justice, subduing the animal nature, guided by the spiritual one, as you
see the Sicilian Charioteer stands, holding his horse-reins, with the
wild lion racing beneath him, and the flying angel above, on the
beautiful coin of early Syracuse; (lowest in Plate XXI.)
And the beginnings of Christian chivalry were in that Greek bridling of
the dark and the white horses.
206. Not that a Greek never made mistakes. He made as many as we do
ourselves, nearly;--he died of his mistakes at last--as we shall die of
them; but so far as he was separated from the herd of more mistaken and
more wretched nations--so far as he was Greek--it was by his rightness.
He lived, and worked, and was satisfied with the fatness of his land,
and the fame of his deeds, by his justice, and reason, and modesty. He
became Graeculus esuriens, little, and hungry, and every man's
errand-boy, by his iniquity, and his competition, and his love of talk.
But his Graecism was in having done, at least at one period of his
dominion, more than anybody else, what was modest, useful, and eternally
true; and as a workman, he verily did, or first suggested the doing of,
everything possible to man.
Take Daedalus, his great type of the practically executive craftsman, and
the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from
Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Daedalus invents,--he,
or his nephew,
The potter's wheel, and all work in clay;
The saw, and all work in wood;
The masts and sails of ships, and all modes of motion;
(wings only proving too dangerous!)
The entire art of minute ornament;
And the deceptive life of statues.
By his personal toil, he involves the fatal labyrinth for Minos; builds
an impregnable fortress for the Agrigentines; adorns healing baths among
the wild parsley-fields of Selinus; buttresses the precipices of Eryx,
under the temple of Aphrodite; and for her temple itself--finishes in
exquisiteness the golden honeycomb.
207. Take note of that last piece of his art: it is connected with many
things which I must bring before you when we enter on the study of
architecture. That study we shall begin at the foot of the Baptistery of
Florence, which, of all buildings known to me, unites the most perfect
symmetry with the quaintest [Greek: poikilia]. Then, from the tomb of
your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite
Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and
iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division,
interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this
last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of
Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had
in carving them, into wedged hexagons--reminiscences of the honeycomb of
Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the
noblest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The
spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But
Daedalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That
cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him, by
his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; and his seeking
refuge, under blood-guiltiness, with Minos, who can judge evil, and
measure, or remit, the penalty of it, but not reward good; Rhadamanthus
only can measure _that_; but Minos is essentially the recognizer of evil
deeds "conoscitor delle peccata," whom, therefore, you find in Dante
under the form of the [Greek: erpeton]. "Cignesi con la coda tante
volte, quantunque gradi vuol che giu sia messa."
And this peril of the influence of Daedalus is twofold; first, in leading
us to delight in glitterings and semblances of things, more than in
their form, or truth;--admire the harlequin's jacket more than the
hero's strength; and love the gilding of the missal more than its
words;--but farther, and worse, the ingenuity of Daedalus may even become
bestial, an instinct for mechanical labor only, strangely involved with
a feverish and ghastly cruelty:--(you will find this distinct in the
intensely Daedal work of the Japanese); rebellious, finally, against the
laws of nature and honor, and building labyrinths for monsters,--not
combs for bees.
208. Gentlemen, we of the rough northern race may never, perhaps, be
able to learn from the Greek his reverence for beauty; but we may at
least learn his disdain of mechanism:--of all work which he felt to be
monstrous and inhuman in its imprudent dexterities.
We hold ourselves, we English, to be good workmen. I do not think I
speak with light reference to recent calamity, (for I myself lost a
young relation, full of hope and good purpose, in the foundered ship
_London_,) when I say that either an AEginetan or Ionian shipwright built
ships that could be fought from, though they were under water; and
neither of them would have been proud of having built one that would
fill and sink helplessly if the sea washed over her deck, or turn
upside-down if a squall struck her topsail.
Believe me, gentlemen, good workmanship consists in continence and
common sense, more than in frantic expatiation of mechanical ingenuity;
and if you would be continent and rational, you had better learn more of
Art than you do now, and less of Engineering. What is taking place at
this very hour,[40] among the streets, once so bright, and avenues, once
so pleasant, of the fairest city in Europe, may surely lead us all to
feel that the skill of Daedalus, set to build impregnable fortresses, is
not so wisely applied as in framing the [Greek: treton ponon],--the
golden honeycomb.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] The closing Lecture, on the religious temper of the Florentine,
though necessary for the complete explanation of the subject to my
class, at the time, introduced new points of inquiry which I do not
choose to lay before the general reader until they can be examined in
fuller sequence. The present volume, therefore, closes with the Sixth
Lecture, and that on Christian art will be given as the first of the
published course on Florentine Sculpture.
[38] These plates of coins are given for future reference and
examination, not merely for the use made of them in this place. The
Lacinian Hera, if a coin could be found unworn in surface, would be very
noble; her hair is thrown free because she is the goddess of the cape of
storms, though in her temple, there, the wind never moved the ashes on
its altar. (Livy, xxiv. 3.)
[39] 'Ancient Cities and Kings,' Plate IV., No. 20.
[40] The siege of Paris, at the time of the delivery of this Lecture,
was in one of its most destructive phases.
LECTURE VII.
THE RELATION BETWEEN MICHAEL ANGELO AND TINTORET.[41]
209. In preceding lectures on sculpture I have included references to
the art of painting, so far as it proposes to itself the same object as
sculpture, (idealization of form); and I have chosen for the subject of
our closing inquiry, the works of the two masters who accomplished or
implied the unity of these arts. Tintoret entirely conceives his figures
as solid statues: sees them in his mind on every side; detaches each
from the other by imagined air and light; and foreshortens, interposes,
or involves them as if they were pieces of clay in his hand. On the
contrary, Michael Angelo conceives his sculpture partly as if it were
painted; and using (as I told you formerly) his pen like a chisel, uses
also his chisel like a pencil; is sometimes as picturesque as Rembrandt,
and sometimes as soft as Correggio.
It is of him chiefly that I shall speak to-day; both because it is part
of my duty to the strangers here present to indicate for them some of
the points of interest in the drawings forming part of the University
collections; but still more, because I must not allow the second year of
my professorship to close, without some statement of the mode in which
those collections may be useful or dangerous to my pupils. They seem at
present little likely to be either; for since I entered on my duties, no
student has ever asked me a single question respecting these drawings,
or, so far as I could see, taken the slightest interest in them.
210. There are several causes for this which might be obviated--there is
one which cannot be. The collection, as exhibited at present, includes a
number of copies which mimic in variously injurious ways the characters
of Michael Angelo's own work; and the series, except as material for
reference, can be of no practical service until these are withdrawn, and
placed by themselves. It includes, besides, a number of original
drawings which are indeed of value to any laborious student of Michael
Angelo's life and temper; but which owe the greater part of this
interest to their being executed in times of sickness or indolence, when
the master, however strong, was failing in his purpose, and, however
diligent, tired of his work. It will be enough to name, as an example of
this class, the sheet of studies for the Medici tombs, No. 45, in which
the lowest figure is, strictly speaking, neither a study nor a working
drawing, but has either been scrawled in the feverish languor of
exhaustion, which cannot escape its subject of thought; or, at best, in
idly experimental addition of part to part, beginning with the head, and
fitting muscle after muscle, and bone after bone, to it, thinking of
their place only, not their proportion, till the head is only about
one-twentieth part of the height of the body: finally, something between
a face and a mask is blotted in the upper left-hand corner of the paper,
indicative, in the weakness and frightfulness of it, simply of mental
disorder from over-work; and there are several others of this kind,
among even the better drawings of the collection, which ought never to
be exhibited to the general public.
211. It would be easy, however, to separate these, with the acknowledged
copies, from the rest; and, doing the same with the drawings of Raphael,
among which a larger number are of true value, to form a connected
series of deep interest to artists, in illustration of the incipient and
experimental methods of design practiced by each master.
I say, to artists. Incipient methods of design are not, and ought not to
be, subjects of earnest inquiry to other people; and although the
re-arrangement of the drawings would materially increase the chance of
their gaining due attention, there is a final and fatal reason for the
want of interest in them displayed by the younger students;--namely,
that these designs have nothing whatever to do with present life, with
its passions, or with its religion. What their historic value is, and
relation to the life of the past, I will endeavor, so far as time
admits, to explain to-day.
212. The course of Art divides itself hitherto, among all nations of the
world that have practiced it successfully, into three great periods.
The first, that in which their conscience is undeveloped, and their
condition of life in many respects savage; but, nevertheless, in harmony
with whatever conscience they possess. The most powerful tribes, in this
stage of their intellect, usually live by rapine, and under the
influence of vivid, but contracted, religious imagination. The early
predatory activity of the Normans, and the confused minglings of
religious subjects with scenes of hunting, war, and vile grotesque, in
their first art, will sufficiently exemplify this state of a people;
having, observe, their conscience undeveloped, but keeping their conduct
in satisfied harmony with it.
The second stage is that of the formation of conscience by the discovery
of the true laws of social order and personal virtue, coupled with
sincere effort to live by such laws as they are discovered.
All the Arts advance steadily during this stage of national growth, and
are lovely, even in their deficiencies, as the buds of flowers are
lovely by their vital force, swift change, and continent beauty.
213. The third stage is that in which the conscience is entirely formed,
and the nation, finding it painful to live in obedience to the precepts
it has discovered, looks about to discover, also, a compromise for
obedience to them. In this condition of mind its first endeavor is
nearly always to make its religion pompous, and please the gods by
giving them gifts and entertainments, in which it may piously and
pleasurably share itself; so that a magnificent display of the powers of
art it has gained by sincerity, takes place for a few years, and is then
followed by their extinction, rapid and complete exactly in the degree
in which the nation resigns itself to hypocrisy.
The works of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Tintoret belong to this period
of compromise in the career of the greatest nation of the world; and are
the most splendid efforts yet made by human creatures to maintain the
dignity of states with beautiful colors, and defend the doctrines of
theology with anatomical designs.
Farther, and as an universal principle, we have to remember that the
Arts express not only the moral temper, but the scholarship, of their
age; and we have thus to study them under the influence, at the same
moment of, it may be, declining probity, and advancing science.
214. Now in this the Arts of Northern and Southern Europe stand exactly
opposed. The Northern temper never accepts the Catholic faith with force
such as it reached in Italy. Our sincerest thirteenth-century sculptor
is cold and formal compared with that of the Pisani; nor can any
Northern poet be set for an instant beside Dante, as an exponent of
Catholic faith: on the contrary, the Northern temper accepts the
scholarship of the Reformation with absolute sincerity, while the
Italians seek refuge from it in the partly scientific and completely
lascivious enthusiasms of literature and painting, renewed under
classical influence. We therefore, in the north, produce our Shakspeare
and Holbein; they their Petrarch and Raphael. And it is nearly
impossible for you to study Shakspeare or Holbein too much, or Petrarch
and Raphael too little.
I do not say this, observe, in opposition to the Catholic faith, or to
any other faith, but only to the attempts to support whatsoever the
faith may be, by ornament or eloquence, instead of action. Every man who
honestly accepts, and acts upon, the knowledge granted to him by the
circumstances of his time, has the faith which God intends him to
have;--assuredly a good one, whatever the terms or form of it--every man
who dishonestly refuses, or interestedly disobeys the knowledge open to
him, holds a faith which God does not mean him to hold, and therefore a
bad one, however beautiful or traditionally respectable.
215. Do not, therefore, I entreat you, think that I speak with any
purpose of defending one system of theology against another; least of
all, reformed against Catholic theology. There probably never was a
system of religion so destructive to the loveliest arts and the
loveliest virtues of men, as the modern Protestantism, which consists in
an assured belief in the Divine forgiveness of all your sins, and the
Divine correctness of all your opinions. But in the first searching and
sincere activities, the doctrines of the Reformation produced the most
instructive art, and the grandest literature, yet given to the world;
while Italy, in her interested resistance to those doctrines, polluted
and exhausted the arts she already possessed. Her iridescence of dying
statesmanship--her magnificence of hollow piety,--were represented in
the arts of Venice and Florence by two mighty men on either side--Titian
and Tintoret,--Michael Angelo and Raphael. Of the calm and brave
statesmanship, the modest and faithful religion, which had been her
strength, I am content to name one chief representative artist at
Venice, John Bellini.
216. Let me now map out for you roughly the chronological relations of
these five men. It is impossible to remember the minor years, in dates;
I will give you them broadly in decades, and you can add what finesse
afterwards you like.
Recollect, first, the great year 1480. Twice four's eight--you can't
mistake it. In that year Michael Angelo was five years old; Titian,
three years old; Raphael, within three years of being born.
So see how easily it comes. Michael Angelo five years old--and you
divide six between Titian and Raphael,--three on each side of your
standard year, 1480.
Then add to 1480, forty years--an easy number to recollect, surely; and
you get the exact year of Raphael's death, 1520.
In that forty years all the new effort and deadly catastrophe took
place. 1480 to 1520.
Now, you have only to fasten to those forty years, the life of Bellini,
who represents the best art before them, and of Tintoret, who represents
the best art after them.
217. I cannot fit you these on with a quite comfortable exactness, but
with very slight inexactness I can fit them firmly.
John Bellini was ninety years old when he died. He lived fifty years
before the great forty of change, and he saw the forty, and died. Then
Tintoret is born; lives eighty[42] years after the forty, and closes, in
dying, the sixteenth century, and the great arts of the world.
Those are the dates, roughly; now for the facts connected with them.
John Bellini precedes the change, meets, and resists it victoriously to
his death. Nothing of flaw or failure is ever to be discerned in him.
Then Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian, together, bring about the
deadly change, playing into each other's hands--Michael Angelo being the
chief captain in evil; Titian, in natural force.
Then Tintoret, himself alone nearly as strong as all the three, stands
up for a last fight; for Venice, and the old time. He all but wins it at
first; but the three together are too strong for him. Michael Angelo
strikes him down; and the arts are ended. "Il disegno di Michael
Agnolo." That fatal motto was his death-warrant.
218. And now, having massed out my subject, I can clearly sketch for you
the changes that took place from Bellini, through Michael Angelo, to
Tintoret.
The art of Bellini is centrally represented by two pictures at Venice:
one, the Madonna in the Sacristy of the Frari, with two saints beside
her, and two angels at her feet; the second, the Madonna with four
Saints, over the second altar of San Zaccaria.
In the first of these, the figures are under life size, and it
represents the most perfect kind of picture for rooms; in which, since
it is intended to be seen close to the spectator, every right kind of
finish possible to the hand may be wisely lavished; yet which is not a
miniature, nor in any wise petty, or ignoble.
In the second, the figures are of life size, or a little more, and it
represents the class of great pictures in which the boldest execution is
used, but all brought to entire completion. These two, having every
quality in balance, are as far as my present knowledge extends, and as
far as I can trust my judgment, the two best pictures in the world.
219. Observe respecting them--
First, they are both wrought in entirely consistent and permanent
material. The gold in them is represented by painting, not laid on with
real gold. And the painting is so secure, that four hundred years have
produced on it, so far as I can see, no harmful change whatsoever, of
any kind.
Secondly, the figures in both are in perfect peace. No action takes
place except that the little angels are playing on musical instruments,
but with uninterrupted and effortless gesture, as in a dream. A choir of
singing angels by La Robbia or Donatello would be intent on their music,
or eagerly rapturous in it, as in temporary exertion: in the little
choirs of cherubs by Luini in the Adoration of the Shepherds, in the
Cathedral of Como, we even feel by their dutiful anxiety that there
might be danger of a false note if they were less attentive. But
Bellini's angels, even the youngest, sing as calmly as the Fates weave.
220. Let me at once point out to you that this calmness is the attribute
of the entirely highest class of art: the introduction of strong or
violently emotional incident is at once a confession of inferiority.
Those are the two first attributes of the best art. Faultless
workmanship, and perfect serenity; a continuous, not momentary,
action,--or entire inaction. You are to be interested in the living
creatures; not in what is happening to them.
Then the third attribute of the best art is that it compels you to think
of the spirit of the creature, and therefore of its face, more than of
its body.
And the fourth is that in the face you shall be led to see only beauty
or joy;--never vileness, vice, or pain.
Those are the four essentials of the greatest art. I repeat them, they
are easily learned.
1. Faultless and permanent workmanship.
2. Serenity in state or action.
3. The Face principal, not the body.
4. And the Face free from either vice or pain.
221. It is not possible, of course, always literally to observe the
second condition, that there shall be quiet action or none; but
Bellini's treatment of violence in action you may see exemplified in a
notable way in his St. Peter Martyr. The soldier is indeed striking the
sword down into his breast; but in the face of the Saint is only
resignation, and faintness of death, not pain--that of the executioner
is impassive; and, while a painter of the later schools would have
covered breast and sword with blood, Bellini allows no stain of it; but
pleases himself by the most elaborate and exquisite painting of a soft
crimson feather in the executioner's helmet.
222. Now the changes brought about by Michael Angelo--and permitted, or
persisted in calamitously, by Tintoret--are in the four points these:
1st. Bad workmanship.
The greater part of all that these two men did is hastily and
incompletely done; and all that they did on a large scale in
color is in the best qualities of it perished.
2d. Violence of transitional action.
The figures flying,--falling,--striking,--or biting. Scenes of
Judgment,--battle,--martyrdom,--massacre; anything that is in
the acme of instantaneous interest and violent gesture. They
cannot any more trust their public to care for anything but
that.
3d. Physical instead of mental interest. The body, and its
anatomy, made the entire subject of interest: the face,
shadowed, as in the Duke Lorenzo,[43] unfinished, as in the
Twilight, or entirely foreshortened, backshortened, and
despised, among labyrinths of limbs, and mountains of sides and
shoulders.
4th. Evil chosen rather than good. On the face itself, instead
of joy or virtue, at the best, sadness, probably pride, often
sensuality, and always, by preference, vice or agony as the
subject of thought. In the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, and
the Last Judgment of Tintoret, it is the wrath of the Dies Irae,
not its justice, in which they delight; and their only
passionate thought of the coming of Christ in the clouds, is
that all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him.
Those are the four great changes wrought by Michael Angelo. I repeat
them:
Ill work for good.
Tumult for Peace.
The Flesh of Man for his Spirit.
And the Curse of God for His blessing.
223. Hitherto, I have massed, necessarily, but most unjustly, Michael
Angelo and Tintoret together, because of their common relation to the
art of others. I shall now proceed to distinguish the qualities of their
own. And first as to the general temper of the two men.
Nearly every existing work by Michael Angelo is an attempt to execute
something beyond his power, coupled with a fevered desire that his power
may be acknowledged. He is always matching himself either against the
Greeks whom he cannot rival, or against rivals whom he cannot forget. He
is proud, yet not proud enough to be at peace; melancholy, yet not
deeply enough to be raised above petty pain; and strong beyond all his
companion workmen, yet never strong enough to command his temper, or
limit his aims.