from the great Master whose classification I comment, I should probably
hesitate on the advice of adopting the palette of Rubens for the
regulation of the tones that compose the Venetian style, of which his
flowery tint formed but a part. What has been said of M. Agnolo in FORM,
may be said of Rubens in COLOUR: they had but one. As the one came to
Nature, and moulded her to his generic form, the other came to Nature
and tinged her with his colour--the colour of gay magnificence. He
levelled his subject to his style, but seldom if ever his style with his
subject; whatever be the subject of Rubens, legend, allegoric, stem,
mournful, martyrdom, fable, epic, dramatic, lyric, grave or gay--the
hues that embody, the air that tinges them, is indiscriminate expanse of
gay magnificence. If the economy of his colours be that of an immense
nosegay, he has not always connected the ingredients with a prismatic
eye; the balance of the iris is not arbitrary, the balance of his colour
often is. It was not to be expected that correctness of form should be
the object of Rubens, though he was master of drawing, and even
ambitious in the display of anatomic knowledge; but there is no mode of
incorrectness, unless what directly militated against his style, such as
meagreness, of which his works do not set an example. His male forms,
generally the brawny pulp of slaughtermen; his females, hillocks of
roses in overwhelmed muscles, grotesque attitudes, and distorted joints,
are swept along in a gulph of colours, as herbage, trees and shrubs are
whirled, tossed, and absorbed by inundation.
But whenever a subject comes genially within the vortex of his manner,
such as that of the Gallery of Luxembourg, it then is not only
characteristically excellent, but includes nearly a superhuman union of
powers. In whatever light we consider that astonishing work, whether as
a series of the most sublime conceptions, regulated by an uniform
comprehensive plan, or as a system of colours and tones, exalting the
subject, and seconded by magic execution, whatever may be its Venetian
or Flemish flaws of mythology and Christianity, ideal and contemporary
costume promiscuously displayed, it leaves all plans of Venetian
allegory far behind, and rivals all their execution; if it be not equal
in simplicity, or emulate in characteristic dignity, the plans of M.
Agnolo and Raffaello, it excels them in the display of that magnificence
which no modern eye can separate from the idea of Majesty.
FOOTNOTE:
[99] =Phthora.=
TENTH LECTURE.
THE METHOD OF FIXING A STANDARD AND DEFINING
THE PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN FRAME,
WITH DIRECTIONS TO
THE STUDENT IN COPYING THE LIFE.
TENTH LECTURE.
The methods of fixing a standard and defining the proportions of the
human frame, are either _analytic_ or _synthetic_, from the whole to the
parts, or from the parts to the whole, and have been promiscuously
adopted. The human is the measure of perfection in Vitruvius; he applies
its rules to architecture, and indeed to every object of taste.
The length of human proportion in Vitruvius, measured by a
perpendicular, or a horizontal, from the middle finger points of both
arms extended, is ten heads, the head measured from the chin to the
hair-roots of the front; and eight if the head be measured from the
extremity of the chin to the vertex of the crown. Three is the favourite
number by which the theorists of proportion have divided the human
structure, as containing a beginning, a middle, and an end; and Pliny
observes that we attain the half of our growth in the third year. The
body, as well as all its members, consists of three main parts, which
correspond with each other, in the same proportion as the parts of the
subordinate members among themselves: the head and body are in the same
unison of measure with the thighs and legs, as the thighs with the legs
and feet, or the upper part of the arm to the elbow and the hand. Thus
the face is divided into three parts, or three times the length of the
nose: never into four, as some have imagined; for the upper part of the
head, from the hair-roots on the front to the top, measured
perpendicularly, has only three-fourths of the nose length, or is in
proportion to the nose as nine to twelve.
The rules of proportion originated, probably, with sculpture, but in the
progress of art received their final determination from the painter:
this is the praise of Parrhasius, and Praxiteles applied to Nicias for
the ultimate decision and refinement of his forms. The foot was the main
medium of ancient measurement; and six feet, according to Vitruvius,
became the measured length of proportion for their statues. Measure is
the method of ascertaining an unknown quantity from a known one; and the
proportion of the foot is subject to less variation than the head or
face. Lomazzo, when he makes the foot of Hercules the seventh part of
his length, and fixes ten faces as the standard of ancient proportion
for a Venus, nine for a Juno, and eight for Neptune, talked from fancy,
and relied on the credulity of his reader.
This relation of the foot to the whole fabric, as established by Nature,
the ancients regulated according to ideal or divine, and human or
characteristic proportions. Of the Apollo, whose height is somewhat more
than seven heads, the standing foot is three inches of a Roman palm
longer than the head. The Medicean Venus, however 'suelt,' however small
her head, has in length no more than seven heads and a half; and yet her
foot measures a palm and a half, and the whole height of the figure six
palms and a half.
Of such observations on proportion it would be easier to continue a long
series than to make them intelligible or useful without actual
demonstration or figures. From Vitruvius with his commentators, and
Lionardo da Vinci, to Albert Durer, Lomazzo, and Jerome Cardan, from the
corrected measurements of Du Fresnoy and De Piles, to Watelet,
Winkelman, and Lavater, it would be easy to show that the mass of
variance, peculiarity, and contradiction, greatly overbalances the
coincidence of experiment and measure. "The descriptions of the
proportions of the human frame," says Mengs, "are infinite, but seldom
agree among themselves. Some are too obscure to give the artist a clear
idea; some have too much limited the combinations which might produce,
or are capable of, proportions homogeneously uniform: others, on the
contrary, have, like Albert Durer, displayed a great quantity and
variety of proportions, to little purpose for any one who should not
choose to imitate his taste. The ordinary method is that of dividing the
figure into a fixed number of heads or faces; but this division is of
more use to the sculptor than the painter, who never can see the just
size of the head, because perspective hides at least a third of the
upper fourth; nor does the breadth of the limbs, in painting, admit of
sculpture measure, as they would appear meagre and scanty on a flat
surface, in comparison of the mass they circumscribe in perspective;
because the habit of looking at objects with both eyes swells their mass
beyond its just diameter, in reality as well as in sculpture. This
difference of limbs the ancients observed in their best basso-relievoes;
they exceed in volume the limbs of their statues. Such are the forms of
the sacrificing group in the gardens of the Medicean Villa at Rome,
represented in the Admiranda of Santes Bartoli, and imitated by
Raffaello in the Cartoon of the Sacrifice at Lystra."
The painter is infinitely more in want of variety than the sculptor, and
consequently cannot submit to the same restriction of rule. Raffaello,
who in a certain sense did no more than multiply the antique style of
the second order, uniting it with a certain air of truth not within the
reach of sculpture, whether from rule or taste, made use of every kind
of proportion without a seeming predilection for any. There are figures
of his which have little more than six heads and a half: such as the
St. Peter in the Cartoon of the Temple Gate; a proportion insufferable
in any other painter but Raffaello.
It is reasonable to suppose, that in endeavouring to form a standard or
a canon of proportion for the human figure, the Greeks began with the
head, its form, its position, the manner in which it is attached to the
trunk; they found that man alone carries his head erect, and that thence
he derives a face and a countenance. Of all the brute creation, what is
called the head is only an extremity of the horizontal body, whose under
parts are shoved forward to seek food or seize prey; front and upper
part are driven back, are shortened, and, in more than one genus, hardly
perceivable. The more the brute is raised before and erects the neck,
the more it gains variety of aspect; still it hangs forward, an appendix
to the trunk: it cannot be properly said to have a head; the etymology
of the word implies an erect position. A head, strictly speaking, is the
prerogative of man, formed beneath a skull which rounds the forehead and
determines the face. The more the front recedes and inclines to the
horizontal, so much the nearer a head approaches the form of a brute;
the more it inclines to the perpendicular, the more it gains of man.
This observation has been demonstrated in the least fallible manner by
Camper, the anatomist, who, by a contrivance equally ingenious and
unequivocal, appears to have ascertained, not only the difference of the
_faceal_ line in animals, but that which discriminates nations. Placing
the skull or head to be measured into a kind of sash or frame, pierced
at equidistant intervals to admit the plummet and horizontal and
perpendicular threads, he draws a straight line from the aperture of the
ear to the under part of the nose, and another from the utmost
projection of the frontal bone to the most prominent part of the upper
jaw. The whole is divided into ninety or even one hundred degrees, from
the actual maximum and minimum of Nature to those of Art. Birds describe
the smallest angles, which widen in proportion as the animal approaches
the human form: the heads of apes reach from forty-two to fifty degrees,
which last approaches man. The Negro and Kalmuck reach seventy, the
European eighty; the ancient Roman artists ascended to ninety-five, the
Greeks raised the ideal _from ninety_ to one hundred degrees. What goes
beyond this line becomes portentous; the head appears misshapen, and
assumes the appearance of a hydrocephalus. It is the limit set by Art,
and established on this physical principle: that the more the form of
the head reclines to the horizontal or overshoots the given
perpendicular, the more the maxillæ are protruded or the more the front,
the less it retains of the true human form, and degenerates into brute
or monster.
From a head so determined, arose an harmonious system of features. Under
a front as full as open, the frontal muscles assumed the seat of
meaning; the cavity of the eyes became deeper, and took a regular and
equal distance from the centre of the nose, a feature of which few of
the moderns ever had a distinct idea; the mouth and lips were shaped for
organs of command and persuasion, rather than appetite; and the apodosis
of the whole, resolution and support, was given in the chin.
From a head so regulated, and placed on the most beautiful of all
columns, the neck, the thinking artist could not fail to conclude to the
rest of the body. As the under parts of the head were subordinate to
the front, so was the lower part of the torso to the breast. The organs
of mere nutrition, or appetite, and secretion, receded and were
subjected to the nobler seats of action and vigour. Such harmony of
system was not only the result of numeric proportion, of length and
breadth of parts; it was the conception of one indivisibly connected
whole, variously uniform:--god, goddess, hero, heroine, male, female,
infancy, youth, virility and age, majesty, energy, agility, beauty,
character, and passions, directed the method of treatment, and formed
STYLE.
The sculptured monuments left by the ancients, that have escaped the
wreck of time and compose the magnificent collections of the Academy and
the Museum, amply prove that these assertions are not the visionary
brood of fancy and sanguine wishes, whilst they offer to the student
advantages which, perhaps, no ancient, certainly no modern schools ever
could or can offer to theirs, not even that of formerly the real and
still the nominal metropolis of Art--Rome.
These monuments may be aptly divided into three classes:
1st. Imitations, not seldom transcripts of _Essential Nature_.
2nd. Homogeneous delineations of _Character_; and
3rd. The highest and last--_Ideal_ Figures.
The first shows to advantage what exists or existed; the second collects
in one individual, what is scattered in his class; the third
subordinates existence and character to beauty and sublimity.
The astonishing remains of gods, demigods, and heroes treasured in the
Museum, from the Parthenon and the Temple of Phigalia, constitute the
first epoch. They establish the elements of proportion, they show what
is essential in the composition and construction of the human frame. The
artist's principle remained, however, negative; he understood the best
he saw, but did not attempt to add, or conclude from what was, to what
might be. These works are commonly considered as the produce of the
school of Phidias, and the substantiation of his principles: if they
are, and there can be little doubt but they are, it must be owned, that
the eulogies lately lavished on them, as presenting, even on their
mutilated and battered surfaces, more of the real texture of the human
frame, a better discrimination of bone, muscle, and tendon, than most of
the works ascribed to more advanced periods, little agree with the
verdict of the ancients, as pronounced by Pliny, on the real character
of Phidias, the architect of gods, fitter to frame divinities than men,
and leave him little more share in the formation of our figures than the
conception. In beholding them, we say, such is man, real unsophisticated
man, man warm from the hand of Nature, but not yet distinguished by her
endless variety and difference of character. The Dioscuri of the
Quirinal, the Lapithæ in conflict with the Centaurs from the Parthenon,
and the heroes from the fabric of Ictinus, are brothers, and only differ
in size and finish; whilst the Panathenaic processions offer the
unvaried transcript of Athenian youth.
Delineation of character forms the second class of the figures in our
possession, and the distinguishing feature of its artists. They found
that, as _all_ were connected by the genus and a central principle of
form, so they were divided into classes, and from each other separated
by an individual stamp, by _character_: to unite this with the
simplicity of the _generic_ principle was their aim; the symmetry
prescribed by general proportion was modified and adapted, not
sacrificed, to the demands of the peculiar quality which distinguished
the attribute they undertook to personify. Thus the Hercules of Glycon,
though the symbol of absolute, irresistible, and uniform strength,
appears to be swift as a stag and elastic like a ball; and thus Agasias,
the author of what the barbarity of custom still continues to misname
the "Fighting Gladiator," though its style, evidently Iconic, be more
connected with individual than generic nature, has spread over its whole
the rapidity of lightning, and substantiated in its _motion_ all Homer
says of Hector rushing through the shattered portals of the Grecian
wall--that, at that instant, nothing could have stopped him but a God.
The wounded Cornicularius, known by the name of the Dying Gladiator, the
Savage whetting his knife to excoriate Marsyas, the enraged Shepherd Boy
ludicrously transformed to a young Patroclus, are too undisguised
portraits to deserve being ranked with this higher class of
characteristic delineation. We with more exultation subjoin to it the
Pathetic Groups which, to the historic artist, at once disclose the
whole _extent_ and _limits_ of dramatic composition--the agonies of
Niobe and her Progeny; the pangs of the Laocoon; Menelaus raising
Patroclus slain by Hector; the Warrior who deserves to be called Hæmon,
with Antigone, self-slain, hanging on his arm--the softer and more
familiar expression of Æthra and Theseus, maternal enquiry and filial
simplicity; Orestes and Pylades pouring libations to Agamemnon's shade;
Venus expostulating with Amor, Amor embracing Psyche: works of different
periods and different styles, but true to the same unerring
principles,--principles not abandoned in the lascivious dream of the
Hermaphrodite, the gross sonorous repose of the Faun, and the tottering
inebriety of Hercules.
The artists of the third epoch concluded from existence to possibility.
The simple purity of the first, and the energetic harmonious variety of
the second period, were its bases; it amalgamated their artless angular
line and rigid precision with the suavity of undulating contours,
elegance of attitude, the soft inflexions of flesh: and created a
standard of ideal beauty which regulated the whole, from the most
prominent, conspicuous, and interesting, to the most remote and minute
parts. The Apollo, the Venus, the Torso, arose to prove that in the same
degree as in an image of art the idea of _simplicity_, or of _one_,
predominates, it will partake of _grandeur_; and that in the degree as
the idea of _variety_ prevails, it will partake of _beauty_: variety
leads to simplicity in images of beauty, simplicity to variety in images
of grandeur, and the union of both produces the sublime.
Such are the splendid, and I repeat it, unparalleled advantages that
surround you; but lest, by their specious display, I should be suspected
of more enthusiasm than becomes the sober office of a teacher, and you
be led to delusive expectations and false conclusions, remember that,
though even the best directed labour cannot supply what Nature has
refused, still it remains an experiment uniformly sanctioned by time,
that without unwearied toil, obstinate perseverance, and submissive
resignation, neither the theory nor the practice of the art can be
fully acquired, and that without them genius is a bubble and talent a
trifle.
And now permit me to finish this fragment of observations on Design with
a few remarks on our mutual situation, as teachers and as pupils of this
Institution: if the advancement of art be the cause and the ultimate aim
of its foundation.
When in recommending the antique as the student's guide in copying the
life, I comparatively might have seemed to depreciate the servile
adherence to the model, I was perfectly aware that the use of life alone
can supply the artist with the real expression, and consequently the
real appearances of bones and muscles in varied action. It will not be
suspected, I trust, that I meant to recommend the frigid introduction of
that marble style, that pedantic stiffness, which, under the abused name
of correctness, frequently disfigures the labours of those who, at too
late a period for successful attempts at changing their manner, abjure
or lose the courage to use what they had learnt before, and content
themselves with being the tame transcribers of the dead letter, instead
of the spirit of the ancients, and importers of nothing but forms and
attitudes of stone.
It is to life we must recur,--to warm, fleshy, genial life,--for
animated forms. To Nature and life Zeuxis applied, to embody the forms
of Polycletus and Alcamenes: and what was the prerogative of Lysippus,
but to give the air, the "morbidezza," the soft transitions, the
illusions of palpitating life, to bronze and marble? The pedantry of
geometrically _straight_ lines is not only no idealism, it is a solecism
in Nature. _Organization_, your object, is inseparable from _life_;
_motion_ from organization: where organization and life are, there is a
seat of life, a _punctum saliens_, acting through veins and branching
arteries, consequently with _pulsation_, and by that, undulating and
rounding the passages of parts to parts. Of the milliards of commas, or
points, that Nature mediately or immediately produces, no two are alike:
how, then, could she produce straight lines, which are all similar, and
by their nature cut, divide, interrupt, destroy?
The province delegated by the Academy to its teachers must be,--where
hope promises success and sparks of genius appear, to foster, to
encourage; but where necessity commands, rather to deter than to delude,
and thus to check the progress of that compendiary method, which,
according to your late President, has ruined the Arts of every country,
by reducing execution to a recipè, substituting manner for style,
ornament for substance, and giving admission to mediocrity.
If the students of this Academy must be supposed to have overcome the
rudiments, and to be arrived at that point from which it may be
discovered whether Nature intended them for mere craftsmen or real
artists, near that point, where, in the phrase of Reynolds, "genius
begins and rules end," it behoves us not to mistake the mere children of
necessity, or the pledges of vanity, for the real nurselings of public
hope, or the future supporters of the beneficent establishment that
rears them. Instruction, it is true, may put them in possession of every
attainable part of the Art in a decent degree; they may learn to draw
with tolerable correctness, to colour with tolerable effect, to put
their figures together tolerably well, and to furnish their faces with a
tolerable expression--it may not be easy for any one to pick any thing
intolerably bad out of their works; but when they have done all
this--and almost all may do all this, for all this may be taught--they
will find themselves exactly at the point where all that gives value to
Art begins--Genius, which cannot be taught--at the threshold of the Art,
in a state of mediocrity. "Gods, men, and fame," says Horace, "reject
mediocrity in poets." Why? Neither Poetry nor Painting spring from the
necessities of society, or furnish necessaries to life; offsprings of
fancy, leisure, and lofty contemplation, organs of religion and
government, ornaments of society, and too often mere charms of the
senses and instruments of luxury, they derive their excellence from
novelty, degree, and polish. What none indispensably want, all may wish
for, but few only are able to procure, acquires its value from some
exclusive quality, founded on intrinsic or some conventional merit, and
that, or an equal substitute, mediocrity cannot reach: hence, by
suffering it to invade the province of genius and talent, we rob the
plough, the shop, the loom, the school, perhaps the desk and pulpit, of
a thousand useful hands. A good mechanic, a trusty labourer, an honest
tradesman, are beings more important, of greater use to society, and
better supporters of the state, than an artist or a poet of mediocrity.
When I therefore say that it is the duty of the Academy to deter rather
than to delude, I am not afraid of having advanced a paradox hostile to
the progress of real Art. The capacities that time will disclose, genius
and talents, cannot be deterred by the exposition of difficulties, and
it is the interest of society that all else should.
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY SAMUEL BENTLEY,
Dorset Street, Fleet Street.
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
Obvious typos have been silently corrected.
All oe-ligatures have been simplified to "oe".
Idiosyncratic spellings have been left unchanged. This includes
inconsistent spellings of proper names and capitalisation.
There are numerous Greek quotations, which have been converted from
Greek to Romanised script. They are marked by equals signs, =like this=.
A few amendments are noted below.
Italicised words and phrases are marked _like this_.
The following corrections are worth special note:
p. 19: "Alcibides" changed to "Alcibiades".
p. 33 footnote 9: =hê kath'= (rough breathing) changed to =ê kath'=
(smooth breathing), and =êkai= changed to =ê kai=.
p. 43 footnote 15: =Abrodiaitos= (smooth breathing) changed to
=Habrodiaitos= (rough breathing).
p. 143: "præliari" changed to "proeliari".
p. 145 footnote 71: =a tar= changed to =atar=.
p. 150 footnote 72: line reference corrected from 328 to 238.
p. 159: "Goliah" changed to "Goliath".
p. 161 footnote 75: =Hormên= (capital letter) changed to =hormên= (lower
case).
p. 284: "Fra." changed to "Frà".