The notion that Painting and Sculpture are concerned only with the
"imitation of Nature,"--that is, with copying the forms and colors of
existing things,--though so often expelled, as it were, with a
pitchfork, persistently recurs, not only in popular talk, but in
deliberate criticism, and in the practice of artists. There are periods
when this notion gets the upperhand, as at the end of the fifteenth
century, and again at the end of the eighteenth, when Rousseau
prescribed a return to Nature as the panacea for all defect, in Art as
elsewhere. Then Winckelmann and his successors triumphed over it for a
while,--showed at least the crudity of that statement. This is the
purpose of much of Sir Joshua Reynolds's lectures. Now it seems to be
coming up again,--thanks partly to Mr. Ruskin, though he might be quoted
on both sides,--and this time with some prospect of demonstrating, by
the aid of photography, what it does in fact amount to.
It is a very general opinion that photography has made painting
superfluous,--or, at least, that it will do so as soon as further
improvements in the process shall enable it to render color as well as
light and shade. And our artists seem to give in to this view, in the
deference they show to the subject, as if it mattered not so much what
it was, or how, as that it is _there_,--a pious tenderness towards barns
and rail-fences and stone walls and the confused monotony of the forest,
not as having any special fitness, not as beautiful, but because they
exist,--a scrupulous anxiety to give the every-day look of the objects
they portray, as any passer-by would see them, free from any distorting
personality. To do them justice, however, this submissiveness to the
matter-of-fact, with the more gifted at least, is a virtue that is
praised and starves. They do it lip-service, and suppose themselves
loyal; but when they come to paint, they are under a spell that does not
allow them to see in things only material qualities, but, without any
violence to Nature, raises it to a higher plane, where other values and
other connections prevail. Art, where it exists to any serious purpose,
follows Nature, but not the natural,--according to Raphael's maxim, that
"the artist's aim is to make things not as Nature makes them, but as she
intends them."
But these audacities, though they make their own excuse in the work
itself, do not pass in a statement without cavil at the arrogance that
would exalt the work of men's hands above the work of God. Shall we
strive with our pigments to outshine the sun, or teach the secrets of
form to the cunning Artificer by whom the world was made? What room for
Art, except as the feeble reflex of the splendors of the actual world?
But if that be all, how to account for the existence of Art as distinct
from upholstery? Why pile our mole-hills by the side of the mountains?
We can see the landscape itself any day;--whence this extraordinary
interest in seeing a bit of it painted,--except, indeed, as furniture
for the drawing-room, to be ordered with the frame at so much the yard
from the picture-dealer?
The root of the difficulty lies in this slippery phrase, Nature. We talk
of the facts of Nature, meaning the existence now and here of the hills,
sky, trees, etc., as if these were fixed quantities,--as if a house or a
tree must be the same at all times and to everybody. But in a child's
drawing we see that these things are not the same to us and to him. He
is careful to give the doors and windows, the chimneys with their smoke,
the lines of the fence, and the walk in front; he insists on the
divisions of the bricks and the window-panes: but for what is
characteristic and essential he has no eye. He gives what the house is
to him, merely _a house_ in general, any house; it would not help it,
but only make the defect more prominent, to straighten and complete the
lines. An artist, with fewer and more careless lines, would give more of
what we see in it; and if he be a man of high power, he may teach us in
turn the limitation of our seeing, by showing that the vague,
half-defined sentiment that attaches to it has also a visible
expression, if we knew where to look for it.
We hear people say they know nothing of Art, but that they can judge as
well as anybody whether a picture is like Nature or not. No doubt
Giotto's contemporaries thought so, too, and they were grown men, with
senses as good as ours; but we smile when Boccaccio says, "There was
nothing in Nature that Giotto could not depict, whether with the pencil,
the pen, or the brush, so like that it seemed not merely like, but the
thing itself." We smile superior, but Giotto had as keen an eye and as
ready a hand as any man since. The lesson is, that we, too, have not
come to the end of even the most familiar objects, but that to another
age our view of them may seem as queer as his seems to us. For the facts
in Nature are not fixed, but transcendental quantities, and their value
depends on the use that is made of them. It is in this direction that
the artist's genius avails; his skill in execution is secondary and
incidental. The measure of his ability is the depth to which he has
penetrated the world of matter, not the number or the accuracy of his
facts. Every landscape wears many faces, as many as there are men and
different moods of the same man. To one the forest is so many cords of
wood; to another, an arboretum; to another, a workshop or a museum; to
another, a poem. What each sees is there; the forest exists for beauty
and for firewood, and lends itself indifferently to either use.
Nature wears this air of impartiality, because her figures are only
zeros, deriving all their significance from their position. We do not
require a like impartiality in the artist, because what he is to give is
not Nature, but what Nature inspires. His endeavor to be impartial would
result only in giving us his opinions or the opinions of others, instead
of the utterance of the oracle. For Nature hides her secret, not by
silence, but in a Babel of sweet voices, heard by each according to the
fineness of his sense: by one as mere noise, by another as a jangle of
pleasing sounds, by the artist as harmony. They are all of them Nature's
voices;--he adds nothing and omits nothing, but hears with a preoccupied
attention, the justification being that his hearing is thus most
complete, as one who understands a language seizes the sense of words
rapidly spoken better than he who from less acquaintance with it strives
to follow all the sounds.
The test of "truth," therefore, in the sense of fact, is insufficient.
The question is, Truth for whom? Not for a child or a savage. If we were
to show a fine landscape to a Hottentot, it would be a mistake to say he
saw it, though the image might be demonstrable on the retina of his eye.
He would not see what we mean when we speak of it, any more than we
should see the footstep on the ground or hear the stirring in the grass
that is plain enough to him, and hits our organs, too, though we are not
trained to perceive it. If the test of merit be the production of a
likeness to something we see, then the artist should know no more of
Nature than we do. But then, though it may surprise us into momentary
admiration to recognize familiar things in this translation,--just as
common talk sounds finer in a foreign tongue,--yet it is but for a time,
and then the inevitable limitations of the counterfeit come in,--its
narrowness and fixity,--crude paint for sunbeams, cold and colorless
stone for the living form. The only test of a work of Art is, how far it
will carry us,--not any comparison by the yardstick. We demand to be
raised above our habitual point of view, and be made aware of a deeper
interest than we knew of. It is in hope of this alone that we pardon the
necessary shortcoming of the means.
This deeper interest has its root in nothing arbitrary, or personal to
the artist. It is not inventing something finer than Nature, but seeing
more truly what Nature shows, that makes the artistic faculty. This is
the lesson taught by the history of Art. Take it up where you will, this
history is nothing but the successive unfolding of a truer conception of
Nature, only speaking here the language of form and color, instead of
words. It is this that lies at the bottom of all its revolutions, and
appears in its downfall as well as in its prosperity.
Where the human form is the theme, the aim must of course be to give its
typical perfection. No naturalist describes the defects of his
specimens, though it may happen that all are imperfect. Comparatively
few persons ever saw our robin in the plumage in which it is always
described. Only in early spring, not very commonly then, is the black of
the head and tail seen pure. But no one hesitates to call this the true
color. The sculptor does not reproduce the peculiarities of his model,
but aims to give ideal form as the most natural form of man.
But in Painting, and especially in Landscape, it seems less easy to fix
upon any ideal, not only from the multifariousness of the details, but,
above all, from the elusiveness of the standard. We might agree upon an
ideal of human beauty, but hardly upon the ideal of anything else. The
sophist in the Hippias Major was prepared to define the beauty of a
maiden, or of a mare; but he was confounded when it was required that
the beauty of a pipkin should be deducible from the same principle, and
yet worse when it was shown to involve that a wooden spoon was more
beautiful than a gold one.
What you see in the woods and mountains depends on what you go for and
what you carry with you. We may go to them as to a quarry or a
wood-pile, or for pleasantness,--the cool spring and the plane-tree
shade, as the ancients did,--or to see fine trees, waterfalls,
mountains. To many persons the beauty of any scene is measured by its
abundance in such _specimens_ of streams, mountains, waterfalls, etc. Of
course the connection is demonstrable enough: one collocation of
features is more readily suggestive of beauty than another. We expect to
find the scenery of a hill-country more attractive than a sand-desert.
But comparing a landscape with a statue, or even Painting generally with
Sculpture, the connection between a happy effect and any definite
arrangement of lines is much looser, and depends on the combination
rather than the ingredients. It is in every one's experience that an
accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to
the meagrest landscape--a bare marsh, a scraggy hill-pasture--a charm of
which the separate features, or the whole, at another time, give no
hint. Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a
deeper feeling than the most famous scenes. We learn from such
experiences that the difference between one patch of earth and another
is wholly superficial, and indicates not so much anything in it as a
greater or less dulness in us. The celebrated panoramas and points of
view are not the favorite haunts of great painters. They do not need to
travel far for their subjects. Mr. Ruskin tells us that Turner did not
paint the high Alps, nor the _cumulus_, the grandest form of cloud.
Calame gives us the nooks and lanes, the rocks and hills, of
Switzerland, rather than the high peaks; Lambinet, an apple-orchard, a
row of pollard-elms, or a weedy pond,--not cataracts or forests. This is
not affectation or timidity, but an instinct that the famous scenes are
no breaks in the order of Nature,--that what is seen in them is visible
elsewhere as well, only not so obvious, and that the office of Art is
not to parrot what is already distinct, but to reveal it where it is
obscure. This makes the inspiration of the artist; this is the source of
all his power, and alone distinguishes him from the topographer and
view-maker.
This transcendentalism is more evident in Painting, as the later and
more developed form; but it is common to all Art, and may be read also
in the Greek sculptures. The experience of every one who with some
practice of eye comes for the first time to see the best antiques is not
that he falls at once to admiring the perfection of their anatomy, and
wondering at the symmetry and complete development of the men and women
of those days, but rather that he is carried away from all comparison
and criticism into a solitude from which returning he discovers that his
previous acquaintance with Sculpture was with masks only, and that the
meaning of plastic art as a capital interest of the human mind is now
for the first time made known to him. He sees that it was no whim of the
Greeks, but an instinct of the infinity it typifies, that made them take
the human form as alone possessing beauty enough to stand by itself. Not
the images of their deities alone, but all their statues were gods. The
charm of the Lizard-Slayer of Praxiteles, or of those immortal riders
that swept along the friezes of the Parthenon, is something quite
distinct from the beauty of a naked boy playing with an arrow, or a
troop of Athenian citizens on horseback. These are the deathless forms
of the happy Olympians, high above the cares and turmoil of the finite,
self-centred and independent. It is the Paradise age of the world,
before the knowledge of good and evil, before sin and death came; the
worship of the Visible, when God saw everything that he had made, and,
behold, it was very good. Hence the air of repose, of eternal duration,
that marks these figures. They have nothing to regret or to hope, no
past or future, but only a timeless existence.
It is from this essential self-sufficingness, not from fancied rules,
that Sculpture is limited with respect to dramatic expression, that is,
expression of passing feeling, accidental action, not identified with
the form. In the best period the first requisite was that the interest
should be thoroughly identified with the shape in which it is
manifested, and not imparted, as by history, association, etc. The
decline began when this lofty isolation was felt as negative, needing to
have interest and expression added to it. But whatever was added only
emphasized without curing the defect. Even the "awful diagonal" of the
Laocoön and the godlike triumph of the Belvedere Apollo show a lower
age. Why triumph, if he was supreme before? These are casual incidents
only, examples of what might happen as well to anybody, not the adequate
conclusive embodiment of an idea. The more elaborately the meaning is
wrought into the form, the more evident that they are not originally
identical.
In Modern Sculpture this deification of the human form is either
expressly banished from the artist's aim, or at least he is not quite in
earnest with it. For instance, in Mr. Palmer's White Captive,--exhibited
not long since in Boston,--the sculptor's account of his work is, that
it portrays an American girl captured by Indians and bound to a tree. We
have to take with us the history and the circumstances: a Christian
woman of the nineteenth century, dragged from her civilized home and
helpless in the hands of savages. This is not at all incidental to the
work, but the work is incidental to it. It is a story which the figure
helps to tell. This is no universal type of womanhood, nor even American
womanhood. American women do not stand naked in the streets, but go
about clothed and active on their errands of duty and pleasure; if we
must needs represent one naked, we must invent some such accident, some
extraordinary dislocation of all usual relations and circumstances. In
place of the antique harmony of character and situation, we have here a
painful incongruity that no study or skill can obviate.
Nor has Modern Sculpture any better success, when, instead of the
pretence of history, it adopts the pretence of personification. Its
highest result in this direction is, perhaps, Thorwaldsen's bas-relief
of Night,--a pretty parlor-ornament. There is a fatal sense of unreality
about works of this kind that even Thorwaldsen's genius was unable to
remove. They are toys, and it seems rather flat to have toys so cumbrous
and so costly.
The reason of this insipidity is, that the ideality aimed at is all on
the outside. There is no soul in these bodies, but only an abstraction;
and so the body remains an abstraction, too. In each case the radical
defect is the same, namely, that the interest is external to the form:
they do not coalesce, but are only arbitrarily connected. We cannot have
these ideal forms, because we do not believe in them. We do not believe
in gods and goddesses, but in men and women; that is, we do not at last
really identify the character with its manifestation. Such was the
fascination of beauty to the Greek mind, that it banished all other
considerations. What mattered it to Praxiteles whether his Satyr was a
useful member of society or not, or whether the young Apollo stood thus
idle and listless for an instant or for a millennium, as long as he was
so beautiful? And the charm so penetrated their works that something of
it reaches down even to us, and holds us as long as we look upon them.
But as soon as we quit the magic circle, the illusion vanishes,--Apollo
is a handsome vagabond whom we incline to send about his business. He
ought to be slaying Pythons and drying up swamps, instead of loitering
here.
We do not believe in gods, nor quite as the ancients did in heroes,--but
in representative men, that is, in ideas, and in men as representing
them. Washington is not to us what Achilles or Agamemnon was to the
Greeks. The form of Achilles would do as well for a god; the antiquaries
do not know whether the Ludovisi Mars was not an Achilles,--perhaps
nobody ever knew. But in all our veneration of Washington, it is not his
person we revere, but his virtues,--precisely the impersonal part of
him, or his person only from association. There is nothing incongruous
in this association as it exists in the mind, any more than there would
have been in his presence, because of the overpowering sense of his
character and history, to which all the outward show of the man is
constantly subordinate. But if we isolate this by making a statue of
him, we have only an apotheosis of cocked-hat and small-clothes, in
which we see what it really was to us. This awkward prominence of the
costume does not come from the accident of modern dress, but from our
unconscious repugnance to petrifying the man in one of his aspects. It
is a touch of grave humor in the genius of Art, thus to give us just
what we ask for, though not what we want.
The Greeks could have portrait-statues, because all they looked for in
the man they saw in his form, and, seeing it, could portray it. If the
modern sculptor truly saw in the figure of Washington all that the name
means to him, he could make a statue worthy to be placed by the side of
the Sophocles and the Phocion. These were true portraits, no doubt; thus
it was that these men appeared to their fellow-citizens; but it does not
follow that they would have appeared so to us. What they saw is there;
it is a reality both for them and for us; but the literal identification
of it with the form belongs to them, not to us, and our mimicry of it
can result only in these abstraction's. For us it is elsewhere, beyond
these finite shapes, on which, by an illusion, it seemed to rest. The
Greek statues are tropes, which we gladly allow in their original use,
but, repeated, they become flat and pedantic. Hence the air of
caricature in modern portrait-statues; for caricature does not
necessarily imply falsification, but only that what is given is
insisted on at the expense of more important truth.
To the view of the early Christian ages, too, the body is old clothes,
ready to be cast off at any moment, good only as means to something
higher. It might seem that Christianity should give a higher value to
the body, since it was believed to have been inhabited by God himself.
But the Passion was a fact of equal importance with the Incarnation.
This honor could be allowed to matter only for an instant, and on the
condition of immediate resumption. That the Highest should suffer death
as a man might well seem to the Greeks foolishness. To the understanding
it is the utmost conceivable contradiction. Yet it is only a more
complete statement of what is involved in the Greek worship of beauty.
_The complete incarnation of Spirit_, which is the definition of beauty,
demands equally that there be no point it does not inhabit, and none in
which it abides. The transience of things is no defect in them, but only
the affirmation of their reality through the incessant casting-off of
its inadequate manifestations. It is not from the excellence, but from
the impotence of its nature, that the stone endures and does not pass
away as the plant and the animal. The higher the organization, the more
rapid and thorough the circulation.
The same truth holds in Art, also, and drives it to forsake these
beautiful petrifactions and seek an expression less bound to the
material. Ideal form is good so far as it brings together in one compact
image what in Nature is scattered and partial; but it is an ideality of
the surface only, not of the substance. It shuts out the defect of this
or that form, but not of Form itself. The Greek ideal is after all _a
thing_, and its impassive perfection a stony death.
The justification is, that the sculptor did not say quite what he meant.
He said flesh, but he meant spirit, and this is what the Greek statues
mean to us. The modern sculptor does not mean spirit, and knows that he
does not; and so, with all his efforts, he gives us only the outside. Is
it asked, Whence this divorce of flesh and spirit? why not give both at
once as Nature does? Then we must do as Nature does, and make our forms
as fluid as hers. But this the sculptor contravenes at the outset. To
follow Nature, he should make his statue of snow. To make it of stone is
to pretend that the form is something of itself. This the Greeks never
meant, for then it would follow that all parts of it were alike
significant. Haydon was delighted to find reproduced in the Elgin
marbles certain obscure and seeming insignificant details of the anatomy
that later schools had overlooked, such as a fold of skin under the
armpit of the Neptune, etc. But any beginner at a life-school could have
pointed out in the same statue endless deficiencies in anatomical
detail. The fold was put in, not because it was there, but because to
the mind of the Greek artist it meant something. Sculptors of the
present day comfort themselves with the belief that their works are more
complete and more accurate in the anatomy than the antique. Very likely,
for the ancients did not dissect. But this accuracy, if it is founded on
no interest beyond accuracy, is after all an impertinence.
The Greek ideal is founded on the exclusion of accident. It is a
declaration that the casual shape is not the true form; it is only a
step farther to the perception that all shape is casual,--the reality
seen, not in it, but through it. The ideal is then no longer perfect
shape, but transparency to the sentiment; the image is not sought to be
placed before the beholder's eyes, but painted as it were in his mind.
Henceforth, suggestion only is aimed at, not representation; the
coöperation of the spectator is relied upon as the indispensable
complement of the design. The Zeus of Phidias seemed to the Greeks,
Plotinus says, Zeus himself, as he would be, if he chose to appear to
human eyes. But a Crucifixion is of itself not at all what the artist
meant. It is not the agony of the flesh, but the triumph of the spirit,
that is intended to be portrayed. If the end be attained, the slighter
and more unpromising the means the better. Thus a new scale of values is
established; nothing is worthy or unworthy of itself; nothing is
excluded, but also in nothing is the interest identified with the thing,
but imparted.
Christian Art, after mere tradition had died out,--for instance, in the
Byzantine and early Italian pictures from the eighth to the middle of
the thirteenth century,--presents the strongest contrast to all that had
gone before. The morose and lifeless monotony or barbarous rudeness of
these figures seems like contempt not only of beauty, but of all natural
expression. They are meaningless of themselves, and quite indifferent to
the character they represent, which is appended to them by
inscriptions,--their relative importance, even, indicated only by size,
more or less splendor of costume, etc., but the faces all alike, and no
attempt made to adapt the action to the occasion. It is another world
they belong to; the present they pointedly renounce and disdain,
condescending to communicate with it only indirectly and by signs.
The main peculiarities were common to Painting and Sculpture, though
most noticeable in Painting. An interest in the actual world seems never
so far lost sight of, and earlier revived, in Sculpture. Even down to
the spring-tide of Modern Art in the thirteenth century, the "pleasant
days" when Guido of Siena was painting his Madonna, the improvement in
Painting was rather a stirring within the cerements of conventional
types, a flush on the cheek of the still rigid form,--while in the
bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors we meet already a realism as much in
excess of the antique as the Byzantine fell short of it.
It is commonly said that Nicola Pisano revived Art through study of the
antique; his models, even, are pointed out, particularly a sarcophagus,
said to have been brought to Pisa in the eleventh century from Greece.
But this sarcophagus, wherever it came from, is not Greek, but late
Roman work; and we find in Nicola no mark of direct Greek influence, but
only of the late Roman and early Christian sarcophagus-sculptures. In
the reliefs upon his celebrated pulpit at Pisa we have the same
short-legged, large-headed, indigenous Italian or Roman figures, and the
same arrangement of hair, draperies, etc., as on those sarcophagi. Taken
by themselves, his works would, no doubt, indicate a new direction. But
by the side of his son Giovanni, or the sculptors of the Northern
cathedrals, he seems to belong to the third century rather than to the
thirteenth.
In Giovanni Pisano the new era was distinctly announced. The Inferno,
usually ascribed to him, among the reliefs on the front of Orvieto
Cathedral,[1] and in his noble pulpit at Pistoia, shows the traces of
the antique only in unimportant details, ornamentation, etc. The antique
served him, no doubt, as a hint to independent study, but the whole
intent is different,--all the beauties and all the defects arrived at by
a different road. In place of the impassive Minos of the Shades, we have
a fiend, serpent-girt,[2] his judicial impartiality enforced apparently
against his will by manacles and anklets of knotted snakes; and
throughout, instead of the calm impersonality of the Greek, dealing out
the typical forms of things like a law of Nature, we have the restless,
intense, partisan, modern man, not wanting in tenderness, but full of a
noble scorn at the unworthiness of the world, and grasping at a reality
beyond it. He is intent, first of all and at all risks, upon vivid
expression, upon telling the story, and speedily outruns the
possibilities of his material. He must make his creatures alive to the
last superficies; and as he cannot give them motion, he puts an emphasis
upon all their bones, sinews, veins, and wrinkles,--every feather is
carved, and even the fishes under the water show their scales. That
mere literalness is not the aim is shown by the open disregard of it
elsewhere; for instance, the size of each figure is determined, not by
natural rules, but by their relative importance, so that in the
Nativity, Mary is twice as large as Joseph and three times as large as
the attendants. And the detail is not everywhere equally minute, but
follows the intensity of the theme, reaching its height in the lower
compartment, where the damned are in suffering, and especially in the
figures of the fiends. This is no aim at literalness, but a struggle for
an emphasis beyond the reach of Sculpture,--taking these means in
despair of others, and, in its thirst for expression, careless alike of
natural probability, typical perfection of form, and pleasing effect.
Different as it seems, the same spirit is at work here and in Painting.
In both it is the repudiation of the classic ideal,--in Sculpture by a
_reductio ad absurdum_, putting its implicit claims to the test of
realization,--in Painting by mere negation, as was natural at the outset
of a new career, before the means of any positive expression were
discovered.
Ideal form was to the Greeks the highest result, the success of the
universe. The end of Art was conceived as Nature's end as well, whether
actually attained or not. Nor was this preference of certain forms
arbitrary, but it followed the plain indications written on every
particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever is means only,
not showing any individuality, or end within itself. A handful of earth
is definable only by its chemical or physical properties, which do not
distinguish it, but confound it with other things. By itself it is only
so much phosphate or silicate, and can come to be something only in a
foreign organism, a plant or an animal. In form is seen the dawning of
individuality, and just as the thing rises in the scale the principle of
form becomes dominant. The handful of earth is sufficiently described by
the chemist's formula,--these ingredients make this substance. But an
organic body cannot be so described. The chemist's account of sugar, for
instance, is C^{6} H^{10} O^{5}. But if we ask what starch is, we have,
again, C^{6} H^{10} O^{5},--and the cellular tissue of plants, also, is
the same. These things, then, as far as he knows, are identical.
Evidently, he is beyond his depth, and the higher we go in the scale the
less he has to say to the purpose,--the separate importance of the
material ingredients constantly decreasing, and the importance of their
definite connection increasing, as the reference to an individual centre
predominates over helpless gravitation. First, aggregation about a
centre, as in the crystal,--then, arrangement of the parts, as upper,
under, and lateral, as in the plant,--then, organization of these into
members. Form is the self-assertion of the thing as no longer means
only; this makes its attractiveness to the artist. The root of his
delight in ideal form is that it promises some finality amid the endless
maze of matter. But this higher completeness, which is beauty, whether
it happen to exist or not, is never the immediate aim of Nature. It is
everywhere implied, but nowhere expressed; for Nature is unwearied in
producing, but negligent of the product. As soon as the end seems
anywhere about to be attained, it is straightway made means again to
something else, and so on forever. The earth and the air hasten to
convert themselves into a plant, the flower into fruit, the fruit into
flesh, and the animal at last to die and give back again to the air and
the earth what they have transmitted to him. Whatever beauty a thing has
is by the way, not as the end for which it exists, and so it is left to
be baffled and soiled by accident. This is the "jealousy of the gods,"
that could not endure that anything should exist without some flaw of
imperfection to confess its mortal birth.
The world is full of beauty, but as it were hinted,--as in the tendency
to make the most conspicuous things the most beautiful, as flowers,
fruits, birds, the insects of the sunshine, the fishes of the surface,
the upper side of the leaf; and perhaps more distinctly (in accordance
with Lord Bacon's suggestion that "Nature is rather busy not to err,
than in labor to produce excellency") in the tendency to hide those that
are ugly, as toads, owls, bats, worms, insects that flee the light, the
fishes of the bottom, the intestines of animals. But these are hints
only, and Nature, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, will sometimes introduce "not
ugliness only, but ugliness in the wrong place." Were beauty the aim, it
should be most evident in her chief products; whereas it is in things
transient, minute, subordinate,--flowers, snow-flakes, the microscopic
details of structure,--that it meets us most invariably, rather than in
the higher animals or in man. Nor in man does it keep pace with his
civilization, but obeys laws that belong to the lower regions of his
nature.
This ambiguity of every fact in Nature comes from the difficulty of
detecting its true connection. There is reality _there_, even in blight
and corruption; something is forwarded, only perhaps not the thing
before us,--as the virtue of the compost-heap appears not in it, but in
the rose-bed. The artist cannot forego a jot of reality, but the obvious
facts are not this, any more than the canvas and the pigment are the
picture. The prose of every-day life is reality in fragments,--the Alps
split into paving-stones,--Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due
connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur
is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's
power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved,
more or less of their vital relations.
Art is not to be blamed for idealizing, for this is only completing what
Nature begins. But the completion of the design is also its limitation.
It is final to the artist as well as to the theme, and cannot yield to
further expansion. In Nature there is no such pretence of finality, and
so her work, though never complete, is never convicted of defect. Her
circuits are never closed; she does not aim to cure the defect in the
thing, but in something else. Each in turn she abandons, and appeals to
a future success, which never is, but always about to be. The reason is,
that the scope of each is wider than immediately appears. It is not
simple completeness that is aimed at, but ascent to higher levels, so
that the consummation it demands, if granted, would cut it off from more
vital connections elsewhere. The ideal of the crystal seems to be
clearness and regularity, but better things are in store for it. It must
become opaque and shapeless in order to be fitted for higher
transformations. The leaf must be cramped to make the flower. Homer's
heroes must hoe potatoes and keep shop before the higher civilization of
the race can be reached.
The Greek ideal is an endeavor to ignore the imperfections of natural
existence. The ideal life is to be rich, strong, powerful, eloquent,
high-born, famous. It was a glorification of the earthly, not by
transcending, but by keeping its limitations out of sight. But this is
only making the limitation essential and irrevocable, so that it infects
the ideal also, which in this very avoidance submits to recognize it.
The statue is not _less_, but more, a thing than the natural body. Life
is not mere exclusion of decay, but organization of it, so that the fury
of corruption passes into fresh vital power. It is a cycle of changes,
the type and show of which are the circulation, constantly removing
effete particles and building up new, and therein giving its hue to the
flesh. But sculpture supposes the current checked, and one aspect fit to
stand for all the rest. The statue is not only a particle, but an
isolated particle, and must first of all divert attention from its
fragmentariness. Mr. Garbett has remarked that plants should not be
copied in sculpture, because the plant is not seen entire, but is partly
hidden in the ground. But the point is not the being seen or not, but
the suggestion of incompleteness. The same remark applies to animals,
and even to man, unless his relations to the world, as an individual
among individuals, can be kept out of sight.
But the finite thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant
perfection is atrophy,--as some poisons are said to kill by arresting
the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the
expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that
these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The
chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,--or, as Plato says, the human to
become godlike by taking away here and adding there,--but remains a
radical incongruity of Nature, never to be escaped from. It brings death
and dissolution to the fair shapes of the earlier world,--for the
worship of form is justified only so long as the mind thinks forms and
not ideas.
The statue may embody an infinite meaning, but to the artist form and
meaning are one. It is not a sentiment that he puts into this shape, but
it is the shape itself that inspires him. The symbolism of Greek Art was
the discovery of a later age. We know what is meant by Circe and Athene,
but Homer did not. It was thus only that the Greek mind could grasp
ideas,--this is the thoroughly _artistic_ character of that people.
Their philosophers were always outlaws. What excited the rage of the
Athenians against Socrates was his endeavor to detach religion from the
images of the gods. When it comes to comparisons between meaning and
expression, as adequate or inadequate, it is evident their unity is
gone;--the meaning is first, and the expression only adjunct or
illustration. It did not impair the sacredness of the Greek deities that
they were the work of the poets and sculptors. But the second Nicene
Council forbade as impious any images of Christ as God, and allowed only
his human nature to be represented,--a strange decree, if the Church had
realized its own doctrine, that the humanity of Christ is as real as his
divinity. But the meaning is, that the finite is not there to stand for
the infinite, but only to indicate it negatively and indirectly,--that
its glory is not to persist in its finiteness, not to hold on to its
form, but to be transformed. The figure of Thersites would be very
unsuitable for Achilles, but is suitable enough for a saint; it was a
pardonable exaggeration to make it even more suitable.
The hero is now the saint; the ideal life a life of poverty, humility,
weakness, labor,--to be long-suffering, to despise and forsake the
world. The present life, the heaven of Achilles, is now Hades, the
forced abode of phantoms having no reality but what is given to them by
religion, and the Hades of the Greek the only true and substantial
world. The new church fled the light of the sun, and sought impatiently
to bury itself in the tomb. The Roman catacombs were not the mere refuge
of a persecuted sect,--their use as places of worship continued long
after such need had ceased. But "among the graves" they found the point
nearest to the happy land beyond, and the silence and the darkness made
it easier to ignore for the few miserable moments that yet remained the
vain tumult of the surface. In such a mood the beauty of the outward
could awaken no delight, but only suspicion and aversion. Not the earth
and its glories, but the fading of these before the unseen and eternal,
was the only possible inspiration of Art. The extreme of this direction
we see in the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, but it has never
completely died out. Gibbon tells us of a Greek priest who refused to
receive some pictures that Titian had painted for him, because they were
too real:--"Your scandalous figures," said he, "stand quite out from the
canvas; they are as bad as a group of statues." It is a tenderness
towards the idea, lest it should be dishonored by actuality. Matter is
gross, obscure, evil, an obstacle to spirit,--and material existence
tolerable only as momentary, vanishing, and, as it were, under constant
protest, and with the suspicion that the Devil has a hand in it. It
belongs especially to the Oriental mind, and its logical result is the
Buddhist heaven of annihilation.
The defect of this view is not that it is too ideal, but that it is not
ideal enough. It is an incomplete idealism that through weakness of
faith does not hold fast its own point of view, and so does not dispose
of matter, but leaves it outside, as negation, obstacle. The body is
allowed to exist, but remains in disgrace and reduced to the barest
indication. But it is honoring matter far too much to allow that it can
be an obstacle. It is no obstacle, for it is _nothing_ of itself.
Rightly understood, this contempt of the body is directed only against
the false emphasis placed upon single aspects or manifestations. It is a
feeling that the true ideal is not thus shut up in a forced exception,
as if it were the subtilized product of a distillation whereby the
earthly is to be purged of its dross; but that it is the all-pervading
reality, which the finite can neither hinder nor help, but only obey,
which death and corruption praise, which establishes itself through
imperfection and transience.
Gibbon, speaking of the Iconoclasts, says,--"The Olympian Jove, created
by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a
philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were
faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last degeneracy
of taste and genius." Such comparisons mistake the point. These are not
parallel attempts, but opposed from the outset. The "Catholic image" was
a declaration that the problem cannot be solved in that way. An early
legend relates, that a painter, undertaking to copy his Christ from a
statue of Jove, had his hand suddenly withered. The attempt is accused
because of the pretence it makes to coordinate body and spirit, Nature
and God,--as if one configuration of matter were more godlike than
another. The figure of the god claims to complete what Nature has
_partly_ done. But now the world is seen to be not merely the product of
Mind working upon Matter, but the Creation of God out of nothing,--thus
altogether His, in one part as much as in another. The only conceivable
separateness, antagonism, is that of the sinful Will, setting itself up
in its vanity; this it must be that arrogates to itself the ability to
_represent_ its Creator.
The Christian image is without form or comeliness,--rejects all outward
graces, seemingly glories in abasement and deformity, fearing only to
attribute to Matter some value of its own.
Henceforth the connection is no longer at arm's-length, as of the
workman and the material. Resistance to limitation is changed into
joyful acceptance; for it is not in the limitation, but in the
resistance, that the misery of earth consists. The quarrel with
imperfection is over. The finite shall neither fortify itself in its
finiteness, nor seek to abolish it, but only make it the willing
instrument of universal ends. Thus the true self first exists, and no
longer needs to be extenuated or apologised for.
The key-note of all this is contained in those verses of the "Dies
Iræ,"--
"Quærens _me_ sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus;
Tantus labor non sit cassus."
Here we have in its compactest expression the difference between this
age and the classic: that I, the vilest of sinners, am the object of
God's highest care,--not the failure and mistake I seem, not the slag
and refuse of Nature's working, but the object of this most stupendous
mystery of the Divine economy. It is no purification or idealizing that
is needed,--any such attempt must be abomination,--but a new birth of
the self, by devotion of it to the purpose for which it was made.
The astounding discovery is slowly realized, and the statement of it
difficult, from the need to distinguish between the true self and the
false, and to declare that this importance belongs to the individual in
virtue of his spiritual nature alone. The sainthood of the saint is not
to be confounded with his personality. What have his virtues to do with
his gown and shoes? what, indeed, with his natural disposition, as
courageous, irascible, avaricious? The difficulty is pervading, not to
be avoided; every aspect of him reveals only what is external, dies from
him daily, and, if isolated, has already lost its meaning. It is only in
his work, in his connection with the world, that we see him truly.
Accordingly, the statue becomes the group, and the group a member of a
series, a cycle in which each is incomplete without the rest. The
classic ideal is shivered into fragments, all to be taken together to
make up the meaning. Of the hundreds of statues and reliefs that
surround the great Northern cathedrals, (Didron counts eighteen hundred
upon the outside of Chartres,--nine thousand in all, carved or painted,
inside and outside,) each has its appointed place in the sacred _epos_
in stone that unfolds about the building from left to right of the
beholder the history of the world from the Creation to the Judgment, and
subordinated in parallel symbolism the daily life of the community,
whatever occupied and interested men,--their virtues and vices, trades
and recreations, the seasons and the elements, jokes, even, and sharp
hits at the great and at the clergy, scenes from popular romances, and
the radicalism of Reynard the Fox,--in short, all that touched the mind
of the age, an impartial reflex of the great drama of life, wherein all
exists alike to the glory of God.
It is not the glory of earth that is here celebrated. M. Didron says the
statues which the mob pulled down from the churches, at the first French
Revolution, as the images of their kings, were the kings and heroes of
the Old Testament. Had they known this, it might not have saved the
statues, but it shows how wide a gulf separated these men from their
fathers, that their hands were not held by some instinct that here was
the first hint of the fundamental idea of Democracy,--the sovereign
importance of man, not as powerful, wise, beautiful, not in virtue of
any chance advantage of birth, but in virtue of his religious nature, of
the infinite possibilities he infolds.
The need to indicate that the source of value is not the accident of
Nature, but Nature redeemed, regenerated by spirit, that all values are
moral values, led to a certain abstractness of treatment,--on one side
qualities to be embodied, on the other figures to receive them, so that
the character seems adventitious, detachable, not thoroughly at one with
the form. For instance, the fiends in the Orvieto Inferno are not terror
embodied, as the Jove of Phidias embodied dignity and command; but the
terrific is accumulated on the outside of them, as tusks, claws, etc.
One can easily believe that the ancient sculptors, had it been lawful,
could have put more horror into the calm features of a Medusa than is
contained in all this apparatus and grimace. The concreteness of the
antique, the form and meaning existing only for each other, is gone; the
union is _occasional_ only, and needs to be certified and kept up afresh
on every new occasion. The form must assert itself, must show itself
alive and quick, not the dead sign of a meaning that has fled. It would
have been a poor compliment to a Greek sculptor to say that his work was
life-like; he might answer with the classically disposed visitor of the
Elgin marbles in Haydon's anecdote,--"Like life! Well, what of that?" He
meant it for something much better. But during the Middle Ages this is
constantly the highest encomium. Amid the utmost rudeness of conception
and of execution, we see the first trace of awakening Art in the
unmistakable effort to indicate that the figures are alive; and in the
cathedral-sculpture of the best time this is still a leading
characteristic. Even the single statues have for their outlines curves
of contrary flexure, expressing motion; they seem to wave in the air,
and their faces to glow with passing emotion. The animals are often
uncouth, but the more life-like; a turn of the head or of the eye, a
restless, unbalanced attitude, brings us nearer to the actual living
creature than the magnificent repose of the antique lions and
eagles,--as if they did not trust to our recognizing their character,
but were prepared to demonstrate it with beak and claws. Even in the
plants, though strictly conventionalized, it is the freedom and spring
of their lines that more than anything else characterizes them and
defies copying.
The world of matter, being no longer endowed with independent reality,
is no longer felt as a contamination incurred by the idea in its descent
into existence. The discrepancy is not final, so that the supremacy of
the spirit is not shown by resistance, but by taking it to heart,
carrying it out, and thereby overcoming it. In a Crucifixion of the
twelfth century, Life is figured on one side crowned and victorious, and
on the other Death overcome and slain. The finiteness of the finite is
not the barrier, but the liberation, of the infinite.
But the statue remains stone; this unmeaning emphasis of weight and
bulk, though diminished, is not to be got rid of. The life that
sculpture can give is superficial and abstract, does not penetrate and
possess the work; it is still the petrifaction of an instant, that does
not instantly pass away, but remains as a contradiction to the next. It
is the struggle against this fixity that gives to the sculpture of the
Renaissance its aspect of unrest, of disdain of the present, of endless
unsatisfied search. Hence the air of conflict that we see in Giovanni
Pisano, and still more in later times,--the sculptor going to the edge
of what the stone will allow, and beyond it, and, still unsatisfied,
seeking through all means to indicate a yet unexecuted possibility. It
is this that seethes in those strange, intense, unearthly figures of
Donatello's, wasted as by internal fire,--the rage for an expression
that shall at the same time declare its own insufficiency.
All that is done only makes the failure more evident. The fixity
continues, and is only deepened into contortion and grimace. What we see
is the effort alone. Hence in modern statues the uneasy,
self-distrustful appeal to the spectator, in place of the lofty
indifference of the antique. In Michel Angelo the same striving to
indicate something in reserve, not expended, led to the exaggerated
emphasis of certain parts, (as the length of the neck, depth of the
eye-sockets, etc.,) and of general muscularity,--a show of _force_, that
gave to the Moses the build of a Titan, and to the Christ of the Last
Judgment the air of a gladiator. Michel Angelo often seems immersed in
mere anatomy and academic _tours de force_, especially in his later
works. He seems to see in the subject only a fresh problem in attitude,
foreshortening, muscular display,--and this not only where he invents,
but also where he borrows,--sometimes most strangely overlooking the
sentiment; as in the figure of Christ, which he borrows from Orcagna and
the older painters, even to the position of the arms, but with the
touching gesture of reproof perverted into a savage menace; or in the
Expulsion, taken almost line for line from Masaccio, but with the
infinite grief expressed in Adam's figure turned into melodrama by
showing his face.
It was not for the delight of the eye, nor from over-reverence of the
matter-of-fact. He despised the copying of models, as the makeshift of
ignorance. His profound study of anatomy was not for greater accuracy of
imitation, but for greater license of invention. Of grace and
pleasingness he became more and more careless, until he who at twenty
had carved the lovely angel of S. Domenico, came at last to make all his
men prize-fighters and his women viragos. It is clear that we nowhere
get his final meaning,--that he does not fairly get to his theme at all,
but is stopped at the outset, and loses himself in the search for a
mode of expression more adequate to that "immense beauty" ever present
to his mind,--so that the matter in hand occupies him only in its
superficial aspects. What he sought on all hands, in his endless
questioning of the human frame, his impatience of drapery, the furious
haste to reach the live surface, and the tender modulation of it when it
is reached, was to make the flesh itself speak and reveal the soul
present at all points alike and at once. Nothing could have satisfied
him but to impart to the marble itself that omnipresence of spirit of
which animal life furnishes the hint. In this Titanic attempt the means
were in open and direct contradiction to the end. It was a violation of
the wise moderation of Sculpture, whose rigid and colorless material
pointedly declines a rivalry it could not sustain. Else why not color
the stone? The hue of flesh is the most direct assertion of life, but at
the same time a direct negative to that totality and emphasis of the
particular shape on which Sculpture relies. The color of the flesh comes
from its transparency to the circulation,--the eternal flux of matter
coming to the surface in this its highest form. It is the display in
matter itself of what its true nature is,--not to resist, but to embody
change,--to reduce itself to mere appearance, and be taken up without
residuum in the momentary manifestation, and then at once give place to
fresh manifestations.
That the earlier practice of coloring statues was given up just when the
need would seem to be the greatest shows its incompatibility with the
fundamental conditions of the art. In the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries statues were still painted and gilded. Afterwards, color is
restricted to parts not directly affected by the circulation, the hair
and the eyes; and at last, when Sculpture is given over to pictorial
effect and is about to yield entirely to Painting, it is wholly
relinquished. Evidently it was felt that to color a statue in imitation
of flesh would only enforce the fact that it is stone.
What Art was now aiming at was not the mere appearance of life, but a
unity like that which life gives, in place of the abstractness and
partiality inherent in Sculpture. This makes the interest of the fact of
life,--that it is the presence of the soul,--the unity established amid
the sundered particularity of matter. In free motion a new centre is
declared, whereby the inertia of the body, its gravitation to a centre
outside of it, is set aside. In sensibility this new centre declares
itself supreme, superseding the passive indifference of extension. The
whole pervades each part, each testifies to the whole and may stand for
it. But the statue, having no such internal unity, is less able to
dispense with outward completeness. All the sides must be given, so that
the whole cannot be seen at one view, but only successively, as an
aggregate.
In the earlier Greek statues the head remains lifeless, abstract, whilst
the limbs are full of expression. In a contrary spirit, more akin to
modern ideas, the Norse myth relates that Skadi, having her choice of a
husband from among all the gods, but having to choose by the feet alone,
meaning to take Baldur, got by mistake Niordr, an inferior deity. This
does not seem so strange to us; but a Greek would have wondered that the
daughter of a wise Titan should not know the feet of Apollo from those
of Nereus. It was said of Taglioni that she put mind into her legs. But
to the modern way of thinking this is clearly exceptional. It is in the
face, and especially in the eye, that we look to see the soul present
and at work, and not merely in its effects as character. As types of
character, the lineaments of the face were explored by the later Greek
Art as profoundly as the rest of the body. But the statue is
sightless,--its eyes do not meet ours, but seem forever brooding over a
world into which the present and its interests do not enter. To the
Greek this was no defect; but to us the omission seems to affect the
most vital point of all, since our conception of the soul involves its
eternity, that is, that it lives always in the present, is not too fine
to exist, secure that it is bound neither by past nor future, but
capable of revolutionizing the character at all moments. Here is the
ground of the remarkable difference that meets us already in the reliefs
of the later classic times. In the reliefs of the best age the figures
are always in profile and in action. Complete personification being out
of the question, it is expressly avoided,--each figure waives attention
to itself, merges itself in the plot. Later, when the profounder idea of
a personality that does not isolate or degrade has begun to make itself
felt, this constraint is given up,--the figures face the spectator, and
enter as it were into relation with the actual world.
The Church very early expressed this feeling of the higher significance
of the head, by allowing it to be sufficient if the head alone were
buried in holy ground. In Art it is naïvely indicated by exaggerated
size of the head and of the eyes,--a very common trait of the earlier
times, and not quite obsolete at the time of the Pisani. This clumsy
expedient is relinquished, but the need it indicated continued, without
the possibility of finding any complete satisfaction in Sculpture,
instead of the intensity and directness that Art now insists upon,
Sculpture can give only extension and indirect hints; instead of mind
present, only its effects and products, with the working cause expressly
removed.
This is the ground of the seeming injustice to Sculpture at the time of
the Revival. Its relative excellence was undervalued, because what it
could do was not quite to the point. While the painters went on
producing their antediluvian forms, the sculptors saw things much more
as we do,--yet the paintings seemed the most life-like. It is
astonishing, when we remember that Nicola was older than Cimabue,
Giovanni than Giotto, Ghiberti than Frà Angelico, that the painters did
not learn from the sculptors more of the actual appearance of things. It
is still more astonishing that it is the painters that get all the
praise for accuracy. Vasari is endless in his praises of Giotto,
Spinello, Stefano, (called Scimia, or the Ape of Nature,) and a host of
others, for accurate imitation. Giovanni Villani boasts that "it is our
fellow-citizen Giotto who has portrayed most naturally every form and
action." Ghiberti finishes an admiring account of some paintings of
Ambrogio Lorenzotto's with the exclamation that it is truly marvellous
to think that all this is only a picture. Few persons, probably, would
see in the specimens of Ambrogio's work that still remain anything
wonderful for resemblance to Nature,--whilst in Ghiberti's everybody
acknowledges the astonishing truth of the detail. He tells us that he
sought "to imitate Nature as far as was possible to him,"--but he seems
not to be aware how much better he succeeded than the people he praises.
Paolo Uccello, who was twenty years younger than Ghiberti, got his
nickname from his skill in painting birds. But one would rather
undertake to paint birds as well as Paolo than to carve them as well as
Ghiberti.
We may learn here how little the demand to "imitate Nature" expresses
what is intended. No accuracy, however demonstrable, will satisfy it. To
interest me in a picture, it is not enough that _something_ is as
visible there as it is elsewhere; it must be something that I was
already striving to see. It was not a greater circumstantiality of
statement than was demanded, but greater directness,--that it should be
relieved of what was unessential to its purpose, tending only to obscure
it. A painting, however rude, has at least this negative merit, that, by
the express substitution of the appearance for the actual image,
needless entanglement in the material is avoided. Weight and bulk are
not indeed annihilated, but they are no longer of primary importance,
and thus less obstructive. The work gains precisely in what it gives
up. By the flat omission of depth infinite depth is acquired,--by the
ignoring of size the expression of size becomes possible; a mountain,
for instance, which would be an absurdity in Sculpture is representable
in Painting. Thus, instead of being more abstract than Sculpture,
Painting is in truth less so, since what it omits is only negative to
the purpose of Art.
It seems to us easier to paint than to carve, and we might expect to
find Painting the older art. But the difficulty lies less in the
execution than in the conception. Painting is not a tinting of surfaces,
but the power to see a complex subject in unity. We may think we have no
difficulty in seeing the landscape, but most persons, if called upon to
state what they saw, pictorially, would show that they could not see the
wood for the trees. Beginners suppose it is some knack of the hand that
they are to acquire, when they learn to draw; but that is a small part
of the matter; the great difficulty is in the seeing. Ordinary vision is
piecemeal: we see the parts; but not the picture, or only vaguely. Even
the degree of facility that is implied in any enjoyment of scenery is
not so much a matter of course as it seems. Cæsar occupied himself,
while crossing the Alps, with composing a grammatical treatise. There is
no evidence that there was anything odd in this. Perhaps Petrarch was
the first man that ever climbed a hill to enjoy the view. We are not
aware how much of what we see in Nature is due to pictures. Hardly any
man is so unsophisticated, but that, if he should try to sketch a
landscape, he would betray, in what he did or in what he omitted, that
he saw it more or less at second-hand, through the interpretations of
Art. A portfolio of Calame's or Harding's or Turner's drawings will give
us new eyes for the most familiar scenes.
But we are aided still more by our habit of looking at things
theoretically, apart from their immediate practical bearing. A savage
can comprehend a carved image, but not so readily a picture. An Indian
whom Catlin painted with half his face in shadow became the
laughingstock of the tribe, as "the man with half a face." It is not
necessary to suspect Mr. Catlin's chiaroscuro; what puzzled them was,
doubtless, the bringing together in one view what they had seen only
separate. They were accustomed to see the man in light and in shadow;
but what they cared for, and therefore what they saw, was only the
effect in making it more or less easy to recognize him and to ascertain
his state of mind, intentions, etc. His face was either visible or
obscured; if they could see enough for their purpose, they regarded only
that. For it to be both at once was possible only from a point of view
which they had not reached. A child takes the shading of the portrait
for dirt,--that being the form in which darkening of the face is
familiar to him. A carved image is easier comprehended, because it can
be handled, turned about, and looked at on different sides, and a
material connection thereby assured between the various aspects. To
transfer this connection to the mind--to see varying distances in one
vertical plane, so that mere gradations of light and shade shall suggest
all these aspects arranged and harmonized in one view--is a farther
step, and the difficulty increases with the variety embraced. Cicero was
struck with this superiority in the artists of his time. "How much," he
says, "do painters see in shadow and relief that we do not see!" Yet
their perception seems strangely limited to us. The ancients had little
notion of perspective. Their eyes were too sure and too well-practised
to overlook the effect of position in foreshortening objects, and they
were much experienced in the corrections required, and the effect of
converging lines in increasing apparent distance was taken advantage of
in their theatre-scenes. But they had not learned that the difference
between the actual and the apparent form is thorough-going, so that the
picture no longer stands in the attitude of passive indifference towards
the beholder, but imposes upon him its own point of view. It was
thought remarkable in the Minerva of Fabullus, that it had the
appearance of always looking at the spectator, from whatever point it
was viewed. This would be miraculous in a statue, and must seem so in
the picture so long as it is looked upon only as one side of a statue.
The wall-paintings of Pompeii, doubtless copies or reminiscences of
Greek originals,--with masterly skill in the parts, and with some
success in the landscape as far as it was easily reducible to one
plane,--are only collections of fragments, and show utter incapacity to
see the whole at once as a picture. For instance, in one of the many
pictures of Narcissus beholding himself in the well, the head, which is
inclined sideways, instead of being simply inverted in the reflection,
is reversed,--so that the chin, which is on the spectator's left in the
figure, is on the right in the reflected image: as if the artist,
knowing no other way, had placed himself head downwards, and in that
position had repeated the face as already painted. Such a blunder could
not originate with a copyist, for it would have been much easier to copy
correctly. It is clear from the general excellence of the figure that it
is not the work of an inferior artist. Nor can it have come from mere
carelessness; it is too elaborate for that,--and, moreover, here is the
main point of the picture, that which tells the story. Doubtless the
painter had noticed the pleasingness of such reflections, as repeating
the human form, the supreme object of interest; but the interest stopped
there. He saw the face above and the face below, as he would see the
different sides of a statue; but so incapable was he of perceiving the
connection and interdependence of them, that, even when Nature had made
the picture for him, he could not see it. This is no isolated, casual
mistake, but only a good chance to see what is really universal, though
not often so obvious.
In this and other pictures the water is like a bit of looking-glass
stuck up in front,--without perspective, without connection with the
ground,--the mere assertion of a reflection. The conception embraced
only the main figure; the rest was added like a label, for explanation
only. These men did not see the landscape as we see it, because the
interest was wanting that combines it into a picture for our eyes. Our
"love of Nature" would have been incomprehensible and disgusting to a
Greek; he would have called our artists "dirt-painters." And from his
point of view he would be right. Dirt it is, if we abide by the mere
facts. The interest of Art lies not in the facts, but in the
truth,--that is, in the facts organized, shown in their place. It is not
that we care more about stocks and stones than they did, but that we
hold the key to an arrangement that gives these things a significance
they have not of themselves.
* * * * *