(Plate XLIII) might almost be portraits of brothers; and the family is
increased by a little Egyptian head in the museum in Venice, and by some
of the men immortalised by Donatello. So too Pericles as we see him in
the bust by Kresilas seems separated by but a narrow margin from
Giorgione’s Knight of Malta. And yet in blood, traditions, circumstances
and hopes these men were the poles asunder.
How then is this likeness of certain portraits to one another to be
explained unless by the existence of some connection dependent on the
temper of the artist?
There is still another curious likeness and another difference to be
noted among the carved and painted portraits of various epochs and
schools. While the head of Corbulo is unlike that of Pericles in the
æsthetic impression it gives, and that of Angelo Doni by Raphael also is
æsthetically unlike the Duke of Norfolk by Titian, still the carved
heads have a common bond as have also the painted ones.[19] They do not
make the two broad groups into which I have, for the sake of making
plain a general idea, divided portraits æsthetically similar, but they
make plain when understood that painted portraits are necessarily
different from carved ones—different in more than the mere fact that one
is round and the other flat. The difference springs deep down from what
is possible to attain by either art. The sculptor of the Pericles and
the painter of the Norfolk both set before us the grave, elegant and
stately face of a bearded man in middle life. Neither artist distracts
our attention by bravura or technique or by realistic emphasis of
detail. Though stylistically similar, these works still do not impress
our minds in the same way. The following pages will be clearer if I say
at once that this differing mental impression arises because in busts
our attention is drawn chiefly to the mouth while in painted portraits
it is turned on the eyes. This is due to the special laws of the
technique by which the works are produced; given a painter and sculptor
with the same point of view and the same mental tendencies, the
portraits produced by them, even of the same person, though evidently
expressing the same intellectual qualities both of artist and of sitter,
are in modes of expression and certain external aspects necessarily
unlike. In pursuing this investigation and in discussing the existence
and nature of the various laws the governance of which I have suggested,
the history of the rise and spread of portraiture must be kept in mind.
[Illustration: PLATE XLI.]
Before the intention of the maker of portraits can be comprehended the
motives that lead to the desire of the public or of private individuals
to possess such work must be understood. In the main they are two,—one
religious and one historic; to these may be added a third, that of
sentiment and friendship. The religious cause is best illustrated by
Egyptian statues, of which a large proportion were made to be placed in
tombs. These are the earliest portraits of western origin which exist in
sufficient numbers to afford a sound basis of criticism. The well-known
dependence, in that country, of these works on religious prescriptions
needs hardly more than passing mention. That the soul of dead mortals
might, returning to this earth and to the tomb, find its accustomed
corporeal dwelling place, portrait statues of the deceased were placed
in the sepulchral chamber.
Holding this belief, it was only natural that the sculptors often made
statues life-size, and as closely resembling the dead original as
possible, in order that the soul might find a shelter exactly similar to
its original living one. Had they not been so made, the soul would have
been troubled in its search. Work such as this was of course expensive
and the mass of the people had to content themselves with smaller and
less elaborate figures or with mere glazed figurines. But the more rare
elaborate works show the ideal and serve as a sure guide in studying the
conceptions and hopes of this or any people—just as the gold treasure
from Mycenæ is of much greater value than all the terra-cotta vases in
showing the life and thoughts of the time.
Other portraits of Pharaohs and their queens, of priests and generals,
were carved on temple walls or set up to commemorate striking events,
and these also were made realistic because of the egotistic idea that
called them into being. Unless the person portrayed was carved
realistically the commemorative value of the monument was lessened.
These religious and commemorative ideas influenced the sculptors in
their choice of material. Both the desire to make an enduring image of
the dead for the sake of the soul that might return and the wish to make
the memory of the person as enduring as possible led the sculptors to
make use of the hardest stones; stones such as do not lend themselves to
sculpture and such as are never used where the art develops in
accordance with cultivated taste rather than special demand.[20] But
though exactness of likeness was tirelessly sought for by the Egyptians
(I refer of course to the earlier epochs before the influx of Greek or
Roman ideas), it was not attained with the same success as in later days
by the Romans and Florentines.
[Illustration: PLATE XLII.]
This failure was in part due to the use of unyielding material, such as
granite and basalt. Successful representation, in such stone, of the
finer details of facial form, was practically impossible, and
furthermore, owing to the dark and variegated colour of these stones,
would have been scarcely noticeable could it have been attained. Hence
the sculptors were led to practise a certain broadness of treatment that
makes their work seem, to careless observation, like the Greek; but
though one of the chief charms of Greek work is broadness, it is the
outcome of very different causes and, if carefully studied, is seen to
produce a very different effect from that of Egyptian work.[21]
Any phenomenon is due to mixed causes, and it must not be supposed that
the use of hard materials alone led to breadth of treatment. The
conventional position of the figures in Egyptian art (due in large
measure to various non-æsthetic causes) was suited better by a broad and
conventionalised treatment of the face than by more particular niceness
in the rendering of its detail.[22] Religious feeling led to the placing
of quietly posed statues in the tombs, and as regards the figures of the
great rulers whose word was law, attitudes expressive of the calm that
results from absolute power were best fitted to express the current
beliefs. These attitudes were also restrained in consequence of the
refractory nature of the stones used.
It is interesting to consider what would have been the development of
sculpture in Egypt had the art been freed from the necessity of
conforming to the demands of religion and contemporary history. One
searches in vain among the masses of Egyptian sculpture for the
expression of the individual sculptor’s emotions. We do not even know
the names of the sculptors. They were not noted by their contemporaries
nor did interest in their work lead them to sign it. Sculpture in that
antique land was not a fine art in the sense of being chosen by men of
special tastes and feeling to express the enjoyment felt by them in
certain forms. It was a highly developed handicraft, a technique pursued
by rule. As illustrative of the character, the life and the thought of
the people portrayed it is allied to Roman work rather than to Greek.
Religion is seen to influence portraiture in another way. Many pictures,
the subjects of which are religious, by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and
others, are filled with portraits, but these are essential to the
composition, and are thought of as figures first, as portraits
afterwards. But there are many sacred pictures of the Renaissance in
which, with varying degrees of simplicity and frankness, a portrait of
the donor of the painting is inserted not as an essential part of the
composition but because of the desire of the donor to secure lasting
recognition of the fact that he had fulfilled his religious vows and
duties. It was an accepted proof of respectability in this world and
might possibly help in the next. Neither in Egypt nor in this class of
pictures of the Renaissance are the works thought of primarily from the
point of view of being artistic reproductions of the human face, but
they are means to an end. They are in fact symbols. Work of this sort is
so rare in Greek or Roman art that it may be considered as practically
non-existent.[23]
The personal portrait, the portrait made for the sake of gratifying the
self-esteem of the person represented, is well exhibited in Egyptian
work in the bas-reliefs illustrating the conquests of the Pharaohs and
in the colossal statues erected in a spirit of pride and
self-glorification such as was exhibited again by the Romans. Such
portraits as these are a certain indication of the all but universal
desire for glory and fame. They are an expression of the same confident
spirit that leads the owners of great buildings to carve their names
over the entrance and are produced in large numbers only during periods
when individuals seek eagerly for personal recognition.
Such periods occur when large stores of money are possessed by private
persons; then religious beliefs grow faint, in men’s if not in
women’s[24] minds, and the quiet and enduring appreciation of a few
objects gives way to the excited pursuit of constant novelty in
enjoyment. Consequently instead of being content with philosophic
moderation men attribute an untrue value to mere possession, and, since
money can buy many material things, come to the false conclusion that he
who has the most is to be ranked among the world’s greatest sons.
But the qualities needful for amassing riches are by no means rare and
in the main are correlated with lack of interest in the Past and with
undeveloped imagination. Hence ignorant of, or at least not sympathetic
with, the more subtle but more effective types of men who work not with
money but with personal character, the wealthy naturally come to think
of themselves as individually interesting and important, and in
consequence their portraits are made in every shape and size. Such works
cannot, as regards the person portrayed, be of much interest, and are
usually ugly, because the lives and occupations of people invariably
affect the forms and expressions of their faces. The exceptions to this
rule are the portraits of such men as Lorenzo dei Medici, or others of
our own day who use their inherited or acquired wealth in the patronage
of the arts and sciences—who use their powers indirectly for the
cultivation of ideals.
Such portraits as these are of varying character. They may be public,
put up, that is, by a grateful and flattering people to commemorate a
ruler or chief citizen, as in the case of Gattamalata in Padua and
Colleone in Venice; or they may be of purely private interest and
intended only for the eyes of the successive generations of the family
to which the person depicted belongs. But public or private, in the one
case as in the other, the desire for them being due to personal regard
and love of fame, an accuracy in the reproduction of feature is sought
that distinguishes them clearly from portraits made with other less
worldly motives.
[Illustration: PLATE XLIII.]
It is known of course that this desire for fame stirred the hearts of
oriental potentates long centuries before the beginning of connected
history. But in that classic part of the ancient world with which we are
intimately related, it does not become specially noticeable till the
time of Alexander. It was an active factor in life during the existence
of the Roman world, and again in the Renaissance. One of the phenomena
most indicative of this aspiration is the character of the monuments
placed on graves, and particularly the inscriptions on such stones. On
the Greek grave stones we find often enough the name of the deceased but
rarely if ever any intimate notice of his life. On Roman and Renaissance
monuments, on the other hand, the length of life, and the honorific
offices held, are all given with wearisomely full detail.
Portraits made for friendship’s sake are uncommon and do not, I believe,
occur before the time of the Renaissance. Then one hears of friends
sending their portraits to one another. In Rome a somewhat similar
custom was practised to a certain extent, as is shown by the portraits
on rings and cameos. Such work, meant as it was for personal adornment,
must have been, at least in part, inspired by the tender regard of
friend for friend. But it seems not to have been a common custom in the
ancient world; just why it would be hard to tell, for no more inviolable
friendships have ever been known than those told of in ancient history
and drama, nor more tender feeling than is expressed in many of the
inscriptions on ancient tombstones. Perhaps it was that the house
architecture of those days was but little adapted to the displaying of
such objects, and the collection by private individuals of things was
but little practised except in Rome, and even there collectors were
comparatively few. However this may be, the fact remains that the
portraits of the ancient world were in the main religious or
commemorative, and the idea of friendship being maintained or
strengthened by the possession of the dumb semblance of absent dear ones
seems to have grown and spread with the Christian religion.
At first sight it appears as if there were three ways of making
portraits—the sculptor’s, the painter’s, and the writer’s. It is not
however in any true sense a portrait that a writer sets before us. This
is beyond his power to accomplish. He is unable, that is, to give
various readers such impression of the look and carriage of the person
described that they can inevitably recognise him in the passing crowd.
Continuous and sequent events may be described by words, but they cannot
show instantaneously isolated images. Masters of style can call up
visions to the mind by well-selected epithets, but such visions are
typical rather than actual; and they are of scenes of considerable
scope, or of actions of dramatic quality, rather than accurate images of
facial form and expression such as in the only true sense of the word,
can be called portraits.
So far as art in the sense of reproduction is concerned, it is evident
that language can be used for description, for suggestions of moods and
general conditions, but not for showing in a sharp and quickly defined
manner a given scene or object at a given moment. When Shelley speaks of
The obscene ravens, clamorous o’er the dead;
The vultures to the conqueror’s banner true
Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
And whose wings rain contagion,—
[Illustration: PLATE XLIV.]
he calls to mind most vividly conditions consequent on war, but before
no two readers of the lines will the same visions rise. To see such
horrors as Shelley writes of, presented so that all beholders will
regard them in the same way, we must turn to such a work as Turner’s
Rizpah.[25]
The Greeks, it is interesting to note in this connection, recognised
this limitation of the power of words and rarely tried to delineate the
actors in their poetry and drama by other means than the description of
traits of character. It may be said that the Greeks also did not attempt
landscape in their writing. True, but we have every reason to know that
the Greek mind was not interested seriously in beauties of landscape,
while we know that it was deeply concerned with the characters and
actions of individuals. Landscape was not studied by the Greeks as an
end in itself, whereas portraiture was. Hence the absence of an attempt
at portraiture in their literature by other means than description of
character is the natural result of their mental tendencies. Such
description can of course be accomplished by language with greater
certainty than by sculpture or painting. It can give such an impression
of the nature of a person that there is no more room for doubt
concerning the qualities that constitute that nature than there is
concerning the colour of eyes that have been put on canvas by some
painter. Take any example and it will appear that when an author tries
to stir the imagination to form an image of a character, he does it
mainly by describing carefully his nature rather than his personal
appearance, and when he attempts to do more than this, he suggests
inevitably a different vision to every reader. Shakespeare’s sonnets are
sufficient evidence of the truth of these statements.
I should not wish to imply that writers, even the greatest of them, do
not sometimes attempt to depict persons by elaborate descriptions, but a
comparison of any two illustrated editions of an author will show my
contention to be correct. The inefficiency of the means and the
inadequacy of the result has been recognised by the masters of
literature. And it needs but to compare a word portrait with a painted
one of the same person to be convinced of the painter’s greater power in
this work. Take Shelley’s lines describing the crazed musician:
There the poor wretch was sitting mournfully
Near a piano, his pale fingers twined
One with the other, and the ooze and wind
Rushed through an open casement, and did sway
His hair, and starred it with the brackish spray;
His head was leaning on a music book,
And he was muttering, and his lean limbs shook;
His lips were pressed against a folded leaf
In hue too beautiful for health, and grief
Smiled in their motions as they lay apart—
As one who wrought from his own fervid heart
The eloquence of passion, soon he raised
His sad meek face and eyes lustrous and glazed
And spoke—sometimes as one who wrote and thought
His words might move some heart that heeded not
If sent to distant lands.—
As a portrait the failure of these verses lies in the fact that the
attention of the reader is hurried on from point to point like a
storm-driven bird and never allowed to rest. Look, for half the time it
takes to read the lines, at Titian’s Concert, and you have a much more
definite image of a musician. It is just because of this unrest of the
attention, due to continued introduction of some new feature of
importance, that poets and writers of prose are much more successful
when they endeavour to reproduce a landscape, for it is a natural
tendency, as we look at any scene of nature, for the eyes to wander over
the hills and far away. They cannot seize the essential points
instantaneously and they cannot apprehend the interrelation of the
details as when they look at a person’s face and figure.
Sometimes the poet—it is generally a poet, for the epithets that poets
use are apt to be more carefully chosen and so have greater graphic
force than those of prose writers—seems to succeed in portraiture, but
if you will consider closely, it will be seen that the success is
fictitious. It is due to our having a ready-formed picture of the
character of the person described which is suited by the poet’s words,
as in Browning’s lines:
You know we French stormed Ratisbon,
A mile or so away
On a little mound Napoleon stood
On our storming day
With neck outthrust, you fancy how,
Legs wide, arms locked behind,
As if to balance the prone brow
Oppressive with its mind.
But to one who had never seen a picture of Napoleon what image would
these lines give? Or, take Lowell’s lines on Lincoln. Not a word in them
concerning the outward appearance of the Martyr Chief; but the attempt,
successful to the uttermost, is made to impress on the reader’s mind
what there was of him to think of, not to look at:
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God and true.
These epithets offer no suggestion that can be visualised, nor is there
when we note
... that sure mind’s unfaltering skill
And supple tempered will
That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.
And then finally, to sum up:
Here was a type of the true elder race,
And one of Plutarch’s men talked with us face to face.
Vivid and eloquent as all this is, it offers no picture of the tall,
gaunt President. It is but a suggestion of mental conditions. It does
not show the deep-set eyes, sorrowful with the sorrows of two races, or
the firm mouth lined with the humour that helped him to bear his burden
of care. Plutarch himself does not show us Cæsar, or Pericles, or
Demosthenes or any other worthy, as the sculptors do.
Possibly it might be suggested that in such poems as those quoted the
writer had no intention of giving a suggestion of the outer husk that
hides the inner man; but there is one class of poems—the love lyrics—in
which the passion-driven bard would surely, could it be accomplished,
give the immortality of portraiture to the beloved. But those “dear dead
women,” the ever-renewing Spring brood of Sappho, Chloris, Lesbia,
Lalage and Doris, are but the vague dwellers of dreamland. Sometimes
they are dark and sometimes fair; they have cheeks that shame the rose,
and eyes whose glance overwhelms as does the bolt of Jove; their brows
are white as driven snow, and a nest for little loves is in their
bosom—but can we ever be sure that we recognise from such description
each particular Lesbia as, waiting and watching at the corner, we
hopefully murmur “She comes, she’s here, she’s past”? Such words as
these form a portrait only for that one love-stung heart that beats the
overtone to the note of Lesbia’s footfall.
No, the writer cannot, in any adequate sense, place before us portraits.
Literature being excluded as a means of portraiture, it remains to
consider sculpture and painting. In order to understand why painted and
carved portraits showing similar types with equal distinctness and
emphasis produce very different effects on the observer and hold his
attention in different ways, study must be made of the different results
possible to attain by these arts. If these general propositions in
regard to the two arts be true, the demands and characteristics of
portraiture will become plainer.
The fundamental distinction between sculpture and painting lies in the
fact that the former concerns itself not always, but primarily, with
light and shadow and fully modelled forms, while the latter deals
chiefly with colour. Furthermore, painting works in two dimensions,
while sculpture exercises herself with three. Hence, figures in
positions that are much contorted or groups that are complexly organised
in retreating planes are unsuitable subjects for a painter, inasmuch as
he cannot represent them clearly except at the expense of infinite
labour. If the sculptor, on the other hand, chooses such subjects, he is
not hampered by the difficulties that block the painter’s path. His
finished work can be looked at from all sides, and he is not liable to
the painter’s risk that his final effect may, perhaps, be ruined by a
misuse of light and shade or by faulty drawing and perspective.