"Poetry, Painting, and Sculpture," says Cunningham, "are of the same
high order of genius; but, as words provide at once shape and color to
our thoughts, Poetry has ever led the way in the march of intellect: as
material forms are ready made, and require but to be skillfully copied,
Sculpture succeeded; and as lights and shadows demand science and
experience to work them into shape, and endow them with sentiment,
Painting was the last to rise into elegance and sublimity. In this order
these high Arts rose in ancient Greece; and in the like order they rose
in modern Italy; but none of them reached true excellence, till the
light of knowledge dawned on the human mind, nor before civilization,
following in the steps of barbarism, prepared the world for the
reception of works of polished grace and tranquil grandeur.
"From the swoon into which the Fine Arts were cast by the overthrow of
the Roman Empire, they were long in waking: all that was learned or
lofty was extinguished: of Painting, there remained but the memory, and
of Sculpture, some broken stones, yet smothered in the ruins of temples
and cities the rules which gave art its science were lost; the
knowledge of colors was passed away, and that high spirit which filled
Italy and Greece with shapes and sentiments allied to heaven, had
expired. In their own good time, Painting and Sculpture arose from the
ruins in which they had been overwhelmed, but their looks were altered;
their air was saddened; their voice was low, though it was, as it had
been in Greece, holy, and it called men to the contemplation of works of
a rude grace, and a but dawning beauty. These 'sisters-twin' came at
first with pale looks and trembling steps, and with none of the
confidence which a certainty of pleasing bestows: they came too with few
of the charms of the heathen about them: of the scientific unity of
proportion, of the modest ease, the graceful simplicity, or the almost
severe and always divine composure of Greece, they had little or none.
But they came, nevertheless, with an original air and character all
their own; they spoke of the presence of a loveliness and sentiment
derived from a nobler source than pagan inspiration; they spoke of Jesus
Christ and his sublime lessons of peace, and charity, and belief, with
which he had preached down the altars and temples of the heathen, and
rebuked their lying gods into eternal silence.
"Though Sculpture and Painting arose early in Italy, and arose with the
mantle of the Christian religion about them, it was centuries before
they were able to put on their full lustre and beauty. For this,
various causes may be assigned. 1. The nations, or rather wild hordes,
who ruled where consuls and emperors once reigned, ruled but for a
little while, or were continually employed in expeditions of bloodshed
and war. 2. The armed feet of the barbarians had trodden into dust all
of art that was elegant or beautiful:--they lighted their camp-fires
with the verses of Euripides or Virgil; they covered their tents with
the paintings of Protogenes and Apelles, and they repaired the breaches
in the walls of a besieged city, with the statues of Phidias and
Praxiteles;--the desires of these barbarians were all barbarous. 3.
Painting and Sculpture had to begin their labors anew; all rules were
lost; all examples, particularly of the former, destroyed: men unable,
therefore, to drink at the fountains of Greece, did not think, for
centuries, of striking the rock for themselves. 4. The Christian
religion, for which Art first wrought, demanded sentiment rather than
shape: it was a matter of mind which was wanted: the personal beauty of
Jesus Christ is nowhere insisted upon in all the New Testament: the
earliest artists, when they had impressed an air of holiness or serenity
on their works, thought they had done enough; and it was only when the
fears of looking like the heathen were overcome, and a sense of the
exquisite beauty of Grecian sculpture prevailed, that the geometrical
loveliness of the human form found its way into art. It may be added,
that no modern people, save the Italians alone, seem to share fully in
the high sense of the ideal and the poetic, visible in the works of
Greece.
"The first fruits of this new impulse were representations of Christ on
the Cross; of his forerunner, St. John; of his Virgin Mother; and of his
companions, the Apostles. Our Saviour had a meek and melancholy look;
the hands of the Virgin are held up in prayer; something of the wildness
of the wilderness was in the air of St. John, and the twelve Apostles
were kneeling or preaching. They were all clothed from head to heel; the
faces, the hands, and the feet, alone were bare; the sentiment of
suffering or rejoicing holiness, alone was aimed at. The artists of the
heathen religion wrought in a far different spirit; the forms which they
called to their canvas, and endowed with life and beauty, were all, or
mostly naked; they saw and felt the symmetry and exquisite harmony of
the human body, and they represented it in such elegance, such true
simplicity and sweetness, as to render their nude figures the rivals in
modesty and innocence of the most carefully dressed. A sense of this
excellence of form is expressed by many writers. 'If,' says Plato, 'you
take a man as he is made by nature, and compare him with another who is
the effect of art, the work of nature will always appear the less
beautiful, because art is more accurate than nature.' Maximus Tyrus also
says, that 'the image which is taken by a painter from several bodies,
produces a beauty which it is impossible to find in any single natural
body, approaching to the perfection of the fairest statues.' And Cicero
informs us, that Zeuxis drew his wondrous picture of Helen from various
models, all the most beautiful that could be found; for he could not
find in one body all those perfections, which his idea of that princess
required.
"So far did the heathens carry their notions of ideal beauty, that they
taxed Demetrius with being too natural, and Dionysius they reproached as
but a painter of men. Lysippus himself upbraided the ordinary sculptors
of his day, for making men such as they were in nature, and boasted of
himself, that he made men as they ought to be. Phidias copied his
statues of Jupiter and Pallas from forms in his own soul, or those which
the muse of Homer supplied. Seneca seems to wonder, that, the sculptor
having never beheld either Jove or Pallas, yet could conceive their
divine images in his mind; and another eminent ancient says, that 'the
fancy more instructs the painter than the imitation; for the last makes
only the things which it sees, but the first makes also the things which
it never sees.' Such were also, in the fulness of time and study, the
ideas of the most distinguished moderns. Alberti tells us, that 'we
ought not so much to love the likeness as the beauty, and to choose from
the fairest bodies, severally, the fairest parts.' Da Vinci uses almost
the same words, and desires the painter to form the idea for himself;
and the incomparable Raphael thus writes to Castiglione concerning his
Galatea: 'To paint a fair one, it is necessary for me to see many fair
ones; but because there is so great a scarcity of lovely women, I am
constrained to make use of one certain idea, which I have formed in my
own fancy.' Guido Reni approaches still closer to the pure ideal of the
great Christian School of Painting, when he wishes for the wings of an
angel, to ascend to Paradise, and see, with his own eyes, the forms and
faces of the blessed spirits, that he might put more of heaven into his
pictures.
"Of the heaven which the great artist wished to infuse into his works,
there was but little in painting, when it rose to aid religion in Italy.
The shape was uncooth, the coloring ungraceful, and there was but the
faint dawn of that divine sentiment, which in time elevated Roman art to
the same eminence as the Grecian. Yet all that Christianity demanded
from Art, at first, was readily accomplished: fine forms, and delicate
hues, were not required for centuries, by the successors of the
Apostles; a Christ on the Cross; the Virgin lulling her divine Babe in
her bosom; the Miracle of Lazarus; the Preaching on the Mount; the
Conversion of St. Paul; and the Ascension--roughly sculptured or
coarsely painted, perhaps by the unskilful hands of the Christian
preachers themselves--were found sufficient to explain to a barbarous
people some of the great ruling truths of Christianity. These, and such
as these, were placed in churches, or borne about by gospel
missionaries and were appealed to, when words failed to express the
doctrines and mysteries which were required to be taught. Such appeals
were no doubt frequent, in times when Greek and Latin ceased to be
commonly spoken, and the present languages of Europe were shaping
themselves, like fruit in the leaf, out of the barbarous dissonance of
the wild tongues which then prevailed. These Christian preachers, with
their emblems and their relics, were listened to by the Gothic
subverters of the empire of art and elegance, with the more patience and
complacency, since they desired not to share in their plunder or their
conquests, and opened to them the way to a far nobler kingdom--a kingdom
not of this earth.
"Though abundance of figures of saints were carved, and innumerable
Madonnas painted throughout Italy, in the earlier days of the Christian
church, they were either literal transcripts of common life, or
mechanical copies or imitations of works furnished from the great store
looms of the Asiatic Greeks. There were thousands--nay, tens of
thousands of men, who wrote themselves artists, while not one of them
had enough of imagination and skill to lift art above the low estate in
which the rule and square of mechanical imitation had placed it. Niccolo
Pisano appears to have been the first who, at Pisa, took the right way
in sculpture: his groups, still in existence, are sometimes too crowded;
his figures badly designed, and the whole defective in sentiment; but
he gave an impulse--communicated through the antique--to composition,
not unperceived by his scholars, who saw with his eyes and wrought with
his spirit. The school which he founded produced, soon after, the
celebrated Ghiberti, whose gates of bronze, embellished with figures,
for the church of San Giovanni, were pronounced by Michael Angelo worthy
to be the gates of Paradise. While the sister art took these large
strides towards fame, Painting lagged ruefully behind; she had no true
models, and she had no true rules; but 'the time and the man' came at
last, and this man was Giovanni Cimabue."