Spence has the strangest notions of the resemblance between painting and
poetry. He believes the two arts to have been so closely connected among
the ancients that they always went hand in hand, the poet never losing
sight of the painter, nor the painter of the poet. That poetry has the
wider sphere, that beauties are within her reach which painting can
never attain, that she may often see reason to prefer unpicturesque
beauties to picturesque ones,—these things seem never to have occurred
to him. The slightest difference, therefore, between the old poets and
artists throws him into an embarrassment from which it taxes all his
ingenuity to escape.
The poets generally gave Bacchus horns. Spence is therefore surprised
that we seldom see these appendages on his statues.[57] He suggests one
reason and another; now the ignorance of the antiquarians, and again
“the smallness of the horns themselves, which were very likely to be hid
under the crown of grapes or ivy which is almost a constant ornament of
the head of Bacchus.” He goes all round the true cause without ever
suspecting it. The horns of Bacchus were not a natural growth like those
of fauns and satyrs. They were ornaments which he could assume or lay
aside at pleasure.
Tibi, cum sine cornibus adstas,
Virgineum caput est, ...
says Ovid in his solemn invocation to Bacchus.[58] He could therefore
show himself without horns, and did, in fact, thus show himself when he
wished to appear in his virgin beauty. In this form artists would choose
to represent him, and necessarily omitted all disagreeable
accompaniments. Horns fastened to the diadem, as we see them on a head
in the royal museum in Berlin,[59] would have been a cumbersome
appendage, as would also the diadem itself, concealing the beautiful
brow. For this reason the diadem appears as rarely as the horns on the
statues of Bacchus, although, as its inventor, he is often crowned with
it by the poets. In poetry both horns and diadem served as subtle
allusions to the deeds and character of the god: in a picture or statue
they would have stood in the way of greater beauties. If Bacchus, as I
believe, received the name of Biformis, Δίμορφος, from having an aspect
of beauty as well as of terror, the artists would naturally have chosen
the shape best adapted to the object of their art.
In the Roman poets Minerva and Juno often hurl the thunderbolt. Why are
they not so represented in art? asks Spence.[60] He answers, “This power
was the privilege of these two goddesses, the reason of which was,
perhaps, first learnt in the Samothracian mysteries. But since, among
the ancient Romans, artists were considered as of inferior rank, and
therefore rarely initiated into them, they would doubtless know nothing
of them; and what they knew not of they clearly could not represent.” I
should like to ask Spence whether these common people were working
independently, or under the orders of superiors who might be initiated
into the mysteries; whether the artists occupied such a degraded
position among the Greeks; whether the Roman artists were not for the
most part Greeks by birth; and so on.
Statius and Valerius Flaccus describe an angry Venus with such terrible
features that we should take her at the moment for a fury rather than
for the goddess of love. Spence searches in vain for such a Venus among
the works of ancient art. What is his conclusion? That more is allowed
to the poet than to the sculptor and painter? That should have been his
inference. But he has once for all established as a general rule that
“scarce any thing can be good in a poetical description which would
appear absurd if represented in a statue or picture.”[61] Consequently
the poets must be wrong. “Statius and Valerius Flaccus belong to an age
when Roman poetry was already in its decline. In this very passage they
display their bad judgment and corrupted taste. Among the poets of a
better age such a repudiation of the laws of artistic expression will
never be found.”[62]
Such criticism shows small power of discrimination. I do not propose to
undertake the defence of either Statius or Valerius, but will simply
make a general remark. The gods and other spiritual beings represented
by the artist are not precisely the same as those introduced by the
poet. To the artist they are personified abstractions which must always
be characterized in the same way, or we fail to recognize them. In
poetry, on the contrary, they are real beings, acting and working, and
possessing, besides their general character, qualities and passions
which may upon occasion take precedence. Venus is to the sculptor simply
love. He must therefore endow her with all the modest beauty, all the
tender charms, which, as delighting us in the beloved object, go to make
up our abstract idea of love. The least departure from this ideal
prevents our recognizing her image. Beauty distinguished more by majesty
than modesty is no longer Venus but Juno. Charms commanding and manly
rather than tender, give us, instead of a Venus, a Minerva. A Venus all
wrath, a Venus urged by revenge and rage, is to the sculptor a
contradiction in terms. For love, as love, never is angry, never avenges
itself. To the poet, Venus is love also, but she is the goddess of love,
who has her own individuality outside of this one characteristic, and
can therefore be actuated by aversion as well as affection. What wonder,
then, that in poetry she blazes into anger and rage, especially under
the provocation of insulted love?
The artist, indeed, like the poet, may, in works composed of several
figures, introduce Venus or any other deity, not simply by her one
characteristic, but as a living, acting being. But the actions, if not
the direct results of her character, must not be at variance with it.
Venus delivering to her son the armor of the gods is a subject equally
suitable to artist and poet. For here she can be endowed with all the
grace and beauty befitting the goddess of love. Such treatment will be
of advantage as helping us the more easily to recognize her. But when
Venus, intent on revenging herself on her contemners, the men of Lemnos,
wild, in colossal shape, with cheeks inflamed and dishevelled hair,
seizes the torch, and, wrapping a black robe about her, flies downward
on the storm-cloud,—that is no moment for the painter, because he has no
means of making us recognize her. The poet alone has the privilege of
availing himself of it. He can unite it so closely with some other
moment when the goddess is the true Venus, that we do not in the fury
forget the goddess of love. Flaccus does this,—
Neque enim alma videri
Jam tumet; aut tereti crinem subnectitur auro,
Sidereos diffusa sinus. Eadem effera et ingens
Et maculis suffecta genas; pinumque sonantem
Virginibus Stygiis, nigramque simillima pallam.[63]