With the ancients, it was undoubtedly a custom to place the portraits of
authors before their works. Martial's 186th epigram of his fourteenth
book is a mere play on words, concerning a little volume containing the
works of Virgil, and which had his portrait prefixed to it. The volume
and the characters must have been very diminutive.
_Quam brevis immensum cepit membrana Maronem!
Ipsius Vultus prima tabella gerit._
Martial is not the only writer who takes notice of the ancients
prefixing portraits to the works of authors. Seneca, in his ninth
chapter on the Tranquillity of the Soul, complains of many of the
luxurious great, who, like so many of our own collectors, possessed
libraries as they did their estates and equipages. "It is melancholy to
observe how the portraits of men of genius, and the works of their
divine intelligence, are used only as the luxury and the ornaments of
walls."
Pliny has nearly the same observation, _lib._ xxxv. _cap._ 2. He
remarks, that the custom was rather modern in his time; and attributes
to Asinius Pollio the honour of having introduced it into Rome. "In
consecrating a library with the portraits of our illustrious authors, he
has formed, if I may so express myself, a republic of the intellectual
powers of men." To the richness of book-treasures, Asinius Pollio had
associated a new source of pleasure, by placing the statues of their
authors amidst them, inspiring the minds of the spectators, even by
their eyes.
A taste for collecting portraits, or busts, was warmly pursued in the
happier periods of Rome; for the celebrated Atticus, in a work he
published of illustrious Romans, made it more delightful, by ornamenting
it with the portraits of those great men; and the learned Varro, in his
biography of Seven Hundred celebrated Men, by giving the world their
true features and their physiognomy _in some manner, aliquo modo
imaginibus_ is Pliny's expression, showed that even their persons should
not entirely be annihilated; they indeed, adds Pliny, form a spectacle
which the gods themselves might contemplate; for if the gods sent those
heroes to the earth, it is Varro who secured their immortality, and has
so multiplied and distributed them in all places, that we may carry
them about us, place them wherever we choose, and fix our eyes on them
with perpetual admiration. A spectacle that every day becomes more
varied and interesting, as new heroes appear, and as works of this kind
are spread abroad.
But as printing was unknown, to the ancients (though _stamping an
impression_ was daily practised, and, in fact, they possessed the art of
printing without being aware of it[22]), how were these portraits of
Varro so easily propagated? If copied with a pen, their correctness was
in some danger, and their diffusion must have been very confined and
slow; perhaps they were outlines. This passage of Pliny excites
curiosity difficult to satisfy; I have in vain inquired of several
scholars, particularly of the late Grecian, Dr. Burney.
A collection of the portraits of illustrious characters affords not only
a source of entertainment and curiosity, but displays the different
modes or habits of the time; and in settling our floating ideas upon the
true features of famous persons, they also fix the chronological
particulars of their birth, age, death, sometimes with short characters
of them, besides the names of painter and engraver. It is thus a single
print, by the hand of a skilful artist, may become a varied banquet. To
this Granger adds, that in a collection of engraved portraits, the
contents of many galleries are reduced into the narrow compass of a few
volumes; and the portraits of eminent persons, who distinguished
themselves through a long succession of ages, may be turned over in a
few hours.
"Another advantage," Granger continues, "attending such an assemblage
is, that the methodical arrangement has a surprising effect upon the
memory. We see the celebrated contemporaries of every age almost at one
view; and the mind is insensibly led to the history of that period. I
may add to these, an important circumstance, which is, the power that
such a collection will have in _awakening genius_. A skilful preceptor
will presently perceive the true bent of the temper of his pupil, by his
being struck with a Blake or a Boyle, a Hyde or a Milton."
A circumstance in the life of Cicero confirms this observation. Atticus
had a gallery adorned with the images or portraits of the great men of
Rome, under each of which he had severally described their principal
acts and honours, in a few concise verses of his own composition. It was
by the contemplation of two of these portraits (the ancient Brutus and a
venerable relative in one picture) that Cicero seems to have incited
Brutus, by the example of these his great ancestors, to dissolve the
tyranny of Cæsar. General Fairfax made a collection of engraved
portraits of warriors. A story much in favour of portrait-collectors is
that of the Athenian courtesan, who, in the midst of a riotous banquet
with her lovers, accidentally casting her eyes on the _portrait_ of a
philosopher that hung opposite to her seat, the happy character of
temperance and virtue struck her with so lively an image of her own
unworthiness, that she suddenly retreated for ever from the scene of
debauchery. The Orientalists have felt the same charm in their pictured
memorials; for "the imperial Akber," says Mr. Forbes, in his Oriental
Memoirs, "employed artists to make portraits of all the principal omrahs
and officers in his court;" they were bound together in a thick volume,
wherein, as the Ayeen Akbery, or the Institutes of Akber, expresses it,
"The PAST are kept in lively remembrance; and the PRESENT are insured
immortality."
Leonard Aretin, when young and in prison, found a portrait of Petrarch,
on which his eyes were perpetually fixed; and this sort of contemplation
inflamed the desire of imitating this great man. Buffon hung the
portrait of Newton before his writing-table.
On this subject, Tacitus sublimely expresses himself at the close of his
admired biography of Agricola: "I do not mean to censure the custom of
preserving in brass or marble the shape and stature of eminent men; but
busts and statues, like their originals, are frail and perishable. The
soul is formed of finer elements, its inward form is not to be expressed
by the hand of an artist with unconscious matter; our manners and our
morals may in some degree trace the resemblance. All of Agricola that
gained our love and raised our admiration still subsists, and ever will
subsist, preserved in the minds of men, the register of ages and the
records of fame."
What is more agreeable to the curiosity of the mind and the eye than the
portraits of great characters? An old philosopher, whom Marville invited
to see a collection of landscapes by a celebrated artist, replied,
"Landscapes I prefer seeing in the country itself, but I am fond of
contemplating the pictures of illustrious men." This opinion has some
truth; Lord Orford preferred an interesting portrait to either landscape
or historical painting. "A landscape, however excellent in its
distributions of wood, and water, and buildings, leaves not one trace in
the memory; historical painting is perpetually false in a variety of
ways, in the costume, the grouping, the portraits, and is nothing more
than fabulous painting; but a real portrait is truth itself, and calls
up so many collateral ideas as to fill an intelligent mind more than any
other species."
Marville justly reprehends the fastidious feelings of those ingenious
men who have resisted the solicitations of the artist, to sit for their
portraits. In them it is sometimes as much pride as it is vanity in
those who are less difficult in this respect. Of Gray, Fielding, and
Akenside, we have no heads for which they sat; a circumstance regretted
by their admirers, and by physiognomists.
To an arranged collection of PORTRAITS, we owe several interesting
works. Granger's justly esteemed volumes originated in such a
collection. Perrault's _Eloges_ of "the illustrious men of the
seventeenth century" were drawn up to accompany the engraved portraits
of the most celebrated characters of the age, which a fervent love of
the fine arts and literature had had engraved as an elegant tribute to
the fame of those great men. They are confined to his nation, as
Granger's to ours. The parent of this race of books may perhaps be the
Eulogiums of Paulus Jovius, which originated in a beautiful CABINET,
whose situation he has described with all its amenity.
Paulus Jovius had a country house, in an insular situation, of a most
romantic aspect. Built on the ruins of the villa of Pliny, in his time
the foundations were still to be traced. When the surrounding lake was
calm, in its lucid bosom were still viewed sculptured marbles, the
trunks of columns, and the fragments of those pyramids which had once
adorned the residence of the friend of Trajan. Jovius was an enthusiast
of literary leisure: an historian, with the imagination of a poet; a
Christian prelate nourished on the sweet fictions of pagan mythology.
His pen colours like a pencil. He paints rapturously his gardens bathed
by the waters of the lake, the shade and freshness of his woods, his
green hills, his sparkling fountains, the deep silence, and the calm of
solitude. He describes a statue raised in his gardens to NATURE; in his
hall an Apollo presided with his lyre, and the Muses with their
attributes; his library was guarded by Mercury, and an apartment devoted
to the three Graces was embellished by Doric columns, and paintings of
the most pleasing kind. Such was the interior! Without, the pure and
transparent lake spread its broad mirror, or rolled its voluminous
windings, by banks richly covered with olives and laurels; and in the
distance, towns, promontories, hills rising in an amphitheatre blushing
with vines, and the elevations of the Alps covered with woods and
pasturage, and sprinkled with herds and flocks.
In the centre of this enchanting habitation stood the CABINET, where
Paulus Jovius had collected, at great cost, the PORTRAITS of celebrated
men of the fourteenth and two succeeding centuries. The daily view of
them animated his mind to compose their eulogiums. These are still
curious, both for the facts they preserve, and the happy conciseness
with which Jovius delineates a character. He had collected these
portraits as others form a collection of natural history; and he pursued
in their characters what others do in their experiments.
One caution in collecting portraits must not be forgotten; it respects
their authenticity. We have too many supposititious heads, and ideal
personages. Conrad ab Uffenbach, who seems to have been the first
collector who projected a methodical arrangement, condemned those
spurious portraits which were fit only for the amusement of children.
The painter does not always give a correct likeness, or the engraver
misses it in his copy. Goldsmith was a short thick man, with wan
features and a vulgar appearance, but looks tall and fashionable in a
bag-wig. Bayle's portrait does not resemble him, as one of his friends
writes. Rousseau, in his Montero cap, is in the same predicament.
Winkelmann's portrait does not preserve the striking physiognomy of the
man, and in the last edition a new one is substituted. The faithful
Vertue refused to engrave for Houbraken's set, because they did not
authenticate their originals; and some of these are spurious, as that of
Ben Jonson, Sir Edward Coke, and others. Busts are not so liable to
these accidents. It is to be regretted that men of genius have not been
careful to transmit their own portraits to their admirers: it forms a
part of their character; a false delicacy has interfered. Erasmus did
not like to have his own diminutive person sent down to posterity, but
Holbein was always affectionately painting his friend. Montesquieu once
sat to Dassier the medallist, after repeated denials, won over by the
ingenious argument of the artist; "Do you not think," said Dassier,
"that there is as much pride in refusing my offer as in accepting it?"