of Aristides, Euphranor the Isthmian, who excelled equally as painter
and statuary, if we may form our judgment from the Theseus he opposed to
that of Parrhasius, and the bronze figure of Alexander Paris, in whom,
says Pliny,[25] the umpire of the goddesses, the lover of Helen, and yet
the murder of Achilles might be traced. This account, which is evidently
a quotation of Pliny's, and not the assumed verdict of a connoisseur,
has been translated with an emphasis it does not admit of, to prove that
an attempt to express different qualities or passions at once in the
same object, must naturally tend to obliterate the effect of each.
'Pliny,' says our critic, 'observes, that in a statue of Paris by
Euphranor, you might discover at the same time three different
characters: the dignity of a judge of the goddesses, the lover of Helen,
and the conqueror of Achilles. A statue in which you endeavour to unite
stately dignity, youthful elegance, and stern valour, must surely
possess none of these to any eminent degree.' The paraphrase, it is
first to be observed, lends itself the mixtures to Pliny it disapproves
of; we look in vain for the coalition of 'stately dignity, stern valour,
and youthful elegance,' in the Paris _he_ describes: the murderer of
Achilles was not his conqueror. But may not dignity, elegance, and
valour, or any other not irreconcilable qualities, be visible at once in
a figure without destroying the primary feature of its character, or
impairing its expression? Let us appeal to the Apollo. Is he not a
figure of character and expression, and does he not possess all three in
a supreme degree? Will it imply mediocrity of conception or confusion of
character, if we were to say that his countenance, attitude, and form
combines divine majesty, enchanting grace, and lofty indignation? Yet
not all three, one ideal whole irradiated the mind of the artist who
conceived the divine semblance. He gave, no doubt, the preference of
expression to the action in which the god is engaged, or rather, from
the accomplishment of which he recedes with lofty and contemptuous
ease.--This was the first impression which he meant to make upon us: but
what contemplation stops here? what hinders us when we consider the
beauty of these features, the harmony of these forms, to find in them
the abstract of all his other qualities, to roam over the whole history
of his atchievements? we see him enter the celestial synod, and all the
gods rise at his august appearance;[26] we see him sweep the plain after
Daphne; precede Hector with the ægis and disperse the Greeks; strike
Patroclus with his palm and decide his destiny.--And is the figure
frigid because its great idea is inexhaustible? might we not say the
same of the infant Hercules of Zeuxis or of Reynolds? Did not the idea
of the man inspire the hand that framed the mighty child? his magnitude,
his crushing grasp, his energy of will, are only the germ, the prelude
of the power that rid the earth of monsters, and which our mind pursues.
Such was no doubt the Paris of Euphranor: he made his character so
pregnant, that those who knew his history might trace in it the origin
of all his future feats, though first impressed by the expression
allotted to the predominant quality and moment. The acute inspector, the
elegant umpire of female form receiving the contested pledge with a
dignified pause, or with enamoured eagerness presenting it to the
arbitress of his destiny, was probably the predominant idea of the
figure; whilst the deserter of Oenone, the seducer of Helen, the subtle
archer, that future murderer of Achilles, lurked under the insidious
eyebrow, and in the penetrating glance of beauty's chosen minion. Such
appeared to me the character and expression of the sitting Paris in the
voluptuous Phrygian dress, formerly in the cortile of the palace
Altheims, at Rome. A figure nearly colossal, which many of you may
remember, and a faint idea of whom may be gathered from the print among
those in the collection published of the Museum Clementinum. A work, in
my opinion, of the highest style and worthy of Euphranor, though I shall
not venture to call it a repetition in marble of his bronze.
From these observations on the collateral and unsolicited beauties which
must branch out from the primary expression of every great idea, it will
not, I hope, be suspected, that I mean to invalidate the necessity of
its unity, or to be the advocate of pedantic subdivision. All such
division diminishes, all such mixtures impair the simplicity and
clearness of expression: in the group of the Laocoon, the frigid
ecstasies of German criticism have discovered pity like a vapour
swimming on the father's eyes; he is seen to suppress in the groan for
his children the shriek for himself,--his nostrils are drawn upward to
express indignation at unworthy sufferings, whilst he is said at the
same time to implore celestial help. To these are added the winged
effects of the serpent-poison, the writhings of the body, the spasms of
the extremities: to the miraculous organization of such expression,
Agesander, the sculptor of the Laocoon, was too wise to lay claim. His
figure is a class, it characterizes every beauty of virility verging on
age; the prince, the priest, the father are visible, but, absorbed in
the man, serve only to dignify the victim of _one_ great expression;
though poised by the artist, for us to apply the compass to the face of
the Laocoon, is to measure the wave fluctuating in the storm: this
tempestuous front, this contracted nose, the immersion of these eyes,
and above all, that long-drawn mouth, are separate and united, seats of
convulsion, features of nature struggling within the jaws of death.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Abstract of the Laws of the Royal Academy, article _Professors_;
page 21.
[4] This has been done in a superior manner by J. G. Herder, in his
_Ideen zur Philosophie der geschichte der Menschheit_, Vol. iii. Book
13; a work translated under the title of _Outlines of a Philosophy of
the History of Man_, 4to.
[5] This account is founded on the conjectures of Mr. _Riem_, in his
Treatise on _die Malerey der Alten_, or the _Painting of the Ancients_,
4to. Berlin, 1787.
[6] Pausanias Attic. c. xxviii. The word used by Pausanias =katagrapsai=,
shows that the figures of Parrhasius were intended for a Bassorelievo.
They were in profile. This is the sense of the word _Catagrapha_ in
Pliny, xxxv. c. 8, he translates it "obliquas imagines."
[7] By the authority chiefly of Pamphilus the master of Apelles, who
taught at Sicyon. 'Hujus auctoritate,' says Pliny, xxxv. 10, 'effectum
est Sicyone primum, deinde et in tota Græcia, ut pueri ingenui ante
omnia _diagraphicen_, hoc est, picturam in buxo, docerentur,' &c.
_Harduin_, contrary to the common editions, reads indeed, and by the
authority, he says, of all the MSS. _graphicen_, which he translates:
ars 'delineandi,' desseigner, but he has not proved that graphice means
not more than design; and if he had, what was it that Pamphilus taught?
he was not the inventor of what he had been taught himself. He
established or rather renewed a particular method of drawing, which
contained the rudiments, and facilitated the method of painting.
[8] Pausan. Phocica, c. xxv. seq.
[9] This I take to be the sense of =Megethos= here, which distinguished
him, according to Ælian, Var. Hist. iv. 3, from Dionysius of Colophon.
The word =Teleiois= in the same passage: =kai en tois teleiois eirgazeto
ta athla=, I translate: _he aimed at, he sought his praise in the
representation of essential proportion_; which leads to ideal beauty.
The =kreittous, cheirous, homoious=; or the =beltionas ê kath' hêmas, ê
kai toioutous, ê cheironas=, of Aristotle, Poetic. c. 2, by which he
distinguishes Polygnotus, Dionysius, Pauson, confirms the sense given to
the passage of Ælian.
[10] =Pareiôn to enereuthes, hoian tên Kassandran en tê leschê epoiêse
tois Delphois.= Lucian: =eikones.= This, and what Pausanias tells of the
colour of Eurynomus in the same picture, together with the coloured
draperies mentioned by Pliny; makes it evident, that the 'simplex color'
ascribed by Quintilian to Polygnotus and Aglaophon, implies less a
single colour, as some have supposed, than that simplicity always
attendant on the infancy of painting, which leaves every colour unmixed
and crudely by itself. Indeed the _Poecile_ (=hê poikilê stoa=) which
obtained its name from his pictures, is alone a sufficient proof of
variety of colours.
[11] Hic primus species exprimere instituit, Pliny xxxv. 36, as
_species_ in the sense Harduin takes it, 'oris et habitus venustas,'
cannot be refused to Polygnotus, and the artists immediately preceding
Apollodorus, it must mean here the subdivisions of generic form; the
classes.
At this period we may with probability fix the invention of local
colour, and tone; which, though strictly speaking it be neither the
light nor the shade, is regulated by the medium which tinges both. This,
Pliny calls 'splendour.' To Apollodorus Plutarch ascribes likewise the
invention of tints, the mixtures of colour and the gradations of shade,
if I conceive the passage rightly: =Apollodôros ho Zôgraphos Anthrôpôn
prôtos exeurôn phthoran kai apochrôsin Skias=, (Plutarch, Bellone an pace
Ath., &c. 346.) This was the element of the ancient =Harmogê=, that
imperceptible transition, which, without opacity, confusion, or
hardness, united local colour, demitint, shade, and reflexes.
[12] 'Pinxit et monochromata ex albo.' Pliny, xxxv. 9. This Aristotle,
Poet. c. 6, calls =leukographein=.
[13] In lineis extremis palmam adeptus----minor tamen videtur, sibi
comparatus, in mediis corporibus exprimendis. Pliny, xxxv. 10. Here we
find the inferiority of the middle parts merely relative to himself.
Compared with himself, Parrhasius was not all equal.
[14] Theseus, in quo dixit, eundem apud Parrhasium rosa pastum esse,
suum vero carne. Plin. xxxv. 11.
[15] The epithet which he gave to himself of =Habrodiaitos=, the
delicate, the elegant, and the epigram he is said to have composed on
himself, are known: See Athenæus, l. xii. He wore, says Ælian, Var.
Hist. ix. 11, a purple robe and a golden garland; he bore a staff wound
round with tendrils of gold, and his sandals were tied to his feet and
ankles with golden straps. Of his easy simplicity we may judge from his
dialogue with Socrates in Xenophon; =apomnêmoneuatôn=, l. iii. Of his
libidinous fancy, besides what Pliny says, from his Archigallus, and the
Meleager and Atalanta mentioned by Suetonius in Tiberio, c. 44.
[16] In the portico of the Piræus by Leochares; in the hall of the
Five-hundred, by Lyson; in the back portico of the Ceramicus there was a
picture of Theseus, of Democracy and the Demos, by Euphranor. Pausan.
Attic. i. 3. Aristolaus, according to Pliny, was a painter, 'è
severissimis.'
[17] Cicero _Oratore_, 73. seq.--In alioque ponatur, aliudque totum sit,
utrum _decere_ an _oportere_ dicas; _oportere_ enim, perfectionem
declarat officii, quo et semper utendum est, et omnibus: _decere_, quasi
aptum esse, consentaneumque tempori et personæ; quod cum in factis
sæpissime, tum in dictis valet, in vultu denique, et gestu, et incessu.
Contraque item _dedecere_. Quod si poeta fugit, ut maximum vitium, qui
peccat, etiam, cum probam orationem affingit improbo, stultove
sapientis: si denique pictor ille vidit, cum immolanda Iphigenia tristis
Calchas esset, mæstior Ulysses, mæreret Menelaus, obvolvendum caput
Agamemnonis esse, quoniam summum illum luctum penicillo, non posset
imitari: si denique histrio, quid deceat quærit: quid faciendum oratori
putemus?
M. F. Quintilianus, l. ii. c. 14.--Operienda sunt quædam, sive ostendi
non debent, sive exprimi _pro dignitate_ non possunt: ut fecit
Timanthes, ut opinor, Cithnius, in ea tabula qua Coloten Tejum vicit.
Nam cum in Iphigeniæ immolatione pinxisset tristem Calchantem,
tristiorem Ulyssem, addidisset Menelao quem summum poterat ars efficere
mærorem, consumptis affectibus, non reperiens quo _dignè_ modo Patris
vultum possit exprimere, velavit ejus caput, et sui cuique animo dedit
æstimandum.
It is evident to the slightest consideration, that both Cicero and
Quintilian lose sight of their premises, and contradict themselves in
the motive they ascribe to Timanthes. Their want of acquaintance with
the nature of plastic expression made them imagine the face of Agamemnon
beyond the power of the artist. They were not aware that by making him
waste expression on inferior actors at the expence of a principal one,
they call him an improvident spendthrift and not a wise oeconomist.
From Valerius Maximus, who calls the subject 'Luctuosum _immolatæ_
Iphigeniæ sacrificium' instead of _immolandæ_, little can be expected to
the purpose. Pliny, with the _dignè_ of Quintilian has the same
confusion of motive.
[18] It is observed by an ingenious Critic, that in the tragedy of
Euripides, the procession is described, and upon Iphigenia's looking
back on her father, he groans, and hides his face to conceal his tears;
whilst the picture gives the moment that precedes the sacrifice, and the
hiding has a different object and arises from another impression.
----=hôs d' eseiden Agamemnôn anax
epi sphagas steichousan eis alsos korên
anestenaxe. Kampalin strepsas kara
Dakrya proêgen, ommatôn peplon protheis.=
[19] Pliny, l. xxxv. c. 18.
[20] Lysippum Sicyonium--audendi rationem cepisse pictoris Eupompi
responso. Eum enim interrogatum, quem sequeretur antecedentium, dixisse
demonstrata hominum multitudine, naturam ipsam imitandam esse, non
artificem. Non habet Latinum nomen symmetria, quam diligentissime
custodivit, nova intactaque ratione quadratas veterum staturas
permutando: Vulgoque dicebat, ab illis factos, quales essent, homines: à
se, quales viderentur esse. Plin. xxxiv. 8.
[21] =Mallon de Apellês ho Ephesios palai tautên proulabe tên eikona; Kai
gar au kai houtos diablêtheis pros Ptolemaion=----
=Loukianou peri tou m. rh. P. T. D.=
[22] Apelles was probably the inventor of what artists call _glazing_.
See Reynolds on Du Fresnoy, note 37. vol. iii.
[23] In matri interfectæ infante miserabiliter blandiente. Plin. l.
xxxiv. c. 9.
[24] A design of Raphael, representing the lues of the Trojans in Creta,
known by the print of Marc Antonio Raymondi.
[25] Reynolds' Disc. V. vol. i. p. 120. Euphranoris Alexander Paris est:
in quo laudatur quod omnia simul intelligantur, judex dearum, amator
Helenæ, et tamen Achillis interfector. Plin. l. xxxiv. 8.
[26] See the Hymn (ascribed to Homer) on Apollo.
SECOND LECTURE.
ART OF THE MODERNS.
=HOITINES HÊGEMONES KAI KOIRANOI ÊSAN.
PLÊTHYN D' OUK AN EGÔ MYTHÊSOMAI OUD' ONOMÊNÔ
OUD' EI MOI DEKA MEN GLÔSSAI, DEKA DE STOMAT' EIEN,
PHÔNÊ D' ARRÊKTOS.=
Homer. Iliad. B. 487.
ARGUMENT.
Introduction--different direction of the art. Preparative
style--Masaccio--Lionardo da Vinci. Style of
establishment--Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titiano, Correggio.
Style of refinement, and depravation. Schools--of Tuscany, Rome,
Venice, Lombardy. The Eclectic school--Machinists. The German
school--Albert Durer. The Flemish school--Rubens. The Dutch
school--Rembrant. Observations on art in Switzerland. The French
school. The Spanish school. England--Conclusion.
SECOND LECTURE.
In the preceding discourse I have endeavoured to impress you with the
general features of ancient art in its different periods of preparation,
establishment and refinement. We are now arrived at the epoch of its
restoration in the fifteenth century of our æra, when religion and
wealth rousing emulation, reproduced its powers, but gave to their
exertion a very different direction. The reigning church found itself
indeed under the necessity of giving more splendour to the temples and
mansions destined to receive its votaries, of subduing their senses with
the charm of appropriate images and the exhibition of events and
actions, which might stimulate their zeal and inflame their hearts: but
the sacred mysteries of Divine Being, the method adopted by Revelation,
the duties its doctrine imposed, the virtues it demanded from its
followers, faith, resignation, humility, sufferings, substituted a
medium of art as much inferior to the resources of Paganism in a
physical sense as incomparably superior in a spiritual one. Those public
customs, that perhaps as much tended to spread the infections of vice as
they facilitated the means of art, were no more; the heroism of the
Christian and his beauty were internal, and powerful or exquisite forms
allied him no longer exclusively to his God. The chief repertory of the
artist, the sacred records, furnished indeed a sublime cosmogony, scenes
of patriarchal simplicity and a poetic race, which left nothing to
regret in the loss of heathen mythology; but the stem of the nation
whose history is its exclusive theme, if it abounded in characters and
powers fit for the exhibition of passions, did not teem with forms
sufficiently exalted to inform the artist and elevate the art.
Ingredients of a baser cast mingled their alloy with the materials of
grandeur and of beauty. Monastic legend and the rubric of martyrology
claimed more than a legitimate share from the labours of the pencil and
the chisel, made nudity the exclusive property of emaciated hermits or
decrepit age, and if the breast of manhood was allowed to bare its
vigour, or beauty to expand her bosom, the antidotes of terror and of
horror were ready at their side to check the apprehended infection of
their charms. When we add to this the heterogeneous stock on which the
reviving system of arts was grafted, a race indeed inhabiting a genial
climate, but itself the fæces of barbarity, the remnants of Gothic
adventurers, humanised only by the cross, mouldering amid the ruins of
the temples they had demolished, the battered fragments of the images
their rage had crushed,--when we add this, I say, we shall less wonder
at the languor of modern art in its rise and progress, than be
astonished at the vigour by which it adapted and raised materials partly
so unfit and defective, partly so contaminated, to the magnificent
system which we are to contemplate.
Sculpture had already produced respectable specimens of its reviving
powers in the basso-relievos of Lorenzo Ghiberti, some works of Donato,
and the Christ of Philippo Brunelleschi,[27] when the first symptoms of
imitation appeared in the frescoes of Tommaso da St. Giovanni, commonly
called Masaccio, from the total neglect of his appearance and
person.[28] Masaccio first conceived that parts are to constitute a
whole; that composition ought to have a centre; expression, truth; and
execution, unity: his line deserves attention, though his subjects led
him not to investigation of form, and the shortness of his life forbade
his extending those elements which Raphael, nearly a century afterward,
carried to perfection--it is sufficiently glorious for him to have been
more than once copied by that great master of expression, and in some
degree to have been the herald of his style: Masaccio lives more in the
figure of Paul preaching on the areopágus, of the celebrated cartoon in
our possession, and in the borrowed figure of Adam expelled from
paradise in the loggia of the Vatican, than in his own mutilated or
retouched remains.
The essays of Masaccio in imitation and expression, Andrea Mantegna[29]
attempted to unite with form; led by the contemplation of the antique,
fragments of which he ambitiously scattered over his works: though a
Lombard, and born prior to the discovery of the best ancient statues, he
seems to have been acquainted with a variety of characters, from forms
that remind us of the Apollo, Mercury or Meleager, down to the fauns and
satyrs: but his taste was too crude, his fancy too grotesque, and his
comprehension too weak to advert from the parts that remained to the
whole that inspired them: hence in his figures of dignity or beauty we
see not only the meagre forms of common models, but even their defects
tacked to ideal Torsos; and his fauns and satyrs, instead of native
luxuriance of growth and the sportive appendages of mixed being, are
decorated with heraldic excrescences and arabesque absurdity. His
triumphs are known to you all; they are a copious inventory of classic
lumber, swept together with more industry than taste, but full of
valuable materials. Of expression he was not ignorant: his burial of
Christ furnished Raphael with the composition, and some of the features
and attitudes in his picture on the same subject in the palace of the
Borgheses,--the figure of St. John, however, left out by Raphael, proves
that Mantegna sometimes mistook grimace for the highest degree of grief.
His oil-pictures exhibit little more than the elaborate anguish of
missal-painting; his frescoes, destroyed at the construction of the
Clementine museum, had freshness, freedom, and imitation.
To Luca Signorelli, of Cortona,[30] nature more than atoned for the want
of those advantages which the study of the antique had offered to Andrea
Mantegna. He seems to have been the first who contemplated with a
discriminating eye his object, saw what was accident and what essential;
balanced light and shade, and decided the motion of his figures. He
foreshortened with equal boldness and intelligence, and thence it is,
probably, that Vasari fancies to have discovered in the last judgment
of Michael Angelo traces of imitation from the Lunetta, painted by Luca,
in the church of the Madonna, at Orvieto; but the powers which animated
him there, and before at Arezzo, are no longer visible in the Gothic
medley with which he filled two compartments in the chapel of Sixtus IV.
at Rome.
Such was the dawn of modern art, when Lionardo da Vinci[31] broke forth
with a splendour which distanced former excellence: made up of all the
elements that constitute the essence of genius, favoured by education
and circumstances, all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor,
anatomist, architect, engineer, chemist, machinist, musician, man of
science, and sometimes empiric,[32] he laid hold of every beauty in the
enchanted circle, but without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed in
her turn each. Fitter to scatter hints than to teach by example, he
wasted life, insatiate, in experiment. To a capacity which at once
penetrated the principle and real aim of the art, he joined an
inequality of fancy that at one moment lent him wings for the pursuit of
beauty, and the next, flung him on the ground to crawl after deformity:
we owe him chiaroscuro with all its magic, we owe him caricature with
all its incongruities. His notions of the most elaborate finish and his
want of perseverance were at least equal:--want of perseverance alone
could make him abandon his cartoon destined for the great
council-chamber at Florence, of which the celebrated contest of horsemen
was but one group; for to him who could organize that composition,
Michael Angelo himself ought rather to have been an object of emulation
than of fear: and that he was able to organize it, we may be certain
from the remaining imperfect sketch in the 'Etruria Pittrice;' but still
more from the admirable print of it by Edelinck, after a drawing of
Rubens, who was Lionardo's great admirer, and has said much to impress
us with the beauties of his Last Supper in the refectory of the
Dominicans at Milano, the only one of his great works which he carried
to ultimate finish, through all its parts, from the head of Christ to
the least important one: it perished soon after him, and we can estimate
the loss only from the copies that survive.
Bartolomeo della Porta, or di S. Marco, the last master of this
period,[33] first gave gradation to colour, form, and masses to drapery,
and a grave dignity, till then unknown, to execution. If he were not
endowed with the versatility and comprehension of Lionardo, his
principles were less mixed with base matter and less apt to mislead him.
As a member of a religious order, he confined himself to subjects and
characters of piety; but the few nudities which he allowed himself to
exhibit, show sufficient intelligence and still more style: he
foreshortened with truth and boldness, and whenever the figure did admit
of it, made his drapery the vehicle of the limb it invests. He was the
true master of Raphael, whom his tuition weaned from the meanness of
Pietro Perugino, and prepared for the mighty style of Michael Angelo
Buonarotti.