or characteristic. The former is called negative, or composed of little
more than chiaroscuro; the second admits, though not ambitiously, a
greater variety and subdivision of tint. The first is the tone of M.
Agnolo, the second that of Raffaello. The sovereign instrument of both
is undoubtedly the simple, broad, pure, fresh, and limpid vehicle of
Fresco. Fresco, which does not admit of that refined variety of tints
that are the privilege of oil painting, and from the rapidity with which
the earths, its chief materials, are absorbed, requires nearly immediate
termination, is for those very reasons the immediate minister and the
aptest vehicle of a great design. Its element is purity and breadth of
tint. In no other style of painting could the generic forms of M. Agnolo
have been divided, like night and day, into that breadth of light and
shade which stamps their character. The silver purity of Correggio is
the offspring of Fresco; his oil paintings are faint and tainted
emanations of the freshness and "limpidezza" in his Frescoes. Oil, which
rounds and conglutinates, spreads less than the sheety medium of Fresco,
and if stretched into breadth beyond its natural tone, as the spirits
which are used to extenuate its glue escape, returns upon itself, and
oftener forms surfaces of dough, or wood, or crust, than fleshy fibre.
Oil impeded the breadth even of the elemental colours of Tiziano in the
Salute. The minute process inseparable from oil, is the reason why M.
Agnolo declared oil painting to be a woman's method, or of idle men. The
master of the colour we see in the Sistina could have no other: for
though colour be the least considerable of that constellation of powers
that blaze in its compartments, it is not the last or least
accomplishment of the work. The flesh of the academic figures on the
frames of the ceiling is a flesh even now superior to all the flesh of
Annibale Carracci in the Farnese, generally pale though not cold, and
never bricky though sometimes sanguine. The Jeremiah among the Prophets,
glows with the glow of Tiziano, but in a breadth unknown to Giorgione
and to him. The Eve under the Tree has the bland pearly harmony of
Correggio; and some of the bodies in air on the lower part of the Last
Judgement, less impaired by time or accident than the rest, for juice
and warmth may still defy all competition. His colour sometimes even
borders on characteristic variety, as in the composition of the Brazen
Serpent. That a man who mastered his materials with such power, did
reject the certain impediments and the precarious and inferior beauties
of oil, which Sebastian del Piombo proposed for the execution of the
Last Judgement, and who punished him for the proposal with his disdain
for life, cannot be wondered at. If I have mentioned particular beauties
of colour, it was more for others than to express what strikes _me_
most. The parts, in the process of every man's work, are always marked
with more or less felicity; and great as the beauties of those which I
distinguished are, they would not be beauties in my eye, if obtained by
a principle discordant from the rest.
The object of my admiration in M. Agnolo's colour is the tone, that
comprehensive union of tint and hue spread over the whole, which seems
less the effect of successive labour than a sudden and instantaneous
exhalation, one principle of light, local colour, demi-tint and shade.
Even the colours of the draperies, though perhaps too distinct, and
often gayer than the gravity of their wearers or the subject allowed,
are absorbed by the general tone, and appear so only on repeated
inspection or separation from the rest. Raffaello did not come to his
great work with the finished system, the absolute power over the
materials, and the conscious authority of M. Agnolo. Though the august
plan which his mind had conceived, admitted of lyric and allegoric
ornament, it was, upon the whole, a drama and characteristic: he could
not therefore apply to its mass the generic colour of the Sistina. Hence
we see him struggling at the onset between the elements of that tone
which the delineation of subdivided character and passions demanded, and
the long imbibed habits and shackles of his master. But one great
picture decided the struggle. This is evident from the difference of the
upper and lower part of the Dispute on the Sacrament. The upper is the
summit of Pietro Perugino's style, dignified and enlarged; the lower is
his own. Every feature, limb, motion, the draperies, the lights and
shades of the lower part, are toned and varied by character. The florid
bloom of youth tinged with the glow of eagerness and impatience to be
admitted; the sterner and more vigorous tint of long initiated and
authoritative manhood; the inflamed suffusion of disputative zeal; the
sickly hue of cloistered meditation; the brown and sun-tinged hermit,
and the pale decrepit elder, contrast each other; but contrasted as they
are, their whole action and colour remain subordinate to the general hue
diffused by the serene solemnity of the surrounding medium, which is
itself tinctured by the effulgence from above. A sufficient balance of
light and shade maintains the whole, though more attention be paid to
individual discrimination than masses. In the economy of the detail we
find the lights no longer so white, the local colour no longer so crude,
the passages to the demi-tints not so much spotted with red, nor the
demi-tints themselves of so green a cast as in the four Symbolic
Pictures on golden grounds of the ceiling.
It appears to me upon the whole, that for a general characteristic tone,
Raffaello has never exceeded the purity of this picture. If in the
School of Athens he has excelled it in individual tints, in tints that
rival less than challenge the glow and juice of Titian, they are
scattered more in fragments than in masses, and at the expense or with
neglect of general unison, if we except the central and connecting
figure of Epictetus. The predominance of tender flesh, and white or
tinted drapery on the foreground, whilst the more distant groups are
embrowned by masculine tints and draperies of deeper hue, prove, that if
Raffaello could command individual colour, he had not penetrated its
general principle.
The Parnassus in the same room has a ruling tone, but not the tone of a
poetic fancy. Aërial freshness was his aim, and he is only frigid. Its
principal actors are ideals of divine nature, and ought to move in a
celestial medium, and Raffaello had no more an adequate colour than
adequate forms for either. But whatever is characteristic, from the
sublimity of Homer to the submissive affable courtesy of Horace and the
directing finger of Pindar, is inimitable and in tune.
The ultimate powers of Raffaello, and, as far as I can judge, of Fresco,
appear to me collected in the astonishing picture of the Heliodorus.
This is not the place to dwell on the loftiness of conception, the
mighty style of design, the refined and appropriate choice of character,
the terror, fears, hopes, palpitation of expression, and the far more
than Corregiesque graces of female forms; the Colour only, considered as
a whole or in subordination, is our object. Though by the choice of the
composition the back-ground, which is the sanctuary of the temple,
embrowned with gold, diffuses a warmer gleam than the scenery of the
foreground, its open area, yet by the dexterous management of opposing
to its glazed cast a mass of vigorous and cruder flesh tints, a fiercer
ebullition of impassioned hues,--the flash of steel and iron armour, and
draperies of indigo, deep black and glowing crimson, the foreground
maintains its place, and all is harmony.
Manifold as the subdivisions of character are, angelic, devout,
authoritative, violent, brutal, vigorous, helpless, delicate; and
various as the tints of the passions that sway them appear, elevated,
warmed, inflamed, depressed, appalled, aghast, they are all united by
the general tone that diffuses itself from the interior repose of the
sanctuary, smoothens the whirlwind that fluctuates on the foreground,
and gives an air of temperance to the whole.
FOOTNOTE:
[98] S. Bartolomeo del Spagnuoletto. S. Agatha Martirizzata nelle poppe
di Seb. del Piombo. Il Porco Sventrato di Ostade. Il Macello dei
Carracci. La Caccia Pidocchi di Murillo.
NINTH LECTURE.
COLOUR.--OIL PAINTING.
NINTH LECTURE.
Having finished the preceding lecture with observations on Fresco, a
method of painting almost as much out of use as public encouragement,
and perhaps better fitted for the serene Italian than the moist air of
more northern climates, I now proceed to Oil Painting. The general
medium of paint is Oil; and in that, according to the division of our
illustrious commentator on Du Fresnoy, "all the modes of harmony, or of
producing that effect of colours which is required in a picture, may be
reduced to three, two of which belong to the Grand style, and the other
to the Ornamental. The first may be called the Roman manner, where the
colours are of a full and strong body, such as are found in the
Transfiguration. The next is that harmony which is produced by what the
ancients called the _corruption_[99] of the colours, by mixing and
breaking them till there is a general union in the whole, without any
thing that shall bring to your remembrance the painter's palette or the
original colours: this may be called the Bolognian style, and it is this
hue and effect of colours which Ludovico Carracci seems to have
endeavoured to produce, though he did not carry it to that perfection
which we have seen since his time in the small works of the Dutch
school, particularly Jan Steen, where art is completely concealed, and
the painter, like a great orator, never draws the attention from the
subject on himself. The last manner belongs properly to the ornamental
style, which we call the Venetian, being first practised at Venice, but
is perhaps better learned from Rubens: here the brightest colours
possible are admitted, with the two extremes of warm and cold, and these
reconciled by being dispersed over the picture, till the whole appears
like a bunch of flowers."
As I perfectly coincide with this division, and the practical
corollaries deduced from it, what I have to say relatively to each of
these classes or styles will rather be a kind of commentary on it than a
text containing a doctrine of my own.
If the Roman style of Historic colour be the style of Raffaello in the
Transfiguration, it died with him; it is certainly not that Roman style
which distinguishes that school from Giulio Romano to Carlo Maratti.
Though the Transfiguration be more remarkable for the characteristic
division of its parts than for its masses, yet it has more than the
breadth, a closer alliance and larger proportion of correspondent
colours, and a much purer theory of shade than we meet with in the
subsequent pictures of the same school; the picture at Genoa of the
Lapidation of St. Stephen, by Giulio Romano, only excepted, which was
probably soon after framed on the principles of the Transfiguration.
The crudeness of colour and asperity of tone observable in the Roman
School, though founded on simplicity, is perhaps a greater proof of
their want of eye and taste than of a pure historic principle. Harmony
of colour consists in the due balance of all, equally remote from
monotony and from spots. Though each part of Roman pictures be painted
with sufficient breadth of manner, their discordance is such that they
do not coalesce into one whole, but appear unconnected fragments in
apposition. Their theory of shade is so defective, that the parts
deprived of light of the same body, or the same piece of drapery, are
not effaced, but coloured. If the positive reds and blues of the Roman
school invigorate the eye, they likewise command it, and counteract the
grandeur of History in a degree not much inferior to the bad effect
produced by the imitation of stuffs discriminated according to their
texture; their bright asperity, and bleak purity, equally pervert the
negative and subordinate character of drapery, and attract a larger
share of attention from the beholder than they deserve. A Madonna in the
hands of Carlo Maratti, and sometimes even of Raffaello, at least in his
earlier productions, is the least visible part of herself. The most
celebrated Madonna of Andrea del Sarto, though in Fresco, is certainly
more indebted to her drapery than her face, perhaps still more to the
sack on which her husband rests, and from which the picture got its
name.
From this censure we ought to except M. Angelo Caravaggi, and Andrea
Sacchi, whose works, though else so dissimilar in principle and
execution, coincide in reducing colour frequently to little more than
chiaroscuro; the one for melancholy and forcible, the other for
visionary or devotional effects.
The Pilgrims adoring the Madonna with the Infant in St. Agostino, by the
former, seem not painted but tinged in the last golden ray of departing
eve; whilst the Vision of St Romualdo, by the latter, surrounds us with
gray twilight and gradual evanescence.
A general style of colours thus amalgamated, appears to me a principle
much superior to that of _corruption_ of them, which Plutarch mentions
as the invention of Apollodorus the Athenian, when painting had scarcely
emerged from the linear process, and it required some courage to wield a
brush. If the ancients ever possessed the Bolognese corruption of
colours, it must have been in periods of refinement. The =Phthora= of
Apollodorus was probably the invention of demi-tints, the effect of
which is produced by "corrupting" or lowering the elemental purity of
the two of which it is composed. 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 Lodovico Carracci spread over
his works, could arise only from the contemplation of various preceding
styles, or their comparison with nature and the object of his choice.
The ideal of his style is a harmony equally remote from affected
brilliancy and vulgar resemblance of tints. Its element is gravity, and
whenever this inspires not its imitation, it will be less serious than
sullen, flat not even, heavy without vigour, and the despatching tool of
mediocrity.
If this be that dignified colour of Lombardy, recommended by Agostino
Carracci, his own picture of the Communion of St. Jerome, and the Dead
Christ among the Maries by Annibale, (which we have seen here,)
excepted, its principle was not adopted by that third ruler of the
Carracci school, nor any of its pupils.
Annibale, from want of feelings, changed the mild evening ray of his
Cousin to the sullen light of a cloudy day, and in the exultation of
mechanic power swims on his work like oil: Guido was too gay and
affected; Guercino too cutting and vulgar; Albano too airy and
insubstantial for it. Under the hand and guided by the sensibility of
Lodovico, it communicated itself even to the open silvery tone of
Fresco.
In the cloisters of St. Michele in Bosco, it equally moderates the
deep-toned tints of the muscular labourers of the hermitage and of the
ponderous demon who mocks their toil, the warlike splendour in the
homage of Totila, the flash of the nocturnal conflagration, and the
three insidious Nymphs in the garden scene, who even now, though nearly
in a state of evanescence, seem moulded by the hand and tinged by the
breath of Love; all are sainted by this solemn tone.
Its triumph in Oil is the altar-piece of St. John preaching, in a
chapel of the Certosa, whose lights seem embrowned by a golden veil, and
the shadowy gleam of Valombrosa; but Lodovico sometimes indulged in
tones austere, pronounced, and hardy. Such is the Flagellation of Christ
in the same church, of which the tremendous depth of flesh-tints
contrasts the open, wide-expanded sky, and less conveys, than dashes its
terrors on the astonished sense.
The third, or Ornamental style, could scarcely arise in any other state
of Italy than Venice. 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 sacrificed, _in part_, propriety to its golden
solicitation.
I say _in part_, for Tiziano perhaps never, Paolo and Tintoretto, though
by much too often, yet not always, spread the enchanting nosegay, which
is the characteristic of this style, with indiscriminate hand. The style
of Tiziano may be divided into three periods: when he copied, when he
imitated, when he strove to generalize, to elevate, or invigorate the
tones of Nature. The first is anxious and precise, the second beautiful
and voluptuous, the third sublime. In the second the parts lead to the
whole, in this the whole to the parts; it is that master-style which in
discriminated tones imparts to ornament a monumental grandeur. It gave
that celestial colour which consideration like an angel spread over the
Salutation in St. Rocco; the colour that wafts its wide expanse and
elemental purity over the primitive scenes of his Abel, Abraham, and
David, in the Salute; the colour that tinged with artless solemn majesty
the Apotheosis of the Virgin in the church de' Frati, embodied
adoration in its portraits, and changed the robes of pomp and warlike
glitter to servants of simplicity. Such is the tone which diffuses its
terrors and its glories in Pietro Martyre over the martyred hermits of
the mountain forest, and taught the painter's eye to "glance from heaven
to earth, from earth to heaven." If this be ornament, what but the
Vatican can the schools of Design oppose to its grandeur and propriety!
If all ornament be allegoric, if it imply something allusive to the
place, the person, or the design for which it is contrived, from that of
a public building or a temple, to that of a library or the decorations
of a toilette, how have the schools of Design, after the demise of M.
Agnolo and Raffaello, observed its principle? Annibale Carracci, with
the Capella Sistina and the Vatican before his eye, has filled the
mansion of Episcopal dignity with a chaotic series of trite fable and
bacchanalian revelry, without allegory, void of allusion, merely to
gratify the puerile ostentation of dauntless execution and academic
skill. And if we advert to a greater name, that of Pellegrino Tibaldi,
is it easy to discover what relation exists between the adventures of
Ulysses and the purposes and pursuits of the academical Institute of
Bologna? and is it sufficient to exculpate him from impropriety of
choice in his plan, if we say that the ceiling of Pellegrino Tibaldi is
a doctrine of style, and that design and style are the principal pursuit
of the students?
But perhaps it is not to Tiziano, but to Tintoretto and Paolo Cagliari,
that the debaucheries of Colour and blind submission to fascinating
tints, the rage of scattering flowers to no purpose, are ascribed. Let
us select from Tintoretto's most extensive work the Scola of St. Rocco,
the most extensive composition, and his acknowledged masterpiece, the
Crucifixion, and compare its tone with that of Rubens and of Rembrandt
for the same subject. What impression feels he, who for the first time
casts a glance on the immense scenery of that work? a whole whose
numberless parts are connected by a lowering, mournful, minacious tone.
A general fearful silence hushes all around the central figure of the
Saviour suspended on the cross, his fainting mother, and a group of male
and female mourners at his foot:--a group of colours that less imitate
than rival Nature, and tinged by grief itself; a scale of tones for
which even Tiziano offers to me no parallel: yet all equally overcast by
the lurid tone that stains the whole, and like a meteor hangs in the
sickly air. Whatever inequality or derelictions of feeling, whatever
improprieties of common place, of local and antique costume, the
master's rapidity admitted to fill his space, and they are great, all
vanish in the power which compresses them into a single point, and we do
not detect them till we recover from our terror.
The picture of Rubens, which we oppose to Tintoretto, was painted for
the church of St. Walburgha at Antwerp, after his return from Italy, and
has been minutely described, and as exquisitely criticised by Reynolds:
"Christ," he says, "is nailed to the cross, with a number of figures
exerting themselves to raise it. The invention of throwing the cross
obliquely from one corner of the picture to the other, is finely
conceived; something in the manner of Tintoretto:" so far Reynolds. In
Tintoretto it is the cross of one of the criminals that they attempt to
raise, who casts his eye on Christ already raised. The body of Christ is
the grandest, in my opinion, that Rubens ever painted; it seems to be
imitated from the Torso of Apollonius, and that of the Laocoon. How far
it be characteristic of Christ, or correspondent with the situation, I
shall not here enquire; my object is the ruling tone of the whole, and
of this the criticism quoted says not a word, though much of local
colour and gray and ochry balance. Would so great a master of tone as
Reynolds have forgot this master-key, if he had found it in the picture?
The fact is, the picture has no other than the painter's usual tone:
Rubens came to his work with gay technic exultation, and, by the magic
of his palette, changed the terrors of Golgotha to an enchanted garden
and clusters of flowers. Rembrandt, though on a smaller scale of size
and composition, concentrated the tremendous moment in one flash of
pallid light. It breaks on the body of Christ, shivers down his limbs,
and vanishes on the armour of a crucifix; the rest is gloom.
Of Paolo Veronese, who was by far the most intemperate and florid of
ornamental masters, the political allegories on the platfonds and
compartments of the Ducal Palace, and the religious legends painted in
the refectories of the convents, or as altar-pieces in the churches of
Venice, differ materially in tone and style. Those were painted for the
Senate, these for the people; and the superior orders were supposed to
be better judges of real grandeur and propriety, than monastic ignorance
and the bigoted and vulgar majority of the crowds that thronged the
churches.