furnished the idea of the Annunziata, painted by Marcello Venusti from
his design, in the sacristy of St. Giov. Lateran, by order of Tommaso
de' Cavalieri, the select friend and favourite of Michael Angelo.
We are told that Michael Angelo represented the Ugolino of Dante,
inclosed in the tower of Pisa: if he did, his own work is lost; but if,
as some suppose, the basso-relievo of that subject by Pierino da Vinci
be taken from his idea, notwithstanding the greater latitude, which the
sculptor might claim, in divesting the figures of drapery and costume;
he appears to me to have erred in the means employed to rouse our
sympathy. A sullen but muscular character, with groups of muscular
bodies and forms of strength, about him, with the allegoric figure of
the Arno at their feet, and that of famine hovering over their heads,
are not the fierce Gothic chief, deprived of revenge, brooding over
despair in the stony cage; are not the exhausted agonies of a father,
petrified by the helpless groans of an expiring family, offering their
own bodies for his food, to prolong his life.
[77] Dixeris egregiè, notum si callida verbum
Reddiderit junctura novum.----
Q. Horat. Flacci de A. P. v. 47.
[78] Matt. xvii. 5, 6. See Fiorillo, geschichte, &c. 104. seq.
[79] The vision on Tabor, as represented here, is the most
characteristic produced by modern art. Whether we consider the action of
the apostles overpowered by the divine effulgence, and divided between
adoration and astonishment, or the forms of the prophets ascending like
flame, and attracted by the lucid centre, or the majesty of Jesus
himself, whose countenance is the only one we know expressive of his
superhuman nature. That the unison of such powers should not, for once,
have disarmed the burlesque of the French critic, rouses equal surprise
and indignation.
FOURTH LECTURE.
INVENTION.
PART II.
=PHTHONERA D' ALLOS ANÊR BLEPÔN,
GNÔMAN KENEAN SKOTÔI KYLINDEI
CHAMAIPETOISAN.=
=PINDAR. NEM. EID. D.=
ARGUMENT.
Choice of subjects; divided into positive, negative,
repulsive.--Observations on the Parerga, or Accessories of
Invention.
FOURTH LECTURE.
The imitation of Nature, as it presents itself in space and figure,
being the real sphere of plastic Invention, it follows, that whatever
can occupy a place and be circumscribed by lines, characterised by form,
substantiated by colour and light and shade, without provoking
incredulity, shocking our conception by absurdity, averting our eye by
loathsomeness or horror, is strictly within its province: but though all
Nature seem to teem with objects of imitation, the "Choice" of subjects
is a point of great importance to the Artist; the conception, the
progress, the finish, and the success of his work depend upon it. An apt
and advantageous subject rouses and elevates Invention, invigorates,
promotes, and adds delight to labour; whilst a dull or repulsive one
breeds obstacles at every step, dejects and wearies--the Artist loses
his labour, the spectator his expectation.
The first demand on every work of art is that it constitute one whole,
that it fully pronounce its own meaning, that it tell itself; it ought
to be independent; the essential part of its subject ought to be
comprehended and understood without collateral assistance, without
borrowing its commentary from the historian or the poet; for as we are
soon wearied with a poem whose fable and motives reach us only by the
borrowed light of annexed notes, so we turn our eye discontented from a
picture or a statue whose meaning depends on the charity of a Cicerone,
or must be fetched from a book.
As the condition that each work of art should fully and essentially tell
its own tale, undoubtedly narrows the quantity of admissible objects,
singly taken, to remedy this, to enlarge the range of subjects,
Invention has contrived by a Cyclus or series to tell the most important
moments of a long story, its beginning, its middle, and its end: for
though some of these may not, in themselves, admit of distinct
discrimination, they may receive and impart light by connection.
Of him who undertakes thus to personify a tale, the first demand is,
that his Invention dwell on the firm basis of the story, on its most
important and significant moments, or its principal actors. Next, as the
nature of the art which is confined to the apparition of single moments
forces him to leap many intermediate ones, he cannot be said to have
invented with propriety, if he neglect imperceptibly to fill the chasm
occasioned by their omission; and, finally, that he shall not interrupt
or lose the leading thread of his plan in quest of episodes, in the
display of subordinate or adventitious beauties. On the observation of
these rules depends the perspicuity of his work, the interest we take in
it, and, consequently, all that can be gained by the adoption of a
historic series.
When form, colour, with conception and execution, are deducted from a
work, its subject, the unwrought stuff only, the naked materials remain,
and these we divide into three classes.
The first are positive, advantageous, commensurate with and adapted for
the art. The whole of the work lies prepared in their germ, and
spontaneously meets the rearing hand of the Artist.
The second class, composed of subjects negative and uninteresting in
themselves, depends entirely on the manner of treating; such subjects
owe what they can be to the genius of the Artist.
The repulsive, the subjects which cannot pronounce their own meaning,
constitute the third class. On them genius and talent are equally
wasted, because the heart has no medium to render them intelligible.
Taste and execution may recommend them to our eye, but never can make
them generally impressive, or stamp them with perspicuity.
To begin with advantageous subjects, immediately above the scenes of
vulgar life, of animals, and common landscape, the simple representation
of actions purely human, appears to be as nearly related to the art as
to ourselves; their effect is immediate; they want no explanation; from
them, therefore, we begin our scale. The next step leads us to pure
historic subjects, singly or in a series; beyond these the delineation
of character, or, properly speaking, the drama, invites; immediately
above this we place the epic with its mythologic, allegoric, and
symbolic branches.
On these four branches of Invention, as I have treated diffusely in the
lecture published on this subject, and since successively in these
prelections, I shall not at present circumstantially dwell, but as
succinctly as possible remind you only of their specific difference and
elements.
The first class, which, without much boldness of metaphor, may be said
to draw its substance immediately from the lap of Nature, to be as
elemental as her emotions, and the passions by which she sways us, finds
its echo in all hearts, and imparts its charm to every eye; from the
mutual caresses of maternal affection and infant simplicity, the
whispers of love or eruptions of jealousy and revenge, to the terrors of
life, struggling with danger, or grappling with death. The Madonnas of
Raphael; the Ugolino, the Paolo and Frances of Dante; the Conflagration
of the Borgo; the Niobe protecting her daughter; Hæmon piercing his own
breast, with Antigone hanging dead from his arm,[80] owe the sympathies
they call forth to their assimilating power, and not to the names they
bear: without names, without reference to time and place, they would
impress with equal energy, because they find their counterpart in every
breast, and speak the language of mankind. Such were the Phantasiæ of
the ancients, which modern art, by indiscriminate laxity of application,
in what is called Fancy-Pictures, has more debased than imitated. A
mother's and a lover's kiss acquire their value from the lips they
press, and suffering deformity mingles disgust with pity.
Historic Invention administers to truth. History, as contradistinguished
from arbitrary or poetic narration, tells us not what might be, but what
is or was; circumscribes the probable, the grand, and the pathetic, with
truth of time, place, custom; gives "local habitation and a name:" its
agents are the pure organs of a fact. Historic plans, when sufficiently
distinct to be told, and founded on the basis of human nature, have
that prerogative over mere natural imagery, that whilst they bespeak our
sympathy, they interest our intellect. We were pleased with the former
as men, we are attracted by this as members of society: bound round with
public and private connections and duties, taught curiosity by
education, we wish to regulate our conduct by comparisons of analogous
situations and similar modes of society: these History furnishes;
transplants us into other times; empires and revolutions of empires pass
before us with memorable facts and actors in their train--the
legislator, the philosopher, the discoverer, the polishers of life, the
warrior, the divine, are the principal inhabitants of this soil: it is
perhaps unnecessary to add, that nothing trivial, nothing grovelling or
mean, should be suffered to approach it. This is the department of
Tacitus and Poussin. The exhibition of character in the conflict of
passions with the rights, the rules, the prejudices of society, is the
legitimate sphere of dramatic invention. It inspires, it agitates us by
reflected self-love, with pity, terror, hope and fear; whatever makes
events, and time and place, the ministers of character and pathos, let
fiction or reality compose the tissue, is its legitimate claim: it
distinguishes and raises itself above historic representation by laying
the chief interest on the _actors_, and moulding the _fact_ into mere
situations contrived for their exhibition: they are the end, this the
medium. Such is the invention of Sophocles and Shakspeare, and uniformly
that of Raphael. The actors, who in Poussin and the rest of historic
painters shine by the splendour of the fact, reflect it in Raphael with
unborrowed rays: they are the luminous object to which the action
points.
Of the epic plan, the loftiest species of human conception, the aim is
to astonish whilst it instructs; it is the sublime allegory of a maxim.
Here Invention arranges a plan by general ideas, the selection of the
most prominent features of Nature, or favourable modes of society,
visibly to substantiate some great maxim. If it admits history for its
basis, it hides the limits in its grandeur; if it select characters to
conduct its plan, it is only in the genus, their features reflect, their
passions are kindled by the maxim, and absorbed in its universal blaze:
at this elevation heaven and earth mingle their boundaries, men are
raised to demigods, and gods descend. This is the sphere of Homer,
Phidias, and Michael Agnolo.
Allegory, or the personification of invisible physic and metaphysic
ideas, though not banished from the regions of Invention, is equally
inadmissible in pure epic, dramatic, and historic plans, because,
wherever it enters, it must rule the whole.[81] It rules with propriety
the mystic drama of the Vatican, where the characters displayed are
only the varied instruments of a mystery by which the church was
established, and Julio and Leone are the allegoric image, the
representatives of that church; but the epic, dramatic, and historic
painter embellish with poetry or delineate with truth what either was or
is supposed to be real; they must therefore conduct their plans by
personal and substantial agency, if they mean to excite that
credibility, without which it is not in their power to create an
interest in the spectator or the reader.
That great principle, the necessity of a moral tendency or of some
doctrine useful to mankind in the _whole_ of an epic performance,
admitted, are we therefore to sacrifice the uniformity of its parts, and
thus to lose that credibility which _alone_ can impress us with the
importance of the maxim that dictated to the poet narration and to the
artist imagery? Are the agents sometimes to be real beings, and
sometimes abstract ideas? Is the Zeus of Homer, of whose almighty will
the bard, at the very threshold of his poem, proclaims himself only the
herald, by the purblind acuteness of a commentator, to be turned into
æther; and Juno, just arriving from her celestial toilet, changed into
air, to procure from their mystic embraces the allegoric offspring of
vernal impregnation? When Minerva, by her weight, makes the chariot of
Diomede groan, and Mars wounded, roars with the voice of ten thousand,
are they nothing but the symbol of military discipline, and the sound of
the battle's roar? or Ate, seized by her hair, and by Zeus dashed from
the battlements of heaven, is she only a metaphysic idea? Forbid it,
Sense! As well might we say, that Milton, when he called the porteress
of hell, Satan's daughter, _Sin_, and his son and dread antagonist,
_Death_, meant only to impress us with ideas of privation and nonentity,
and sacrificed the real agents of his poem to an unskilful choice of
names? Yet it is their name that has bewildered his commentator and
biographer in criticisms equally cold, repugnant and incongruous, on the
admissibility and inadmissibility of allegory in poems of supposed
reality. What becomes of the interest the poet and the artist mean to
excite in us, if, in the moment of reading or contemplating, we do not
believe what the one tells and the other shows? It is that magic which
places on the same basis of existence, and amalgamates the mythic or
superhuman, and the human parts of the Ilias, of Paradise Lost, and of
the Sistine Chapel, that enraptures, agitates, and whirls us along as
readers or spectators.
When Poussin represented Coriolanus in the Volscian camp, he placed
before him in suppliant attitude his mother, wife, and children, with a
train of Roman matrons kneeling, and behind them the erect and frowning
form of an armed female, accompanied by another with streaming hair,
recumbent on a wheel. On these two, unseen to all else, Coriolanus,
perplexed in the extreme, in an attitude of despair, his sword half
drawn, as if to slay himself, fixes his scared eyes: who discovers not
that he is in a trance, and in the female warrior recognises the
tutelary genius of Rome, and her attendant Fortune, to terrify him into
compliance? Shall we disgrace with the frigid conceit of an allegory the
powerful invention which disclosed to the painter's eye the agitation in
the Roman's breast and the proper moment for fiction? Who is not struck
by the sublimity of a vision which, without diminishing the credibility
of the fact, adds to its importance, and raises the hero, by making him
submit not to the impulse of private ties, but to the imperious destiny
of his country?
Among the paltry subterfuges contrived by dulness to palliate the want
of invention, the laborious pedantry of emblems ranks foremost, by which
arbitrary and conventional signs have been substituted for character and
expression. If the assertion of S. Johnson, that the plastic arts "can
illustrate, but cannot inform," be false as a general maxim, it gains an
air of truth with regard to this hieroglyphic mode of exchanging
substance for signs; and the story which he adds in proof, of a young
girl's mistaking the usual figure of Justice with a steel-yard for a
cherry-woman, becomes here appropriate. The child had seen many stall
and market-women, and always with a steel-yard or a pair of scales, but
never a figure of Justice; and it might as well be pretended that one
not initiated in the Egyptian mysteries should discover in the Scarabæus
of an obelisk the summer solstice, as that a child, a girl, or a man not
acquainted with Cæsar Ripa, or some other emblem-coiner, should find in
a female holding a balance over her eyes, in another with a bridle in
her hand, in a third leaning on a broken pillar, and in a fourth loaded
with children, the symbols of Justice, Temperance, Fortitude and
Charity. If these signs be at all admissible, they ought, at least, to
receive as much light from the form, the character, and expression of
the figures they accompany, as they reflect on them, else they become
burlesque, instead of being attributes. Though this rage for emblem did
not become epidemic before the lapse of the sixteenth century, when the
Cavalieri of the art, the Zucchari, Vasari and Porta's undertook to
deliver more work than their brains could furnish with thought, yet even
the philosophers of the art, in the classic days of Julio and Leo,
cannot be said to have been entirely free from it. What analogy is there
between an ostrich at the side of a female with a balance in her hand,
and the idea of Justice? Yet thus has Raphael represented her in a
stanza of the Vatican. Nor has he been constant to the same emblem, as
on the ceiling of another stanza, he has introduced her with a scale,
and armed with a sword. The _Night_ of M. Agnolo, on the Medicean tombs,
might certainly be taken for what she professes to be, without the
assistance of the mask, the poppies, and the owl at her feet, for the
dominion of sleep is personified in her expression and posture: perhaps
even her beautiful companion, whose faintly stretching attitude and
half-opened eyes express the symptoms of approaching _morn_, might be
conceived for its representative;[82] but no stretch of fancy can, in
their male associates, reach the symbols of _full day_ and _eve_, or in
the females of the monument of Julio II. the ideas of _contemplative_
and _active life_.
To means so arbitrary, confused and precarious, the ancients never
descended: their general ideas had an uniform and general typus, which
invention never presumed to alter or to transgress; but this typus lay
less in the attributes than in the character and form. The inverted
torch and moon-flower were the accompaniments, and not the substitutes,
of _Death_ and _Sleep_; neither _Psyche_ nor _Victory_ depended on her
wings. Mercury was recognized without the caduceus or purse, and Apollo
without his bow or lyre; various and similar, the branches of one
family, their leading lines descended from that full type of majesty
which Phidias, the architect of gods, had stamped on his Jupiter.
Whether we ought to consider the son of Charmidas as the inventor or the
regulator of this supreme and irremovable standard, matters not, from
_him_ the ancient writers date the epoch of mythic invention; no
revolutions of style changed the character of his forms, talent only
polished with more or less success what his laws had established.
Phidias, says Quintilian, was framed to form gods; Phidias, says Pliny,
gave in his Jupiter a new motive to religion.
Whether or not, after the restoration of art, the Supreme Being, the
eternal essence of incomprehensible perfection, ought ever to have been
approached by the feeble efforts of human conception, it is not my
office to discuss, perhaps it ought not--but since it has, as the Roman
Church has embodied divine substance, and called on our arts for an
auxiliary, it was to be expected that, to make assistance effectual, a
full type, a supreme standard of form, should have been established for
the author and the agents of the sacred circle: but, be it from the
tyranny of religious barbarians, or inability, or to avoid the
imputation of copying each other, painters and sculptors, widely
differing among themselves in the conception of divine or sainted form
and character, agree in nothing but attributes and symbols: triangular
glories, angelic ministry and minstrelsy, the colours of the drapery;
the cross, the spear, the stigmata; the descending dove; in implements
of ecclesiastic power or instruments of martyrdom.
The Biblic expression, as it is translated, "of the Ancient of
Days"--which means, "He that existed before time," furnished the
primitive artists, instead of an image of supreme majesty, only with the
hoary image of age: and such a figure borne along by a globe of angels,
and crowned with a kind of episcopal mitre, recurs on the bronzes of
Lorenzo Ghiberti. The sublime mind of M. Agnolo, soaring beyond the idea
of decrepitude and puny formality, strove to form a type in the
elemental energy of the Creator of Adam, and darted life from His
extended hand, but in the Creator of Eve sunk again to the idea of age.
Raphael strove to compound a form from M. Angelo and his predecessors,
to combine energy and rapidity with age: in the Loggia he follows M.
Agnolo, in the Stanza the prior artists; here his gods are affable and
mild, there rapid, and perhaps more violent than energetic. After these
two great names, it were profanation to name the attempts of their
successors.
The same fluctuation perplexes the effigy of the Saviour. Lionardo da
Vinci attempted to unite power with calm serenity, but in the Last
Supper alone presses on our hearts by humanity of countenance. The
Infant Christ of M. Agnolo is a superhuman conception, but as man and
Redeemer with his cross, in the Minerva, he is a figure as mannered in
form and attitude, as averting by stern severity; and, as the Judge of
Mankind in the Last Judgment, he seems to me as unworthy of the artist's
mind as of his master-hand. The Christs of Raphael, as infants, are
seldom more than lovely children; as a man, the painter has poised His
form between church tradition and the dignified mildness of his own
character.
Two extremes appear to have co-operated to impede the establishment of a
type in the formation of the Saviour: by one He is converted into a
character of mythology, the other debases Him to the dregs of mankind.
"The character corresponding with that of Christ," says Mengs,[83]
"ought to be a compound of the characters of Jupiter and of Apollo,
allowing only for the accidental expression of the moment." What magic
shall amalgamate the superhuman airs of Rhea's and Latona's sons, with
patience in suffering and resignation? The critic in his exultation
forgot the leading feature of his Master--condescending humility. In the
race of Jupiter majesty is often tempered by emanations of beauty and of
grace, but never softened to warm humanity. Here lies the knot:--
The Saviour of mankind extending his arm to relieve, without visible
means, the afflicted, the hopeless, the dying, the dead, is a subject
that visits with awe the breast of every one who calls himself after His
name; the artist is in the sphere of adoration.
An exalted sage descending to every beneficent office of humanity,
instructing ignorance, not only forgiving but excusing outrage,
pressing his enemy to his breast, commands the sympathy of every man,
though he be no believer; the artist is in the sphere of sentiment.
But a mean man, marked with the features of a mean race, surrounded by a
beggarly, ill-shaped rabble and stupid crowds--may be mistaken for a
juggler, that claims the attention of no man. Of this let Art beware.
From these observations on positive we now proceed to the class of
_negative_ subjects. Negative we call those which in themselves possess
little that is significant, historically true or attractive, pathetic or
sublime, which leave our heart and fancy listless and in apathy, though
by the art with which they are executed they allure and retain the eye:
here, if ever, the artist creates his own work, in raising, by ingenious
combination, that to a positive subject which in its parts is none, or
merely passive.