculpture as infant painting had borrowed its first theory of forms,
so it probably borrowed its method of arranging them; and this is
Apposition, a collateral arrangement of figures necessary for telling a
single or the scattered moments of a fact. If statuary indulged in the
combination of numerous groups, such as those of the Niobe, it might
dispose them in composition, it might fix a centre and its rays, and
so produce an illusion as far as colourless form is capable of giving
it. But sculpture, when it was first consulted by painting, was not yet
arrived at that period which allowed the display of such magnificence;
a single figure or a single group could not sufficiently inform the
painter; he was reduced to consult bassorelievo, and of that Apposition
is the element.
And in this light we ought to contemplate a great part of the Capella
Sistina. Its plan was monumental, and some of its compartments were
allotted to Apposition, not because M. Agnolo was a sculptor, but
because it was a more comprehensive medium to exhibit his general plan
than the narrower scale of composition. He admitted and like a master
treated composition, whenever his subject from the primeval simplicity
of elemental nature retreated within the closer bounds of society:
his Patriarchs, his Prophets and his Sibyls, singly considered or as
groups, the scenery of the Brazen Serpent, of David and of Judith, of
Noah and his sons, are models of the roundest and grandest composition.
What principle of composition do we miss in the creation of Adam and of
Eve? Can it grasp with more unity, characterise with more propriety,
present with brighter perspicuity, give greater truth of place or round
with more effect? If collateral arrangement be the ruling plan of the
Last Judgment, if point of sight and linear and aërial perspective in
what is elevated, comes forward or recedes, if artificial masses and
ostentatious roundness, on the whole, be absorbed by design or sacrificed
to higher principles, what effects has the greatest power of machinery
ever contrived to emulate the conglobation of those struggling groups
where light and shade administered to terrour or sublimity? What, to
emulate the boat of Charon disemboguing its crew of criminals, flung in
a murky mass of shade across the pallid concave and bleak blast of light
that blows it on us? A meteor in the realms of chiaroscuro which obscures
whatever the most daring servants of that power elsewhere produced.
If the plan of M. Agnolo must be estimated by other principles, his
process must be settled by other rules than the plan and process of
Correggio at Parma. Though the first and greatest, Correggio was no
more than a Machinist. It was less the Assumption of the Virgin, less
a monument of triumphant Religion he meditated to exhibit by sublimity
of conception or characteristic composition, than by the ultimate
powers of linear and aërial perspective at an elevation which demanded
eccentric and violent foreshortening, set off and tuned by magic light
and shade, to embody the medium in which the actors were to move; and
to the splendour and loftiness of that he accommodated the subject and
subordinated the agents. Hence his work, though moving in a flood of
harmony, is not legitimate Composition. The synod that surrounds the
glory, the glory itself that embosoms the Virgin and her angelic choir,
Christ who precipitates himself to meet the glory, are equally absorbed
in the _bravura_ of the vehicle, they radiate reflect and mass, but shew
us little more than limbs. This makes the cupola of Correggio less epic
or dramatic than ornamental. The technic part of Composition alone,
though carried to the highest pitch of perfection, if its ostentation
absorb the subject, stamps inferiority on the master. Take away Homer’s
language, and you take much, but you leave the epic poet unimpaired; take
it from Virgil, strip him of the majesty, the glow, the propriety of his
diction, and the remainder of his claim to epic poetry will nearly be
reduced to what he borrowed from Homer’s plan. What is it we remember
when we leave the cupolas of Correggio, what when we leave the chapel of
Sixtus? There, a man who transferred to a colossal scale the dictates
of his draped or naked model, applied them with a comprehensive eye and
set them off by magic light and shade and wide expanded harmony of tone;
here an epic plan combined and told in simple modes of grandeur. Each man
gave what he had, Correggio limbs and effect, M. Agnolo being, form and
meaning. If the cupola of Correggio be in its kind, unequalled by earlier
or succeeding plans, if it leave far behind the effusions of Lanfranchi
and Pietro da Cortona, it was not the less their model; the ornamental
style of machinists dates not the less its origin from him.