I
French sculpture naturally follows very much the same course as
French painting. Its beginnings, however, are Gothic, and the
Renaissance emancipated rather than created it. Italy, over which the
Gothic wave passed with less disturbing effect than anywhere else, and
where the Pisans were doing pure sculpture when everywhere farther north
sculpture was mainly decorative and rigidly architectural, had a potent
influence. But the modern phases of French sculpture have a closer
relationship with the Chartres Cathedral than modern French painting has
with its earliest practice; and Claux Sluters, the Burgundian Fleming
who modelled the wonderful Moses Well and the tombs of Jean Sans Peur
and Phillippe le Hardi at Dijon, among his other anachronistic
masterpieces, exerted considerably greater influence upon his successors
than the Touraine school of painting and the Clouets did upon theirs.
These works are a curious compromise between the Gothic and the modern
spirits. Sluters was plainly a modern temperament working with Gothic
material and amid Gothic ideas. In itself his sculpture is hardly
decorative, as we apply the epithet to modern work. It is just off the
line of rigidity, of insistence in every detail of its right and title
to individuality apart from every other sculptured detail. The prophets
in the niches of the beautiful Dijon Well, the monks under the arcades
of the beautiful Burgundian tombs, have little relation with each other
as elements of a decorative sculptural composition. They are in the same
style, that is all. Each of them is in interest quite independent of the
other. Compared with one of the Pisans' pulpits they form a congeries
rather than a composition. Compared with Goujon's "Fountain of the
Innocents" their motive is not decorative at all. Isaiah, Ezekiel,
Jeremiah asserts his individuality in a way the more sociable prophets
of the Sistine Chapel would hesitate to do. They have a little the air
of hermits--of artistic anchorites, one may say.
They are Gothic, too, not only in being thus sculpturally undecorative
and uncomposed, but in being beautifully subordinate to the architecture
which it is their unmistakable ancillary function to decorate in the
most delightful way imaginable--in being in a word architecturally
decorative. The marriage of the two arts is, Gothically, not on equal
terms. It never occurred, of course, to the Gothic architect that it
should be. His _ensemble_ was always one of which the chief, the
overwhelming, one may almost say the sole, interest is structural. He
even imposed the condition that the sculpture which decorated his
structure should be itself architecturally structural. One figure of the
portals of Chartres is almost as like another as one pillar of the
interior is like its fellows; for the reason--eminently satisfactory to
the architect--that it discharges an identical function.
Emancipation from this thraldom of the architect is Sluters's great
distinction, however. He is modern in this sense, without going so
far--without going anything like so far--as the modern sculptor who
divorces his work from that of the architect with whom he is called upon
to combine to the end of an _ensemble_ that shall be equally agreeable
to the sense satisfied by form and that satisfied by structure. His
figures, subordinate as they are to the general architectural purpose
and function of what they decorate, are not only not purely structural
in their expression, stiff as they still are from the point of view of
absolutely free sculpture; they are, moreover, not merely unrelated to
each other in any essential sense, such as that in which the figures of
the Pisans and of Goujon are related; they are on the contrary each and
all wonderfully accentuated and individualized. Every ecclesiastic on
the Dijon tombs is a character study. Every figure on the Well has a
psychologic as well as a sculptural interest. Poised between Gothic
tradition and modern feeling, between a reverend and august æsthetic
conventionality and the dawn of free activity, Sluters is one of the
most interesting and stimulating figures in the whole history of
sculpture. And the force of his characterizations, the vividness of his
conceptions, and the combined power and delicacy of his modelling give
him the added importance of one of the heroes of his art in any time or
country. There is something extremely Flemish in his sense of
personality. A similar interest in humanity as such, in the individual
apart from the type, is noticeable in the pictures of the Van Eycks, of
Memling, of Quentin Matsys, and Roger Van der Weyden, wherein all idea
of beauty, of composition, of universal appeal is subordinated as it is
in no other art--in that of Holland no more than in that of Italy--to
the representation in the most definite, precise, and powerful way of
some intensely human personality. There is the same extraordinary
concreteness in one of Matsys's apostles and one of Sluters's prophets.
Michel Colombe, the pupil of Claux and Anthoniet and the sculptor of the
monument of François II., Duke of Brittany, at Nantes, the relief of
"St. George and the Dragon" for the Château of Gaillon, now in the
Louvre, and the Fontaine de Beaune, at Tours, and Jean Juste, whose
noble masterpiece, the Tomb of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, is the
finest ornament of the Cathedral of St. Denis, bridge the distance and
mark the transition to Goujon, Cousin, and Germain Pilon far more
suavely than the school of Fontainebleau did the change from that of
Tours to Poussin. Cousin, though the monument of Admiral Chabot is a
truly marvellous work, witnessing a practical sculptor's hand, is really
to be classed among painters. And Germain Pilon's compromise with
Italian decorativeness, graceful and fertile sculptor as his many works
show him to have been, resulted in a lack of personal force that has
caused him to be thought on the one hand "seriously injured by the
bastard sentiment proper to the school of Fontainebleau," as Mrs.
Pattison somewhat sternly remarks, and on the other to be reprehended by
Germain Brice in 1718, for evincing _quelque reste du goût
gothique_--some reminiscence of Gothic taste. Jean Goujon is really the
first modern French sculptor.