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THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
JOHN RUSKIN
CROWN OF WILD OLIVE
TIME AND TIDE
QUEEN OF THE AIR
LECTURES ON ART AND LANDSCAPE
ARATRA PENTELICI
NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
NEW YORK CHICAGO
ARATRA PENTELICI.
SEVEN LECTURES
ON THE
ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE,
GIVEN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN MICHAELMAS TERM, 1870.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE v
LECTURE I.
OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS 1
LECTURE II.
IDOLATRY 20
LECTURE III.
IMAGINATION 39
LECTURE IV.
LIKENESS 67
LECTURE V.
STRUCTURE 90
LECTURE VI.
THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS 114
LECTURE VII.
THE RELATION BETWEEN MICHAEL ANGELO AND TINTORET 132
LIST OF PLATES
Facing Page
I. Porch of San Zenone, Verona 14
II. The Arethusa of Syracuse 15
III. The Warning to the Kings, San Zenone, Verona 15
IV. The Nativity of Athena 46
V. Tomb of the Doges Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepolo 49
VI. Archaic Athena of Athens and Corinth 50
VII. Archaic, Central and Declining Art of Greece 72
VIII. The Apollo of Syracuse, and the Self-made Man 84
IX. Apollo Chrysocomes of Clazomenae 85
X. Marble Masonry in the Duomo of Verona 100
XI. The First Elements of Sculpture. Incised outline
and opened space 101
XII. Branch of Phillyrea 109
XIII. Greek Flat relief, and sculpture by edged incision 111
XIV. Apollo and the Python. Heracles and the Nemean Lion 119
XV. Hera of Argos. Zeus of Syracuse 120
XVI. Demeter of Messene. Hera of Cnossus 121
XVII. Athena of Thurium. Siren Ligeia of Terina 121
XVIII. Artemis of Syracuse. Hera of Lacinian Cape 122
XIX. Zeus of Messene. Ajax of Opus 124
XX. Greek and Barbarian Sculpture 127
XXI. The Beginnings of Chivalry 129
PREFACE.
1. I must pray the readers of the following Lectures to remember that
the duty at present laid on me at Oxford is of an exceptionally complex
character. Directly, it is to awaken the interest of my pupils in a
study which they have hitherto found unattractive, and imagined to be
useless; but more imperatively, it is to define the principles by which
the study itself should be guided; and to vindicate their security
against the doubts with which frequent discussion has lately incumbered
a subject which all think themselves competent to discuss. The
possibility of such vindication is, of course, implied in the original
consent of the Universities to the establishment of Art Professorships.
Nothing can be made an element of education of which it is impossible to
determine whether it is ill done or well; and the clear assertion that
there is a canon law in formative Art is, at this time, a more important
function of each University than the instruction of its younger members
in any branch of practical skill. It matters comparatively little
whether few or many of our students learn to draw; but it matters much
that all who learn should be taught with accuracy. And the number who
may be justifiably advised to give any part of the time they spend at
college to the study of painting or sculpture ought to depend, and
finally _must_ depend, on their being certified that painting and
sculpture, no less than language, or than reasoning, have grammar and
method,--that they permit a recognizable distinction between scholarship
and ignorance, and enforce a constant distinction between Right and
Wrong.
2. This opening course of Lectures on Sculpture is therefore restricted
to the statement, not only of first principles, but of those which were
illustrated by the practice of one school, and by that practice in its
simplest branch, the analysis of which could be certified by easily
accessible examples, and aided by the indisputable evidence of
photography.[1]
The exclusion of the terminal Lecture[2] of the course from the series
now published, is in order to mark more definitely this limitation of my
subject; but in other respects the Lectures have been amplified in
arranging them for the press, and the portions of them trusted at the
time to extempore delivery (not through indolence, but because
explanations of detail are always most intelligible when most familiar)
have been in substance to the best of my power set down, and in what I
said too imperfectly, completed.
3. In one essential particular I have felt it necessary to write what I
would not have spoken. I had intended to make no reference, in my
University Lectures, to existing schools of Art, except in cases where
it might be necessary to point out some undervalued excellence. The
objects specified in the eleventh paragraph of my inaugural Lecture[3]
might, I hoped, have been accomplished without reference to any works
deserving of blame; but the Exhibition of the Royal Academy in the
present year showed me a necessity of departing from my original
intention. The task of impartial criticism[4] is now, unhappily, no
longer to rescue modest skill from neglect; but to withstand the errors
of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity.
The Exhibition of 1871 was very notable in this important particular,
that it embraced some representation of the modern schools of nearly
every country in Europe: and I am well assured that, looking back upon
it after the excitement of that singular interest has passed away, every
thoughtful judge of Art will confirm my assertion, that it contained not
a single picture of accomplished merit; while it contained many that
were disgraceful to Art, and some that were disgraceful to humanity.
4. It becomes, under such circumstances, my inevitable duty to speak of
the existing conditions of Art with plainness enough to guard the youths
whose judgments I am intrusted to form, from being misled, either by
their own naturally vivid interest in what represents, however
unworthily, the scenes and persons of their own day, or by the cunningly
devised, and, without doubt, powerful allurements of Art which has long
since confessed itself to have no other object than to allure. I have,
therefore, added to the second of these Lectures such illustration of
the motives and course of modern industry as naturally arose out of its
subject; and shall continue in future to make similar applications;
rarely indeed, permitting myself, in the Lectures actually read before
the University, to introduce, subjects of instant, and therefore too
exciting, interest; but completing the addresses which I prepare for
publication in these, and in any other, particulars, which may render
them more widely serviceable.
5. The present course of Lectures will be followed, if I am able to
fulfill the design of them, by one of a like elementary character on
Architecture; and that by a third series on Christian Sculpture: but, in
the meantime, my effort is to direct the attention of the resident
students to Natural History, and to the higher branches of ideal
Landscape: and it will be, I trust, accepted as sufficient reason for
the delay which has occurred in preparing the following sheets for the
press, that I have not only been interrupted by a dangerous illness, but
engaged, in what remained to me of the summer, in an endeavor to deduce,
from the overwhelming complexity of modern classification in the Natural
Sciences, some forms capable of easier reference by Art students, to
whom the anatomy of brutal and floral nature is often no less important
than that of the human body.
The preparation of examples for manual practice, and the arrangement of
standards for reference, both in Painting and Sculpture, had to be
carried on, meanwhile, as I was able. For what has already been done,
the reader is referred to the "Catalogue of the Educational Series,"
published at the end of the Spring Term: of what remains to be done I
will make no anticipatory statement, being content to have ascribed to
me rather the fault of narrowness in design, than of extravagance in
expectation.
DENMARK HILL,
_25th November, 1871._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Photography cannot exhibit the character of large and finished
sculpture; but its audacity of shadow is in perfect harmony with the
more roughly picturesque treatment necessary in coins. For the rendering
of all such frank relief, and for the better explanation of forms
disturbed by the luster of metal or polished stone, the method employed
in the plates of this volume will be found, I believe, satisfactory.
Casts are first taken from the coins, in white plaster; these are
photographed, and the photograph printed by the autotype process. Plate
XII. is exceptional, being a pure mezzotint engraving of the old school,
excellently carried through by my assistant, Mr. Allen, who was taught,
as a personal favor to myself, by my friend, and Turner's fellow-worker,
Thomas Lupton. Plate IV. was intended to be a photograph from the superb
vase in the British Museum, No. 564 in Mr. Newton's Catalogue; but its
variety of color defied photography, and after the sheets had gone to
press I was compelled to reduce Le Normand's plate of it, which is
unsatisfactory, but answers my immediate purpose.
The enlarged photographs for use in the Lecture Room were made for me
with most successful skill by Sergeant Spackman, of South Kensington;
and the help throughout rendered to me by Mr. Burgess is acknowledged in
the course of the Lectures; though with thanks which must remain
inadequate lest they should become tedious; for Mr. Burgess drew the
subjects of Plates III., X., and XIII.; and drew and engraved every
wood-cut in the book.
[2] It is included in this edition. See Lecture VII., pp. 132-158.
[3] Lectures on Art, 1870.
[4] A pamphlet by the Earl of Southesk, 'Britain's Art Paradise'
(Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh), contains an entirely admirable
criticism of the most faultful pictures of the 1871 Exhibition. It is to
be regretted that Lord Southesk speaks only to condemn; but indeed, in
my own three days' review of the rooms, I found nothing deserving of
notice otherwise, except Mr. Hook's always pleasant sketches from
fisher-life, and Mr. Pettie's graceful and powerful, though too slightly
painted, study from Henry IV.
ARATRA PENTELICI.
LECTURE I.
OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS.
_November, 1870._
1. If, as is commonly believed, the subject of study which it is my
special function to bring before you had no relation to the great
interests of mankind, I should have less courage in asking for your
attention to-day, than when I first addressed you; though, even then, I
did not do so without painful diffidence. For at this moment, even
supposing that in other places it were possible for men to pursue their
ordinary avocations undisturbed by indignation or pity,--here, at least,
in the midst of the deliberative and religious influences of England,
only one subject, I am well assured, can seriously occupy your
thoughts--the necessity, namely, of determining how it has come to pass
that, in these recent days, iniquity the most reckless and monstrous can
be committed unanimously, by men more generous than ever yet in the
world's history were deceived into deeds of cruelty; and that prolonged
agony of body and spirit, such as we should shrink from inflicting
willfully on a single criminal, has become the appointed and accepted
portion of unnumbered multitudes of innocent persons, inhabiting the
districts of the world which, of all others, as it seemed, were best
instructed in the laws of civilization, and most richly invested with
the honor, and indulged in the felicity, of peace.
Believe me, however, the subject of Art--instead of being foreign to
these deep questions of social duty and peril,--is so vitally connected
with them, that it would be impossible for me now to pursue the line of
thought in which I began these lectures, because so ghastly an emphasis
would be given to every sentence by the force of passing events. It is
well, then, that in the plan I have laid down for your study, we shall
now be led into the examination of technical details, or abstract
conditions of sentiment; so that the hours you spend with me may be
times of repose from heavier thoughts. But it chances strangely that, in
this course of minutely detailed study, I have first to set before you
the most essential piece of human workmanship, the plow, at the very
moment when--(you may see the announcement in the journals either of
yesterday or the day before)--the swords of your soldiers have been sent
for _to be sharpened_, and not at all to be beaten into plowshares. I
permit myself, therefore, to remind you of the watchword of all my
earnest writings--"Soldiers of the Plowshare, instead of Soldiers of the
Sword,"--and I know it my duty to assert to you that the work we enter
upon to-day is no trivial one, but full of solemn hope; the hope,
namely, that among you there may be found men wise enough to lead the
national passions towards the arts of peace, instead of the arts of war.
I say, the work "we enter upon," because the first four lectures I gave
in the spring were wholly prefatory; and the following three only
defined for you methods of practice. To-day we begin the systematic
analysis and progressive study of our subject.
2. In general, the three great, or fine, Arts of Painting, Sculpture,
and Architecture, are thought of as distinct from the lower and more
mechanical formative arts, such as carpentry or pottery. But we cannot,
either verbally, or with any practical advantage, admit such
classification. How are we to distinguish painting on canvas from
painting on china?--or painting on china from painting on glass?--or
painting on glass from infusion of color into any vitreous substance,
such as enamel?--or the infusion of color into glass and enamel from
the infusion of color into wool or silk, and weaving of pictures in
tapestry, or patterns in dress? You will find that although, in
ultimately accurate use of the word, painting must be held to mean only
the laying of a pigment on a surface with a soft instrument; yet, in
broad comparison of the functions of Art, we must conceive of one and
the same great artistic faculty, as governing _every mode of disposing
colors in a permanent relation on, or in, a solid substance_; whether it
be by tinting canvas, or dyeing stuffs; inlaying metals with fused
flint, or coating walls with colored stone.
3. Similarly, the word 'Sculpture,'--though in ultimate accuracy it is
to be limited to the development of form in hard substances by cutting
away portions of their mass--in broad definition, must be held to
signify _the reduction of any shapeless mass of solid matter into an
intended shape_, whatever the consistence of the substance, or nature of
the instrument employed; whether we carve a granite mountain, or a piece
of box-wood, and whether we use, for our forming instrument, ax, or
hammer, or chisel, or our own hands, or water to soften, or fire to
fuse;--whenever and however we bring a shapeless thing into shape, we do
so under the laws of the one great art of Sculpture.
4. Having thus broadly defined painting and sculpture, we shall see that
there is, in the third place, a class of work separated from both, in a
specific manner, and including a great group of arts which neither, of
necessity, _tint_, nor for the sake of form merely, _shape_ the
substances they deal with; but construct or arrange them with a view to
the resistance of some external force. We construct, for instance, a
table with a flat top, and some support of prop, or leg, proportioned in
strength to such weights as the table is intended to carry. We construct
a ship out of planks, or plates of iron, with reference to certain
forces of impact to be sustained, and of inertia to be overcome; or we
construct a wall or roof with distinct reference to forces of pressure
and oscillation, to be sustained or guarded against; and, therefore, in
every case, with especial consideration of the strength of our
materials, and the nature of that strength, elastic, tenacious, brittle,
and the like.
Now although this group of arts nearly always involves the putting of
two or more separate pieces together, we must not define it by that
accident. The blade of an oar is not less formed with reference to
external force than if it were made of many pieces; and the frame of a
boat, whether hollowed out of a tree-trunk, or constructed of planks
nailed together, is essentially the same piece of art; to be judged by
its buoyancy and capacity of progression. Still, from the most wonderful
piece of all architecture, the human skeleton, to this simple one,[5]
the plowshare, on which it depends for its subsistence, _the putting of
two or more pieces together_ is curiously necessary to the perfectness
of every fine instrument; and the peculiar mechanical work of
Daedalus,--inlaying,--becomes all the more delightful to us in external
aspect, because, as in the jawbone of a Saurian, or the wood of a bow,
it is essential to the finest capacities of tension and resistance.
5. And observe how unbroken the ascent from this, the simplest
architecture, to the loftiest. The placing of the timbers in a ship's
stem, and the laying of the stones in a bridge buttress, are similar in
art to the construction of the plowshare, differing in no essential
point, either in that they deal with other materials, or because, of the
three things produced, one has to divide earth by advancing through it,
another to divide water by advancing through it, and the third to divide
water which advances against it. And again, the buttress of a bridge
differs only from that of a cathedral in having less weight to sustain,
and more to resist. We can find no term in the gradation, from the
plowshare to the cathedral buttress, at which we can set a logical
distinction.
6. Thus then we have simply three divisions of Art--one, that of giving
colors to substance; another, that of giving form to it without question
of resistance to force; and the third, that of giving form or position
which will make it capable of such resistance. All the fine arts are
embraced under these three divisions. Do not think that it is only a
logical or scientific affectation to mass them together in this manner;
it is, on the contrary, of the first practical importance to understand
that the painter's faculty, or masterhood over color, being as subtle as
a musician's over sound, must be looked to for the government of every
operation in which color is employed; and that, in the same manner, the
appliance of any art whatsoever to minor objects cannot be right, unless
under the direction of a true master of that art. Under the present
system, you keep your Academician occupied only in producing tinted
pieces of canvas to be shown in frames, and smooth pieces of marble to
be placed in niches; while you expect your builder or constructor to
design colored patterns in stone and brick, and your china-ware merchant
to keep a separate body of workwomen who can paint china, but nothing
else. By this division of labor, you ruin all the arts at once. The work
of the Academician becomes mean and effeminate, because he is not used
to treat color on a grand scale and in rough materials; and your
manufactures become base, because no well-educated person sets hand to
them. And therefore it is necessary to understand, not merely as a
logical statement, but as a practical necessity, that wherever beautiful
color is to be arranged, you need a Master of Painting; and wherever
noble form is to be given, a Master of Sculpture; and wherever complex
mechanical force is to be resisted; a Master of Architecture.
7. But over this triple division there must rule another yet more
important. Any of these three arts may be either imitative of natural
objects or limited to useful appliance. You may either paint a picture
that represents a scene, or your street door, to keep it from rotting;
you may mold a statue, or a plate; build the resemblance of a cluster
of lotus stalks, or only a square pier. Generally speaking, Painting
and Sculpture will be imitative, and Architecture merely useful; but
there is a great deal of Sculpture--as this crystal ball,[6] for
instance, which is not imitative, and a great deal of architecture
which, to some extent, is so, as the so-called foils of Gothic
apertures; and for many other reasons you will find it necessary to keep
distinction clear in your minds between the arts--of whatever
kind--which are imitative, and produce a resemblance or image of
something which is not present; and those which are limited to the
production of some useful reality, as the blade of a knife, or the wall
of a house. You will perceive also, as we advance, that sculpture and
painting are indeed in this respect only one art; and that we shall have
constantly to speak and think of them as simply _graphic_, whether with
chisel or color, their principal function being to make us, in the words
of Aristotle, "[Greek: theoretikoi tou peri somata kallous]" (Polit. 8.
3), "having capacity and habit of contemplation of the beauty that is in
material things;" while architecture, and its correlative arts, are to
be practiced under quite other conditions of sentiment.
8. Now it is obvious that so far as the fine arts consist either in
imitation or mechanical construction, the right judgment of them must
depend on our knowledge of the things they imitate, and forces they
resist: and my function of teaching here would (for instance) so far
resolve itself, either into demonstration that this painting of a
peach[7] does resemble a peach, or explanation of the way in which this
plowshare (for instance) is shaped so as to throw the earth aside with
least force of thrust. And in both of these methods of study, though of
course your own diligence must be your chief master, to a certain extent
your Professor of Art can always guide you securely, and can show you,
either that the image does truly resemble what it attempts to resemble,
or that the structure is rightly prepared for the service it has to
perform. But there is yet another virtue of fine art which is, perhaps,
exactly that about which you will expect your Professor to teach you
most, and which, on the contrary, is exactly that about which you must
teach yourselves all that it is essential to learn.
[Illustration: FIG. 1]
9. I have here in my hand one of the simplest possible examples of the
union of the graphic and constructive powers,--one of my breakfast
plates. Since all the finely architectural arts, we said, began in the
shaping of the cup and the platter, we will begin, ourselves, with the
platter.
Why has it been made round? For two structural reasons: first, that the
greatest holding surface may be gathered into the smallest space; and
secondly, that in being pushed past other things on the table, it may
come into least contact with them.
Next, why has it a rim? For two other structural reasons: first, that
it is convenient to put salt or mustard upon; but secondly, and chiefly,
that the plate may be easily laid hold of. The rim is the simplest form
of continuous handle.
Farther, to keep it from soiling the cloth, it will be wise to put this
ridge beneath, round the bottom; for as the rim is the simplest possible
form of continuous handle, so this is the simplest form of continuous
leg. And we get the section given beneath the figure for the essential
one of a rightly made platter.
10. Thus far our art has been strictly utilitarian, having respect to
conditions of collision, of carriage, and of support. But now, on the
surface of our piece of pottery, here are various bands and spots of
color which are presumably set there to make it pleasanter to the eye.
Six of the spots, seen closely, you discover are intended to represent
flowers. These then have as distinctly a graphic purpose as the other
properties of the plate have an architectural one, and the first
critical question we have to ask about them is, whether they are like
roses or not. I will anticipate what I have to say in subsequent
Lectures so far as to assure you that, if they are to be like roses at
all, the liker they can be, the better. Do not suppose, as many people
will tell you, that because this is a common manufactured article, your
roses on it are the better for being ill-painted, or half-painted. If
they had been painted by the same hand that did this peach, the plate
would have been all the better for it; but, as it chanced, there was no
hand such as William Hunt's to paint them, and their graphic power is
not distinguished. In any case, however, that graphic power must have
been subordinate to their effect as pink spots, while the band of
green-blue round the plate's edge, and the spots of gold, pretend to no
graphic power at all, but are meaningless spaces of color or metal.
Still less have they any mechanical office: they add nowise to the
serviceableness of the plate; and their agreeableness, if they possess
any, depends, therefore, neither on any imitative, nor any structural,
character; but on some inherent pleasantness in themselves, either of
mere colors to the eye, (as of taste to the tongue,) or in the placing
of those colors in relations which obey some mental principle of order,
or physical principle of harmony.
11. These abstract relations and inherent pleasantnesses, whether in
space, number, or time, and whether of colors or sounds, form what we
may properly term the musical or harmonic element in every art; and the
study of them is an entirely separate science. It is the branch of
art-philosophy to which the word 'aesthetics' should be strictly limited,
being the inquiry into the nature of things that in themselves are
pleasant to the human senses or instincts, though they represent
nothing, and serve for nothing, their only service _being_ their
pleasantness. Thus it is the province of aesthetics to tell you, (if you
did not know it before,) that the taste and color of a peach are
pleasant, and to ascertain, if it be ascertainable, (and you have any
curiosity to know,) why they are so.
12. The information would, I presume, to most of you, be gratuitous. If
it were not, and you chanced to be in a sick state of body in which you
disliked peaches, it would be, for the time, to you false information,
and, so far as it was true of other people, to you useless. Nearly the
whole study of aesthetics is in like manner either gratuitous or useless.
Either you like the right things without being recommended to do so, or,
if you dislike them, your mind cannot be changed by lectures on the laws
of taste. You recollect the story of Thackeray, provoked, as he was
helping himself to strawberries, by a young coxcomb's telling him that
"he never took fruit or sweets." "That," replied, or is said to have
replied, Thackeray, "is because you are a sot, and a glutton." And the
whole science of aesthetics is, in the depth of it, expressed by one
passage of Goethe's in the end of the second part of Faust;--the notable
one that follows the song of the Lemures, when the angels enter to
dispute with the fiends for the soul of Faust. They enter
singing--"Pardon to sinners and life to the dust." Mephistopheles hears
them first, and exclaims to his troop, "Discord I hear, and filthy
jingling"--"Mis-toene hoere ich: garstiges Geklimper." This, you see, is
the extreme of bad taste in music. Presently the angelic host begin
strewing roses, which discomfits the diabolic crowd altogether.
Mephistopheles in vain calls to them--"What do you duck and shrink
for--is that proper hellish behavior? Stand fast, and let them
strew"--"Was duckt und zuckt ihr; ist das Hellen-brauch? So haltet
stand, und lasst sie streuen." There you have also, the extreme, of bad
taste in sight and smell. And in the whole passage is a brief embodiment
for you of the ultimate fact that all aesthetics depend on the health of
soul and body, and the proper exercise of both, not only through years,
but generations. Only by harmony of both collateral and successive lives
can the great doctrine of the Muses be received which enables men
"[Greek: chairein orthos],"--"to have pleasure rightly;" and there is no
other definition of the beautiful, nor of any subject of delight to the
aesthetic faculty, than that it is what one noble spirit has created,
seen and felt by another of similar or equal nobility. So much as there
is in you of ox, or of swine, perceives no beauty, and creates none:
what is human in you, in exact proportion to the perfectness of its
humanity, can create it, and receive.
13. Returning now to the very elementary form in which the appeal to our
aesthetic virtue is made in our breakfast-plate, you notice that there
are two distinct kinds of pleasantness attempted. One by hues of color;
the other by proportions of space. I have called these the musical
elements of the arts relating to sight; and there are indeed two
complete sciences, one of the combinations of color, and the other of
the combinations of line and form, which might each of them separately
engage us in as intricate study as that of the science of music. But of
the two, the science of color is, in the Greek sense, the more musical,
being one of the divisions of the Apolline power; and it is so
practically educational, that if we are not using the faculty for color
to discipline nations, they will infallibly use it themselves as a means
of corruption. Both music and color are naturally influences of peace;
but in the war trumpet, and the war shield, in the battle song and
battle standard, they have concentrated by beautiful imagination the
cruel passions of men; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia
of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from
the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote
themselves in the symbols of the shields of the Seven against Thebes,
colors have been the sign and stimulus of the most furious and fatal
passions that have rent the nations: blue against green, in the decline
of the Roman Empire; black against white, in that of Florence; red
against white, in the wars of the Royal houses in England; and at this
moment, red against white, in the contest of anarchy and loyalty, in all
the world.
14. On the other hand, the directly ethical influence of color in the
sky, the trees, flowers, and colored creatures round us, and in our own
various arts massed under the one name of painting, is so essential and
constant that we cease to recognize it, because we are never long enough
altogether deprived of it to feel our need; and the mental diseases
induced by the influence of corrupt color are as little suspected, or
traced to their true source, as the bodily weaknesses resulting from
atmospheric miasmata.
15. The second musical science which belongs peculiarly to sculpture,
(and to painting, so far as it represents form,) consists in the
disposition of beautiful masses. That is to say, beautiful surfaces
limited by beautiful lines. Beautiful _surfaces_, observe; and remember
what is noted in my Fourth Lecture of the difference between a space and
a mass. If you have at any time examined carefully, or practiced from,
the drawings of shells placed in your copying series, you cannot but
have felt the difference in the grace between the aspects of the same
line, when inclosing a rounded or unrounded space. The exact science of
sculpture is that of the relations between outline and the solid form it
limits; and it does not matter whether that relation be indicated by
drawing or carving, so long as the expression of solid form is the
mental purpose; it is the science always of the beauty of relation in
three dimensions. To take the simplest possible line of continuous
limit--the circle: the flat disk inclosed by it may indeed be made an
element of decoration, though a very meager one; but its relative mass,
the ball, being gradated in three dimensions, is always delightful.
Here[8] is at once the simplest, and, in mere patient mechanism, the
most skillful, piece of sculpture I can possibly show you,--a piece of
the purest rock-crystal, chiseled, (I believe, by mere toil of hand,)
into a perfect sphere. Imitating nothing, constructing nothing;
sculpture for sculpture's sake of purest natural substance into simplest
primary form.
16. Again. Out of the nacre of any mussel or oyster shell you might cut,
at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular disks of the
prettiest color and luster. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of shell
_is_ used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster becoming
itself an unwilling modeler, agglutinates its juice into three
dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically
gradated, together with the savage instinct of attributing value to what
is difficult to obtain, make the little boss so precious in men's sight,
that wise eagerness of search for the kingdom of heaven can be likened
to their eagerness of search for _it_; and the gates of Paradise can be
no otherwise rendered so fair to their poor intelligence, as by telling
them that every gate was of "one pearl."
17. But take note here. We have just seen that the sum of the perceptive
faculty is expressed in these words of Aristotle's, "to take pleasure
rightly" or straightly--[Greek: chairein orthos]. Now, it is not
possible to do the direct opposite of that,--to take pleasure
iniquitously or obliquely--[Greek: chairein adikos] or [Greek:
skolios],--more than you do in enjoying a thing because your neighbor
cannot get it. You may enjoy a thing legitimately because it is rare,
and cannot be seen often (as you do a fine aurora, or a sunset, or an
unusually lovely flower); that is Nature's way of stimulating your
attention. But if you enjoy it because your neighbor cannot have
it,--and, remember, all value attached to pearls more than glass beads,
is merely and purely for that cause,--then you rejoice through the worst
of idolatries, covetousness; and neither arithmetic, nor writing, nor
any other so-called essential of education, is now so vitally necessary
to the population of Europe, as such acquaintance with the principles of
intrinsic value, as may result in the iconoclasm of jewelry; and in the
clear understanding that we are not, in that instinct, civilized, but
yet remain wholly savage, so far as we care for display of this selfish
kind.
You think, perhaps, I am quitting my subject, and proceeding, as it is
too often with appearance of justice alleged against me, into irrelevant
matter. Pardon me; the end, not only of these Lectures, but of my whole
Professorship, would be accomplished,--and far more than that,--if only
the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is
indeed to be a joy forever, must be a joy for all; and that though the
idolatry may not have been wholly divine which sculptured gods, the
idolatry is wholly diabolic, which, for vulgar display, sculptures
diamonds.
18. To go back to the point under discussion. A pearl, or a glass bead,
may owe its pleasantness in some degree to its luster as well as to its
roundness. But a mere and simple ball of unpolished stone is enough for
sculpturesque value. You may have noticed that the quatrefoil used in
the Ducal Palace of Venice owes its complete loveliness in distant
effect to the finishing of its cusps. The extremity of the cusp is a
mere ball of Istrian marble; and consider how subtle the faculty of
sight must be, since it recognizes at any distance, and is gratified by,
the mystery of the termination of cusp obtained by the gradated light on
the ball.
In that Venetian tracery this simplest element of sculptured form is
used sparingly, as the most precious that can be employed to finish the
facade. But alike in our own, and the French, central Gothic, the
ball-flower is lavished on every line--and in your St. Mary's spire, and
the Salisbury spire, and the towers of Notre Dame of Paris, the rich
pleasantness of decoration,--indeed, their so-called 'decorative
style,'--consists only in being daintily beset with stone balls. It is
true the balls are modified into dim likeness of flowers; but do you
trace the resemblance to the rose in their distant, which is their
intended, effect?
19. But, farther, let the ball have motion; then the form it generates
will be that of a cylinder. You have, perhaps, thought that pure early
English architecture depended for its charm on visibility of
construction. It depends for its charm altogether on the abstract
harmony of groups of cylinders,[9] arbitrarily bent into moldings, and
arbitrarily associated as shafts, having no _real_ relation to
construction whatsoever, and a theoretical relation so subtle that none
of us had seen it till Professor Willis worked it out for us.
20. And now, proceeding to analysis of higher sculpture, you may have
observed the importance I have attached to the porch of San Zenone, at
Verona, by making it, among your standards, the first of the group which
is to illustrate the system of sculpture and architecture founded on
faith in a future life. That porch, fortunately represented in the
photograph, from which Plate I. has been engraved, under a clear and
pleasant light, furnishes you with examples of sculpture of every kind,
from the flattest incised bas-relief to solid statues, both in marble
and bronze. And the two points I have been pressing upon you are
conclusively exhibited here, namely,--(1) that sculpture is essentially
the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface; (2) that
the pleasantness of that bossy condition to the eye is irrespective of
imitation on one side, and of structure on the other.
[Illustration: I.
PORCH OF SAN ZENONE. VERONA.]
[Illustration: II.
THE ARETHUSA OF SYRACUSE.]
[Illustration: III.
THE WARNING TO THE KINGS
SAN ZENONE. VERONA.]
21. (1.) Sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness
or roundness of surface.
If you look from some distance at these two engravings of Greek coins,
(place the book open, so that you can see the opposite plate three or
four yards off,) you will find the relief on each of them simplifies
itself into a pearl-like portion of a sphere, with exquisitely gradated
light on its surface. When you look at them nearer, you will see that
each smaller portion into which they are divided--cheek, or brow, or
leaf, or tress of hair--resolves itself also into a rounded or undulated
surface, pleasant by gradation of light. Every several surface is
delightful in itself, as a shell, or a tuft of rounded moss, or the
bossy masses of distant forest would be. That these intricately
modulated masses present some resemblance to a girl's face, such as the
Syracusans imagined that of the water-goddess Arethusa, is entirely a
secondary matter; the primary condition is that the masses shall be
beautifully rounded, and disposed with due discretion and order.
22. (2.) It is difficult for you, at first, to feel this order and
beauty of surface, apart from the imitation. But you can see there is a
pretty disposition of, and relation between, the projections of a
fir-cone, though the studded spiral imitates nothing. Order exactly the
same in kind, only much more complex; and an abstract beauty of surface
rendered definite by increase and decline of light--(for every curve of
surface has its own luminous law, and the light and shade on a parabolic
solid differs, specifically, from that on an elliptical or spherical
one)--it is the essential business of the sculptor to obtain; as it is
the essential business of a painter to get good color, whether he
imitates anything or not. At a distance from the picture, or carving,
where the things represented become absolutely unintelligible, we must
yet be able to say, at a glance, "That is good painting, or good
carving."
And you will be surprised to find, when you try the experiment, how
much the eye must instinctively judge in this manner. Take the front of
San Zenone, for instance, Plate I. You will find it impossible, without
a lens, to distinguish in the bronze gates, and in great part of the
wall, anything that their bosses represent. You cannot tell whether the
sculpture is of men, animals, or trees; only you feel it to be composed
of pleasant projecting masses; you acknowledge that both gates and wall
are, somehow, delightfully roughened; and only afterwards, by slow
degrees, can you make out what this roughness means; nay, though here
(Plate III.) I magnify[10] one of the bronze plates of the gate to a
scale, which gives you the same advantage as if you saw it quite close,
in the reality,--you may still be obliged to me for the information that
_this_ boss represents the Madonna asleep in her little bed; and this
smaller boss, the Infant Christ in His; and this at the top, a cloud
with an angel coming out of it; and these jagged bosses, two of the
Three Kings, with their crowns on, looking up to the star, (which is
intelligible enough, I admit); but what this straggling, three-legged
boss beneath signifies, I suppose neither you nor I can tell, unless it
be the shepherd's dog, who has come suddenly upon the Kings with their
crowns on, and is greatly startled at them.
23. Farther, and much more definitely, the pleasantness of the surface
decoration is independent of structure; that is to say, of any
architectural requirement of stability. The greater part of the
sculpture here is exclusively ornamentation of a flat wall, or of
door-paneling; only a small portion of the church front is thus treated,
and the sculpture has no more to do with the form of the building than a
piece of lace veil would have, suspended beside its gates on a festal
day: the proportions of shaft and arch might be altered in a hundred
different ways without diminishing their stability; and the pillars
would stand more safely on the ground than on the backs of these carved
animals.
24. I wish you especially to notice these points, because the false
theory that ornamentation should be merely decorated structure is so
pretty and plausible, that it is likely to take away your attention from
the far more important abstract conditions of design. Structure should
never be contradicted, and in the best buildings it is pleasantly
exhibited and enforced: in this very porch the joints of every stone are
visible, and you will find me in the Fifth Lecture insisting on this
clearness of its anatomy as a merit; yet so independent is the
mechanical structure of the true design, that when I begin my Lectures
on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will
be one in which the structure is wholly concealed. It will be the
Baptistery of Florence, which is, in reality, as much a buttressed
chapel with a vaulted roof, as the Chapter House of York;--but round it,
in order to conceal that buttressed structure, (not to decorate,
observe, but to _conceal_,) a flat external wall is raised; simplifying
the whole to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge
ware, on the surface of which the eye and intellect are to be interested
by the relations of dimension and curve between pieces of incrusting
marble of different colors, which have no more to do with the real make
of the building than the diaper of a Harlequin's jacket has to do with
his bones.
25. The sense of abstract proportion, on which the enjoyment of such a
piece of art entirely depends, is one of the aesthetic faculties which
nothing can develop but time and education. It belongs only to highly
trained nations; and, among them, to their most strictly refined
classes, though the germs of it are found, as part of their innate
power, in every people capable of art. It has for the most part vanished
at present from the English mind, in consequence of our eager desire for
excitement, and for the kind of splendor that exhibits wealth, careless
of dignity; so that, I suppose, there are very few now even of our best
trained Londoners who know the difference between the design of
Whitehall and that of any modern club-house in Pall Mall. The order and
harmony which, in his enthusiastic account of the Theater of Epidaurus,
Pausanias insists on before beauty, can only be recognized by stern
order and harmony in our daily lives; and the perception of them is as
little to be compelled, or taught suddenly, as the laws of still finer
choice in the conception of dramatic incident which regulate poetic
sculpture.
26. And now, at last, I think, we can sketch out the subject before us
in a clear light. We have a structural art, divine and human, of which
the investigation comes under the general term Anatomy; whether the
junctions or joints be in mountains, or in branches of trees, or in
buildings, or in bones of animals. We have next a musical art, falling
into two distinct divisions--one using colors, the other masses, for its
elements of composition; lastly, we have an imitative art, concerned
with the representation of the outward appearances of things. And, for
many reasons, I think it best to begin with imitative Sculpture; that
being defined as _the art which, by the musical disposition of masses,
imitates anything of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us; and
does so in accordance with structural laws having due reference to the
materials employed_.
So that you see our task will involve the immediate inquiry what the
things are of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us: what, in few
words,--if we are to be occupied in the making of graven images,--we
ought to like to make images _of_. Secondly, after having determined its
subject, what degree of imitation or likeness we ought to desire in our
graven image; and, lastly, under what limitations demanded by structure
and material, such likeness may be obtained.
These inquiries I shall endeavor to pursue with you to some practical
conclusion, in my next four Lectures; and in the sixth, I will briefly
sketch the actual facts that have taken place in the development of
sculpture by the two greatest schools of it that hitherto have existed
in the world.
27. The tenor of our next Lecture, then, must be an inquiry into the
real nature of Idolatry; that is to say, the invention and service of
Idols: and, in the interval, may I commend to your own thoughts this
question, not wholly irrelevant, yet which I cannot pursue; namely,
whether the God to whom we have so habitually prayed for deliverance
"from battle, murder, and sudden death," _is_ indeed, seeing that the
present state of Christendom is the result of a thousand years' praying
to that effect, "as the gods of the heathen who were but idols;" or
whether--(and observe, one or other of these things _must_ be
true)--whether our prayers to Him have been, by this much, worse than
Idolatry;--that heathen prayer was true prayer to false gods; and our
prayers have been false prayers to the True One?
FOOTNOTES:
[5] I had a real plowshare on my lecture-table; but it would interrupt
the drift of the statements in the text too long if I attempted here to
illustrate by figures the relation of the colter to the share, and of
the hard to the soft pieces of metal in the share itself.
[6] A sphere of rock crystal, cut in Japan, enough imaginable by the
reader, without a figure.
[7] One of William Hunt's peaches; not, I am afraid, imaginable
altogether, but still less representable by figure.
[8] The crystal ball above mentioned.
[9] All grandest effects in moldings may be, and for the most part have
been, obtained by rolls and cavettos of circular (segmental) section.
More refined sections, as that of the fluting of a Doric shaft, are only
of use near the eye and in beautiful stone; and the pursuit of them was
one of the many errors of later Gothic. The statement in the text that
the moldings, even of best time, "have no real relation to
construction," is scarcely strong enough: they in fact contend with, and
deny the construction, their principal purpose seeming to be the
concealment of the joints of the voussoirs.
[10] Some of the most precious work done for me by my assistant, Mr.
Burgess, during the course of these Lectures, consisted in making
enlarged drawings from portions of photographs. Plate III. is engraved
from a drawing of his, enlarged from the original photograph of which
Plate I. is a reduction.
LECTURE II.
IDOLATRY.
_November, 1870._