united powers of chiaroscuro, were far excelled both in compass and
magnitude of its application by the genius of Antonio Allegri, from the
place of his nativity surnamed Correggio. To them light and shade was
only necessary as the more or less employed, or obedient attendant on
design, composition, and colour. But design, composition, and colour,
were no more than the submissive vehicles, or enchanted ministers of its
charms to Correggio. If, strictly speaking, he was not the inventor of
its element, he fully spanned its measure, and expanded the powers of
its harmony through Heaven and earth; in his eye and hand it became the
organ of sublimity; the process of his cupolas made it no longer a
question whether an art circumscribed by lines and figure could convey
ideas of reality and immensity at once. Entranced by his spell, and
lapped in his elysium, we are not aware of the wide difference between
the conception of the medium, the place, space, and mode in which
certain beings ought, or may be supposed to move, and that of those
beings themselves; and forget, though fully adequate to the first, that
Correggio was unequal to the second; that though he could build Heaven,
he could not people it. If M. Agnolo found in the depth of his mind and
in grandeur of line the means of rendering the immediate effect of will
and power intuitive in the Creation of Adam, by darting life from the
finger of Omnipotence, the coalition of light and darkness opened to the
entranced eye of Correggio the means of embodying the Mosaic "Let there
be light," and created light in that stream of glory which, issuing from
the divine Infant in his Notte, proclaims a God. If Thought be
personified in the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel, he has
made Silence audible in the slumbering twilight that surrounds the
Zingara; and filled the gloom which enbosoms Jupiter and Io, with the
whispers of Love.
And though perhaps we should be nearer truth by ascribing the cause of
Correggio's magic to the happy conformation of his organs, and his calm
serenity of mind, than to Platonic ecstasies, a poet might at least be
allowed to say "that his soul, absorbed by the contemplation of
infinity, soared above the sphere of measurable powers, knowing that
every object whose limits can be distinctly perceived by the mind, must
be within its grasp; and however grand, magnificent, beautiful, or
terrific, fall short of the conception itself, and be less than
sublime."--In this, from whatever cause, consists the real spell of
Correggio--which neither Parmegiano nor Annibale Carracci seem to have
been able to penetrate: the Bolognese certainly not; for if we believe
himself in his letters to Ludovico, expressive of his emotions at the
first sight of Correggio's cupolas, he confines his admiration to the
foreshortening and grace of forms, the successful imitation of flesh,
and rigorous perspective.
Of Correggio's numerous pretending imitators Ludovico Carracci appears
to be the only one who penetrated his principle: the axiom, that the
less the traces appear of the means by which a work has been produced,
the more it resembles the operations of nature, is not an axiom likely
to spring from the infancy of art. The even colour, veiled splendour,
the solemn twilight; that tone of devotion and cloistered meditation,
which Ludovico Carracci spread over his works, could arise only from the
contemplation of some preceding style, analogous to his own feelings and
its comparison with nature; and where could that be met with in a degree
equal to what he found in the infinite unity and variety of Correggio's
effusions? They inspired his frescoes in the cloisters of St. Michele in
Bosco: the foreshortenings of the muscular Labourers at the Hermitage,
and of the ponderous Dæmon that mocks their toil, the warlike splendour
in the homage of Totila, the nocturnal conflagration of Monte Cassino,
the wild graces of deranged beauty, and the insidious charms of the
sister nymphs in the garden-scene, equally proclaim the pupil of
Correggio.
His triumph in oil is the altar-piece of St. John preaching, in a
chapel of the Certosa at Bologna, whose lights seem embrowned by a
golden veil, and the shadowy gleam of Vallombrosa; though he sometimes
indulged in tones austere, pronounced, and hardy: such is the
Flagellation of Christ in the same church, whose tremendous depth of
flesh-tints contrasts the open wide-expanded sky, and less conveys than
dashes its terrors on the astonished sense.
The schools of Bologna, Parma, Milano, with more or less geniality,
imitated their predecessors, but added no new features to the theory of
light and shade. As to its progress on this side of the Alps, it is
better to say nothing than little on the wide range of Rubens, and the
miracles of Rembrandt.
FOOTNOTES:
[90] Nella arte della pittura aggiunse costui alla maniera del colorire
ad olio, una certa oscurità; donde hanno dato i moderni gran forza e
rilievo alle loro figure. Vasari vita di Lion. da Vinci, p. 559. ed.
1550.
[91] In the greater part of the Cartoons, it does not appear that
chiaroscuro had more than an ordinary share of attention.
In the Miraculous Draught plain day-light prevails.
In the Miracle at the Temple-gate a more forcible and more sublime
effect would have been obtained from a cupola-light and pillars darkened
on the foreground.
In the Excecation of Elymas, composition and expression owe little of
their roundness and evidence to chiaroscuro.
Apposition seems to have arranged the Sacrifice at Lystra.
If Dionysius and Damaris, in the cartoon of the Areopagus, had more
forcibly refracted by dark colours or shade, the light against the
speaker, effect and subject would have gained.
Considered individually or in masses, the chiaroscuro in the cartoon of
Ananias appears to be perfect; but the Donation of the Keys owes what
impression it makes on us in a great measure to the skillful
distribution of its light and shade.
[92] In the following absurd description of the well-known picture in
the Palace Pitti: "It consists of three half-figures, one of which
represents Martin Luther in the habit of an Augustine Monk, who plays on
a harpsichord: Calvin stands by him in a chorister's dress, with a
violin in his hand: opposite you see a young lively girl in a bonnet
with a plume of white feathers; by her Giorgione meant to represent the
noted Catharine, Luther's mistress and wife," &c. Fiorillo, vol. ii. p.
63. To expose the ignorant credulity which dictated this passage, it is
sufficient to observe, that Giorgione died 1511, and that Calvin was
born 1508.
[93] In every edition of the Vite subsequent to his own of 1550. The
following passage deserves to be given in his own words: "Giorgione di
Castel franco; il quale sfumò le sue pitture e dette una terribil'
movenzia a certe cose come è una storia nella Scuola di San Marco a
Venezia, dove è un tempo turbido che tuona, et trema il dipinto, et le
figure si muovono & si spiccano da la tavola per una certa oscurità di
ombre bene intese."--Proemio della terza Parle delle Vite, p. 558.
[94] A la Scuola di S. Marco la Tempestà Sedata dal Santo, ove fra le
altre cose sono tre remiganti ignudi, pregiatissimi pel disegno, e per
le attitudini. Lanzi Storia, &c. Tomo II. parte prima. Scuola Veneta.
SEVENTH LECTURE.
ON DESIGN.
SEVENTH LECTURE.
It is perhaps unnecessary to premise, that by the word Design I mean
here not what that word denotes in a general sense, the plan of a whole,
but what it applies in its narrowest and most specific sense, the
_drawing_ of the figures and component parts of the subject. The Arts of
Design have been so denominated from their nearly exclusive power of
representing Form, the base and principal object of plastic in
contradistinction to vocal imitation. In forms alone the idea of
existence can be rendered intuitive and permanent. Languages perish;
words succeed each other, become obsolete and die; even colours, the
dressers and ornaments of bodies, fade; Lines alone can neither be
obliterated nor misconstrued; by application to their standard alone,
discrimination takes place, and description becomes intelligible. Here
is the only ostensible seat of corporeal Beauty; here only it can
strictly exist; for, as the notion of Beauty arises from the pleasure we
feel in the harmonious co-operation of the component forms of some
favourite object towards _one_ end at _once_--it implies their immediate
co-existence in the mass they compose; and as that immediately and at
once can be perceived and conveyed to the mind by the eye alone,--Figure
is the legitimate vehicle of Beauty, and Design the physical element of
the Art.
Of Design, the element is correctness and style; its extinction,
incorrectness and manner. On the first principle of correctness, or the
power of copying and drawing with precision the proportions of any
object singly, or in relation with others,--as it may be considered in
the light of an elementary qualification without which none would
presume to enter himself a student of the Academy,--I should perhaps
forbear to speak, did I not consider it as the basis of _Design_, and
were I not apprehensive that from the prevalent bend of the reigning
taste, you do not lay on it all the stress you ought, and that, if you
neglect the acquisition of the power to _copy_ with purity and
precision any given object, you will never acquire that of _imitating_
what you have chosen for your model.
Our language generally confounds, or rather those who use it, when they
speak of the art, the two words _copy_ and _imitation_, though
essentially different in their operation, as well as their meaning. An
eye geometrically just, with a hand implicitly obedient, is the
requisite of the former, without all choice, without selection,
amendment, or omission; whilst choice, directed by judgment and taste,
constitutes the essence of imitation, and raises the humble copyist to
the noble rank of an artist.
Those who have stopped short at the acquisition of the former faculty
have made a means their end, have debased the designer to the servile
though useful draughtsman of natural history: and those who have aspired
to the second without gaining the first, have substituted air for
substance, and attempted to raise a splendid fabric on a quicksand: the
first have retarded the progress of the art; the second have perverted
its nature: each has erred, to prove that the coalition of both is
indispensable.
It has been said by a high authority within these walls, and indeed in
the whole province of modern art, that as painting is the student's
ultimate aim, the sooner you acquire the power of using the pencil, the
better; but I am persuaded that we should pervert the meaning of the
great artist we speak of, were we to conclude, that by this observation
rather than precept, he meant to discourage the acquisition of
correctness. The zealous votary of M. Agnolo could never mean this; he
was too well acquainted with the process of that great man's studies,
who placed the compass in the eye, not to find in the precision with
which he had traced the elements, the foundation of his style. His
breadth, he knew, was only the vehicle of his comprehension, and not
vacuity; for breadth might easily be obtained, if emptiness can give it.
All he meant to say was, that it mattered not whether you acquired
correctness by the pencil, the crayon, or the pen, and that, as the
sculptor models, the painter may paint his line; for though neither he
who anxiously forms lines without the power of embodying them, nor he
who floats loosely on masses of colour, can be said to design, this
being merely the slave of a brush, that of a point, yet both tools may
serve alternately or indiscriminately the purposes of the real designer.
It is with the same intention of emancipating your practice from an
exclusive and slavish attachment to any particular tool, that you are
reminded by the same authority of the proverbial expression "Io tengo il
disegno alle punta dei pennelli," "My design is at the point of my
brush;"--though I am afraid the expression is dignified with the great
name of Correggio through a lapse of memory, as it appears from Vasari
that it was the petulant effusion of Girolamo da Trevigi, an obscure
painter, in derision of the elaborate cartoon prepared by Pierino del
Vaga for his fresco-painting in the great saloon of the Palace Doria at
Genoa.
The same authority has repeatedly told us, that if we mean to be
correct, we must scrutinize the principles on which the ancients reared
their forms. What were those principles?
I shall not digress in search of them to that primitive epoch when the
cestrum performed the functions of light and shade, and perhaps supplied
linear painting with the faint hues of a stained drawing; nor yet to the
second period, when practice had rendered the artist bolder, and the
pencil assisted the cestrum; when Parrhasius, on the subtile examination
of line and outline, established the canon of divine and heroic form; we
shall find them acknowledged with equal submission in the brightest æra
of Grecian execution, and the honour of exclusively possessing them
contested by the most eminent names of that æra, Apelles and Protogenes.
The name of Apelles, in ancient record, is the synonyme of unrivalled
and unattainable excellence--he is the favourite mortal in whom, if we
believe tradition, Nature exhibited _for once_ a specimen of what her
union with education and circumstances could produce; though the
enumeration of his works by Pliny points out the modification which we
ought to apply to the idea of that superiority. It consisted more in the
union than in the extent of his powers; he knew better what he could do,
what ought to be done, at what point he could arrive, and what lay
beyond his reach, than any other artist. Grace of conception and
refinement of taste were his elements, and went hand in hand with grace
of execution and taste in finish. That he built both, not on the
precarious and volatile blandishments of colour, or the delusive charms
of light and shade, but on the solid foundation of form, acquired by
precision and obedience of hand--not only the confessed inability of
succeeding artists to finish his ultimate Venus, but his well-known
contest of lines with Protogenes (the correctest finisher of his time),
not a legendary tale, but a well attested fact, irrefragably proves. The
panel on which they were drawn made part of the Imperial collection in
the Palatium, existed in the time of Pliny, and was inspected by him;
their evanescent subtilty, the only trait by which he mentions them, was
not, as it appears, the effect of time, but of a delicacy, sweep, and
freedom of hand nearly miraculous. What they were, drawn in different
colours, and with the point of a brush, one upon the other, or rather
within each other, it would be equally unavailing and useless for our
purpose to enquire; but the corollaries we may deduce from the contest
are obviously these: that all consists of elements; that the schools of
Greece concurred in one elemental principle, fidelity of eye, and
obedience of hand; that these form _precision_, precision
_proportion_,[95] proportion _symmetry_, and symmetry _Beauty_: that it
is the "little more or less," imperceptible to vulgar eyes, which
constitutes _Grace_, and establishes the superiority of one artist over
another: that the knowledge of the degrees of things, or _Taste_,
presupposes a comparative knowledge of things themselves: that colour,
grace, and taste are companions, not substitutes of form, expression,
and character, and, when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid
faults.
This precision of hand and eye presupposed, we now come to its
application and object, Imitation, which rests on Nature.
Imitation is properly divided into Iconic and Ideal. Iconic imitation is
confined to an individuum or model, whose parts it delineates according
to their character and essence, already distinguishing the native and
inherent, from the accidental and adventitious parts. By the first it
forms its standard, and either omits or subordinates the second to them,
so as not to impede or to affect the harmony of a whole. This is
properly the province of the Portrait and the strictly Historic
painter, whose chief object and essential requisite is Truth. Portrait
in general, content to be directed by the rules of Physiognomy, which
shows the animal being it represents at rest, seldom calls for aid on
Pathognomy, which exhibits that being agitated, or at least animated and
in motion; but when it does--and, though in a gentler manner than
History, it always ought to do it--it differs in nothing from that, but
in extent and degree, and already proceeds on the firm _permanent basis
of_ NATURE.
By Nature, I understand the general and permanent principles of visible
objects, not disfigured by accident or distempered by disease, not
modified by fashion or local habits. Nature is a collective idea, and
though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never
_in its perfection_ inhabit a _single_ object: our ideas are the
offspring of our senses; without a previous knowledge of many _central_
forms, though we may copy, we can no more imitate, or, in other words,
rise to the principle of action and penetrate the character of our
model, than we can hope to create the form of a being we have not seen,
without retrospect to one we have. Meanness of manner is the infallible
consequence that results from the exclusive recourse to one model: why
else are those who have most closely adhered to, and most devoutly
studied the model, exactly the most incorrect, the most remote from the
real human form? Can there be any thing more disgusting to an eye
accustomed to harmony of frame, than the starveling forms of Albert
Durer, unless it be the swampy excrescences of Rembrandt? the figures of
the former, proportions without symmetry; those of the Dutch artist,
uniform abstracts of lumpy or meagre deformity: and yet the German was a
scientific man, had measured, had in his opinion reduced to principles,
the human frame; whilst the Dutchman, form only excepted, possessed
every power that constitutes genius in art, seldom excelled in invention
and composition, and the creator of that magic combination of colour
with chiaroscuro, never perhaps before, and surely never since attained.
And did not the greatest master of colour but one, Tintoretto, if we
believe his biographer Ridolfi, declare, that "to design from natural
bodies, or what is the same, from the model, was the task of men
experienced in art, inasmuch as those bodies were generally destitute
of grace and a good form." We are informed by the Latin Editor of Albert
Durer's book on the Symmetry of the Human Body, that during his stay at
Venice he was requested by Andrea Mantegna, who had conceived a high
opinion of his execution and certainty of hand, to pay him a visit at
Mantoua, for the express purpose of giving him an idea of that form, of
which he himself had had a glimpse from the contemplation of the
Antique. Andrea was then ill, and expired before Albert could profit by
his instructions:[96] this disappointment, says the author of the
anecdote, Albert never ceased to lament during his life. How fit the
Mantouan was to instruct the German, is not the question here; the fact
proves that Albert felt a want which he found his model could not
supply, and had too just an idea of the importance of the art to be
proud of dexterity of finger or facility of execution, when exerted
only to transcribe or perpetuate defects--though these defects, almost
incredible to tell, soon after invaded Italy, gave a check to the
imitation of M. Agnolo, supplanted his forms, and produced a temporary
revolution of style in the Tuscan School, of which the frescoes of
Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio in S. Giovanni dei Scholchi, and the
latter productions of Jacopo da Puntormo are indisputable proofs. But
without recurring to other proofs, the method adopted by the Academy in
the process of study, appears to be founded on the insufficiency of the
model for attaining correctness. Why has it decreed that the student,
before he be permitted to study life, should devote a certain period to
the study of the Antique? If you fancy the motive lay in the comparative
facility of drawing from a motionless object, you lend your own
misconception to the Academy; for, though in general it be undoubtedly
more easy to draw an immoveable object than one that, however
imperceptibly, is in perpetual motion, and always varies its points of
sight, it cannot be the case when applied to the Antique; for where is
the great name among the moderns that ever could reach the line and the
proportions of the ancients? M. Agnolo filled part of the Capella
Sistina with imitations, and sometimes transcripts of the Torso,--will
any one stand forth and say that he reached it? Compare the Restoration
of Montorsoli, Giacomo della Porta and Bernini, or Baccio Bandinello's
Laocoon, with the rest of the figures, or the original, and deplore the
palpable inferiority. What was it that the Academy intended by making
the Antique the basis of your studies? what? but to lead you to the
sources of Form; to initiate you in the true elements of human essence;
to enable you to judge at your transition from the marble to life what
was substance and possession in the individual, and what excrescence and
want, what homogeneous, what discordant, what deformity, what beauty. It
intended, by making you acquainted with a variety of figures, to qualify
you for classing them according to character and function, what
exclusively belongs to some or one, and what is the common law of all;
to make you sensible that the union of simplicity and variety produces
harmony, and that monotony or confusion commences where either is
neglected, or each intrudes upon the other; in short, to supply by its
stores, as far as time and circumstances permitted, what the _public_
granted to the artists of Greece; what Zeuxis demanded and obtained from
the people of Croton; what Eupompus pointed out to Lysippus; what
Raffaello, with better will than success, searched in his own mind; and
what Andrea Mantegna, however unqualified to find himself, desired to
impress on the mind of Albert Durer--a standard of FORM.[97]