simplest sense means the division of a single object into light and
shade, and in its widest compass comprises their distribution over a
whole composition: whether the first derive its splendour by being
exposed to a direct light, or from colours in its nature luminous; and
whether the second owe their obscurity directly to the privation of
light, or be produced by colours in themselves opaque. Its exclusive
power is, to give substance to form, place to figure, and to create
space. It may be considered as legitimate or spurious: it is legitimate
when, as the immediate offspring of the subject, its disposition,
extent, strength or sweetness are subservient to form, expression, and
invigorate or illustrate character, by heightening the primary actor or
actors, and subordinating the secondary; it is spurious when from an
assistant aspiring to the rights of a principal, it becomes a substitute
for indispensable or more essential demands. As such, it has often been
employed by the machinists of different schools, for whom it became the
refuge of ignorance, a palliative for an incurable disease, and the
asylum of emptiness; still, as even a resource of this kind proves a
certain vigour of mind, it surprises into something like unwilling
admiration and forced applause.
Of every subject Unity is the soul: unity, of course, is inseparable
from legitimate chiaroscuro: hence the individual light and shade of
every figure that makes part of a given or chosen subject, whether
natural or ideal, as well as the more compound one of the different
intermediate groups, must act as so many rays emanating from one centre
and terminate, blazing, evanescent, or obscured, in rounding it to the
eye.
Truth is the next requisite of chiaroscuro, whatever be the subject.
Some it attends without ambition, content with common effects; some it
invigorates or inspires: but in either case, let the effect be that of
usual expanded day-light, or artificial and condensed, it ought to be
regulated by truth in extent, strength, brilliancy, softness, and above
all, by simplicity in its positive and purity in its negative parts. As
shade is the mere absence of light, it cannot, except from reflexes,
possess any hue or colour of its own, and acquires all its charms from
transparency.
But to the rules which art prescribes to Chiaroscuro, to round each
figure of a composition with truth, to connect it with the neighbouring
groups, and both with the whole--it adds, that all this should be done
with strict adherence to propriety, at the least possible expense of the
subordinate parts, and with the utmost attainable degree of effect and
harmony--demands which it is not my duty to inquire, whether they
entered ever with equal evidence the mind of any one artist, ancient or
modern: whether, if it be granted possible that they did, they were ever
balanced with equal impartiality; and grant this, whether they ever were
or could be executed with equal felicity. A character of equal
universal power is not a human character--and the nearest approach to
perfection can only be in carrying to excellence one great quality with
the least alloy of defects. Thus in the School of Athens, Raffaello's
great aim being to embody on the same scene the gradations, varieties
and utmost point of human culture _as it proceeds from the individual to
society, and from that ascends to God_; he suffered expression and
character to preponderate over effect and combination of masses, and
contriving to unite the opposite wings with the centre by entrance and
exit at each extremity, as far as expression could do it, succeeded, to
make what in itself is little more than apposition of single figures or
detached groups, one grand whole.--I say, as far as expression could
satisfy a mind qualified to contemplate and penetrate his principle,
however unsatisfied a merely picturesque eye might wander over a
scattered assemblage of figures equally illuminated and unconnected by a
commanding mass of light and shade.
From this deficiency of effect in the composition we speak of, it is
evident, that mere natural light and shade, however separately or
individually true, is not always legitimate Chiaroscuro in art. Nature
sheds or withholds her ray indiscriminately, and every object has what
share it can obtain by place and position, which it is the business of
art to arrange by fixing a centre and distributing the rays according to
the more or less important claims of the subject: as long as it
regulates itself by strict observance of that principle, it matters not
whether its principal mass radiate from the middle, wind in undulating
shapes, dart in decided beams from the extremities; emanate from one
source, or borrow additional effect from subordinate ones: let it mount
like flame or descend in lightning; dash in stern tones terror on the
eye, emergent from a dark or luminous medium; through twilight immerse
itself in impenetrable gloom or gradually vanish in voluptuous repose,
guided by the subject the most daring division of light and shade
becomes natural and legitimate, and the most regular, spurious and
illegitimate without it.
To attain in the execution the highest possible and widest expanded
effect of light, with equal depth and transparence in the shade,
brilliancy of colour is less required than unison: a sovereign tone must
pervade the whole, which, though arbitrary and dependent on choice,
decides all subordinate ones, as the tone of the first instrument in a
regular concert tunes all the rest; their effect entirely depends on
being in unison with it, and discord is produced whenever they revolt:
by thus uniting itself with the whole, the simplest tone well managed
may become, not only harmonious, but rich and splendid, it is then the
tone of Nature: whilst the most brilliant one, if contradicted or
disappointed by the detail of the inferior, may become heavy, leathern,
and discordant.
Though every work of Correggio is an illustration of this principle, and
none with brighter evidence than his "Notte," in which the central light
of the infant irradiates the whole; perhaps the most decisive, because
the most appropriate proof of it, is in its companion the less known
picture of St. Sebastian, at Dresden; in which the central light of a
glory, not only surprises the eye with all the splendour of a sun,
though its colour is a yellow comparatively faint, and terminates in
brown, but tinges the whole, perfectly transparent, with its emanation.
That not before the lapse of two hundred years after the resurrection of
Art, the discovery of Chiaroscuro, as a principle of beauty in single
figures and of effect in composition, should be awarded to Lionardo da
Vinci, a patriarch of that school which time has shown of all others the
least inclined to appreciate its advantages, is at once a proof of the
singularity that marks the local distribution of powers, and of the
inconceivable slowness which attends human perception in the progress of
study: but without generally admitting what has been said with more
energy than judgment or regard to truth, that modern art literally
sprang from the loins of Lionardo, it must be granted that no work
anterior or contemporary with his essays in Chiaroscuro now exists to
disprove his claim to the first vision of its harmony; its magic lent
the charm, by which his females allure, to forms neither ideal nor much
varied; sisters of one family, they attract by the light in which they
radiate, by the shade that veils them--for the features of Giotto's or
Memmi's Madonnas or virgin-saints floating in the same medium, would
require little more to be their equals.
This principle Lionardo seems seldom if ever to have extended to relieve
or recommend his larger compositions and male figures, if we except the
group of contending horsemen which made or was intended for some part of
his rival Cartoon in the Sala del Consiglio: a knot of supreme powers in
Composition and Chiaroscuro: though, as we know it chiefly from a copy
of P. P. Rubens engraved by Edelinck, the gross evidence of Flemish
liberties taken with the style, makes it probable that the original
simplicity of light and shade has been invigorated by the artificial
contrasts of the copyist. Lionardo's open scenery, tinged with the
glareless evenness of plain daylight, seldom warrants effects so
concentrated. Unostentatious gravity marks the characters of his Last
Supper, and in sober evening tones marked probably the Chiaroscuro of
the groups and scenery, if we may be allowed to form our judgment from
the little that remains unimpaired by the ravages of time and the more
barbarous ones of renovators.
To the discovery of central radiance the genius of Lionardo with equal
penetration added its counterpart, _purity_ of shade and the
coalescence of both through imperceptible demi-tints. Whatever tone of
light he chose, he never forgot that the shade intended to set it off
was only its absence, and not a positive colour, and that both were to
be harmonized by demi-tints composed of both; a principle of which no
school anterior to him has left a trace.
That the discovery of a principle big with advantages as obvious as
important to art should have been reserved for the penetration of
Lionardo, however singular, is less strange than that, when discovered
and its powers demonstrated, it should, with the exception of one name,
have not only met with no imitators, but with an ambiguous and even
discouraging reception from the pupils of his own school, and some next
allied to it. Vasari, his panegyrist rather than biographer, talks of it
more as a singular phænomenon than as an evident principle, and avowing
that he introduced a certain depth of shade into oil-painting, which
enabled succeeding artists to relieve their figures more forcibly,[90]
persevered to discolour walls and pannels with washy flat insipidity.
Bartolomeo della Porta alone appears to have had sufficient compass of
mind to grasp its energy and connect it with colour: from him, through
Andrea del Sarto down to Pietro Berettini, who owed his effects rather
to opposition of tints than to legitimate Chiaroscuro, the Tuscan school
gradually suffered it to dwindle into evanescence. Unless we were to
consider its astonishing effects in some of Michael Angelo's works in
the light of imitations rather than as emanations of his own genius;
which perhaps we are the less warranted to presume, as he seems to have
paid no attention to Lionardo's discovery in its brightest period; for
the groups of his celebrated cartoon exhibit little more than individual
light and shade.
What the Tuscan school treated with neglect, the Roman appears not to
have been eager to adopt: if Raffaello did not remain a stranger to the
theories of Lionardo and Frà Bartolomeo, he suffered the principle to
lie dormant; for no production of his during his intercourse with them
is marked by concentration of light or purity of shade or subordinate
masses: nor is the interval between his last departure from Florence
and his entrance of the Vatican discriminated by any visible progress in
massing and illuminating a whole: the upper and lower parts of the
Dispute on the Sacrament, cut sheer asunder, as a whole, are little
relieved in either; and if the Parnassus and the School of Athens have
the beginning, middle, and end of legitimate composition, they owe it to
expression and feeling; nor can the more vigorous display of Chiaroscuro
in the works of the second stanza, the Deliverance of Peter, the Fall of
Heliodorus, the Attila, the Mass of Bolsena be referred to a principle
of imitation, when we see it neglected in a subject where it might have
ruled with absolute sway, in the Incendio del Borgo, and on the whole in
every Composition of the third and fourth stanza; a series of evidence
that Raffaello considered Chiaroscuro as a subordinate vehicle, and
never suffered its blandishments or energies to absorb meaning or to
supplant expression and form:[91] but the harmony which immediately
after him Giulio Pipi, and Polydoro only excepted, the rest of his
pupils had sacrificed or consecrated to higher beauties, their
successors, the subsequent Roman school from the Zuccari through
Giuseppe Cesari down to C. Maratta, if they did not entirely lose in a
heavy display of academic pedantry, or destroy by the remorseless
"bravura" of mannered practice, the uniformly polluted by bastard
theories and adulterated methods of shade.
When I say that the Roman school uniformly erred in their principle of
shade, I have not forgot M. Angelo da Caravaggio, whose darks are in
such perfect unison with the lights of his chiaroscuro, that A. Caracci
declared he did not grind colour but flesh itself for his tints ("che
macinava carne"), and whom for that reason and on such authority I
choose rather to consider as the head of his own school than as the
member of another: in some of his surviving works, but far more
frequently in those which without sufficient authenticity are ascribed
to him, an abrupt transition from light to darkness, without an
intervening demi-tint, has offended the eye and provoked the sarcasm of
an eminent critic: but as long as the picture of the Entombing of Christ
in the Chiesa Nuova at Rome may be appealed to; as long as the Pilgrim's
kneeling before the Madonna with the child in her arms, of St. Agostino
at Rome, shall retain their tone; or the Infant Jesus, once in the Spada
palace, crushing the serpent's head, shall resist the ravages of
time--it will be difficult to produce in similar works of any other
master or any other school, from Lionardo down to Rembrandt, a system of
chiaroscuro which shall equal the severe yet mellow energy of the first;
the departing evening ray and veiled glow of the second; or, with
unimpaired harmony, the bold decision of masses and stern light and
shade of the third.
The homage sparingly granted or callously refused to chiaroscuro by the
two schools of design was with implicit devotion paid to it by the nurse
of colour, the school of Venice. Whether as tradition, on the authority
of Vasari, maintains, they received it as a principle of imitation from
the perspicacity, or as a native discovery from the genius of Giorgione
Barbarelli, though from what has been advanced on both sides of the
question, it would be presumptuous positively to decide on either, it
must be allowed, that if the Venetian received a hint from the
Florentine, he extended it through a system, the harmony of which was
all his own, and excelled in breadth and amenity the light which it
could not surpass in splendour, added transparence to purity of shade,
rounded by reflexes and discovered by the contrast of deep with aerial
colour, that energy of effect which mere chiaroscuro could not have
reached, and which was carried near perfection by Paolo Cagliari.
Among the varied mischief poured into this country by the rapacious
sophistry of traders and the ambitious cullibility of wealthy
collectors, no fraud perhaps has been more destructive to the genuine
appreciation of original styles than the baptism of pictures with names
not their own: by this prolific method worse ones than those of Luini,
Aretusi, Timoteo della Vite, Bonifacio, are daily graced with the
honours due to Lionardo, Correggio, Raffaello, Tizian; though none have
suffered more by the multiplication than Giorgione, whom shortness of
life, a peculiar fatality of circumstances, and the ravages of time,
have conspired to render one of the scarcest as well as least
authenticated artists even in Italy: to whom his earliest and latest
biographers have been as critically unjust as chronologically
inattentive; Vasari by transferring to another his principal work;
Fiorillo by making him paint the portrait of Calvin the Reformer.[92]
To form our opinion therefore of Giorgione's chiaroscuro from a few
portraits or single figures, if legitimate, often restored, or from the
crumbling remnants of his decayed frescoes, would be to form an estimate
of a magnificent fabric from some loose fragment or stone: to do full
justice to his powers we must have recourse to his surprising work in
the School of S. Marco at Venice; a composition whose terrific graces
Vasari descants on with a fervour inferior only to the artist's own
inspiration, though he unaccountably ascribes it to the elder Palma.[93]
"In the School of S. Marco he painted the story of the ship which
conducts the body of St. Mark through a horrible tempest, with other
barges assailed by furious winds; and besides, groups of aërial
apparitions, and various forms of fiends who vent their blasts against
the vessels, that by dint of oars and energy of arms strive to force
their way through the mountainous and hostile waves which threaten to
submerge them. You hear the howling blast, you see the grasp and fiery
exertion of the men, the fluctuation of the waves, the lightning that
bursts the clouds, the oars bent by the flood, the flood broke by the
oars, and dashed to spray by the sinews of the rowers. What more? In
vain I labour to recollect a picture that equals the terrors of this
whose design, invention, and colour make the canvass tremble! Often when
he finishes, an artist, absorbed in the contemplation of parts, forgets
the main point of a design, and as the spirits cool, loses the vein of
his enthusiasm; but this man, never losing sight of the subject, guided
his conceit to perfection."
The effect of this work, when it drew such a stream of eulogy from lips
else so frugal in Venetian praise, may be guessed at from the impression
it makes in its present decay--for even now, it might defy the
competition of the most terrific specimens in chiaroscuro, the boat of
Charon in M. Angelo's Last Judgment, perhaps, only excepted. Yet its
master was defrauded of its glory by his panegyrist, whilst it was
exciting the wonder and curiosity of every beholder: Lanzi is the only
historian who notices its remains, and the real author;[94] we look in
vain for it in Ridolfi, who in his Life of Giorgione treats us instead
of it with a delectable account of a night-piece which he painted,
exhibiting the tragi-comedy of castrating a cat.
It has been treated as a mistake to confine the chiaroscuro of a subject
exclusively to one source; nor can it be doubted that often it is and
has been proved to be both necessary and advantageous to admit more;
this is however a licence to be granted with considerable caution, and
it appears to be the privilege of superior powers to raise a subject, by
the admission of subordinate, sometimes diverging, sometimes opposite
streams of light, to assist and invigorate the effect of the primary
one, without impairing that unity which alone can ensure a breadth to
effect, without which each part, for mastery striving, soon would be
lost in confusion, or crumble into fragments. The best instances of the
advantages gained by the superinduction of artificial light, appear to
be the Pietro Martire and the S. Lorenzo of Tiziano: if selection can be
made from the works of a master, where to count is to choose. In the
first, the stern light of evening far advanced in the background, is
commanded by the celestial emanation bursting from above, wrapping the
summit in splendour, and diffusing itself in rays more or less devious
over the scenery. The subject of S. Lorenzo, a nocturnal scene, admits
light from two sources--the fire beneath the Saint, and a raised torch:
but receives its principal splendour from the aërial reflex of the
vision on high, which sheds its mitigating ray on the martyr.
The nocturnal studies of Tintoretto from models and artificial groups
have been celebrated: these, prepared in wax or clay, he arranged,
raised, suspended, to produce masses, foreshortening, and variety of
effect: it was thence he acquired that decision of chiaroscuro unknown
to more expanded daylight, by which he divided his bodies, and those
wings of obscurity and light by which he separated the groups of his
composition, though the mellowness of his eye nearly always instructed
him to connect the two extremes by something intermediate that partook
of both, as the extremes themselves by reflexes with the back-ground or
the scenery. The general rapidity of his process, by which he baffled
his competitors and often overwhelmed himself, did not indeed always
permit him to attend deliberately to this principle, and often hurried
him into an abuse of practice, which in the lights turned breadth into
mannered or insipid flatness, and in the shadows into total extinction
of parts: of all this, he has in the schools of S. Rocco and Marco given
the most unquestionable instances; the Resurrection of Christ and the
Massacre of the Innocents, comprehend every charm by which chiaroscuro
fascinates its votaries: in the Vision, dewy dawn melts into deep but
pellucid shade, itself rent or reflected by celestial splendour and
angelic hues: whilst in the Infant-massacre at Bethlehem alternate
sheets of stormy light and agitated gloom dash horror on the astonished
eye.
He pursued, however, another method to create, without more assistance
from chiaroscuro than individual light and shade, an effect equivalent
and perhaps superior to what the utmost stretch of its powers could have
produced, in the Crucifixion of the Albergo, or Guest-room of S. Rocco,
the largest and most celebrated of his works. The multitudinous rabble
dispersed over that picture, (for such, rather than composition, one
group excepted, that assemblage of accidental figures deserves to be
called,) he connected by a sovereign tone, ingulphing the whole in one
mass of ominous twilight, an eclipse, or what precedes a storm, or
hurricane, or earthquake; nor suffering the captive eye to rest on any
other object than the faint gleam hovering over the head of the Saviour
in the centre, and in still fainter tones dying on the sainted group
gathered beneath the Cross. Yet this nearly superhuman contrivance,
which raises above admiration a work whose incongruous parts else must
have sunk it beneath mediocrity, Agostino Carracci, in his print, with
chalcographic callus, has totally overlooked; for notwithstanding the
iron sky that overhangs the whole, he has spread, if not sunshine, the
most declared daylight from end to end, nor left the eye uninformed of
one motley article, or one blade of grass.
With Iacopo Robusti may be named, though adopted by another school,
Belisario Corenzio, an Achæan Greek, his pupil, his imitator in the
magic of chiaroscuro, and with still less compunction his rival in
dispatch and rapidity of hand: the immense compositions in which he
overflowed, he encompassed, and carried to irresistible central
splendour by streams of shade, and hemmed his glories in with clouds, or
showery, or pregnant with thunder. The monasteries and churches of
Naples and its dependencies abound in his frescoes.
The more adscititious effects of chiaroscuro produced by the opposition
of dark to lucid, opaque to transparent bodies, and cold to warm tints,
though fully understood by the whole Venetian school, were nearly
carried to perfection by Paolo Cagliari. There is no variety of
harmonious or powerful combination in the empire of colour, as a
substitute of light and shade, which did not emanate from his eye,
variegate his canvass, and invigorate his scenery. Many of his works,
however, and principally the masses scattered over his Suppers, prove
that he was master of that legitimate chiaroscuro which, independent of
colour, animates composition: but the gaiety of his mind, which inspired
him with subjects of magnificence and splendour, of numerous assemblies
canopied by serene skies or roving lofty palaces, made him seek his
effects oftener in opposed tints, than in powerful depths of light and
shade.