respecting death and life. But underlying both these, and far more
mysterious, dreadful, and yet beautiful, there is the Greek conception
of _spiritual_ darkness; of the anger of fate, whether foredoomed or
avenging; the root and theme of all Greek tragedy; the anger of the
Erinnyes, and Demeter Erinnys, compared to which the anger either of
Apollo or Athena is temporary and partial:--and also, while Apollo or
Athena only slay, the power of Demeter and the Eumenides is over the
whole life; so that in the stories of Bellerophon, of Hippolytus, of
Orestes, of Oedipus, you have an incomparably deeper shadow than any
that was possible to the thought of later ages, when the hope of the
Resurrection had become definite. And if you keep this in mind, you will
find every name and legend of the oldest history become full of meaning
to you. All the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends
of the family of Tantalus. The main one is the making of the ivory
shoulder of Pelops after Demeter has eaten the shoulder of flesh. With
that you have Broteas, the brother of Pelops, carving the first statue
of the mother of the gods; and you have his sister, Niobe, weeping
herself to stone under the anger of the deities of light. Then Pelops
himself, the dark-faced, gives name to the Peloponnesus, which you may
therefore read as the "isle of darkness;" but its central city, Sparta,
the "sown city," is connected with all the ideas of the earth as
life-giving. And from her you have Helen, the representative of light in
beauty, and the Fratres Helenæ--"lucida sidera;" and, on the other side
of the hills, the brightness of Argos, with its correlative darkness
over the Atreidæ, marked to you by Helios turning away his face from the
feast of Thyestes.
152. Then join with these the Northern legends connected with the air.
It does not matter whether you take Dorus as the son of Apollo or the
son of Helen; he equally symbolises the power of light: while his
brother, Æolus, through all his descendants, chiefly in Sisyphus, is
confused or associated with the real god of the winds, and represents to
you the power of the air. And then, as this conception enters into art,
you have the myths of Dædalus, the flight of Icarus, and the story of
Phrixus and Helle, giving you continual associations of the physical air
and light, ending in the power of Athena over Corinth as well as over
Athens.
Now, once having the clue, you can work out the sequels for yourselves
better than I can for you; and you will soon find even the earliest or
slightest grotesques of Greek art become full of interest. For nothing
is more wonderful than the depth of meaning which nations in their first
days of thought, like children, can attach to the rudest symbols; and
what to us is grotesque or ugly, like a little child's doll, can speak
to them the loveliest things. I have brought you to-day a few more
examples of early Greek vase painting, respecting which remember
generally that its finest development is for the most part sepulchral.
You have, in the first period, always energy in the figures, light in
the sky or upon the figures;[13] in the second period, while the
conception of the divine power remains the same, it is thought of as in
repose, and the light is in the god, not in the sky; in the time of
decline, the divine power is gradually disbelieved, and all form and
light are lost together. With that period I wish you to have nothing to
do. You shall not have a single example of it set before you, but shall
rather learn to recognise afterwards what is base by its strangeness.
These, which are to come early in the third group of your Standard
series, will enough represent to you the elements of early and late
conception in the Greek mind of the deities of light.
[Footnote 13: See Note in the Catalogue on No. 201.]
153. First (S. 204), you have Apollo ascending from the sea; thought of
as the physical sunrise: only a circle of light for his head; his
chariot horses, seen foreshortened, black against the day-break, their
feet not yet risen above the horizon. Underneath is the painting from
the opposite side of the same vase: Athena as the morning breeze, and
Hermes as the morning cloud, flying across the waves before the sunrise.
At the distance I now hold them from you, it is scarcely possible for
you to see that they are figures at all, so like are they to broken
fragments of flying mist; and when you look close, you will see that as
Apollo's face is invisible in the circle of light, Mercury's is
invisible in the broken form of cloud: but I can tell you that it is
conceived as reverted, looking back to Athena; the grotesque appearance
of feature in the front is the outline of his hair.
These two paintings are excessively rude, and of the archaic period; the
deities being yet thought of chiefly as physical powers in violent
agency.
Underneath these two are Athena and Hermes, in the types attained about
the time of Phidias; but, of course, rudely drawn on the vase, and still
more rudely in this print from Le Normant and De Witte. For it is
impossible (as you will soon find if you try for yourself) to give on a
plane surface the grace of figures drawn on one of solid curvature, and
adapted to all its curves: and among other minor differences, Athena's
lance is in the original nearly twice as tall as herself, and has to be
cut short to come into the print at all. Still, there is enough here to
show you what I want you to see--the repose, and entirely realised
personality, of the deities as conceived in the Phidian period. The
relation of the two deities is, I believe, the same as in the painting
above, though probably there is another added of more definite kind. But
the physical meaning still remains--Athena unhelmeted, as the _gentle_
morning wind, commanding the cloud Hermes to slow flight. His petasus is
slung at his back, meaning that the clouds are not yet opened or
expanded in the sky.
154. Next (S. 205), you have Athena, again unhelmeted and crowned with
leaves, walking between two nymphs, who are crowned also with leaves;
and all the three hold flowers in their hands, and there is a fawn
walking at Athena's feet.
This is still Athena as the morning air, but upon the earth instead of
in the sky, with the nymphs of the dew beside her; the flowers and
leaves opening as they breathe upon them. Note the white gleam of light
on the fawn's breast; and compare it with the next following
examples:--(underneath this one is the contest of Athena and Poseidon,
which does not bear on our present subject).
Next (S. 206), Artemis as the moon of morning, walking low on the hills,
and singing to her lyre; the fawn beside her, with the gleam of light
and sunrise on its ear and breast. Those of you who are often out in the
dawntime know that there is no moon so glorious as that gleaming
crescent, though in its wane, ascending _before_ the sun.
Underneath, Artemis, and Apollo, of Phidian time.
Next (S. 207), Apollo walking on the earth, god of the morning, singing
to his lyre; the fawn beside him, again with the gleam of light on its
breast. And underneath, Apollo, crossing the sea to Delphi, of the
Phidian time.
155. Now you cannot but be struck in these three examples with the
similarity of action in Athena, Apollo, and Artemis, drawn as deities of
the morning; and with the association in every case of the fawn with
them. It has been said (I will not interrupt you with authorities) that
the fawn belongs to Apollo and Diana because stags are sensitive to
music; (are they?). But you see the fawn is here with Athena of the dew,
though she has no lyre; and I have myself no doubt that in this
particular relation to the gods of morning it always stands as the
symbol of wavering and glancing motion on the ground, as well as of the
light and shadow through the leaves, chequering the ground as the fawn
is dappled. Similarly the spots on the nebris of Dionysus, thought of
sometimes as stars (+apo tês tôn astrôn poikilias+, Diodorus, I.
11), as well as those of his panthers, and the cloudings of the
tortoise-shell of Hermes, are all significant of this light of the sky
broken by cloud-shadow.
156. You observe also that in all the three examples the fawn has light
on its ears, and face, as well as its breast. In the earliest Greek
drawings of animals, bars of white are used as one means of detaching
the figures from the ground; ordinarily on the under side of them,
marking the lighter colour of the hair in wild animals. But the placing
of this bar of white, or the direction of the face in deities of light,
(the faces and flesh of women being always represented as white,) may
become expressive of the direction of the light, when that direction is
important. Thus we are enabled at once to read the intention of this
Greek symbol of the course of a day (in the centre-piece of S. 208,
which gives you the types of Hermes). At the top you have an archaic
representation of Hermes stealing Io from Argus. Argus is here the
Night; his grotesque features monstrous; his hair overshadowing his
shoulders; Hermes on tip-toe, stealing upon him and taking the cord
which is fastened to the horn of Io out of his hand without his feeling
it. Then, underneath, you have the course of an entire day. Apollo
first, on the left, dark, entering his chariot, the sun not yet risen.
In front of him Artemis, as the moon, ascending before him, playing on
her lyre, and looking back to the sun. In the centre, behind the horses,
Hermes, as the cumulus cloud at mid-day, wearing his petasus heightened
to a cone, and holding a flower in his right hand; indicating the
nourishment of the flowers by the rain from the heat cloud. Finally, on
the right, Latona, going down as the evening, lighted from the right by
the sun, now sunk; and with her feet reverted, signifying the reluctance
of the departing day.
Finally, underneath, you have Hermes of the Phidian period, as the
floating cumulus cloud, almost shapeless (as you see him at this
distance); with the tortoise-shell lyre in his hand, barred with black,
and a fleece of white cloud, not level but _oblique_, under his feet.
(Compare the "+dia tôn koilôn--plagiai+," and the relations of
the "+aigidos êniochos Athana+," with the clouds as the moon's
messengers, in Aristophanes; and note of Hermes generally, that you
never find him flying as a Victory flies, but always, if moving fast at
all, _clambering_ along, as it were, as a cloud gathers and heaps
itself: the Gorgons stretch and stride in their flight, half kneeling,
for the same reason, running or gliding shapelessly along in this
stealthy way.)
157. And now take this last illustration, of a very different kind. Here
is an effect of morning light by Turner (S. 301), on the rocks of
Otley-hill, near Leeds, drawn long ago, when Apollo, and Artemis, and
Athena, still sometimes were seen, and felt, even near Leeds. The
original drawing is one of the great Farnley series, and entirely
beautiful. I have shown, in the last volume of "Modern Painters," how
well Turner knew the meaning of Greek legends:--he was not thinking of
them, however, when he made this design; but, unintentionally, has given
us the very effect of morning light we want: the glittering of the
sunshine on dewy grass, half dark; and the narrow gleam of it on the
sides and head of the stag and hind.
158. These few instances will be enough to show you how we may read in
the early art of the Greeks their strong impressions of the power of
light. You will find the subject entered into at somewhat greater length
in my "Queen of the Air;" and if you will look at the beginning of the
7th book of Plato's "Polity," and read carefully the passages in the
context respecting the sun and intellectual sight, you will see how
intimately this physical love of light was connected with their
philosophy, in its search, as blind and captive, for better knowledge. I
shall not attempt to define for you to-day the more complex but much
shallower forms which this love of light, and the philosophy that
accompanies it, take in the mediæval mind; only remember that in future,
when I briefly speak of the Greek school of art with reference to
questions of delineation, I mean the entire range of the schools, from
Homer's days to our own, which concern themselves with the
representation of light, and the effects it produces on material
form--beginning practically for us with these Greek vase paintings, and
closing practically for us with Turner's sunset on the Temeraire; being
throughout a school of captivity and sadness, but of intense power; and
which in its technical method of shadow on material form, as well as in
its essential temper, is centrally represented to you by Dürer's two
great engravings of the "Melencolia" and the "Knight and Death." On the
other hand, when I briefly speak to you of the Gothic school, with
reference to delineation, I mean the entire and much more extensive
range of schools extending from the earliest art in Central Asia and
Egypt down to our own day in India and China:--schools which have been
content to obtain beautiful harmonies of colour without any
representation of light; and which have, many of them, rested in such
imperfect expressions of form as could be so obtained; schools usually
in some measure childish, or restricted in intellect, and similarly
childish or restricted in their philosophies or faiths: but contented in
the restriction; and in the more powerful races, capable of advance to
nobler development than the Greek schools, though the consummate art of
Europe has only been accomplished by the union of both. How that union
was effected, I will endeavour to show you in my next lecture; to-day I
shall take note only of the points bearing on our immediate practice.
159. A certain number of you, by faculty and natural disposition,--and
all, so far as you are interested in modern art,--will necessarily have
to put yourselves under the discipline of the Greek or chiaroscuro
school, which is directed primarily to the attainment of the power of
representing form by pure contrast of light and shade. I say, the
"discipline" of the Greek school, both because, followed faithfully, it
is indeed a severe one, and because to follow it at all is, for persons
fond of colour, often a course of painful self-denial, from which young
students are eager to escape. And yet, when the laws of both schools are
rightly obeyed, the most perfect discipline is that of the colourists;
for they see and draw _everything_, while the chiaroscurists must leave
much indeterminate in mystery, or invisible in gloom: and there are
therefore many licentious and vulgar forms of art connected with the
chiaroscuro school, both in painting and etching, which have no parallel
among the colourists. But both schools, rightly followed, require first
of all absolute accuracy of delineation. _This_ you need not hope to
escape. Whether you fill your spaces with colours, or with shadows, they
must equally be of the true outline and in true gradations. I have been
thirty years telling modern students of art this in vain. I mean to say
it to you only once, for the statement is too important to be weakened
by repetition.
WITHOUT PERFECT DELINEATION OF FORM AND PERFECT GRADATION OF SPACE,
NEITHER NOBLE COLOUR IS POSSIBLE, NOR NOBLE LIGHT.
160. It may make this more believable to you if I put beside each other
a piece of detail from each school. I gave you the St. John of Cima da
Conegliano for a type of the colour school. Here is my own study of the
sprays of oak which rise against the sky of it in the distance, enlarged
to about its real size (Edu. 12). I hope to draw it better for you at
Venice; but this will show you with what perfect care the colourist has
followed the outline of every leaf in the sky. Beside, I put a
chiaroscurist drawing (at least, a photograph of one), Dürer's from
nature, of the common wild wall-cabbage (Edu. 32). It is the most
perfect piece of delineation by flat tint I have ever seen, in its
mastery of the perspective of every leaf, and its attainment almost of
the bloom of texture, merely by its exquisitely tender and decisive
laying of the colour. These two examples ought, I think, to satisfy you
as to the precision of outline of both schools, and the power of
expression which may be obtained by flat tints laid within such outline.
161. Next, here are two examples of the gradated shading expressive of
the forms within the outline, by two masters of the chiaroscuro school.
The first (S. 12) shows you Lionardo's method of work, both with chalk
and the silver point. The second (S. 302), Turner's work in mezzotint;
both masters doing their best. Observe that this plate of Turner's,
which he worked on so long that it was never published, is of a subject
peculiarly depending on effects of mystery and concealment, the fall of
the Reuss under the Devil's Bridge on the St. Gothard; (the _old_
bridge; you may still see it under the existing one, which was built
since Turner's drawing was made). If ever outline could be dispensed
with, you would think it might be so in this confusion of cloud, foam,
and darkness. But here is Turner's own etching on the plate (Edu. 35 F),
made under the mezzotint; and of all the studies of rock outline made by
his hand, it is the most decisive and quietly complete.
162. Again; in the Lionardo sketches, many parts are lost in obscurity,
or are left intentionally uncertain and mysterious, even in the light,
and you might at first imagine some permission of escape had been here
given you from the terrible law of delineation. But the slightest
attempts to copy them will show you that the terminal lines are
inimitably subtle, unaccusably true, and filled by gradations of shade
so determined and measured that the addition of a grain of the lead or
chalk as large as the filament of a moth's wing, would make an
appreciable difference in them.
This is grievous, you think, and hopeless? No, it is delightful and full
of hope: delightful, to see what marvellous things can be done by men;
and full of hope, if your hope is the right one, of being one day able
to rejoice more in what others have done, than in what you can yourself
do, and more in the strength that is for ever above you, than in that
you can never attain.
163. But you can attain much, if you will work reverently and patiently,
and hope for no success through ill-regulated effort. It is, however,
most assuredly at this point of your study that the full strain on your
patience will begin. The exercises in line-drawing and flat laying of
colour are irksome; but they are definite, and within certain limits,
sure to be successful if practised with moderate care. But the
expression of form by shadow requires more subtle patience, and involves
the necessity of frequent and mortifying failure, not to speak of the
self-denial which I said was needful in persons fond of colour, to draw
in mere light and shade. If, indeed, you were going to be artists, or
could give any great length of time to study, it might be possible for
you to learn wholly in the Venetian school, and to reach form through
colour. But without the most intense application this is not possible;
and practically, it will be necessary for you, as soon as you have
gained the power of outlining accurately, and of laying flat colour, to
learn to express solid form as shown by light and shade only. And there
is this great advantage in doing so, that many forms are more or less
disguised by colour, and that we can only represent them completely to
others, or rapidly and easily record them for ourselves, by the use of
shade alone. A single instance will show you what I mean. Perhaps there
are few flowers of which the impression on the eye is more definitely of
flat colour, than the scarlet geranium. But you would find, if you were
to try to paint it,--first, that no pigment could approach the beauty of
its scarlet; and secondly, that the brightness of the hue dazzled the
eye, and prevented its following the real arrangement of the cluster of
flowers. I have drawn for you here (at least this is a mezzotint from my
drawing), a single cluster of the scarlet geranium, in mere light and
shade (Edu. 32 B.), and I think you will feel that its domed form, and
the flat lying of the petals one over the other, in the vaulted roof of
it, can be seen better thus than if they had been painted scarlet.
164. Also this study will be useful to you, in showing how entirely
effects of light depend on delineation, and gradation of spaces, and not
on methods of shading. And this is the second great practical matter I
want you to remember to-day. All effects of light and shade depend not
on the method or execution of shadows, but on their rightness of place,
form, and depth. There is indeed a loveliness of execution _added_ to
the rightness, by the great masters, but you cannot obtain that unless
you become one of them. Shadow cannot be laid thoroughly well, any more
than lines can be drawn steadily, but by a long-practised hand, and the
attempts to imitate the shading of fine draughtsmen, by dotting and
hatching, are just as ridiculous as it would be to endeavour to imitate
their instantaneous lines by a series of re-touchings. You will often
indeed see in Lionardo's work, and in Michael Angelo's, shadow wrought
laboriously to an extreme of fineness; but when you look into it, you
will find that they have always been drawing more and more form within
the space, and never finishing for the sake of added texture, but of
added fact. And all those effects of transparency and reflected light,
aimed at in common chalk drawings, are wholly spurious. For since, as I
told you, all lights are shades compared to higher lights, and lights
only as compared to lower ones, it follows that there can be no
difference in their quality as such; but that light is opaque when it
expresses substance, and transparent when it expresses space; and shade
is also opaque when it expresses substance, and transparent when it
expresses space. But it is not, even then, transparent in the common
sense of that word; nor is its appearance to be obtained by dotting or
cross hatching, but by touches so tender as to look like mist. And now
we find the use of having Lionardo for our guide. He is supreme in all
questions of execution, and in his 28th chapter, you will find that
shadows are to be "dolce e sfumose," to be tender, and look as if they
were exhaled, or breathed on the paper. Then, look at any of Michael
Angelo's finished drawings, or of Correggio's sketches, and you will see
that the true nurse of light is in art, as in nature, the cloud; a misty
and tender darkness, made lovely by gradation.
165. And how absolutely independent it is of material or method of
production, how absolutely dependent on rightness of place and
depth,--there are now before you instances enough to prove. Here is
Dürer's work in flat colour, represented by the photograph in its smoky
brown; Turner's, in washed sepia, and in mezzotint; Lionardo's, in
pencil and in chalk; on the screen in front of you a large study in
charcoal. In every one of these drawings, the material of shadow is
absolutely opaque. But photograph-stain, chalk, lead, ink, or
charcoal,--every one of them, laid by the master's hand, becomes full of
light by gradation only. Here is a moonlight (Edu. 31 B.), in which you
would think the moon shone through every cloud; yet the clouds are mere
single dashes of sepia, imitated by the brown stain of a photograph;
similarly, in these plates from the Liber Studiorum the white paper
becomes transparent or opaque, exactly as the master chooses. Here, on
the granite rock of the St. Gothard (S. 302), in white paper made
opaque, every light represents solid bosses of rock, or balls of foam.
But in this study of twilight (S. 303), the same white paper (coarse old
stuff it is, too!) is made as transparent as crystal, and every fragment
of it represents clear and far away light in the sky of evening in
Italy.
From all which the practical conclusion for you is, that you are never
to trouble yourselves with any questions as to the means of shade or
light, but only with the right government of the means at your disposal.
And it is a most grave error in the system of many of our public
drawing-schools, that the students are permitted to spend weeks of
labour in giving attractive appearance, by delicacy of texture, to
chiaroscuro drawings in which every form is false, and every relation of
depth, untrue. A most unhappy form of error; for it not only delays, and
often wholly arrests, their advance in their own art; but it prevents
what ought to take place correlatively with their executive practice,
the formation of their taste by the accurate study of the models from
which they draw. And I must so far anticipate what we shall discover
when we come to the subject of sculpture, as to tell you the two main
principles of good sculpture; first, that its masters think before all
other matters of the right placing of masses; secondly, that they give
life by flexure of surface, not by quantity of detail; for sculpture is
indeed only light and shade drawing in stone.