ἑπτὰ δ’ ἐπέσχε πέλεθρα πεσών.
It is impossible for the painter to give the god this extraordinary
size. Yet if he do not, we have no Homeric Mars lying on the ground, but
an ordinary warrior.[88]
Longinus says, it has often seemed to him that Homer’s design was to
raise his men to gods and degrade his deities to men. Painting
accomplishes this. On canvas we lose every thing which in poetry exalts
the gods above mere godlike men. Size, strength, speed,—qualities which
Homer has always in store for his gods in miraculous measure, far
surpassing any thing he attributes to his most famous heroes,[89]—are
necessarily reduced in the picture to the common scale of humanity.
Jupiter and Agamemnon, Apollo and Achilles, Ajax and Mars, are all
kindred beings, only to be distinguished by some arbitrary outward sign.
The expedient to which painters have recourse to indicate that a certain
character is supposed to be invisible, is a thin cloud veiling the side
of the figure that is turned towards the other actors on the scene. This
cloud seems at first to be borrowed from Homer himself. For, when in the
confusion of battle one of the chief heroes becomes exposed to a danger
from which nothing short of divine aid can save him, the poet makes his
guardian deity veil him in a thick cloud or in darkness, and so lead him
from the field. Paris is thus delivered by Venus,[90] Idæus by
Neptune,[91] Hector by Apollo.[92] Caylus never omits strongly to
recommend to the artist this mist or cloud, whenever he is to paint
pictures of such occurrences. But who does not perceive that this
veiling in mist and darkness is only the poet’s way of saying that the
hero became invisible? It always seems strange to me, therefore, to find
this poetical expression embodied in a picture, and an actual cloud
introduced, behind which, as behind a screen, the hero stands hidden
from his enemy. This was not the poet’s meaning. The artist in this
exceeds the limits of painting. His cloud is a hieroglyphic, a purely
symbolic sign, which does not make the rescued hero invisible, but
simply says to the observers,—“You are to suppose this man to be
invisible.” It is no better than the rolls of paper with sentences upon
them, which issue from the mouth of personages in the old Gothic
pictures.
Homer, to be sure, makes Achilles give three thrusts with his lance at
the thick cloud[93] while Apollo is carrying off Hector,—τρὶς δ’ ἠέρα
τύψε βαθεῖαν. But that, in the language of poetry, only means that
Achilles was so enraged that he thrust three times with his lance before
perceiving that his enemy was no longer before him. Achilles saw no
actual cloud. The whole secret of this invisibility lay not in the
cloud, but in the god’s swift withdrawal of the imperilled hero. In
order to indicate that the withdrawal took place so instantaneously that
no human eye could follow the retreating form, the poet begins by
throwing over his hero a cloud; not because the by-standers saw the
cloud in the place of the vanished shape, but because to our mind things
in a cloud are invisible.
The opposite device is sometimes used, and, instead of the object being
made invisible, the subject is smitten with blindness. Thus Neptune
blinds the eyes of Achilles when he rescues Æneas from his murderous
hands by transporting him from the thick of the contest to the rear.[94]
In reality, the eyes of Achilles were no more blinded in the one case
than in the other the rescued heroes were veiled in a cloud. Both are
mere expressions employed by the poet to impress more vividly on our
minds the extreme rapidity of the removal; the disappearance, as we
should call it.
But artists have appropriated the Homeric mist not only in those cases
of concealment or disappearance where Homer himself employed or would
have employed it, but in cases where the spectator was to perceive
something which the characters on the canvas, or some of them at least,
were not to be conscious of. Minerva was visible to Achilles only, when
she restrained him from committing violence against Agamemnon. “I know
no other way of expressing this,” says Caylus, “than to interpose a
cloud between the goddess and the other members of the council.” This is
entirely contrary to the spirit of the poet. Invisibility was the
natural condition of his deities. So far from any stroke of blindness or
intercepting of the rays of light being necessary to render them
invisible,[95] a special illumination, an increased power of human
vision was needed to see them. Not only, therefore, is this cloud an
arbitrary and not a natural symbol in painting, but it does not possess
the clearness which, as an arbitrary sign, it should. It has a double
meaning, being employed as well to make the invisible visible as to
render the visible invisible.