elements of Michael Angelo's style.[34] By these principles he selected
or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter, as sculptor, as
architect, he attempted, and above any other man succeeded, to unite
magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts with the
utmost simplicity and breadth. His line is uniformly grand: character
and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient
to grandeur. The child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him
indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the
patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity;
his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man; his
men are a race of giants. This is the 'terribil via' hinted at by
Agostino Carracci, though perhaps as little understood by the Bolognese
as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To
give the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty,
was the exclusive power of Michael Angelo. He is the inventor of epic
painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine chapel which exhibits
the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He
has personified motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; embodied
sentiment on the monuments of St. Lorenzo, unravelled the features of
meditation in the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine chapel; and in the
Last Judgement, with every attitude that varies the human body, traced
the master-trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though as
sculptor, he expressed the character of flesh more perfectly than all
who went before or came after him, yet he never submitted to copy an
individual; Julio the second only excepted, and in him he represented
the reigning passion rather than the man.[35] In painting he contented
himself with a negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected
all meretricious ornament.[36] The fabric of St. Peter, scattered into
infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he
concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex gave the air
of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him all in all, was M.
Angelo, the salt of art: sometimes he no doubt had his moments of
dereliction, deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his
forms with futile and ostentatious anatomy: both met with armies of
copyists; and it has been his fate to have been censured for their
folly.
The inspiration of Michael Angelo was followed by the milder genius of
Raphael Sanzio,[37] the father of dramatic painting; the painter of
humanity; less elevated, less vigorous, but more insinuating, more
pressing on our hearts, the warm master of our sympathies. What effect
of human connexion, what feature of the mind, from the gentlest emotion
to the most fervid burst of passion, has been left unobserved, has not
received a characteristic stamp from that examiner of man? M. Angelo
came to nature, nature came to Raphael--he transmitted her features like
a lucid glass, unstained, unmodified. We stand with awe before M.
Angelo, and tremble at the height to which he elevates us--we embrace
Raphael, and follow him wherever he leads us. Energy, with propriety of
character and modest grace, poise his line and determine his
correctness. Perfect human beauty he has not represented; no face of
Raphael's is perfectly beautiful; no figure of his, in the abstract,
possesses the proportions that could raise it to a standard of
imitation: form to him was only a vehicle of character or pathos, and to
those he adapted it in a mode and with a truth which leaves all attempts
at emendation hopeless. His invention connects the utmost stretch of
possibility with the most plausible degree of probability, in a manner
that equally surprises our fancy, persuades our judgment, and affects
our heart. His composition always hastens to the most necessary point as
its centre, and from that disseminates, to that leads back as rays, all
secondary ones. Group, form, and contrast are subordinate to the event,
and common-place ever excluded. His expression, in strict unison with
and decided by character, whether calm, animated, agitated, convulsed,
or absorbed by the inspiring passion, unmixed and pure, never
contradicts its cause, equally remote from tameness and grimace: the
moment of his choice never suffers the action to stagnate or to expire;
it is the moment of transition; the crisis big with the past and
pregnant with the future.--If, separately taken, the line of Raphael has
been excelled in correctness, elegance, and energy; his colour far
surpassed in tone, and truth, and harmony; his masses in roundness, and
his chiaroscuro in effect--considered as instruments of pathos, they
have never been equalled; and in composition, invention, expression, and
the power of telling a story, he has never been approached.
Whilst the superior principles of the art were receiving the homage of
Tuscany and Rome, the inferior but more alluring charm of colour began
to spread its fascination at Venice, from the pallet of Giorgione da
Castel Franco[38], and irresistibly entranced every eye that approached
the magic of Titiano Vecelli of Cador.[39] To no colourist before or
after him, did Nature unveil herself with that dignified familiarity in
which she appeared to Titiano. His organ, universal and equally fit for
all her exhibitions, rendered her simplest to her most compound
appearances with equal purity and truth. He penetrated the essence and
the general principle of the substances before him, and on these
established his theory of colour. He invented that breadth of local tint
which no imitation has attained; and first expressed the negative nature
of shade: his are the charms of glazing, and the mystery of reflexes, by
which he detached, rounded, connected, or enriched his objects. His
harmony is less indebted to the force of light and shade, or the
artifices of contrast, than to a due balance of colour, equally remote
from monotony and spots. His backgrounds seem to be dictated by nature.
Landscape, whether it be considered as the transcript of a spot, or the
rich combination of congenial objects, or as the scene of a phænomenon,
dates its origin from him: he is the father of portrait-painting, of
resemblance with form, character with dignity, and costume with
subordination.
Another charm was yet wanting to complete the round of art--harmony: it
appeared with Antonio Læti,[40] called Correggio, whose works it
attended like an enchanted spirit. The harmony and the grace of
Correggio are proverbial: the medium which by breadth of gradation
unites two opposite principles, the coalition of light and darkness by
imperceptible transition, are the element of his style.--This inspires
his figures with grace, to this their grace is subordinate: the most
appropriate, the most elegant attitudes were adopted, rejected, perhaps
sacrificed to the most awkward ones, in compliance with this imperious
principle: parts vanished, were absorbed, or emerged in obedience to it.
This unison of a whole, predominates over all that remains of him, from
the vastness of his cupolas to the smallest of his oil-pictures.--The
harmony of Correggio, though assisted by exquisite hues, was entirely
independent of colour: his great organ was chiaroscuro in its most
extensive sense; compared with the expanse in which he floats, the
effects of Lionardo da Vinci are little more than the dying ray of
evening, and the concentrated flash of Giorgione discordant abruptness.
The bland central light of a globe, imperceptibly gliding through lucid
demitints into rich reflected shades, composes the spell of Correggio,
and affects us with the soft emotions of a delicious dream.
Such was the ingenuity that prepared, and such the genius that raised to
its height the fabric of modern art. Before we proceed to the next
epoch, let us make an observation.
Form not your judgment of an artist from the exceptions which his
conduct may furnish, from the exertions of accidental vigour, some
deviations into other walks, or some unpremeditated flights of fancy,
but from the predominant rule of his system, the general principle of
his works. The line and style of Titian's design, sometimes expand
themselves like those of Michael Angelo. His Abraham prevented from
sacrificing Isaac; his David adoring over the giant-trunk of Goliath;
the Friar escaping from the murderer of his companion in the forest,
equal in loftiness of conception and style of design, their mighty tone
of colour and daring execution: the heads and groups of Raphael's
frescoes and portraits sometimes glow and palpitate with the tints of
Titian, or coalesce in masses of harmony, and undulate with graces
superior to those of Correggio; who in his turn once reached the highest
summit of invention, when he embodied silence and personified the
mysteries of love in the voluptuous group of Jupiter and Io; and again
exceeded all competition of expression in the divine features of his
Ecce-Homo. But these sudden irradiations, these flashes of power are
only exceptions from their wonted principles; pathos and character own
Raphael for their master, colour remains the domain of Titian, and
harmony the sovereign mistress of Correggio.
The resemblance which marked the two first periods of ancient and modern
art vanishes altogether as we extend our view to the consideration of
the third, or that of refinement, and the origin of schools. The
pre-eminence of ancient art, as we have observed, was less the result of
superior powers, than of simplicity of aim and uniformity of pursuit.
The Helladic and the Ionian schools appear to have concurred in
directing their instruction to the grand principles of form and
expression: this was the stamen which they drew out into one immense
connected web. The talents that succeeded genius, applied and directed
their industry and polish to decorate the established system, the
refinements of taste, grace, sentiment, colour, adorned beauty,
grandeur, and expression. The Tuscan, the Roman, the Venetian, and the
Lombard schools, whether from incapacity, want of education, of adequate
or dignified encouragement, meanness of conception, or all these
together, separated, and in a short time substituted the medium for the
end. Michael Angelo lived to see the electric shock which his design and
style had given to art, propagated by the Tuscan and Venetian schools,
as the ostentatious vehicle of puny conceits and emblematic quibbles, or
the palliative of empty pomp and degraded luxuriance of colour. He had
been copied but was not imitated by Andrea Vannucchi, surnamed Del
Sarto, who in his series of pictures on the life of John the Baptist, in
preference adopted the meager style of Albert Durer. The artist who
appears to have penetrated deepest to his mind, was Pelegrino Tibaldi,
of Bologna;[41] celebrated as the painter of the frescoes in the
academic institute of that city, and as the architect of the Escurial
under Philip II. The compositions, groups, and single figures of the
institute exhibit a singular mixture of extraordinary vigour and puerile
imbecility of conception, of character and caricature, of style and
manner. Polypheme groping at the mouth of his cave for Ulysses, and
Æolus granting him favourable winds, are striking instances of both:
than the Cyclops, Michael Angelo himself never conceived a form of
savage energy, with attitude and limbs more in unison; whilst the god of
winds is degraded to a scanty and ludicrous semblance of Thersites, and
Ulysses with his companions travestied by the semi-barbarous look and
costume of the age of Constantine or Attila; the manner of Michael
Angelo is the style of Pelegrino Tibaldi; from him Golzius, Hemskerk,
and Spranger borrowed the compendium of the Tuscan's peculiarities. With
this mighty talent, however, Michael Angelo seems not to have been
acquainted, but by that unaccountable weakness incident to the greatest
powers, and the severe remembrancer of their vanity, he became the
superintendant and assistant tutor of the Venetian Sebastiano[42], and
of Daniel Ricciarelli, of Volterra[43]; the first of whom, with an
exquisite eye for individual, had no sense for ideal colour, whilst the
other rendered great diligence and much anatomical erudition, useless by
meagerness of line and sterility of ideas: how far Michael Angelo
succeeded in initiating either in his principles, the far-famed pictures
of the resuscitation of Lazarus, by the first, once in the cathedral of
Narbonne, and since inspected by us all at the Lyceum here,[44] and the
fresco of the descent from the cross, in the church of La Trinità del
Monte, at Rome, by the second, sufficiently evince: pictures which
combine the most heterogeneous principles. The group of Lazarus in
Sebastian del Piombo's and that of the women, with the figure of Christ,
in Daniel Ricciarelli's, not only breathe the sublime conception that
inspired, but the master-hand that shaped them: offsprings of Michael
Angelo himself, models of expression, style, and breadth, they cast on
all the rest an air of inferiority, and only serve to prove the
incongruity of partnership between unequal powers; this inferiority
however is respectable, when compared with the depravations of Michael
Angelo's style by the remainder of the Tuscan school, especially those
of Giorgio Vasari,[45] the most superficial artist and the most
abandoned mannerist of his time, but the most acute observer of men and
the most dextrous flatterer of princes. He overwhelmed the palaces of
the Medici and of the popes, the convents and churches of Italy, with a
deluge of mediocrity, commended by rapidity and shameless 'bravura' of
hand: he alone did more work than all the artists of Tuscany together,
and to him may be truly applied, what he had the insolence to say of
Tintoretto, that he turned the art into a boy's toy.
Whilst Michael Angelo was doomed to lament the perversion of his style,
death prevented Raphael from witnessing the gradual decay of his. The
exuberant fertility of Julio Pipi called Romano,[46] and the less
extensive but classic taste of Polydoro da Caravagio deserted indeed the
standard of their master, but with a dignity and magnitude of compass
which command respect. It is less from his tutored works in the Vatican,
than from the colossal conceptions, the pathetic or sublime allegories,
and the voluptuous reveries which enchant the palace del T, near
Mantoua, that we must form our estimate of Julio's powers; they were of
a size to challenge all competition, had he united purity of taste and
delicacy of mind with energy and loftiness of thought; as they are, they
resemble a mighty stream, sometimes flowing in a full and limpid vein,
but oftener turbid with rubbish. He has left specimens of composition
from the most sublime to the most extravagant; to a primeval simplicity
of conception in his mythologic subjects, which transports us to the
golden age of Hesiod, he joined a rage for the grotesque; to uncommon
powers of expression a decided attachment to deformity and grimace, and
to the warmest and most genial imagery the most ungenial colour.
With nearly equal, but still more mixed fertility, Francesco
Primaticcio[47] propagated the style and the conceptions of his master
Julio on the Gallic side of the Alps, and with the assistance of Nicolo,
commonly called Dell' Abbate after him, filled the palaces of Francis I.
with mythologic and allegoric works, in frescoes of an energy and depth
of tone till then unknown. Theirs was the cyclus of pictures from the
Odyssea of Homer at Fontainbleau, a mine of classic and picturesque
materials: they are destroyed, and we may estimate their loss, even
through the disguise of the mannered and feeble etchings of Theodore Van
Tulden.
The compact style of Polydoro,[48] formed on the antique, such as it is
exhibited in the best series of the Roman military bassrelievoes, is
more monumental, than imitative or characteristic. But the virility of
his taste, the impassioned motion of his groups, the simplicity,
breadth, and never excelled elegance and probability of his drapery,
with the forcible chiaroscuro of his compositions, make us regret the
narrowness of the walk to which he confined his powers.
No painter ever painted his own mind so forcibly as Michael Angelo
Amerigi, surnamed Il Caravaggi.[49] To none nature ever set limits with
a more decided hand. Darkness gave him light; into his melancholy cell
light stole only with a pale reluctant ray, or broke on it, as flashes
on a stormy night. The most vulgar forms he recommended by ideal light
and shade, and a tremendous breadth of manner.
The aim and style of the Roman school deserve little further notice
here, till the appearance of Nicolas Poussin[50] a Frenchman, but
grafted on the Roman stock. Bred under Quintin Varin, a French painter
of mediocrity, he found on his arrival in Italy that he had more to
unlearn than to follow of his master's principles, renounced the
national character, and not only with the utmost ardour adopted, but
suffered himself to be wholly absorbed by the antique. Such was his
attachment to the ancients, that it may be said he less imitated their
spirit than copied their relics and painted sculpture; the costume, the
mythology, the rites of antiquity were his element; his scenery, his
landscape, are pure classic ground. He has left specimens to show that
he was sometimes sublime, and often in the highest degree pathetic, but
history in the strictest sense was his property, and in that he ought to
be followed. His agents only appear, to tell the fact; they are
subordinate to the story. Sometimes he attempted to tell a story that
cannot be told: of his historic dignity the celebrated series of
Sacraments; of his sublimity, the vision he gave to Coriolanus; of his
pathetic power, the infant Pyrrhus; and of the vain attempt to tell by
figures what words alone can tell, the testament of Eudamidas, are
striking instances. His eye, though impressed with the tint, and
breadth, and imitation of Titiano, seldom inspired him to charm with
colour; crudity and patches frequently deform his effects. He is unequal
in his style of design; sometimes his comprehension fails him; he
supplies, like Pietro Testa, ideal heads and torsos with limbs and
extremities transcribed from the model. Whether from choice or want of
power he has seldom executed his conceptions on a larger scale than that
which bears his name, and which has perhaps as much contributed to make
him the darling of this country, as his merit.
The wildness of Salvator Rosa[51] opposes a powerful contrast to the
classic regularity of Poussin. Terrific and grand in his conceptions of
inanimate nature, he was reduced to attempts of hiding by boldness of
hand, his inability of exhibiting her impassioned, or in the dignity of
character: his line is vulgar: his magic visions, less founded on
principles of terror than on mythologic trash and caprice, are to the
probable combinations of nature, what the paroxysms of a fever are to
the flights of vigorous fancy. Though so much extolled and so
ambitiously imitated, his banditti are a medley made up of starveling
models, shreds and bits of armour from his lumber-room, brushed into
notice by a daring pencil. Salvator was a satyrist and a critic, but the
rod which he had the insolence to lift against the nudities of Michael
Angelo, and the anachronism of Raphael, would have been better employed
in chastising his own misconceptions.
The principle of Titiano, less pure in itself and less decided in its
object of imitation, did not suffer so much from its more or less
appropriate application by his successors, as the former two. Colour
once in a very high degree attained, disdains subordination and
engrosses the whole. Mutual similarity attracts, body tends to body, as
mind to mind, and he who has once gained supreme dominion over the eye,
will hardly resign it to court the more coy approbation of mind, of a
few opposed to nearly all. Add to this the character of the place and
the nature of the encouragement held out to the Venetian artists. Venice
was the centre of commerce, the repository of the riches of the globe,
the splendid toy-shop of the time: its chief inhabitants princely
merchants, or a patrician race elevated to rank by accumulations from
trade, or naval prowess; the bulk of the people, mechanics or artisans,
administering the means, and in their turn fed by the produce of luxury.
Of such a system, what could the art be more than the parasite? Religion
itself had exchanged its gravity for the allurements of ear and eye, and
even sanctity disgusted, unless arrayed by the gorgeous hand of
fashion.--Such was, such will always be the birth-place and the theatre
of colour: and hence it is more matter of wonder that the first and
greatest colourists should so long have foreborne to overstep the
modesty of nature in the use of that alluring medium, than that they
yielded by degrees to its golden solicitations.[52]
The principle of Correggio vanished with its author, though it found
numerous imitators of its parts. Since him, no eye has conceived that
expanse of harmony with which the voluptuous sensibility of his mind
arranged and enchanted all visible nature. His grace, so much vaunted
and so little understood, was adopted and improved to elegance by
Francesco Mazzuoli, called Il Parmegiano,[53] but instead of making her
the measure of propriety, he degraded her to affectation: in
Parmegiano's figures action is the adjective of the posture; the
accident of attitude; they 'make themselves air, into which they
vanish.' That disengaged play of delicate forms, the 'Sueltezza' of the
Italians, is the prerogative of Parmegiano, though nearly always
obtained at the expense of proportion. His grandeur, as conscious as his
grace, sacrifices the motive to the mode, simplicity to contrast: his
St. John loses the fervour of the apostle in the orator; his Moses the
dignity of the lawgiver in the savage. With incredible force of
chiaroscuro, he united bland effects and fascinating hues, but their
frequent ruins teach the important lesson, that the mixtures which
anticipate the beauties of time, are big with the seeds of premature
decay.
Such was the state of the art, when, towards the decline of the
sixteenth century, Lodovico Carracci,[54] with his cousins Agostino[55]
and Annibale, founded at Bologna that eclectic school, which by
selecting the beauties, correcting the faults, supplying the defects and
avoiding the extremes of the different styles, attempted to form a
perfect system. But as the mechanic part was their only object, they did
not perceive that the projected union was incompatible with the leading
principle of each master. Let us hear this plan from Agostino Carracci
himself, as it is laid down in his sonnet[56] on the ingredients
required to form a perfect painter, if that may be called a sonnet which
has more the air of medical prescription. 'Take,' says Agostino, 'the
design of Rome, Venetian motion and shade, the dignified tone of
Lombardy's colour, the terrible manner of Michael Angelo, the just
symmetry of Raphael, Titiano's truth of nature, and the sovereign purity
of Corregio's style: add to these the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi,
the learned invention of Primaticcio, and a little of Parmegiano's
grace: but to save so much study, such weary labour, apply your
imitation to the works which our dear Nicolo has left us here.' Of such
advice, balanced between the tone of regular breeding and the cant of an
empiric, what could be the result? excellence or mediocrity? who ever
imagined that a multitude of dissimilar threads could compose an uniform
texture, that dissemination of spots would make masses, or a little of
many things produce a legitimate whole? indiscriminate imitation must
end in the extinction of character, and that in mediocrity,--the cipher
of art.