There is one other important step left towards the atchievement of the
art: but the artist, who, boldly forsaking the common path, dares to
attempt it, finds himself at once on the brink of a precipice, and starts
back dismayed.
The stories of martyrs and saints, fables and metamorphoses, are almost
the only objects of modern painters—repeated a thousand times, and varied
almost beyond the limits of possibility, every tolerable judge grows sick
at them.
The judicious artist falls asleep over a Daphne and Apollo, a Proserpine
carried off by Pluto, an Europa, &c. he wishes for occasions to shew
himself a poet, to produce significant images, to paint Allegory.
Painting goes beyond the senses: _there_ is its most elevated pitch, to
which the Greeks strove to raise themselves, as their writings evince.
Parrhasius, like Aristides, a painter of the soul, was able to express
the character even of a whole people: he painted the Athenians as mild
as cruel, as fickle as steady, as brave as timid. Such a representation
owes its possibility only to the allegorical method, whose images convey
general ideas.
But here the artist is lost in a desart. Tongues the most savage, which
are entirely destitute of abstracted ideas, containing no word whose
sense could express memory, space, duration, &c. these tongues, I say,
are not more destitute of general signs, than painting in our days. The
painter who thinks beyond his palette longs for some learned apparatus,
by whose stores he might be enabled to invest abstracted ideas with
sensible and meaning images. Nothing has yet been published of this
kind, to satisfy a rational being; the essays hitherto made are not
considerable, and far beneath this great design. The artist himself
knows best in what degree he is satisfied with Ripa’s Iconology, and the
emblems of ancient nations, by Van Hooghe.
Hence the greatest artists have chosen but vulgar objects. _Annibal
Caracci_, instead of representing in general symbols and sensible images
the history of the Farnesian family, as an allegorical poet, wasted all
his skill in fables known to the whole world.
Go, visit the galleries of monarchs, and the publick repositories of
art, and see what difference there is between the number of allegorical,
poetical, or even historical performances, and that of fables, saints, or
madonnas.
Among great artists, _Rubens_ is the most eminent, who first, like a
sublime poet, dared to attempt this untrodden path. His most voluminous
composition, the gallery of Luxembourg, has been communicated to the
world by the hands of the best engravers.
After him the sublimest performance undertaken and finished, in that
kind, is, no doubt, the cupola of the imperial library at Vienna, painted
by _Daniel Gran_, and engraved by _Sedelmayer_. The Apotheosis of
Hercules at Versailles, done by _Le Moine_, and alluding to the Cardinal
_Hercules de Fleury_, though deemed in France the most august of
compositions, is, in comparison of the learned and ingenious performance
of the German artist, but a very mean and short-sighted Allegory,
resembling a panegyric, the most striking beauties of which are relative
to the almanack. The artist had it in his power to indulge grandeur, and
his flipping the occasion is astonishing: but even allowing, that the
Apotheosis of a minister was all that he ought to have decked the chief
cieling of a royal palace with, we nevertheless see through his fig-leaf.
The artist would require a work, containing every image with which any
abstracted idea might be poetically inverted; a work collected from
all mythology, the best poets of all ages, the mysterious philosophy
of different nations, the monuments of the ancients on gems, coins,
utensils, &c. This magazine should be distributed into several classes,
and, with proper applications to peculiar possible cases, adapted to the
instruction of the artist. This would, at the same time, open a vast
field for imitating the ancients, and participating of their sublimer
taste.
The taste in our decorations, which, since the complaints of _Vitruvius_,
hath changed for the worse, partly by the grotesques brought in vogue by
_Morto da Feltro_, partly by our trifling house-painting, might also,
from more intimacy with the ancients, reap the advantages of reality and
common sense.
The Caricatura-carvings, and favourite shells, those chief supports of
our ornaments, are full as unnatural as the candle-sticks of _Vitruvius_,
with their little castles and palaces: how easy would it be, by the help
of Allegory, to give some learned convenience to the smallest ornament!
_Reddere personæ scit convenientia cuique._
Hor.
Paintings of ceilings, doors, and chimney-pieces, are commonly but the
expletives of these places, because they cannot be gilt all over. Not
only they have not the least relation to the rank and circumstances of
the proprietor, but often throw some ridicule or reflection upon him.
’Tis an abhorrence of barrenness that fills walls and rooms; and pictures
void of thought must supply the vacuum.
Hence the artist, abandoned to the dictates of his own fancy, paints, for
want of Allegory, perhaps a satire on him to whom he owes his industry;
or, to shun this Charybdis, finds himself reduced to paint figures void
of any meaning.