Be it truth or fable that Love made the first attempt in the imitative
arts, thus much is certain: that she never tired of guiding the hand of
the great masters of antiquity. For although painting, as the art which
reproduces objects upon flat surfaces, is now practised in the broadest
sense of that definition, yet the wise Greek set much narrower bounds to
it. He confined it strictly to the imitation of beauty. The Greek artist
represented nothing that was not beautiful. Even the vulgarly beautiful,
the beauty of inferior types, he copied only incidentally for practice
or recreation. The perfection of the subject must charm in his work. He
was too great to require the beholders to be satisfied with the mere
barren pleasure arising from a successful likeness or from consideration
of the artist’s skill. Nothing in his art was dearer to him or seemed to
him more noble than the ends of art.
“Who would want to paint you when no one wants to look at you?” says an
old epigrammatist[9] to a misshapen man. Many a modern artist would say,
“No matter how misshapen you are, I will paint you. Though people may
not like to look at you, they will be glad to look at my picture; not as
a portrait of you, but as a proof of my skill in making so close a copy
of such a monster.”
The fondness for making a display with mere manual dexterity, ennobled
by no worth in the subject, is too natural not to have produced among
the Greeks a Pauson and a Pyreicus. They had such painters, but meted
out to them strict justice. Pauson, who confined himself to the beauties
of ordinary nature, and whose depraved taste liked best to represent the
imperfections and deformities of humanity,[10] lived in the most
abandoned poverty;[11] and Pyreicus, who painted barbers’ rooms, dirty
workshops, donkeys, and kitchen herbs, with all the diligence of a Dutch
painter, as if such things were rare or attractive in nature, acquired
the surname of Rhyparographer,[12] the dirt-painter. The rich
voluptuaries, indeed, paid for his works their weight in gold, as if by
this fictitious valuation to atone for their insignificance.
Even the magistrates considered this subject a matter worthy their
attention, and confined the artist by force within his proper sphere.
The law of the Thebans commanding him to make his copies more beautiful
than the originals, and never under pain of punishment less so, is well
known. This was no law against bunglers, as has been supposed by critics
generally, and even by Junius himself,[13] but was aimed against the
Greek Ghezzi, and condemned the unworthy artifice of obtaining a
likeness by exaggerating the deformities of the model. It was, in fact,
a law against caricature.
From this same conception of the beautiful came the law of the Olympic
judges. Every conqueror in the Olympic games received a statue, but a
portrait-statue was erected only to him who had been thrice victor.[14]
Too many indifferent portraits were not allowed among works of art. For
although a portrait admits of being idealized, yet the likeness should
predominate. It is the ideal of a particular person, not the ideal of
humanity.
We laugh when we read that the very arts among the ancients were subject
to the control of civil law; but we have no right to laugh. Laws should
unquestionably usurp no sway over science, for the object of science is
truth. Truth is a necessity of the soul, and to put any restraint upon
the gratification of this essential want is tyranny. The object of art,
on the contrary, is pleasure, and pleasure is not indispensable. What
kind and what degree of pleasure shall be permitted may justly depend on
the law-giver.
The plastic arts especially, besides the inevitable influence which they
exercise on the character of a nation, have power to work one effect
which demands the careful attention of the law. Beautiful statues
fashioned from beautiful men reacted upon their creators, and the state
was indebted for its beautiful men to beautiful statues. With us the
susceptible imagination of the mother seems to express itself only in
monsters.
From this point of view I think I detect a truth in certain old stories
which have been rejected as fables. The mothers of Aristomenes, of
Aristodamas, of Alexander the Great, Scipio, Augustus, and Galerius,
each dreamed during pregnancy that she was visited by a serpent. The
serpent was an emblem of divinity.[15] Without it Bacchus, Apollo,
Mercury, and Hercules were seldom represented in their beautiful
pictures and statues. These honorable women had been feasting their eyes
upon the god during the day, and the bewildering dream suggested to them
the image of the snake. Thus I vindicate the dream, and show up the
explanation given by the pride of their sons and by unblushing flattery.
For there must have been some reason for the adulterous fancy always
taking the form of a serpent.
But I am wandering from my purpose, which was simply to prove that among
the ancients beauty was the supreme law of the imitative arts. This
being established, it follows necessarily that whatever else these arts
may aim at must give way completely if incompatible with beauty, and, if
compatible, must at least be secondary to it.
I will confine myself wholly to expression. There are passions and
degrees of passion whose expression produces the most hideous
contortions of the face, and throws the whole body into such unnatural
positions as to destroy all the beautiful lines that mark it when in a
state of greater repose. These passions the old artists either refrained
altogether from representing, or softened into emotions which were
capable of being expressed with some degree of beauty.
Rage and despair disfigured none of their works. I venture to maintain
that they never represented a fury.[16] Wrath they tempered into
severity. In poetry we have the wrathful Jupiter, who hurls the
thunderbolt; in art he is simply the austere.
Anguish was softened into sadness. Where that was impossible, and where
the representation of intense grief would belittle as well as disfigure,
how did Timanthes manage? There is a well-known picture by him of the
sacrifice of Iphigenia, wherein he gives to the countenance of every
spectator a fitting degree of sadness, but veils the face of the father,
on which should have been depicted the most intense suffering. This has
been the subject of many petty criticisms. “The artist,” says one,[17]
“had so exhausted himself in representations of sadness that he
despaired of depicting the father’s face worthily.” “He hereby
confessed,” says another,[18] “that the bitterness of extreme grief
cannot be expressed by art.” I, for my part, see in this no proof of
incapacity in the artist or his art. In proportion to the intensity of
feeling, the expression of the features is intensified, and nothing is
easier than to express extremes. But Timanthes knew the limits which the
graces have imposed upon his art. He knew that the grief befitting
Agamemnon, as father, produces contortions which are essentially ugly.
He carried expression as far as was consistent with beauty and dignity.
Ugliness he would gladly have passed over, or have softened, but since
his subject admitted of neither, there was nothing left him but to veil
it. What he might not paint he left to be imagined. That concealment was
in short a sacrifice to beauty; an example to show, not how expression
can be carried beyond the limits of art, but how it should be subjected
to the first law of art, the law of beauty.
Apply this to the Laocoon and we have the cause we were seeking. The
master was striving to attain the greatest beauty under the given
conditions of bodily pain. Pain, in its disfiguring extreme, was not
compatible with beauty, and must therefore be softened. Screams must be
reduced to sighs, not because screams would betray weakness, but because
they would deform the countenance to a repulsive degree. Imagine
Laocoon’s mouth open, and judge. Let him scream, and see. It was,
before, a figure to inspire compassion in its beauty and suffering. Now
it is ugly, abhorrent, and we gladly avert our eyes from a painful
spectacle, destitute of the beauty which alone could turn our pain into
the sweet feeling of pity for the suffering object.
The simple opening of the mouth, apart from the violent and repulsive
contortions it causes in the other parts of the face, is a blot on a
painting and a cavity in a statue productive of the worst possible
effect. Montfaucon showed little taste when he pronounced the bearded
face of an old man with wide open mouth, to be a Jupiter delivering an
oracle.[19] Cannot a god foretell the future without screaming? Would a
more becoming posture of the lips cast suspicion upon his prophecies?
Valerius cannot make me believe that Ajax was painted screaming in the
above-mentioned picture of Timanthes.[20] Far inferior masters, after
the decline of art, do not in a single instance make the wildest
barbarian open his mouth to scream, even though in mortal terror of his
enemy’s sword.[21]
This softening of the extremity of bodily suffering into a lesser degree
of pain is apparent in the works of many of the old artists. Hercules,
writhing in his poisoned robe, from the hand of an unknown master, was
not the Hercules of Sophocles, who made the Locrian rocks and the Eubœan
promontory ring with his horrid cries. He was gloomy rather than
wild.[22] The Philoctetes of Pythagoras Leontinus seemed to communicate
his pain to the beholder, an effect which would have been destroyed by
the slightest disfigurement of the features. It may be asked how I know
that this master made a statue of Philoctetes. From a passage in Pliny,
which ought not to have waited for my emendation, so evident is the
alteration or mutilation it has under gone.[23]