Pictorial Arts.
In sculpture beauty and grace are the principal things; but in painting
expression, passion, and character predominate; therefore just so much of
the claims of beauty must be neglected. For a perfect beauty of all forms,
such as sculpture demands, would detract from the characteristic and weary
by monotony. Accordingly painting may also present ugly faces and
emaciated figures; sculpture, on the other hand, demands beauty, although
not always perfect, but, throughout, strength and fulness of the figures.
Consequently a thin Christ upon the Cross, a dying St. Jerome, wasted by
age and disease, like the masterpiece of Domenichino, is a proper subject
for painting; while, on the contrary, the marble figure by Donatello, in
the gallery at Florence, of John the Baptist, reduced to skin and bone by
fasting, has, in spite of the masterly execution, a repulsive effect. From
this point of view sculpture seems suitable for the affirmation, painting
for the negation, of the will to live, and from this it may be explained
why sculpture was the art of the ancients, while painting has been the art
of the Christian era.
In connection with the exposition given in § 45 of the first volume, that
the discovery, recognition, and retention of the type of human beauty
depends to a certain extent upon an anticipation of it, and therefore in
part has an _a priori_ foundation, I find that I have yet to bring out
clearly the fact that this anticipation nevertheless requires experience,
by which it may be stirred up; analogous to the instinct of the brutes,
which, although guiding the action _a priori_, yet requires determination
by motives in the details of it. Experience and reality present to the
intellect of the artist human forms, which, in one part or another, are
more or less true to nature, as if it were asking for his judgment
concerning them, and thus, after the Socratic method, call forth from that
obscure anticipation the distinct and definite knowledge of the ideal.
Therefore it assisted the Greek sculptors very much that the climate and
customs of their country gave them opportunity the whole day of seeing
half‐naked forms, and in the gymnasium entirely naked forms. In this way
every limb presented its plastic significance to criticism, and to
comparison with the ideal which lay undeveloped in their consciousness.
Thus they constantly exercised their judgment with regard to all forms and
limbs, down to their finest shades of difference; and thus, little by
little, their originally dull anticipation of the ideal of human beauty
was raised to such distinct consciousness that they became capable of
objectifying it in works of art. In an entirely analogous manner some
experience is useful and necessary to the poet for the representation of
characters. For although he does not work according to experience and
empirical data, but in accordance with the clear consciousness of the
nature of humanity, as he finds it within himself, yet experience serves
this consciousness as a pattern, incites it and gives it practice.
Accordingly his knowledge of human nature and its varieties, although in
the main it proceeds _a priori_ and by anticipation, yet first receives
life, definiteness, and compass through experience. But, supporting
ourselves upon the preceding book and chapter 44 in the following book, we
can go still deeper into the ground of that marvellous sense of beauty of
the Greeks which made them alone of all nations upon earth capable of
discovering the true normal type of the human form, and accordingly of
setting up the pattern of beauty and grace for the imitation of all ages,
and we can say: The same thing which, if it remains unseparated from the
_will_, gives sexual instinct with its discriminating selection, _i.e._,
_sexual love_ (which it is well known was subject among the Greeks to
great aberrations), becomes, if, by the presence of an abnormally
preponderating intellect, it separates itself from the will and yet
remains active, _the objective sense of beauty_ of the human form, which
now shows itself primarily as a critical artistic sense, but can rise to
the discovery and representation of the norm of all parts and proportions;
as was the case in Phidias, Praxiteles, Scopas, &c. Then is fulfilled what
Goethe makes the artist say—
“That I with mind divine
And human hand
May be able to form
What with my wife,
As animal, I can and must.”
And again, analogous to this, that which in the poet, if it remained
unseparated from the will, would give only worldly prudence, becomes, if
it frees itself from the will by abnormal preponderance of the intellect,
the capacity for objective, dramatic representation.
Modern sculpture, whatever it may achieve, is still analogous to modern
Latin poetry, and, like this, is a child of imitation, sprung from
reminiscences. If it presumes to try to be original, it at once goes
astray, especially upon the bad path of forming according to nature as it
lies before it, instead of according to the proportions of the ancients.
Canova, Thorwaldsen, and many others may be compared to Johannes Secundus
and Owenus. It is the same with architecture, only there it is founded in
the art itself, the purely æsthetic part of which is of small compass, and
was already exhausted by the ancients; therefore the modern architect can
only distinguish himself in the wise application of it; and he ought to
know that he removes himself from good taste just so far as he departs
from the style and pattern of the Greeks.
The art of the painter, considered only so far as it aims at producing the
appearance of reality, may ultimately be referred to the fact that he
understands how to separate purely what in seeing is the mere sensation,
thus the affection of the retina, _i.e._, the only directly given
_effect_, from its _cause_, _i.e._, the objective external world, the
perception of which first rises in the understanding from this effect;
whereby, if he has technical skill, he is in a position to produce the
same effect in the eye through an entirely different cause, the patches of
applied colour, from which then in the understanding of the beholder the
same perception again arises through the unavoidable reference of the
effect to the ordinary cause.
If we consider how there lies something so entirely idiosyncratic, so
thoroughly original, in every human countenance, and that it presents a
whole which can only belong to a unity consisting entirely of necessary
parts by virtue of which we recognise a known individual out of so many
thousands, even after long years, although the possible variations of
human features, especially of one race, lie within very narrow limits, we
must doubt whether anything of such essential unity and such great
originality could ever proceed from any other source than from the
mysterious depths of the inner being of nature; but from this it would
follow that no artist could be capable of really reproducing the original
peculiarity of a human countenance, or even of composing it according to
nature from recollection. Accordingly what he produced of this kind would
always be only a half true, nay, perhaps an impossible composition; for
how should he compose an actual physiognomical unity when the principle of
this unity is really unknown to him? Therefore, in the case of every face
which has merely been imagined by an artist, we must doubt whether it is
in fact a possible face, and whether nature, as the master of all masters,
would not show it to be a bungled production by pointing out complete
contradictions in it. This would, of course, lead to the principle that in
historical paintings only portraits ought to figure, which certainly would
then have to be selected with the greatest care and in some degree
idealised. It is well known that great artists have always gladly painted
from living models and introduced many portraits.
Although, as is explained in the text, the real end of painting, as of art
in general, is to make the comprehension of the (Platonic) Ideas of the
nature of the world easier for us, whereby we are at once thrown into the
state of pure, _i.e._, will‐less, knowing, there yet belongs to it besides
this an independent beauty of its own, which is produced by the mere
harmony of the colours, the pleasingness of the grouping, the happy
distribution of light and shade, and the tone of the whole picture. This
accompanying subordinate kind of beauty furthers the condition of pure
knowing, and is in painting what the diction, the metre, and rhyme are in
poetry; both are not what is essential, but what acts first and
immediately.
I have some further evidence to give in support of my judgment given in
the first volume, § 50, on the inadmissibleness of allegory in painting.
In the Borghese palace at Rome there is the following picture by Michael
Angelo Caravaggio: Jesus, as a child of about ten years old, treads upon
the head of a serpent, but entirely without fear and with great calmness;
and His mother, who accompanies Him, remains quite as indifferent. Close
by stands St. Elizabeth, looking solemnly and tragically up to heaven. Now
what could be thought of this kyriological hieroglyphic by a man who had
never heard anything about the seed of the woman that should bruise the
head of the serpent? At Florence, in the library of the palace Riccardi,
we find the following allegory upon the ceiling, painted by Luca Giordano,
which is meant to signify that science frees the understanding from the
bonds of ignorance: the understanding is a strong man bound with cords,
which are just falling off; a nymph holds a mirror in front of him,
another hands him a large detached wing; above sits science on a globe,
and beside her, with a globe in her hand, the naked truth. At Ludwigsburg,
near Stuttgart, there is a picture which shows us time, as Saturn, cutting
off with a pair of shears the wings of Cupid. If this is meant to signify
that when we grow old love proves unstable, this no doubt has its truth.
The following may serve to strengthen my solution of the problem as to why
Laocoon does not cry out. One may practically convince oneself of the
faulty effect of the representation of shrieking by the works of the
plastic and pictorial arts, which are essentially dumb, by a picture of
the slaughter of the innocents, by Guido Reni, which is to be found in the
Academy of Arts at Bologna, and in which this great artist has committed
the mistake of painting six shrieking wide‐open mouths. Let any one who
wants to have this more distinct think of a pantomimic representation on
the stage, and in one of the scenes an urgent occasion for one of the
players to shriek; if now the dancer who is representing this part should
express the shriek by standing for a while with his mouth wide open, the
loud laughter of the whole house would bear witness to the absurdity of
the thing. Accordingly, since the shrieking of Laocoon had to be avoided
for reasons which did not lie in the objects to be represented, but in the
nature of the representing art, the task thus arose for the artist so to
present this not‐shrieking as to make it plausible to us that a man in
such a position should not shriek. He solves this problem by representing
the bite of the snake, not as having already taken place, nor yet as still
threatening, but as just happening now in the side; for thereby the lower
part of the body is contracted, and shrieking made impossible. This
immediate but only subordinate reason was correctly discovered by Goethe,
and is expounded at the end of the eleventh book of his autobiography, and
also in the paper on Laocoon in the first part of the Propylæa; but the
ultimate, primary reason, which conditions this one, is that which I have
set forth. I cannot refrain from remarking that I here stand in the same
relation to Goethe as with reference to the theory of colours. In the
collection of the Duke of Aremberg at Brussels there is an antique head of
Laocoon which was found later. However, the head in the world‐renowned
group is not a restored one which follows from Goethe’s special table of
all the restorations of this group, which is given at the end of the first
volume of the Propylæa, and is also confirmed by the fact that the head
which was found later resembles that of the group very much. Thus we must
assume that another antique repetition of the group has existed to which
the Aremberg head belonged. In my opinion the latter excels both in beauty
and expression that of the group. It has the mouth decidedly wider open
than in the group, yet not really to the extent of shrieking.