The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote--in a preface to certain Dante
illustrations by Stradanus, a sixteenth-century artist of no great
excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892--that the
illustrations of Gustave Doré, 'in spite of glaring artistic defects,
must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to translate
Dante's conceptions into terms of plastic art.' One can only account for
this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by supposing that a temperament,
strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness the countless schools
and influences of the Renaissance in Italy, is of necessity a little
lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the finer substances of emotion. It
is more difficult to account for so admirable a scholar not only
preferring these illustrations to the work of what he called 'the graceful
and affected Botticelli,'--although 'Doré was fitted for his task, not by
dramatic vigour, by feeling for beauty, or by anything sternly in sympathy
with the supreme poet's soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity
and gloom,'--but preferring them because 'he created a fanciful world,
which makes the movement of Dante's _dramatis personæ_ conceivable,
introducing the ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged
with destinies of souls and creeds and empires.' When the ordinary student
finds this intelligence in an illustrator, he thinks, because it is his
own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation of the text, while
work of the extraordinary intelligences is merely an expression of their
own ideas and feelings. Doré and Stradanus, he will tell you, have given
us something of the world of Dante, but Blake and Botticelli have builded
worlds of their own and called them Dante's--as if Dante's world were more
than a mass of symbols of colour and form and sound which put on humanity,
when they arouse some mind to an intense and romantic life that is not
theirs; as if it was not one's own sorrows and angers and regrets and
terrors and hopes that awaken to condemnation or repentance while Dante
treads his eternal pilgrimage; as if any poet or painter or musician
could be other than an enchanter calling with a persuasive or compelling
ritual, creatures, noble or ignoble, divine or dæmonic, covered with
scales or in shining raiment, that he never imagined, out of the
bottomless deeps of imaginations he never foresaw; as if the noblest
achievement of art was not when the artist enfolds himself in darkness,
while he casts over his readers a light as of a wild and terrible dawn.
Let us therefore put away the designs to _The Divine Comedy_, in which
there is 'an ordinary intelligence,' and consider only the designs in
which the magical ritual has called up extraordinary shapes, the magical
light glimmered upon a world, different from the Dantesque world of our
own intelligence in its ordinary and daily moods, upon a difficult and
distinguished world. Most of the series of designs to Dante, and there are
a good number, need not busy any one for a moment. Genelli has done a
copious series, which is very able in the 'formal' 'generalized' way
which Blake hated, and which is spiritually ridiculous. Penelli has
transformed the 'Inferno' into a vulgar Walpurgis night, and a certain
Schuler, whom I do not find in the biographical dictionaries, but who was
apparently a German, has prefaced certain flaccid designs with some
excellent charts, while Stradanus has made a series for the 'Inferno,'
which has so many of the more material and unessential powers of art, and
is so extremely undistinguished in conception, that one supposes him to
have touched in the sixteenth century the same public Doré has touched in
the nineteenth.
Though with many doubts, I am tempted to value Flaxman's designs to the
'Inferno,' the 'Purgatorio,' and the 'Paradiso,' only a little above the
best of these, because he does not seem to have ever been really moved by
Dante, and so to have sunk into a formal manner, which is a reflection of
the vital manner of his Homer and Hesiod. His designs to _The Divine
Comedy_ will be laid, one imagines, with some ceremony in that immortal
wastepaper-basket in which Time carries with many sighs the failures of
great men. I am perhaps wrong, however, because Flaxman even at his best
has not yet touched me very deeply, and I hardly ever hope to escape this
limitation of my ruling stars. That Signorelli does not seem greatly more
interesting except here and there, as in the drawing of 'The Angel,' full
of innocence and energy, coming from the boat which has carried so many
souls to the foot of the mountain of purgation, can only be because one
knows him through poor reproductions from frescoes half mouldered away
with damp. A little-known series, drawn by Adolph Stürler, an artist of
German extraction, who was settled in Florence in the first half of this
century, are very poor in drawing, very pathetic and powerful in
invention, and full of most interesting pre-Raphaelitic detail. There are
admirable and moving figures, who, having set love above reason, listen in
the last abandonment of despair to the judgment of Minos, or walk with a
poignant melancholy to the foot of his throne through a land where owls
and strange beasts move hither and thither with the sterile content of the
evil that neither loves nor hates, and a Cerberus full of patient cruelty.
All Stürler's designs have, however, the languor of a mind that does its
work by a succession of delicate critical perceptions rather than the
decision and energy of true creation, and are more a curious contribution
to artistic methods than an imaginative force.
The only designs that compete with Blake's are those of Botticelli and
Giulio Clovio, and these contrast rather than compete; for Blake did not
live to carry his 'Paradiso' beyond the first faint pencillings, the first
thin washes of colour, while Botticelli only, as I think, became
supremely imaginative in his 'Paradiso,' and Clovio never attempted the
'Inferno' and 'Purgatorio' at all. The imaginations of Botticelli and
Clovio were overshadowed by the cloister, and it was only when they passed
beyond the world or into some noble peace, which is not the world's peace,
that they won a perfect freedom. Blake had not such mastery over figure
and drapery as had Botticelli, but he could sympathize with the persons
and delight in the scenery of the 'Inferno' and the 'Purgatorio' as
Botticelli could not, and could fill them with a mysterious and spiritual
significance born perhaps of mystical pantheism. The flames of Botticelli
give one no emotion, and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot of the
Church led by the gryphon, half eagle, half lion, of Christ's dual nature,
but is a fragment of some mediæval pageant pictured with a merely
technical inspiration. Clovio, the illuminator of missals, has tried to
create with that too easy hand of his a Paradise of serene air reflected
in a little mirror, a heaven of sociability and humility and prettiness, a
heaven of women and of monks; but one cannot imagine him deeply moved, as
the modern world is moved, by the symbolism of bird and beast, of tree and
mountain, of flame and darkness. It was a profound understanding of all
creatures and things, a profound sympathy with passionate and lost souls,
made possible in their extreme intensity by his revolt against corporeal
law, and corporeal reason, which made Blake the one perfectly fit
illustrator for the 'Inferno' and the 'Purgatorio': in the serene and
rapturous emptiness of Dante's Paradise he would find no symbols but a few
abstract emblems, and he had no love for the abstract, while with the
drapery and the gestures of Beatrice and Virgil, he would have prospered
less than Botticelli or even Clovio.
1897.