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The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 3 (of 3)

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Title: The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 3 (of 3)

Author: Henry Fuseli

Editor: John Knowles


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF HENRY FUSELI, VOLUME 3 (OF 3) ***

    THE LIFE

    AND

    WRITINGS

    OF

    HENRY FUSELI, ESQ. M.A. R.A.

    KEEPER, AND PROFESSOR OF PAINTING TO THE
    ROYAL ACADEMY IN LONDON; MEMBER OF THE FIRST CLASS
    OF THE ACADEMY OF ST. LUKE AT ROME.

    THE FORMER WRITTEN, AND THE LATTER EDITED BY

    JOHN KNOWLES, F.R.S.

    CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY AT ROTTERDAM,

    HIS EXECUTOR.

    "Animo vidit, ingenio complexus est, eloquentiâ illuminavit."
          _Velleius Paterculus in Ciceronem._

    IN THREE VOLUMES.

    VOL. III.

    LONDON:
    HENRY COLBURN AND RICHARD BENTLEY,
    NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
    MDCCCXXXI.




    LONDON:
    PRINTED BY SAMUEL BENTLEY,
    Dorset Street, Fleet Street.




    CONTENTS OF THE THIRD VOLUME.

    LECTURES.

    XI. On the prevailing Method of treating
    the History of Painting, with Observations
    on the Picture of Lionardo da
    Vinci of "The Last Supper"                             Page 1

    XII. On the Present State of the Art, and the
    Causes which check its Progress                            39


    APHORISMS,
    Chiefly relative to the Fine Arts                          61


    A HISTORY OF ART IN THE SCHOOLS OF ITALY.

    The Tuscan School                                         153

    The School of Florence                                    193

    The School of Siena                                       231

    The Roman School                                          242

    The School of Naples                                      279

    The School of Venice                                      334

    The School of Mantoua                                     361

    The School of Bologna                                     399




    ELEVENTH LECTURE.

    ON THE PREVAILING METHOD OF TREATING THE HISTORY OF PAINTING,
    WITH OBSERVATIONS ON THE PICTURE OF LIONARDO DA VINCI OF
    "THE LAST SUPPER."




ELEVENTH LECTURE.


In this Lecture I shall submit to your consideration some criticisms on
the prevailing method of treating the History of our Art; attended by a
series of observations on the magnificent picture of the Last Supper, by
Lionardo da Vinci, now before you.

History, mindless of its real object, sinking to Biography, has been
swelled into a diffuse catalogue of individuals, who, tutored by
different schools, or picking something from the real establishers of
Art, have done little more than repeat, or imitate through the medium of
either, what those had found in Nature, discriminated, selected, and
applied to Art, according to her dictates. Without wishing to depreciate
the merit of that multitude who felt, proved themselves strong enough,
and strenuously employed life to follow, it must be pronounced below
the historian's dignity to allow them more than a transitory glance.
Neither originality, nor selection and combination of materials
scattered over the various classes of Art by others, have much right to
attention from him who only investigates the real progress of Art, if
the first proves to have added nothing essential to the system by
novelty, and the second to have only diluted energy, and by a popular
amalgama to have pleased the vulgar. Novelty, without enlarging the
circle of knowledge, may delight or strike, but is nearer allied to whim
than to invention; and an eclectic system, without equality of parts, as
it originated in want of comprehension, totters on the brink of
mediocrity.

The first ideas of Expression, Character, Form, Chiaroscuro, and Colour,
originated in Tuscany: Masaccio, Lionardo da Vinci, M. Agnolo,
Bartolomeo della Porta. The first was carried off before he could give
more than hints of dramatic composition; the second appears to have
established character on physiognomy, and to have seen the first vision
of chiaroscuro, though he did not penetrate the full extent of its
charm; the third had power, knowledge, and life sufficiently great,
extensive, and long, to have fixed style on its basis, had not an
irresistible bias drawn off his attention from the modesty and variety
of Nature; Baccio gave amplitude to drapery, and colour to form.

Of the Tuscan School that succeeded these, the main body not only added
nothing to their discoveries, but, if their blind attachment to the
singularities rather than the beauties of the third be excepted, equally
inattentive to expression, character, propriety of form, the charms of
chiaroscuro, and energies of colour, contented themselves to give to
tame or puerile ideas, obvious and common-place conceptions, a kind of
importance by mastery of execution and a bold but monotonous and always
mannered outline; and though Andrea del Sarto, with Francia Bigio,
Giacopo da Pontormo, and Rosso, may be allowed to have thought sometimes
for themselves and struck out paths of their own, will it be asserted
that they enlarged or even filled the circle traced out before? The most
characteristic work of Andrea's original powers, is, no doubt, the
historic series in S. Giovanni dei Scalzi; yet, when compared with the
patriarchal simplicity of the groups in the Lunette of the Sistine
Chapel, the _naïveté_ of his characters and imagery will be found too
much tainted with contemporary, local, and domestic features, for
Divine, Apostolic, and Oriental agents. His drapery, whenever he escapes
from the costume of the day, combines with singular felicity the breadth
of the _Frati_, and the acute angles of Albert Durer; but neither its
amplitude, nor the solemn repose and tranquillity of his scenery, can
supply the want of personal dignity, or consecrate vulgar forms and
trivial features.

The Roman school like an Oriental sun rose, not announced by dawn, and,
setting, left no twilight. Raffaello established his school on the
Drama; its scenery, its expression, its forms; History, Lyrics,
Portrait, became under his hand the organs of passion and character.
With his demise the purity of this principle vanished. Julio Romano, too
original to adopt, formed a school of his own at Mantoua, which, as it
was founded on no characteristic principle, added nothing to Art, and
did not long survive its founder. Polydoro Caldara was more ambitious to
emulate the forms of the antique than to propagate the style of his
master, which was not comprehended by Penny, called Il Fattore, mangled
by Perrino del Vaga, became common-place in the hands of the Zuccari,
barbarous manner during the usurpation of Giuseppe Cesari, sunk to
tameness in the timid imitation of Sacchi and Maratta, and expired under
the frigid method of Mengs.

A certain national, though original character, marks the brightest epoch
of the Venetian School. However deviating from each other, Tiziano,
Tintoretto, Jacopo da Ponte, and Paolo Veronese, acknowledge but one
element of imitation, Nature herself: this principle each bequeathed to
his school, and no attempt to adulterate its simplicity by uniting
different methods, distinguishes their immediate successors: hence they
preserved features of originality longer than the surrounding schools,
whom the vain wish to connect incompatible excellence, soon degraded to
mediocrity, and from that plunged to insignificance.

If what is finite could grasp infinity, the variety of Nature might be
united by individual energy; till then the attempt to amalgamate her
scattered beauties by the imbecility of Art, will prove abortive.
Genius is the pupil of Nature; perceives, is dazzled, and imperfectly
transmits one of her features: thus saw M. Agnolo, Raffaello, Tiziano,
Correggio; and such were their technic legacies, as inseparable from
their attendant flaws, as in equal degrees irreconcilable. That Nature
is not subject to decrepitude, is proved by the superiority of modern
over ancient science; what hinders modern Art to equal that of classic
eras, is the effect of irremovable causes.

But I hasten to the principal object of this Lecture, the consideration
of the technic character of Lionardo da Vinci, one, and in my opinion
the first of the great restorers of modern Art, as deduced from his most
important work, the Last Supper, surviving as a whole in the magnificent
copy of Marco Uggione, rescued from a random pilgrimage by the courage
and vigilance of our President, and by the Academy made our own. The
original of this work, the ultimate test of his most vigorous powers,
the proof of his theory, and what may be called with propriety the first
characteristic composition since the revival of the Art, was the
principal ornament of the Refectory in the Dominican Convent of S.
Maria delle Gratie, at Milan.

Let us begin with the centre, the seat of the principal figure, from
which all the rest emanate like rays. Sublimely calm, the face of the
Saviour broods over the immense, whilst every face and every limb around
him, roused by his mysterious word, fluctuate in restless curiosity and
sympathetic pangs.

The face of the Saviour is an abyss of thought, and broods over the
immense revolution in the economy of mankind, which throngs inwardly on
his absorbed eye--as the spirit creative in the beginning over the
water's darksome wave--undisturbed and quiet. It could not be lost in
the copy before us: how could its sublime conception escape those who
saw the original? It has survived the hand of Time in the study which
Lionardo made in crayons, exhibited with most of the attendant heads in
the British Gallery; and even in the feebler transcript of Del Testa.

I am not afraid of being under the necessity of retracting what I am
going to advance, that neither during the splendid period immediately
subsequent to Lionardo, nor in those which succeeded to our own time,
has a face of the Redeemer been produced which, I will not say equalled,
but approached the sublimity of Lionardo's conception, and in quiet and
simple features of humanity embodied divine, or, what is the same,
incomprehensible and infinite powers. To him who could contrive and give
this combination, the unlimited praise lavished on the inferior
characters who surround the hero, whilst his success in that was
doubted--appears to me not only no praise, but a gross injustice.

Yet such was the judgment of Vasari, and in our days of Lanzi, both
founded on the pretended impossibility of transcribing the beauty of
forms and the varied energies of expression distributed by the artist
among the disciples. "The moment," says Lanzi, and says well, "is that
in which the Saviour says to the Disciples, "One of you will betray me!"
On every one of the innocent men the word acts like lightning: he who is
at a greater distance, distrusting his own ears, applies to his
neighbour; others, according to their variety of character, betray
raised emotions. One of them faints, one is fixed in astonishment; this
wildly rises, the simple candour of another tells that he cannot be
suspected: Judas, meanwhile, assumes a look of intrepidity, but, though
he counterfeits innocence, leaves no doubt of being the traitor. Vinci
used to tell, that for a year he wandered about, perplexed with the
thought how to embody in one face the image of so black a mind; and
frequenting a village which a variety of villains haunted, he met at
last, by the help of some associated features, with his man. Nor was his
success less conspicuous in furnishing both the Jameses with congenial
and characteristic beauty; but being unable to find an ideal superior to
theirs for Christ, he left the head, as Vasari affirms, imperfect,
though Arminine ascribes a high finish even to that."

Thus is the modesty and diffidence of the artist, who, in the midst of
the most glorious success, always sought and wished for more, brought as
evidence against him by all his pretended judges and critics, if we
except the single Bottari, who finds in it, with the highest finish, all
the fortitude of mind characteristic of the Saviour, united to lively
consideration of the suffering that awaited him--though even that is,
in my opinion, below the conception of Lionardo.

Lest those who have read and recollect the character of Lionardo which I
have submitted to the public, should, from the predilection with which I
have dwelt on what I think the principal feature of his performance, the
face and attitude of the hero, suspect I shift my ground, or charge me
with inconsistency, I repeat what I said then, when I was nearly
unacquainted with this work, that the distinguishing feature of his
powers lay in the delineation of character, which he often raised to a
species, and not seldom degraded to caricature. The triumphant proof of
both is the great performance before us; the same mind that could unite
divine power with the purest humanity, by an unaccountable dereliction,
not only of the dignity due to his subject, but of sound sense, thought
it not beneath him to haunt the recesses of deformity to unkennel a
villain. Did he confine villainy to deformity? If he had, he would have
disdained to give him two associates in feature; for the face of him who
holds up his finger, and his who argues on the left extremity of the
table, seem to have proceeded, if not absolutely from the same, from a
very similar mould, yet they are in the number of the elect, and, though
on the brink of caricature, have the air of good men. Expression alone
separates them from the traitor, whom incapacity of remorse, hatred,
rage at being discovered, and habitual meanness, seem to have divided
into equal shares.

The portrait of Cesar Borgia, by Giorgione, now hung up for your study
in the Academy for Painting, proves that the most atrocious mind may
lurk under good, sedate, and even handsome features. Though his hand
were not drawing a dagger, who would expect mercy or remorse from the
evil methodized villainy of that eye? But Judas was capable of remorse;
intolerant of the dreadful suffering with which the horrid act had
overwhelmed him, he rushed on confession of his crime, restitution, and
suicide.

To the countenance and attitude of St. John, blooming with youth,
innocent, resigned, partaking perhaps somewhat too much of the feminine,
and those of the two James's invigorated by the strength of virility,
energetic and bold, none will refuse a competent praise of varied
beauty; but they neither are nor ought to be ideal, and had they been
so, they could neither compete nor interfere with the sublimity that
crowns the Saviour's brow, and stamps his countenance with the God.

The felicity, novelty, and propriety of Lionardo's conception and
invention, are powerfully seconded by every part of execution:--the tone
which veils and wraps actors and scene into one harmonious whole, and
gives it breadth; the style of design, grand without affectation, and,
if not delicate or ideal, characteristic of the actors; the draperies
folded with equal simplicity, elegance, and costume, with all the
propriety of presenting the highest finish, without anxiety of touch, or
thronging the eye.

So artless is the assemblage of the figures, that the very name of
composition seems to degrade what appears arranged by Nature's own hand.
That the nearest by relation, characters and age, should be placed
nearest the master of the feast, and of course attract the eye soonest,
was surely the most natural arrangement; but if they are conspicuous,
they are not so at the expense of the rest: distance is compensated by
action; the centre leads to all, as all lead to the centre. That the
great restorer of light and shade sacrificed the effects and charms of
_chiaroscuro_ at the shrine of character, raised him at once above all
his future competitors; changes admiration to sympathy, and makes us
partners of the feast.

As expression sprang from the subject, so it gave rise to competition.
That Raffaello was acquainted with Lionardo's work, and felt its power,
is evident from his composition, engraved by M. Antonio: finding
invention anticipated, he took refuge in imitation, and filled it with
sentiments of his own; whether, beyond the dignity of attitude, he
attempts to approach the profundity of Lionardo's Christ, cannot, from a
print of very moderate dimensions, be decided. In the listening figure
of Judas, with equal atrocity of guilt he appears to have combined
somewhat more of apostolic consequence.

The well-known Last Supper of the Loggia, painted, or what is more
probable, superintended by Raffaello, is, by being made a night scene,
by contrast and chiaroscuro, become an original conception; but as it
presents little more than groups busy to arrange themselves for sitting
down or breaking up, it cannot excite more interest than what is due to
contrast and effect, and active groups eager to move yet not tumultuary.

But if Lionardo disdained to consult the recesses of composition and the
charms of artificial chiaroscuro, he did not debase his work to mere
apposition: uniting the whole by tone, he gave it substance by truth of
imitation, and effect by the disposition of the characters; the groups
flanking each side of the Saviour, emerge, recede, and support each
other with a roundness, depth, and evidence which leave all attempts at
emendation or improvement hopeless. But why should I attempt to
enumerate beauties which are before you, and which if you do not
perceive yourselves, no words of mine can ever make you feel?

The universality of Lionardo da Vinci is become proverbial: but though
possessed of every element, he rather gave glimpses than a standard of
form; though full of energy, he had not powers effectually to court the
various graces he pursued. His line was free from meagreness, and his
forms presented volume, but he appears not to have ever been much
acquainted, or to have sedulously sought much acquaintance, with the
Antique. Character was his favourite study, and character he has often
raised from an individual to a species, and as often depressed to
caricature. The strength of his execution lay in the delineation of male
heads; those of his females owe nearly all their charms to chiaroscuro,
of which he is the supposed inventor: they are seldom more discriminated
than the children they fondle; they are sisters of one family. The
extremities of his hands are often inelegant, though timorously drawn,
like those of Christ among the Doctors in the picture we lately saw
exhibited. Lionardo da Vinci touched in every muscle of his forms the
master-key of the passion he wished to express, but he is ideal only in
chiaroscuro.

Such was the state of the Art before the appearance of M. Agnolo and
Raffaello, and the establishment of style.

Of M. Agnolo it is difficult to decide who have understood less, his
encomiasts or his critics, though both rightly agree in dating from him
an epoch--those of the establishment, these of the subversion of Art.

It is the lot of Genius to be opposed, and to be invigorated by
opposition. All extremes touch each other: frigid praise and frigid
censure wait on easily attainable or common powers: but the successful
adventurer in the realms of Discovery, in spite of the shrugs, checks,
and sneers of the timid, the malign, and the envious, leaps on an
unknown or long lost shore, ennobles it with his name, and grasps
immortality.

M. Agnolo appeared, and soon discovered that works worthy of perpetuity
could neither be built on defective and unsubstantial forms, nor on the
transient whim of fashion and local sentiment; that their stamina were
the real stamina of Nature, the genuine feelings of humanity; and
planned for painting what Homer had planned for poetry, the epic part,
which, with the utmost simplicity of a whole, should unite magnificence
of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts. His line became
generic, but perhaps too uniformly grand: character and beauty were
admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to grandeur. The
child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him indiscriminately
stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of
poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are
moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man; his men are a race
of giants. This is the "terribil via," this is that "magic circle," in
which we are told that none durst move but he. No, none but he who makes
sublimity of conception his element of form. M. Agnolo himself offers
the proof: for the lines that bear in a mass on his mighty tide of
thought in the Gods and Patriarchs and Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel,
already too ostentatiously show themselves in the Last Judgement, and
rather expose than support his ebbing powers in the Chapel of Paul.
Considered as a whole, the Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion
of Paul, in that place, are the dotage of M. Agnolo's style; but they
have parts which make that dotage more enviable than the equal vigour of
mediocrity.

With what an eye M. Agnolo contemplated the Antique, we may judge from
his Bacchus, the early production of his youth: in style it is at least
equal, perhaps in pulp and fleshiness superior, to what is called the
Antique Roman Style. His idea seems to have been the personification of
youthful inebriety, but it is the inebriety of a superior being, not yet
forsaken by grace, not yet relinquished by mind. In more advanced years,
the Torso of Apollonius became his standard of form. But the Dæmons of
Dante had too early tinctured his fancy to admit in their full majesty
the Gods of Homer and of Phidias.

Such was the opinion formed of the plan and style of M. Agnolo by the
judges, the critics, the poets, the artists, the public, of his own and
the following age, from Bembo to Ariosto, from Raffaello to Tiziano,
down to Agostino and Annibale Carracci. Let us now compare it with the
technical verdict given by the greatest professional critic, on the
Continent, of our times. "M. Agnolo," says Mengs, "seeking always to be
grand, was perhaps only bulky, and by the perpetual use of a convex
line, over-spanned the forms and irrecoverably lost the line of Nature.
This charged style attended him in his youth, and engrossed him when a
man. For this reason his works will always be much inferior to the
antique of the good style; for though they made robust and muscular
figures, they never made them heavy:--an instance is the Hercules of
Glycon, who, though so bulky, and of form so majestic, is easily seen to
be swift like a stag, and elastic like a ball. The style of M. Agnolo
could not give similar ideas, for the joints of his figures are too
contracted, and seem only made for the posture into which he puts them.
The forms of his flesh are too round, his muscles of a mass and shape
always similar, which hides their springs of motion; nor do you ever see
in his works a muscle in repose, than which a greater fault Design knows
not. He perfectly knew what place each muscle ought to occupy, but never
gave its form. Nor did he understand the nature of tendons, as he made
them equally fleshy from end to end, and his bones too round. Raffaello
partook of all these defects, without ever reaching the profundity of
his muscular theory. Raffaello's strength lay in characterizing aged and
nervous frames; he was too hard for delicacy, and in figures of grandeur
an exaggerated copy of M. Agnolo." So far Mengs.

M. Agnolo appears to have had no infancy; if he had, we are not acquainted
with it. His earliest works are equal in principle and compass of
execution to the vigorous proofs of his virility. Like an oriental sun, he
burst upon us at once, without a dawn. Raffaello Sanzio we see in his
cradle, we hear him stammer, but _propriety_ rocked the cradle, and
_character_ formed his lips. Even in the trammels of Pietro Perugino, dry
and servile in his style of design, he traced what was essential, and
separated it from what was accidental in his model. The works of Lionardo
da Vinci and the Cartoon of Pisa are said to have invigorated his eye, but
it was the Antique that completed the system which he had begun to
establish on Nature; from them he learned discrimination and choice of
forms. He found that in the construction of the body the articulations of
the bones were the true cause of ease and grace in the action of the
limbs, and that the knowledge of this was the reason of the superiority of
antique design. He found that certain features were fittest for certain
expressions and peculiar to certain characters; that such a head, such
hands, such feet, are the stamen or the growth of such a body, and on
physiognomy established homogeneousness. Of all artists he was the
greatest, the most precise, the most acute observer. When he designed, he
first attended to the primary intention and motive of his figure, next to
its general measure, then to the bones and their articulations; from them
to the principal muscles, or the muscles eminently wanted, and their
attendant nerves, and at last to the more or less essential minutiæ. But
the characteristic part of the subject is infallibly the characteristic
part of his design, if it be formed even by a few rapid or a single stroke
of his pen or pencil. The strokes themselves are characteristic, they
follow or indicate the texture or fibre of the part; flesh in their
rounding, nerves in straight, bones in angular touches.

Such was the felicity and such the propriety of Raffaello when employed
in the dramatic evolutions of character,--both suffered when he
attempted to abstract the forms of sublimity or beauty. The painter of
humanity not often wielded with success superhuman weapons. His Gods
never rose above prophetic or patriarchial forms: if the finger of M.
Agnolo impressed the divine countenance oftener with sternness than awe,
the Gods of Raffaello are sometimes too affable and mild, like him who
speaks to Jacob in the ceiling of the Vatican; sometimes too violent,
like him who separates light from darkness in the Loggia: but though
made chiefly to walk with dignity on earth, he soared above it in the
mild effulgence and majestic rapture of Christ on Tabor, not indeed as
we see his face now from the repairs of the manufacturers in the Louvre,
and still more in the frown of the angelic countenance that withers all
the strength of the warrior Heliodorus. Of ideal female beauty, though
he himself, in his letter to Count Castiglione, tells us that from its
scarcity in life he made attempts to reach it by an idea formed in his
own mind, he certainly wanted that standard which guided him in
character. His Goddesses and mythologic females are no more than
aggravations of the generic forms of M. Agnolo. Roundness, mildness,
sanctimony, and insipidity, compose the features and air of his
Madonnas: transcripts of the nursery, or some favourite face. The
Madonna del Impanato, the Madonna Bella, the Madonna della Sedia, and
even the longer proportions and greater delicacy and dignity of the
Madonna formerly in the collection of Versailles, share more or less of
this insipidity: it chiefly arises from the high, smooth, roundish
forehead, the shaven vacuity between the arched semicircular eye-brows,
their elevation above the eyes, and the ungraceful division, growth and
scantiness of hair. This indeed might be the result of his desire not to
stain the virgin character of sanctity with the most distant hint of
coquetry or meretricious charms; for in his Magdalens, he throws it with
luxuriant profusion, and surrounds the breast and shoulders with
undulating waves and plaits of gold. The character of Mary Magdalen met
his,--it was the character of a passion.

It is evident from every picture or design at every period of his art in
which she had a part, that he supposed her enamoured when she follows
the body of the Saviour to the tomb, or throws herself dishevelled over
his feet, or addresses him when he bears his cross. The cast of her
features, her forms, her action, are the character of love in agony.
When character inspired Raffaello, his women became definitions of grace
and pathos at once.

Such is the exquisite line and turn of the averted half-kneeling female
with the two children among the spectators of Heliodorus. Her attitude,
the turn of her neck, supplies all face, and intimates more than he ever
expressed by features; and that she would not have gained by showing
them, may be guessed from her companion on the foreground, who, though
highly elegant and equally pathetic in her action, has not features
worthy of either. The fact is, form and style were by Raffaello
employed chiefly, if not always, as vehicles of character and pathos;
the Drama is his element, and to that he has adapted them in a mode and
with a propriety which leave all attempts at emendation hopeless: if
his lines have been excelled or rivalled in energy, correctness,
elegance,--considered as instruments of the passions, they have never
been equalled, and as parts of invention, composition and expression
relative to his story, have never been approached.

The result of these observations on M. Agnolo and Raffaello is this,
that M. Agnolo drew in generic forms the human race; that Raffaello
drew the forms and characters of society diversified by artificial
wants.

We find therefore M. Agnolo more sublime, and we sympathise more with
Raffaello, because he resembles us more. When Reynolds said that M.
Agnolo had more _imagination_, and Raffaello more _fancy_, he meant to
say, that the one had more sublimity, more elementary fire; the other
was richer in social imagery, in genial conceits, and artificial
variety. Simplicity is the stamen of M. Agnolo; varied propriety, with
character, that of Raffaello.

Of the great restorers of Art, the two we have considered, made Design
and Style the basis of their plan, content with negative and unambitious
colour; the two next inverted the principle, and employed Design and
Style as vehicles of _colour_ or of _harmony_.

The style of Tiziano's design has two periods: he began with copying
what was before him without choice, and for some time continued in the
meagre, anxious, and accidental manner of Giovanni Bellino; but
discovering in the works of Giorgione that breadth of form produced
breadth of colour, he endeavoured, and succeeded, to see Nature by
comparison, and in a more ample light. That he possessed the theory of
the human body, needs not to be proved from the doubtful designs which
he is said to have made for the anatomical work of Vesalio; that he had
familiarized himself with the style of M. Agnolo, and burned with
ambition to emulate it, is less evident from adopting some of his
attitudes in the pictures of Pietro Martyre and the Battle of
Ghiaradadda, than from the elemental conceptions, the colossal style,
and daring foreshortenings which astonish in the Cain and Abel, the
Abraham and Isaac, the Goliath and David, on the ceiling of the fabric
of St. Spirito at Venice. Here, and here alone, is the result of that
union of tone and style which, in Tintoretto's opinion, was required to
make a perfect painter,--for in general the male forms of Tiziano are
those of sanguine health, often too fleshy for character, less elastic
than muscular, or vigorous without grandeur. His females are the fair
dimpled Venetian race, soft without delicacy, too full for elegance, for
action too plump; his infants are poised between both, and preferable to
either. In portrait he has united character and resemblance with
dignity, and still remains unrivalled.

A certain national character marks the brightest æra of the Venetian
school: however deviating from each other, Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassan,
and Paolo, acknowledged but one element of imitation, Nature herself.
This principle each bequeathed to his followers; and no attempt to
adulterate its simplicity, by uniting different methods, distinguished
their immediate successors. Hence they preserved features of originality
longer than the surrounding schools, whom the vain wish to connect
incompatible excellence soon degraded to mediocrity, and from that
plunged to insignificance.

The soft transitions from the convex to the concave line, which connect
grandeur with lightness, form the style of Correggio; but using their
coalition without balance, merely to obtain a breadth of demi-tint and
uninterrupted tones of harmony, he became, from excess of roundness,
oftener heavy than light, and frequently incorrect.

It is not easy, from the unaccountable obscurity in which his life is
involved, to ascertain whether he saw the Antique in sufficient degrees
of quantity or beauty; but he certainly must have been familiar with
modelling, and the helps of sculpture, to plan with such boldness, and
conquer with such ease, the unparalleled difficulties of his
foreshortenings. His grace is oftener beholden to convenience of place
than elegance of line. The most appropriate, the most elegant attitudes
were adopted, rejected, perhaps sacrificed to the most awkward ones, in
compliance with his imperious principle: parts vanished, were absorbed,
or emerged in obedience to it.

The Danaë, of which we have seen duplicates, the head excepted, he seems
to have painted from an antique female torso. But ideal beauty of face,
if ever he conceived, he never has expressed; his beauty is equally
remote from the idea of the Venus, the Niobe, and the best forms of
Nature. The Magdalen, in the picture of St. Girolamo of Parma, is
beholden for the charms of her face to chiaroscuro, and that
incomparable hue and suavity of bloom which scarcely permit us to
discover the defects of forms not much above the vulgar. But that he
sometimes reached the sublime, by hiding the limits of his figures in
the bland medium which inwraps them, his Jupiter and Io prove.

Such were the principles on which the Tuscan, the Roman, the Venetian,
and the Lombard schools established their systems of style, or rather
the _manner_ which, in various directions and modes of application,
perverted style. M. Agnolo lived to see the electric shock which his
design had given to Art, propagated by the Tuscan and Venetian schools
as the ostentatious vehicle of puny conceits and emblematic quibbles, or
the palliative of empty pomp and degraded luxuriance of colour.

Of his imitators, the two most eminent are Pellegrino Tibaldi, called
"M. Agnolo riformato" by the Bolognese Eclectics, and Francesco
Mazzuoli, called Parmegiano.

Pellegrino Tibaldi penetrated the technic without the moral principle of
his master's style; he had often grandeur of line without sublimity of
conception; hence the _manner_ of M. Agnolo is frequently the _style_ of
Pellegrino Tibaldi. Conglobation and eccentricity, an aggregate of
convexities suddenly broken by rectangular, or cut by perpendicular
lines, compose his system. His fame principally rests on the Frescoes
of the Academic Institute at Bologna, and the Ceiling of the Merchants'
Hall at Ancona. It is probably on the strength of those, that the
Carracci, his countrymen, are said to have called him their "M. Agnolo
riformato,"--M. Agnolo corrected. I will not do that injustice to the
Carracci to suppose, that for one moment they could allude by this
verdict to the Ceiling and the Prophets and Sibyls of the Capella
Sistina; they glanced perhaps at the technic exuberance of the Last
Judgement, and the senile caprices of the Capella Paolina. These, they
meant to inform us, had been pruned, regulated, and reformed by
Pellegrino Tibaldi. Do his works in the Institute warrant this verdict?
So far from it, that it exhibits little more than the dotage of M.
Agnolo. The single figures, groups, and compositions of the Institute,
present a singular mixture of extraordinary vigour and puerile
imbecility of conception, of character and caricature, of style and
manner.

The figure of Polypheme groping at the mouth of his cave for Ulysses,
and the composition of Æolus granting to Ulysses favourable winds, are
striking instances of both. Than the Cyclops, M. Agnolo himself never
conceived a form of savage energy, provoked by sufferings and revenge,
with attitude and limbs more in unison; whilst the God of Winds is
degraded to the scanty and ludicrous semblance of Thersites, and Ulysses
with his companions travestied by the semi-barbarous look and costume of
the age of Constantine or Attila.

From Pellegrino Tibaldi, the Germans, Dutch, and Flemings, Hemskerk,
Goltzius, and Spranger, borrowed the compendium of the great Tuscan's
peculiarities, dropsied the forms of vigour, or dressed the gewgaws of
children in colossal shapes.

Parmegiano poised his line between the grace of Correggio and the energy
of M. Agnolo, and from contrast produced Elegance; but instead of making
propriety her measure, degraded her to affectation. That disengaged play
of delicate forms, the "sueltezza" of the Italians, is the prerogative
of Parmegiano, though nearly always obtained at the expense of
proportion. He conceived the variety, but not the simplicity of beauty,
and drove contrast to extravagance. The figure of St. John, in the
altar-piece of St. Salvador at Città di Castello, now at the Marquis of
Abercorn's, and known from the print of Giulio Bonasone, which less
imitates than exaggerates its original in the Cartoon of Pisa, is one
proof among many: his action is the accident of his attitude; he is
conscious of his grandeur, and loses the fervour of the apostle in the
orator.

So his celebrated Moses, if I see right, has in his forms less of
grandeur than agility, in his action more passion than majesty, and
loses the legislator in the savage. This figure, together with Raphael's
figure of God in the Vision of Ezekiel, is said to have furnished Gray
with some of the master-traits of his Bard,--figures than which Painting
cannot produce two more dissimilar: calm, placid contemplation, and the
decided burst of passion in coalition.

Whilst M. Agnolo was doomed to live and brood over the perversion of
_his_ style, death prevented Raffaello from witnessing the gradual decay
of his.

Such was the state of style, when, toward the decline of the sixteenth
century, Lodovico Carracci, with his cousins Agostino and Annibale,
founded at Bologna, on the hints caught from Pellegrino Tibaldi, that
Eclectic School which, by selecting the beauties, correcting the faults,
supplying the defects, and avoiding the extremes of the different
styles, attempted to form a perfect system. The specious ingredients of
this technic panacea have been preserved in a complimentary sonnet of
Agostino Carracci, and are compounded of the design and symmetry of
Raffaello, the terrible manner of M. Agnolo, the sovereign purity of
Correggio's style, Tiziano's truth and nature, Tintoretto's and Paolo's
vivacity and chiaroscuro, Lombardy's tone of colour, the learned
invention of Primaticcio, the decorum and solidity of Pellegrino
Tibaldi, and a little of Parmegiano's grace, all amalgamated by Niccolo
dell' Abbate.

I shall not attempt a parody of this prescription by transferring it to
Poetry, and prescribing to the candidate for dramatic fame the imitation
of Shakspeare, Otway, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Congreve, Racine, Addison,
as amalgamated by Nicholas Rowe. Let me only ask whether such a mixture
of demands ever entered with equal evidence the mind of any one artist,
ancient or modern; whether, if it be granted possible that they did,
they were ever balanced with equal impartiality; and grant this, whether
they ever were or could be executed with equal felicity? A character of
equal universal power is not a human character; and the nearest approach
to perfection can only be in carrying to excellence one great quality
with the least alloy of collateral defects: to attempt more will
probably end in the extinction of character, and that, in
mediocrity--the cypher of Art.

And were the Carracci such? Separate the precept from the practice, the
artist from the teacher, and the Carracci are in possession of my
submissive homage. Lodovico is the inventor of that solemn hue, that
sober twilight, which you have heard so often recommended as the proper
tone of historic colour. Agostino, with learning, taste, and form,
combined Corregiesque tints. Annibale, inferior to both in sensibility
and taste, in the wide range of talent, undaunted execution and academic
prowess, left either far behind. But if he preserved the breadth of the
style we speak of, he added nothing to its dignity; his pupils were
inferior to _him_, and to his pupils, their successors. _Style_
continued to linger, with fatal symptoms of decay, in Italy; and if it
survives, has not yet found a place to re-establish its powers on this
side of the Alps.




TWELFTH LECTURE.

ON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART, AND THE CAUSES WHICH CHECK ITS PROGRESS.




TWELFTH LECTURE.


Such is the influence of the plastic Arts on society, on manners,
sentiments, the commodities and the ornaments of life, that we think
ourselves generally entitled to form our estimate of times and nations
by its standard. As our homage attends those whose patronage reared them
to a state of efflorescence or maturity, so we pass with neglect, or
pursue with contempt, the age or race which want of culture or of
opportunity averted from developing symptoms of a similar attachment.

A genuine perception of Beauty is the highest degree of education, the
ultimate polish of man; the master-key of the mind, it makes us better
than we were before. Elevated or charmed by the contemplation of
superior works of Art, our mind passes from the images themselves to
their authors, and from them to the race which reared the powers that
furnish us with models of imitation or multiply our pleasures.

This inward sense is supported by exterior motives in contact with a far
greater part of society, whom wants and commerce connect with the Arts;
for nations pay or receive tribute in proportion as their technic sense
exerts itself or slumbers. Whatever is commodious, amene, or useful,
depends in a great measure on the Arts: dress, furniture, and habitation
owe to their breath what they can boast of grace, propriety, or shape:
they teach Elegance to finish what Necessity invented, and make us
enamoured of our wants.

This benign influence infallibly spreads or diminishes in proportion as
its original source, a sense of genuine Beauty, flows from an ample or a
scanty vein, in a clear or turbid stream. As Taste is adulterated or
sinks, Ornament takes a meagre, clumsy, barbarous, ludicrous, or
meretricious form; Affectation dictates; Simplicity and elegance are
loaded; interest vanishes: in a short time Necessity alone remains, and
Novelty with Error go hand in hand.

These obvious observations on the importance of the Arts, lead to the
question so often discussed, and at no time more important than ours--on
the causes that raised them at various times, and among different
nations--on the means of assisting their progress, and how to check
their decay. Of much that has been said on it, much must be repeated,
and something added.

The Greeks commonly lead the van of the arguments produced to answer
this question. Their religious and civil establishments; their manners,
games, contests of valour and of talents; the Cyclus of their Mythology,
peopled with celestial and heroic forms; the honours, the celebrity of
artists; the serene Grecian sky and mildness of the climate, are the
causes supposed to have carried that nation within the ken of
perfection.

Without refusing to each of these various advantages its share of
effect, History informs us that if Religion and Liberty prepared a
public, and spread a technic taste over all Greece, Athens and Corinth
must be considered as the principal nurses of Art, without whose
fostering care the general causes mentioned could not have had so
decided an effect; for nothing surely contributed so much to the gradual
evolution of Art, as that perpetual opportunity which they presented to
the artist of public exhibition; the decoration of temples, halls,
porticoes, a succession of employments equally numerous, important, and
dignified: hence that emulation to gain the heights of Art; the fervour
of public encouragement, the zeal and gratitude of the artists were
reciprocal: Polygnotus prepared with Cimon what Phidias with Pericles
established, on public taste, Essential, Characteristic, and Ideal
Styles.

Whether human nature admitted of no more, or other causes prevented a
farther evolution of powers, nothing greater did arise; Polish, Elegance,
and Novelty supplied Invention: here is the period of decay; the Art
gradually sunk to mediocrity, and its final reward--Indifference.

The artist and the public are ever in the strictest reciprocity: if the
Arts flourished nowhere as in Greece, no other nation ever interested
itself with motives so pure in their establishment and progress, or
allowed them so ample a compass. As long as their march was marked with
such dignity, whilst their union excited admiration, commanded
attachment, and led the public, they grew, they rose; but when
individually to please, the artist attempted to monopolize the interest
due to Art, to abstract by novelty and to flatter the multitude, ruin
followed. To prosper, the Art not only must feel itself free, it ought
to reign: if it be domineered over, if it follow the dictate of Fashion
or a Patron's whims, then is its dissolution at hand.

To attain the height of the Ancient was impossible for Modern Art,
circumscribed by narrower limits, forced to form itself rapidly and on
borrowed principles; still it owes its origin and support to nearly
similar causes. During the fourteenth, and still more in the course of
the fifteenth century, so much activity, so general a predilection for
Art spread themselves over the greater part of Italy, that we are
astonished at the farrago of various imagery produced at those periods.
The artist and the Art were indeed considered as little more than
craftsmen and a craft; but they were indemnified for the want of
honours, by the dignity of their employment, by commissions to decorate
churches, convents, and public buildings.

Let no one to whom truth and its propagation are dear, believe or
maintain that Christianism was inimical to the progress of Arts, which
probably nothing else could have revived. Nothing less than Christian
enthusiasm could give that lasting and energetic impulse whose magic
result we admire in the works that illustrate the period of Genius and
their establishment. Nor is the objection that England, France, and
Germany professed Christianity, built churches and convents, and yet had
no Art, an objection of consequence; because it might with equal
propriety be asked, why it did not appear sooner in Italy itself. The
Art forms a part of social education and the ultimate polish of man, nor
can it appear during the rudeness of infant societies; and as, among the
Western nations, the Italians were the first who extricated themselves
from the bonds of barbarism and formed asylums for industry, Art and
Science kept pace with the social progress, and produced their first
legitimate essays among them.

How favourably religious enthusiasm operated on Art, their sympathetic
revolutions still farther prove; they flourished, they languished, they
fell together. As zeal relented and public grandeur gave way to private
splendour, the Arts became the hirelings of Vanity and Wealth; servile
they roamed from place to place, ready to administer to the whims and
wants of the best bidder: in this point of sight we can easily solve all
the phænomena which occur in the history of Art,--its rise, its fall,
eclipse, and re-appearance in various places, with styles as different
as various tastes.

The efficient cause, therefore, why higher Art at present is sunk to
such a state of inactivity and languor that it may be doubted whether it
will exist much longer, is not a particular one, which private
patronage, or the will of an individual, however great, can remove; but
a general cause, founded on the bent, the manners, habits, modes of a
nation,--and not of one nation alone, but of all who at present pretend
to culture. Our age, when compared with former ages, has but little
occasion for great works, and that is the reason why so few are
produced:[1]--the ambition, activity, and spirit of public life is
shrunk to the minute detail of domestic arrangements--every thing that
surrounds us tends to show us in private, is become snug, less, narrow,
pretty, insignificant. We are not, perhaps, the less happy on account of
all this; but from such selfish trifling to expect a system of Art built
on grandeur, without a total revolution, would only be less presumptuous
than insane.

What right have we to expect such a revolution in our favour?

Let us advert for a moment to the enormous difference of difficulty
between forming and amending the taste of a public--between legislation
and reform: either task is that of Genius; both have adherents,
disciples, champions; but persecution, derision, checks will generally
oppose the efforts of the latter, whilst submission, gratitude,
encouragement, attend the smooth march of the former. No madness is so
incurable as wilful perverseness; and when men can once, with Medea,
declare that they know what is best, and approve of it, but must, or
choose to follow the worst, perhaps a revolution worse to be dreaded
than the disease itself, must precede the possibility of a cure. Though,
as it has been observed, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries granted
to the artists little more than the attention due to ingenious
craftsmen; they were, from the object of their occupations and the taste
of their employers, the legitimate precursors of M. Agnolo and
Raffaello, who did no more than raise their style to the sublimity and
pathos of the subject. These trod with loftier gait and bolder strides a
path, on which the former had sometimes stumbled, often crept, but
always advanced: the public and the artist went hand in hand--but on
what spot of Europe can the young artist of our day be placed to meet
with circumstances equally favourable? Arm him, if you please, with the
epic and dramatic powers of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, where are the
religious and civic establishments, where the temples and halls open to
receive, where the public prepared to call them forth, to stimulate, to
reward them?

Idle complaints! I hear a thousand voices reply! You accuse the public
of apathy for the Arts, while public and private exhibitions tread on
each other's heels, panorama opens on panorama, and the splendour of
galleries dazzles the wearied eye, and the ear is stunned with the
incessant stroke of the sculptor's hammer, and our temples narrowed by
crowds of monuments shouldering each other to perpetuate the memory of
Statesmen who deluded, or of Heroes who bled at a Nation's call! Look
round all Europe--revolve the page of history from Osymandias to
Pericles, from Pericles to Constantine--and say what age, what race
stretched forth a stronger arm to raise the drooping genius of Art? Is
it the public's fault if encouragement is turned into a job, and
dispatch and quantity have supplanted excellence and quality, as objects
of the artist's emulation?--And do you think that accidental and
temporary encouragement can invalidate charges founded on permanent
causes? What blew up the Art, will in its own surcease terminate its
success. Art is not ephemeral; Religion and Liberty had for ages
prepared what Religion and Liberty were to establish among the ancients:
the germ of the Olympian Jupiter, and the Minerva of Phidias, lay in the
Gods of Aëgina, and that of Theseus, Hercules, and Alcibiades in the
blocks of Harmodios and Aristogiton.

If the revolution of a neighbouring nation emancipated the people from
the yoke of superstition, it has perhaps precipitated them to
irreligion. He who has no visible object of worship is indifferent about
modes, and rites, and places; and unless some great civil provisional
establishment replaces the means furnished by the former system, the
Arts of France, should they disdain to become the minions and handmaids
of fashion, may soon find that the only public occupation left for them
will be a representation of themselves, deploring their new-acquired
advantages. By a great establishment, I mean one that will employ the
living artists, raise among them a spirit of emulation dignified by the
objects of their occupation, and inspire the public with that spirit;
not an ostentatious display of ancient and modern treasures of genius,
accumulated by the hand of conquest or of rapine. To plunder the earth
was a Roman principle, and it is not perhaps matter of lamentation that
Modern Rome, by a retaliation of her own principle, is made to pay the
debt contracted with mankind. But let none fondly believe that the
importation of Greek and Italian works of Art is an importation of Greek
and Italian genius, taste, establishments and means of encouragement;
without transplanting and disseminating these, the gorgeous accumulation
of technic monuments is no more than a dead capital, and, instead of a
benefit, a check on living Art.

With regard to ourselves, the barbarous, though then perhaps useful rage
of image-breakers in the seventeenth century, seems much too
gratuitously propagated as a principle in an age much more likely to
suffer from irreligion than superstition. A public body inflamed by
superstition, suffers, but it suffers from the ebullitions of radical
heat, and may return to a state of health and life; whilst a public body
plunged into irreligion, is in a state of palsied apathy, the cadaverous
symptom of approaching dissolution. Perhaps neither of these two
extremes may be precisely our own state; we probably float between both.
But surely in an age of inquiry and individual liberty of _thought_,
when there are almost as many sects as heads, there was little danger
that the admission of Art to places of devotion could ever be attended
by the errors of idolatry; nor have the motives which resisted the offer
of ornamenting our churches perhaps any eminent degree of ecclesiastic
or political sagacity to recommend them. Who would not rejoice if the
charm of our Art, displaying the actions and example of the sacred
Founder of our religion and of his disciples in temples and conventicles,
contributed to enlighten the zeal, stimulate the feelings, sweeten the
acrimony, or dignify the enthusiasm of their respective audiences? The
source of the grand monumental style of Greece was Religion with Liberty.
At that period the artist, as Pliny expresses himself, was the property of
the public, or in other words, he considered himself as responsible for
the influence of his works on public principle: with the decline of
Religion and Liberty his importance and the Art declined; and though the
Egyptian custom of embalming the dead and suffering the living to linger
had not yet been adopted, from the organ of the public he became the tool
of private patronage; and private patronage, however commendable or
liberal, can no more supply the want of general encouragement, than the
conservatories and hotbeds of the rich, the want of a fertile soil or
genial climate. Luxury in times of taste keeps up execution in proportion
as it saps the dignity and moral principle of the Art; gold is the motive
of its exertions, and nothing that ennobles man was ever produced by gold.
When Nero transported the Pontic Apollo to the golden house, and furnished
the colossal shoulders of the god with his own head, Sculpture lent her
hand to legitimate the sacrilege: why should Painting be supposed to have
been more squeamish when applied to decorate the apartments of his
pleasures and the cabinet of Poppæa with Milesian pollutions, or the
attitudes of Elephantis?

The effect of honours and rewards has been insisted on as a necessary
incentive to artists: they ought indeed to be, they sometimes are, the
result of superior powers; but accidental or partial honours cannot
create Genius, nor private profusion supply public neglect. No genuine
work of Art ever was or ever can be produced, but for its own sake; if
the artist do not conceive to please himself, he never will finish to
please the world. Can we persuade ourselves that all the treasures of
the globe could suddenly produce an Iliad or Paradise Lost, or the
Jupiter of Phidias, or the Capella Sistina? Circumstances may assist or
retard parts, but cannot make them: they are the winds that now blow out
a light, now animate a spark to conflagration. Nature herself has set
her barriers between age and age, between genius and genius, which no
mortal overleaps; all attempts to raise to perfection at once, what can
only be reared by a succession of epochs, must prove abhortive and
nugatory: the very proposals of premiums, honours, and rewards to excite
talent or rouse genius, prove of themselves that the age is unfavourable
to Art; for, had it the patronage of the public, how could it want them?

We have now been in possession of an Academy more than half a century;
all the intrinsic means of forming a style alternate at our commands;
professional instruction has never ceased to direct the student;
premiums are distributed to rear talent and stimulate emulation, and
stipends are granted to relieve the wants of genius and finish
education. And what is the result? If we apply to our Exhibition, what
does it present, in the aggregate, but a gorgeous display of varied
powers, condemned, if not to the beasts, at least to the dictates of
fashion and vanity? What therefore can be urged against the conclusion,
that, as far as the public is concerned, the Art is sinking, and
threatens to sink still deeper, from the want of demand for great and
significant works? Florence, Bologna, Venice, each singly taken,
produced in the course of the sixteenth century alone, more great
historic pictures than all Britain taken together, from its earliest
attempts at painting to its present efforts. What are we to conclude
from this? that the soil from which Shakspeare and Milton sprang, is
unfit to rear the Genius of Poetic Art? or find the cause of this
seeming impotence in that general change of habits, customs, pursuits,
and amusements, which for near a century has stamped the national
character of Europe with apathy or discountenance of the genuine
principles of Art?

But if the severity of these observations, this denudation of our
present state moderates our hopes, it ought to invigorate our efforts
for the ultimate preservation, and, if immediate restoration be
hopeless, the gradual recovery of Art. To raise the Arts to a
conspicuous height may not perhaps be in our power; we shall have
deserved well of posterity if we succeed in stemming their farther
downfall, if we fix them on the solid base of principle. If it be out of
our power to furnish the student's activity with adequate practice, we
may contribute to form his theory; and Criticism founded on experiment,
instructed by comparison, in possession of the labours of every epoch of
Art, may spread the genuine elements of taste, and check the present
torrent of affectation and insipidity.

This is the real use of our Institution, if we may judge from analogy.
Soon after the middle of the sixteenth century, when the gradual
evanescence of the great luminaries in Art began to alarm the public, an
idea started at Florence of uniting the most eminent artists into a
society, under the immediate patronage of the Grand Duke, and the title
of Academy: it had something of a Conventual air, has even now its own
chapel, and celebrates an annual festival with appropriate ceremonies;
less designed to promote than to prevent the gradual debasement of Art.
Similar associations in other places were formed in imitation, and at
the time of the Carracci even the private schools of painters adopted
the same name. All, whether public or private, supported by patronage or
individual contribution, were and are symptoms of Art in distress,
monuments of public dereliction and decay of Taste. But they are at the
same time the asylum of the student, the theatre of his exercises, the
repositories of the materials, the archives of the documents of our art,
whose principles their officers are bound now to maintain, and for the
preservation of which they are responsible to posterity, undebauched by
the flattery, heedless of the sneers, undismayed by the frown of their
own time.

Permit me to part with one final observation. Reynolds has told us, and
from _him_ whose genius was crowned with the most brilliant success
during his life, from him it came with unexampled magnanimity, "that
those who court the applause of their own time, must reckon on the
neglect of posterity." On this I shall not insist as a general maxim;
all depends on the character of the time in which an artist lives, and
on the motive of his exertions. M. Agnolo, Raffaello, Tiziano, and
Vasari, Giuseppe d'Arpino, and Luca Giordano, enjoyed equal celebrity
during their own times. The three first enjoy it now, the three last are
forgotten or censured. What are we to infer from this unequal verdict of
posterity? What, but what Cicero says, that time obliterates the
conceits of opinion or fashion, and establishes the verdicts of Nature?
The age of Julio and Leone demanded genius for its own sake, and found
it--the age of Cosmo, Ferdinand, and Urban, demanded talents and
dispatch to flatter their own vanity, and found them too; but Cosmo,
Ferdinand, and Urban, are sunk in the same oblivion, or involved in the
same censure with their tools--Julio and Leone continue to live with the
permanent powers which they had called forth.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Vel duo vel nemo--turpe et miserabile!




APHORISMS, CHIEFLY RELATIVE TO THE FINE ARTS.




APHORISMS.


1. Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and
judgment partial.

2. The price of excellence is labour, and time that of immortality.

3. Art, like love, excludes all competition, and absorbs the man.

4. Art is the attendant of nature, and genius and talent the ministers
of art.

5. Genius either discovers new materials of nature, or combines the
known with novelty.

6. Talent arranges, cultivates, polishes, the discoveries of genius.

7. Intuition is the attendant of genius; gradual improvement that of
talent.

8. Arrangement presupposes materials: fruits follow the bud and foliage,
and judgment the luxuriance of fancy.

9. The fiery sets his subject in a blaze, and mounts its vapours; the
melancholy cleaves the rock, or gropes through thorns for his; the
sanguine deluges all, and seizes none; the phlegmatic sucks one, and
drops off with repletion.

10. Some enter the gates of art with golden keys, and take their seats
with dignity among the demi-gods of fame; some burst the doors and leap
into a niche with savage power; thousands consume their time in chinking
useless keys, and aiming feeble pushes against the inexorable doors.

11. Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate
genius.

12. Organization is the mother of talent; practice its nurse; the
senses its dominion; but hearts alone can penetrate hearts.

13. It is the lot of genius to be opposed, and to be invigorated by
opposition: all extremes touch each other; frigid praise and censure
wait upon attainable or common powers; but the successful adventurer in
the realms of discovery leaps on an unknown or long-lost shore, ennobles
it with his name, and grasps immortality.

14. Genius without bias, is a stream without direction: it inundates
all, and ends in stagnation.

15. He who pretends to have sacrificed genius to the pursuits of
interest or fashion; and he who wants to persuade you he has
indisputable titles to a crown, but chooses to wave them for the
emoluments of a partnership in trade, deserve equal belief.

16. Taste is the legitimate offspring of nature, educated by propriety:
fashion is the bastard of vanity, dressed by art.

17. The immediate operation of taste is to ascertain the kind; the next,
to appreciate the degrees of excellence.

_Coroll._--Taste, founded on sense and elegance of mind, is reared by
culture, invigorated by practice and comparison: scantiness stops short
of it; fashion adulterates it: it is shackled by pedantry, and
overwhelmed by luxuriance.

Taste sheds a ray over the homeliest or the most uncouth subject.
Fashion frequently flattens the elegant, the gentle, and the great, into
one lumpy mass of disgust.

If "foul and fair" be all that your gross-spun sense discerns, if you
are blind to the intermediate degrees of excellence, you may perhaps be
a great man--a senator--a conqueror; but if you respect yourself, never
presume to utter a syllable on works of taste.

18. If mind and organs conspire to qualify you for a judge in works of
taste, remember that you are to be possessed of three things--the
subject of the work which you are to examine; the character of the
artist as such; and, before all, of impartiality.

_Coroll._--All first impressions are involuntary and inevitable; but
the knowledge of the subject will guide you to judge first of the whole;
not to creep on from part to part, and nibble at execution before you
know what it means to convey. The notion of a tree precedes that of
counting leaves or disentangling branches.

Every artist has, or ought to have, a character or system of his own;
if, instead of referring that to the test of nature, you judge him by
your own packed notions, or arraign him at the tribunal of schools which
he does not recognize--you degrade the dignity of art, and add another
fool to the herd of Dilettanti.

But if, for reasons best known to yourself, you come determined to
condemn what yet you have not seen, let me advise you to drop your
pursuits of art for one of far greater importance--the inquiry into
yourself; nor aim at taste till you are sure of justice.

19. Misconception of its own powers is the injurious attendant of
genius, and the most severe remembrancer of its vanity.

_Coroll._--Much of Leonardo da Vinci's life evaporated in useless
experiment and quaint research; Michael Angelo perplexed the limbs of
grandeur with the minute ramifications of anatomy; Rafaelle forsook
humanity to people a mythologic desert with clumsy gods and clumsier
goddesses; Shakspeare, trusting time and chance with Hamlet and Othello,
revised a frozen sonnet, or fondled his Adonis; whilst Milton dropt the
trumpet that had astonished hell, left Paradise, and introduced a
pedagogue to Heaven. When genius is surprised by such lethargic moments,
we can forget that Johnson wrote Irene, and Hogarth made a solemn fool
of Paul.

20. Reality teems with disappointment for him whose sources of enjoyment
spring in the elysium of fancy.

21. Where perfection cannot take place, a very high degree of general
excellence is impossible. Negligence is the shade of energy; where there
is neither, expect mediocrity, the common expletive of society; capacity
without elevation, industry without predilection, practice without
choice.

_Coroll._--"About this time," says Tacitus, "died Poppæus Sabinus, who,
from a middling origin, rose to imperial friendships, the consulate,
and the honours of the triumph: he was selected for the space of
four-and-twenty years to govern the most important provinces,[2] not for
any distinguished merit of his own, but because he was equal to his
task, and not above it."

Behold here the most comprehensive epitaph of mediocrity, and the most
unambiguous solution of every riddle with which its brilliant success
may have perplexed your mind.

22. Determine the principle on which you commence your career of art:
some woo the art itself, some its appendages; some confine their view to
the present, some extend it to futurity: the butterfly flutters round a
meadow; the eagle crosses seas.

23. In ranging the phenomena of art, remember carefully, though you
place it on the side of exceptions, that a decided bias is not always a
sign of latent power; nor indolence, indifference, or even apathy, a
sign of impotence.

24. Circumstances may assist or retard parts, but cannot make them: they
are the winds that now blow out a light, now animate a spark to
conflagration.

_Coroll._--Augustus and Mæcenas are said to have made Virgil: what was
it, then, that prevented Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and the two Antonines,
from producing at least a Lucan?

25. Deserve, but expect not, to be praised by your contemporaries, for
any excellence which they may be jealous of being allowed to possess
themselves; leave the dispensation of justice to posterity.

26. If wishes are the spawn of imbecility, precipitation is the bantling
of fool-hardiness: legitimate will, investigates and acquires the means.
Mistake not an itching finger for authentic will.

27. Some of the most genuine effusions of genius in art, some of the
most estimable qualities in society, may be beholden for our homage to
very disputable principles.

_Coroll._--The admission of a master's humanity to his slave supposes
the validity of an execrable right; and the courage shown in a duel
cannot be applauded without submitting to the dictates of feudal
barbarity. Had the poet's conception prepared us for the rashness of
Lear, the ambition of Macbeth's wife, and the villany of Iago, by the
usual gradations of nature, he could not have rushed on our heart with
the irresistibility that now subdues it. Had the line of Correggio
floated in a less expanse, he would have lost that spell of light and
shade which has enthralled all eyes; and Rubens, had he not invigorated
bodies to hills of flesh, and tinged his pencil in the rainbow, would
not have been the painter of magnificence.

28. Genius has no imitator. Some can be poets and painters only at
second-hand: deaf and blind to the tones and motions of Nature herself,
they hear or see her only through some reflected medium of art; they are
emboldened by prescription.

29. Let him who has more genius than talent give up as impossible what
he finds difficult. Talent may mimic genius with success, and
frequently impose on all but the first judges; but genius is awkward in
the attempt to use the tools of talent.

_Coroll._--Hyperides, Lysias, Isocrates, might imitate much of
Demosthenes; but he would have become ridiculous by stooping to collect
their beauties.[3] The spear of Roland might be couched to gain a lady's
favour; but its sole ornament was the heart, torn from the breast-plate
of her foe.

30. Mediocrity is formed, and talent submits, to receive prescription;
that, the liveried attendant, this, the docile client of a patron's
views or whims: but genius, free and unbounded as its _origin_, scorns
to receive commands, or in submission, neglects those it received.

_Coroll._--The gentle spirit of Rafaelle embellished the conceits of
Bembo and Divizio, to scatter incense round the triple mitre of his
prince; and the Vatican became the flattering annals of the court of
Julius and Leo: whilst Michael Angelo refused admittance to master and
to times, and doomed his purple critic to hell.[4]

31. Distinguish between genius and singularity of character; an artist
of mediocrity may be an odd man: let the nature of works be your guide.

32. The most impotent, the most vulgar, and the coldest artists
generally arrogate to themselves the most vigorous, the most dignified,
and the warmest subjects.

33. He has powers, dignity, and fire, who can inspire a trifle with
importance.

34. Know that nothing is trifling in the hand of genius, and that
importance itself becomes a bauble in that of mediocrity:--the
shepherd's staff of Paris would have been an engine of death in the
grasp of Achilles; the ash of Peleus could only have dropped from the
effeminate fingers of the curled archer.

35. Art either imitates or copies, selects or transcribes; consults the
class, or follows the individual.

36. Imitative art, is either epic or sublime, dramatic or impassioned,
historic or circumscribed by truth. The first astonishes, the second
moves, the third informs.

37. Whatever hides its limits in its greatness--whatever shows a feature
of immensity, let the elements of Nature or the qualities of animated
being make up its substance, is sublime.

38. Whatever by reflected self-love inspires us with hope, fear, pity,
terror, love, or mirth--whatever makes events, and time, and place, the
ministers of character and pathos, let fiction or reality compose its
tissue, is dramatic.

39. That which tells us, not what might be, but what is; circumscribes
the grand and the pathetic with truth of time, place, custom; what
gives "a local habitation and a name," is historic.

_Coroll._--No human performance is either purely epic, dramatic, or
historic. Novelty and feelings will make the historian sometimes launch
out into the marvellous; or will warm his bosom and extort a tear.

The dramatist while gazing at some tremendous feature, or the pomp of
superior agency, will drop the chain he holds, and be absorbed in the
sublime; whilst the epic or lyric poet, forgetting his solitary
grandeur, will sometimes descend and mix with his agents.

The tragic and the comic dramatists formed themselves on Hector and
Andromache, on Irus and Ulysses. The spirit from the prison-house
breathes like the shade of Patroclus; Octavia and the daughter of
Soranus[5] melt like Ophelia and Alcestis.

40. Those who have assigned to the plastic arts beauty, strictly so
called, as the ultimate end of imitation, have circumscribed the whole
by a part.

_Coroll._--The charms of Helen and of Niobe are instruments of
sublimity: Meleager and Cordelia fall victims to the passions; Agrippina
and Berenice give interest to truth.

41. Beauty, whether individual or ideal, consists in the concurrence of
parts to one end, or the union of the simple and the various.

_Coroll._--Whatever be your powers, assume not to legislate on beauty:
though always the same herself, her empire is despotic, and subject to
the anarchies of despotism, enthroned to-day, dethroned to-morrow: in
treating subjects of universal claim, most has been done by leaving most
to the reader's and spectator's taste or fancy. "It is difficult," says
Horace, "to pronounce exactly to every man's eye and mind, what every
man thinks himself entitled to estimate by a standard of his own."[6]
The Apollo and Medicean Venus are not by all received as the canons of
male and female beauty; and Homer's Helen is the finest woman we have
read of, merely because he has left her to be made up of the Dulcineas
of his readers.

42. Beauty alone, fades to insipidity; and like possession cloys.

43. Grace is beauty in motion, or rather grace regulates the air, the
attitudes and movements of beauty.

44. Nature makes no parade of her means--hence all studied grace is
unnatural.

_Coroll._--The attitudes of Parmegiano are exhibitions of studied grace.
The grace of Guido is become proverbial, but it is the grace of the art.

45. All actions and attitudes of children are graceful, because they are
the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment--divested of
affectation, and free from all pretence.

_Coroll._--The attitudes and motions of the figures of Rafaelle are
graceful because they are poised by Nature.

46. Proportion, or symmetry, is the basis of beauty; propriety, of
grace.

47. Creation gives, invention finds existence.

48. Invention in general is the combination of the possible, the
probable, or the known, in a mode that strikes with novelty.

_Coroll._--Invention has been said to mean no more than the moment of
any fact chosen by the artist.

To say that the painter's invention is not to find or to combine its own
subject, is to confine it to the poet's or historian's alms--is to
annihilate its essence; it says in other words, that Macbeth or Ugolino
would be no subjects for the pencil, if they had not been prepared by
history and borrowed from Shakspeare and Dante.

49. Ask not--Where is fancy bred? in the heart? in the head? how begot?
how nourished?

_Coroll._--The critic who inquires whether in the madness of Lear, grief
for the loss of empire, or the resentment of filial ingratitude
preponderated--and he who doubts whether it be within the limits of art
to embody beings of fancy, agitate different questions, but of equal
futility.

50. Genius may adopt, but never steals.

_Coroll._--An adopted idea or figure in the works of genius will be a
foil or a companion; but an idea of genius borrowed by mediocrity scorns
the base alliance and crushes all its mean associates--it is the
Cyclop's thumb, by which the pigmy measured his own littleness,--"or
hangs like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief."

51. Genius, inspired by invention, rends the veil that separates
existence from possibility; peeps into the dark, and catches a shape, a
feature, or a colour, in the reflected ray.

52. Talent, though panting, pursues genius through the plains of
invention, but stops short at the brink that separates the real from the
possible. Virgil followed Homer in making Mezentius speak to Rhœbus, but
shrank from the reply of the prophetic courser.[7]

53. Whenever the medium of any work, whether lines, colour, grouping,
diction, becomes so predominant as to absorb the subject in its
splendour, the work is degraded to an inferior order.

54. The painter, who makes an historical figure address the spectator
from the canvass, and the actor who addresses a soliloquy to you from
the stage, have equal claims to your contempt or pity.

55. Common-place figures are as inadmissible in the grand style of
painting as common-place characters or sentiments in poetry.

_Coroll._--Common-place figures were first introduced by the gorgeous
machinists of Venice, and adopted by the Bolognese school of Eclectics;
the modern school of Rome from Carlo Maratta to Battoni knew nothing
else; and they have been since indiscriminately disseminated on this
side of the Alps, by those whom mediocrity obliged to hide themselves in
crowds, or a knack at grouping stimulated to aggregate a rabble.

56. The copious is seldom grand.

57. Glitter is the refuge of the mean.

58. All apparatus destroys terror, as all ornament grandeur: the minute
catalogue of the cauldron's ingredients in Macbeth destroys the terror
attendant on mysterious darkness; and the seraglio-trappings of Rubens
annihilate his heroes.

59. All conceits, not founded upon probable combinations of nature, are
absurd. The _capricci_ of Salvator Rosa, and of his imitators, are, to
the fiends of Michael Angelo, what the paroxysms of a fever are to the
sallies of vigorous fancy.

60. Distinguish carefully between bold fancy and a daring hand; between
the powers of nature and the acquisitions of practice: most of
Salvator's banditti are a medley made up of starveling models and the
shreds of his lumber-room brushed into notice by a daring pencil.

61. Distinguish between boldness and brutality of hand, between the face
of beauty and _the bark of a tree_.

62. All mediocrity pretends.

63. Invention, strictly speaking, being confined to _one_ moment, he
invents best who in that moment combines the traces of the past, the
energy of the present, and a glimpse of the future.

64. Composition has been divided into natural and ornamental: that is
dictated by the subject, this by effect or situation.

65. Distinguish between composition and grouping: though none can
compose without grouping, most group without composing.

_Coroll._--The assertion that grouping may not be composing, has been
said to make a distinction without a difference: as if there had not
been, still are, and always will be squadrons of artists, whose skill in
grouping can no more be denied, than their claim to invention, and
consequently to composition, admitted, if invention means the true
conception of a subject and composition the best mode of representing
it. After the demise of Lionardo and Michael Angelo, their successors,
however discordant else, uniformly agreed to lose the subject in the
medium. Raffaello had no followers. Tiziano and something of Tintoretto
excepted, what instance can there be produced of composition in the
works of the Venetian school? Are the splendid masquerades of Paolo to
be dignified with that name? If composition has a part in the effusions
of the great founder of the Lombard school, it surely did not arrange
the celestial hubbub of his cupolas, content to inspire his Io, the
Zingaro, Christ in the Garden, perhaps (I speak with diffidence) his
Notte. So characteristically separate from real composition are the most
splendid assemblages, the most happy combinations of figures, if founded
on the mere power of grouping, that one of the first, and certainly the
most courteous critic in Art of the age, in compliment to the Venetian
and Flemish Schools, has thought proper to divide composition into
legitimate and ornamental.

66. Ask not, what is the shape of composition? You may in vain climb the
pyramid, wind with the stream, or point the flame; for composition,
unbounded like Nature, and her subjects, though resident in all, may be
in none of these.

67. The nature of picturesque composition is depth, or to come forward
and recede.

_Coroll._--Pausias, in painting a sacrifice, foreshortened the victim,
and threw its shade on part of the surrounding crowd, to show its height
and length.[8]

68. Sculpture composes in single groups or separate figures, but
apposition is the element of basso-relievo.

_Coroll._--Poussin painted basso-relievo, Algardi chiselled pictures.

69. He who treats you with all the figures of a subject save the
principal, is as civil or important as he who invites you to dine with
all a nobleman's family, the master only excepted: this sometimes may
be no loss, but surely you cannot be said to have dined with the chief
of the family.

70. Examine whether an artist treats you with a subject, or only with
some of its limbs: many see only the lines, some the masses, others the
colours, and not a few the mere back-ground of their subject.

71. Second thoughts are admissible in painting and poetry only as
dressers of the first conception; no great idea was ever formed in
fragments.

72. He alone can conceive and compose, who sees the whole at once before
him.

73. He who conceives the given point of a subject in many different
ways, conceives it not at all. Appeal to the artist's own feelings; you
will ever find him most reluctant to give up that part of it which he
conceived intuitively, and readier to dismiss that which harassed him by
alteration.

74. Metaphysical composition, if it be numerous, will be oftener
mistaken for dilapidation of fragments than regular distribution of
materials.

_Coroll._--The School of Athens as it is called, by Raffaelle,
communicates to few more than an arbitrary assemblage of speculative
groups: yet if the subject be the dramatic representation of philosophy,
as it prepares for active life, the parts of the building are not
connected with more regular gradation than those groups: fitted by
physical and intellectual harmony, man ascends from himself to society,
from society to God.

75. No excellence of execution can atone for meanness of conception.

76. Grandeur of conception will predominate over the most vulgar
materials--if in the subjects of Jesus before Pilate, by Rembrandt, and
the Resuscitation of Lazarus by Lievens,[9] the materials had all been
equal to the conception, they would have been works of superhuman
powers.

77. Repetition of attitude and gesture invigorates the expression of the
grand: as a torrent gives its own direction to every object it sweeps
along, so the impression of a sublime or pathetic moment absorbs the
contrasts of inferior agents.

78. Tameness lies on this side of expression, grimace overleaps it;
insipidity is the relative of folly, eccentricity of madness.

79. The fear of not being understood, or felt, makes some invigorate
expression to grimace.

80. The temple of expression, like that of religion, has a portico and a
sanctuary; that is trod by all, this only admits her votaries.

81. Propriety, modesty and delicacy, guard expression from the
half-conceits of the weak, the intemperance of the extravagant, and the
brutality of the vulgar.

82. Sensibility is the mother of sympathy. How can he paint Beauty who
has not throbbed at her charms? How shall he fill the eye with the dew
of humanity whose own never shed a tear for others? How can he form a
mouth to threaten or command, who licks the hereditary spittle of
princes?

83. He fails with greater dignity, who expresses the principal feature
of his subject and misses or neglects all the secondary, than he who
consumes his powers on what is subordinate and comes exhausted to the
chief.

_Coroll._--Those who have asserted that Lionardo, in finishing the Last
Supper, was so exhausted by his exertions to trace the characters and
emotions of the disciples, that, unable to fix the physiognomy of
Christ, he found himself reduced to the necessity of leaving that head
unfinished,--either never saw it, or if they did, were too low to reach
the height, and too shallow to fathom the depth of the conception.

84. The coward, driven to despair, leaps back into the face of danger;
and the tame, stimulated to exertions and aiming at expression, puffs
spirit into flutter; or tears the garb of passion and flourishes the
rags.

85. Affectation cannot excite sympathy. How can you feel for him who
cannot feel for himself? How can he feel for himself, who exhibits the
artificial graces of studied attitude?

86. The loathsome is abominable, and no engine of expression.

_Coroll._ When Spenser dragged into light the entrails of the serpent,
slain by the Red-cross Knight, he dreamt a butcher's dream and not a
poet's: and Fletcher,[10] or his partner, when rummaging the surgeon's
box of cataplasms and trusses to assuage hunger, solicited the grunt of
an applauding sty.

87. Sympathy and disgust are the lines that separate terror from horror:
though we shudder at, we scarcely pity what we abominate.

_Coroll._--Rowe, when he congratulates the ghost on bidding Hamlet spare
his mother, accuses _her_ of a crime with which the poet never charged
her: that Shakspeare might be hurried on to horror let the "vile jelly"
witness, which Cornwall treads from Gloster's bleeding sockets.

88. Expression animates, convulses, or absorbs form. The Apollo is
animated; the warrior of Agasias is agitated; the Laocoon is convulsed;
the Niobe is absorbed.

89. The being seized by an enormous passion, be it joy or grief, hope or
despair, loses the character of its own individual expression, and is
absorbed by the power of the feature that attracts it: Niobe and her
family are assimilated by extreme anguish; Ugolino is petrified by the
fate that sweeps his sons; and every metamorphosis from that of Clytie
to the transfusion of Gianni Fucci[11] tells a new allegory of
sympathetic power.

90. Reject with indignant incredulity all self-congratulations of
conscious villainy, though they be uttered by Richard or by Iago.

91. The axe, the wheel, saw-dust, and the blood-stained sheet are not
legitimate substitutes of terror.

92. All division diminishes, all mixtures impair the simplicity and
clearness of expression.

93. The epoch which discovered expression, or what the Greeks called
"manners,"[12] is marked by Pliny as that which gave importance and
effect to art.

_Coroll._--Homer invested his heroes with ideal powers, but copied
nature in delineating their moral character. Achilles, the irresistible
in arms, clad in celestial armour, is a splendid being, created by
himself; Achilles the fool of passions, is the real man delivered to him
by tradition.

That the plastic artist should have had an aim beyond the poet is
improbable, because the poet, in general, furnished him with materials;
he composed his man of beauty and ideal limbs, not to obscure, but to
invigorate his character and our attention.

The limbs, the form of Ajax hurling defiance from the sea-swept rock
unto the murky sky, were, no doubt, exquisite; but if the artist
mitigated his expression, the indignation due to blasphemy from the
spectator gave way to sterner indignation at the injustice of his gods.

The expression of the ancients, from the heights and depths of the
sublime, descended and emerged to search every nook of the human breast;
from the ambrosial locks of Zeus, and the maternal phantom fluttering
round Ulysses,[13] to the half-slain mother, shuddering lest the infant
should suck the blood from her palsied nipple, and the fond attention of
Penelope dwelling on the relation of her returned son.[14]

The expression of the ancients explored nature even in the mute
recesses, in the sullen organs of the brute; from the Argus of Ulysses,
to the lamb, the symbol of expiatory resignation, on an altar, and to
the untameable feature of the toad.

The expression of the ancients roamed all the fields of licit and
illicit pleasure; from the petulance with which Ctesilochus exhibited
the pangs of a Jupiter delivered by celestial midwives, to the
libidinous sports of Parrhasius, and from these to the indecent
caricature[15] which furnished Crassus with a repartee.

The ancients extended expression even to the colour of their materials
in sculpture: to express the remorse of Athamas, Aristonidas the Theban
mixed metals; and Alcon formed a Hercules of iron, to express the
perseverance of the God.[16]

94. Invention, before it attends to composition, group, or contrast,
classes its subject and ascertains what kind of impression it is to make
on the whole.

95. Invention never suffers the action to expire, nor the spectator's
fancy to consume itself in preparation, or stagnate into repose: it
neither begins from the egg, nor coldly gathers the remains; for action
and interest terminate together.

96. The middle moment, the moment of suspense, the crisis, is the moment
of importance, big with the past and pregnant with the future: we rush
from the flames with the Warrior of Agasias, and look forward to his
enemy; or we hang in suspense over the wound of the Expiring
Soldier,[17] and poise with every drop which yet remains of life.

97. Distinguish between the hero and the actor; between exertions of
study and effects of impulse.

98. Know that expression has its classes. The frown of the Hercynian
phantom may repress the ardour, but cannot subdue the dignity of
Drusus;[18] the terror of the Centurion at the Resurrection[19] is not
the panic of his soldiers; the palpitation of Hamlet cannot degenerate
into vulgar fright.

_Coroll._--Of all the eclectics, Domenichino alone composed for
expression; but his expression compared with Raffaello's is the
expression of Theocritus compared with that of Homer. A detail of pretty
images is rather calculated to diminish than to enforce energy with the
whole: a lovely child taking refuge in the bosom of a lovely mother is
an idea of nature, and pleasing in a lowly or domestic subject; but
amidst the terrors of martyrdom, it is a shred tacked to a purple robe.
In touching the circle that surrounds the Ananias of Raffaelle, you
touch the electric chain; an irresistible spark darts from the last as
from the first, and penetrates and subdues. At the Martyrdom of St.
Agnes,[20] you saunter amidst the mob of a lane, where the silly chat of
neighbouring gossips announces a topic as silly, till you find, with
indignation, that instead of a broken pot, or a petty theft, you are to
witness a scene for which Heaven opens, the angels descend, and Jesus
rises from his throne.

99. Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command
over the eye.

_Coroll._--On beauty, unsupported by vigour and expression, Homer dwells
less than on active deformity; he tells us, in three lines, that Nireus
led three ships, his parentage, his form, his effeminacy; but opens in
Thersites a source of comedy and entertainment.

Raffaelle not only subjected beauty to expression, but, at the command
of invention, degraded it into a handmaid of deformity: thus the flowers
of infancy and youth, virility and age, are scattered round the
temple-gate, to impress us more by comparison with the distorted beings
that crawl before and defy the powers of every other hand but the one
delegated by Omnipotence.[21]

100. Imitation seems to cease, where the ideal part begins.

101. The imitator rises above the copyist by generalizing the individual
to a class; the idealist mounts above the imitator by uniting classes.

102. The imitator, by comparison and taste, unites the scattered limbs
of kindred excellence; the idealist, by the "mind's eye," fixes,
personifies, embodies possibility: modes and degrees of single powers
are the province of the former; the latter unites whatever implies no
contradiction in an assemblage of varied excellence.

_Coroll._--This is best explained by the Ilias. Each individual of Homer
forms a class, and is circumscribed by one quality of heroic power;
Achilles alone unites their different energies.

The height, the strength, the giant-stride and supercilious air of Ajax;
the courage, the impetuosity, the never-failing aim, the never-bloodless
stroke of Diomedes; the presence of mind, the powerful agility of
Ulysses; the velocity of the lesser Ajax; Agamemnon's sense of
prerogative and domineering spirit,--assign to each his separate class
of heroism, yet lessen not their shades of imperfection. Ajax appears
the warrior rather than the leader; Ulysses is too prudent to be more
than brave; the hawk more than the eagle predominates in the son of
Oileus; Agamemnon has the prerogative of power, but not of heroism;
Diomede alone might appear to have been raised too high, had he been
endowed with an assuming spirit. So far the poet found, ennobled,
classified; but all these he sums up, and creates an ideal form from
their assemblage, in Achilles:--he is the grandson of Jupiter, the son
of a goddess, the favourite of Heaven--[22]"What arms can fit me but the
shield of Ajax? The lance maddens not in the grasp of Diomede to chase
the flames from the ships. Let him confer with thee, Ulysses, and the
rest." Such is his language. Before the pursuer of Hector vanishes the
velocity of Ajax; from destroying Agamemnon he is prevented by Minerva;
he gives his armour to the son of Menœtius, and disperses all but the
gods; his spear none can throw, and none tear from the ground when
thrown; a miracle alone can save those that oppose him singly; when else
he fights, 'tis not to gain a battle, but to subvert Troy.

What Achilles is to his confederates, the Apollo, the Torso, the
statues[23] of the Quirinal, are to all other known figures of gods, of
demi-gods and heroes.

103. Fancy not to compose an ideal form by mixing up a mass of
promiscuous beauties; for, unless you consulted what was homogeneous and
what was possible in Nature, you have hatched only a monster: this, we
suppose, was understood by Zeuxis when he collected the beauties of
Agrigentum to compose a perfect female.[24]

104. If there be any thing serious in art, it certainly then ought to be
exerted when religion is the subject; but idolaters and iconoclasts seem
to have conspired, either to banish the author of their faith to the
cold sphere of mythology, or to debase him to the dregs of mankind.

_Coroll._--Majesty is the feature of the Supreme Being; no eternal
Father of the moderns approaches the majesty of Jupiter.

The gods of Michael Angelo are stern. The gods of Raffaelle are affable
and weak. The gods of Guido have the air of ancient courtiers.

In the race of Jupiter, majesty is tempered by emanations of beauty and
of grace, but never softened into love.

The Christ of Michael Angelo is severe. The Christ of Raffaelle is
poised between the heraldry of church tradition and the dignified
mildness of his own character. The Christ of Guido is a well suspended
corpse.

"The character corresponding with that of Christ," says a critic and a
painter,[25] "is a mixture of the characters of Jupiter and Apollo,
allowing only for the accidental expression of the moment." What magic
shall amalgamate the superhuman airs of Rhea's and Latona's sons with
sufferings and resignation? The critic, in his exultation, forgot the
leading feature of his master--humility.

Whatever be the ideal form of Christ, the Saviour of mankind, extending
his arm to relieve the afflicted, the hopeless, the dying, is a subject
that comes home to the breast of every one who calls himself after his
name:--the artist is in the sphere of adoration with the Christian.

A great and beneficent character, eminently exerting unknown healing
powers over the family of disease and pain, claims the participation of
every feeling man, though he be no believer:--the artist is in the
sphere of sentiment with the Deist or Mahometan.

But a mean man marked with the features of a mean sect, surrounded by a
beggarly ill-shaped rabble and stupid masks--is probably a juggler that
claims the attention of no one.

The Resurrection of Christ derives its interest from its rapidity, the
Ascension from its slowness.

In the Resurrection, the hero, like a ball of fire, shoots up resistless
from the bursting tomb, and scatters terror and astonishment,--what
apprehension could not dream of, what the eye had never beheld, and
tongue had never uttered, blazes before us,--tumultuous agitation rends
the whole. Such is the spirit of the Resurrection by Raffaelle.

The Ascension is the last of many similar scenes: no longer with the
rapidity of a conqueror, but with the calm serenity of triumphant power,
the hero is borne up in splendour, and gradually vanishes from those
who, by repeated visions, had been taught to expect whatever was
amazing. Silent and composed, with eyes more absorbed in adoration than
wonder, they followed the glorious emanation, till addressed by the
white-robed messengers of their departed King.

105. We are more impressed by Gothic than by Greek mythology, because
the bands are not yet rent which tie us to its magic: he has a powerful
hold of us, who holds us by our superstition or by a theory of honour.

106. The east expands, the north concentrates images.

107. Disproportion of parts is the element of hugeness,--proportion, of
grandeur; all Oriental, all Gothic styles of Architecture, are huge; the
Grecian alone, is grand.

108. The female, able to invigorate her taste without degenerating into
a pedant, sloven or virago, may give her hand to the man of elegance,
who scorns to sacrifice his sense to the presiding phantoms of an
effeminate age.

109. The collector who arrogates not to himself the praise bestowed on
his collections, and the reader who fancies himself not the author of
the beauties he recites to an admiring circle--are not the last of men.

110. The epoch of rules, of theories, poetics, criticisms in a nation,
will add to their stock of authors in the same proportion as it
diminishes their stock of genius: their productions will bear the stamp
of study, not of nature; they will adopt, not generate; sentiment will
supplant images, and narrative invention; words will be no longer the
dress but the limbs of composition, and feeble elegance will supply the
want of nerves.

111. He "lisped not in numbers, no numbers came to him," though he count
his verses by thousands, who has not learnt to distinguish the harmony
of two lines from that of a period--whom dull monotony of ear condemns
to the drowsy psalmody of one returning couplet.

112. Some seek renown as the Parthians sought victory--by seeming to fly
from it.

113. He has more than genius--he is a hero--who can check his powers in
their full career to glory, merely not to crush the feeble on his road.

114. He who could have the choice, and should prefer to be the first
painter of insects, of flowers, or of drapery, to being the second in
the ranks of history, though degraded to the last class of art, would
undoubtedly be in the first of men by the decision of Cæsar.

115. Such is the aspiring nature of man, that nothing wounds the copyist
more sorely than the suspicion of being thought what he is.

116. He who depends for all upon his model, should treat no other
subject but his model.

117. The praises lavished on the sketches of vigorous conception, only
sharpen the throes of labour in finishing.

118. As far as the medium of an art can be taught, so far is the artist
confined to the class of mere mechanics; he only then elevates himself
to talent, when he imparts to his method, or his tool, some unattainable
or exclusive excellence of his own.

119. None but the first can represent the first. Genius, absorbed by the
subject, hastens to the centre; and from that point disseminates, to
that leads back the rays: talent, full of its own dexterities, begins to
point the rays before they have a centre, and aggregates a mass of
secondary beauties.

120. The ear absorbed in harmonies of its own creation, is deaf to all
external ones.

121. Harmony disposes, melody determines.

122. There is not a bauble thrown by the sportive hand of fashion, which
may not be caught with advantage by the hand of art.

_Coroll._--Shakspeare has been excused for seeking in the Roman senate
what he knew all senates could furnish--a buffoon. Paulo of Verona, with
equal strength of argument, may be excused for cramming on the
foreground of an assembly or a feast, what he knew a feast or assembly
could furnish--a dog, an ape, a scullion, a parrot, or a dwarf.

123. He has done much in art who raises your curiosity--he has done all
who has raised it and keeps it up restless and uniform; prostrate
yourself before the genius of Homer.

124. Difficulties surmounted to obtain what in itself is of no real
value, deserve pity or contempt: the painted catalogue of wrinkles by
Denner are not offsprings of art, but fac-similes of natural history.

125. Love for what is called deception in painting, marks either the
infancy or decrepitude of a nation's taste.

126. Indiscriminate execution, like the monkey's rasor, cuts shear
asunder the parts it meant to polish.

_Coroll._--Francesco Barbieri broke like a torrent over the academic
rules of his masters. As the desire of disseminating character over
every part of his composition made Raphael less attentive to its general
effect, so an ungovernable itch of copying all that lay in his way made
this man sacrifice order, costume, mind, to mere effects of colour: a
map of flesh, a pile of wood, a sleeve, a hilt, a feathered hat, a
table-cloth, or a gold-tissued robe, were for Guercino what a quibble
was for Shakspeare. The countenance of his Dido has that sublimity of
woe which affects us in the Æneis, but she is pierced with a toledo and
wrapped in brocade; Anna is an Italian Duenna; the scene, the Mole of
Ancona or of Naples, the spectators a brace of whiskered Spaniards, and
a deserting Amorino winds up the farce. In his St. Petronilla the rags
and brawny limbs of two gigantic porters crush the effect which the
saint ought to have, and all the rest is frittered into spots. Yet is
that picture a tremendous instance of mechanic powers and intrepidity of
hand. As a firm base supports, pervades, unites the tones of harmony, so
a certain stern virility inspires, invigorates and gives a zest to all
Guercino's colour. The gayer tints of Guido vanish before his as
insipid,[26] Domenichino appears laboured, and the Carracci dim. Nor was
Guercino a stranger to the genuine expressions of untaught nature, and
there is more of pathos in the dog which he introduced caressing the
returned prodigal, than in all the Farnese gallery; as the Argus of
Ulysses, looking up at his old master, then dropping his head and dying,
moves more than all the metamorphoses of Ovid. If his male figures be
brought to the test of style, it may be said, that he never made a man;
their virility is tumour or knotty labour; to youth he gave emaciated
lankness, and to old age little besides decrepitude and beards--meanness
to all: and though he was more cautious in female forms, they owe the
best part of their charms to chiaroscuro.

127. Execution has its classes.

_Coroll._--Satan summoning the Princes of Hell stretched over the fiery
flood; or the giant snake of the Norway seas hovering over a storm-vexed
vessel, by Gerard Douw, or Vanderverf--are incongruous ideas; would be
incongruous though Michael Angelo had planned their design and Rembrandt
massed their light and shade.

128. It has been said, but let us repeat it: the proportion of will and
power is not always reciprocal. A copious measure of will is sometimes
assigned to ordinary and contracted minds; whilst the greatest faculties
as frequently evaporate in indolence and languor.

129. Mighty execution of impotent conception, and vigour of conception
with trembling execution, are coalitions equally deplorable.

130. He is a prince of artists and of men who knows the moment when his
work is done. On this Apelles founded his superiority over his
contemporaries; the knowledge when to stop, left Sylla nothing to fear,
though disarmed; the want of knowing this, exposed Cæsar to the dagger
of Brutus.

131. Next to him who can finish, is he who has hid from you that he
cannot.

132. If finishing be to terminate all the parts of a performance in an
equal degree, no artist ever finished his work. A great part of
conception or execution is always sacrificed to some individual
excellence which either he possesses or thinks he possesses. The
colourist makes lines only the vehicle of colour; the designer
subordinates hue to his line; the man of breadth or chiaroscuro
overwhelms sometimes both, and the subject itself to produce effect.

133. The fewer the traces that appear of the means by which any work has
been produced, the more it resembles the operations of Nature, and the
nearer it is to sublimity.

134. Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to
mediocrity.

_Coroll._--Take the design of Rome, Venetian motion and shade,
Lombardy's tone of colour, add the terrible manner of Angelo, Titian's
truth of nature, and the supreme purity of Corregio's style; mix them up
with the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, with the learned invention of
Primaticcio, and a few grains of Parmegiano's grace: and what do you
think will be the result of this chaotic prescription, such elemental
strife? Excellence, perhaps, equal to one or all of the names that
compose these ingredients? You are deceived, if you fancy that a
multitude of dissimilar threads can compose a uniform texture--that
dissemination of spots will make masses, or a little of many things
produce a whole. If Nature stamped you with a character, you will either
annihilate it by indiscriminate imitation of heterogeneous excellence,
or debase it to mediocrity and add one to the ciphers of art. Yet such
is the prescription of Agostino Carracci,[27] and such in general must
be the dictates of academics.

135. If you mean to reign dictator over the arts of your own times,
assail not your rivals with the blustering tone of condemnation and
rigid censure;--sap with conditional or lamenting praise--confine them
to unfashionable excellence--exclude them from the avenues of fame.

136. If you wish to give consequence to your inferiors, answer their
attacks.

_Coroll._--Michael Angelo, advised to resent the insolence of some
obscure upstart who was pushing forward to notice by declaring himself
his rival, answered: "Chi combatte con dappochi, non vince a nulla:" who
contests with the base, loses with all!

137. Genius knows no partner. All partnership is deleterious to poetry
and art: one must rule.[28]

138. The wish of perpetuating a name by enlisting under the banners of
another, is the ambition of inferior minds: biography, with all its
branches of "Ana," translation and engraving, however useful to man or
dear to art, is the unequivocal homage of inferiority offered by taste
and talent to the majesty of genius.

139. Dive in the crowd, meet beauty: follow vigour, compare character,
snatch the feature that moves unobserved and the sudden burst of
passion--and you are at the school of nature with Lysippus.[29]

140. The lessons of disappointment, humiliation and blunder, impress
more than those of a thousand masters.

141. There are artists, who have wasted much of life in abstruse
theories on proportion, who have measured the Antique in all its forms
and characters, compared it with Nature, and mixed up amalgamas of both,
yet never made a figure stand or move.

_Coroll._--"The Apollo is altogether composed of lines sweetly convex,
of very small obtuse angles, and of flats, but the soft convexities
predominate the character of the figure, being a compound of strength,
dignity and delicacy. The artist has expressed the first by convex
outlines, the second by their uniformity, and the third by undulation of
forms. The convex line predominates in the Laocoon, and the forms of the
muscles are angular at their insertions and ends to express agitation;
for by these means the nerves and tendons become more visible, straight
lines meeting with concave and convex ones, form those angles which
produce violence of action. The sculptor of the Farnesian Hercules
invented a style totally different; to obtain fleshiness, he composed
the figure of round and convex muscles, but made their insertions flat
to signify that they are nervous and unincumbered with fat, the
characteristic of strength."

"In the Gladiator there is a mixture of the Herculean and the Laocoontic
forms, the muscles in action are angulated, whilst those at rest are
short and round, a variety conformable to nature," &c.

    Opere di A.R. MENGS, t. i. p. 203.

142. Neither he who forms lines without the power of embodying them, nor
he who floats on masses, can be said to draw: the one is the slave of a
brush, the other of a point.

143. Pulp without solidity absorbs, and relentless tension tears
character.

144. In following too closely a model, there is danger in mistaking the
individual for Nature herself; in relying only on the schools, the
deviation into manner seems inevitable: what then remains, but to
transpose _yourself_ into your subject?

145. Style is the selection of forms and groups and tones to suit a
subject.

_Coroll._--The Italian _Style Grandioso_, the French _Il y a du style_,
the English _great style and breadth_, when applied to a performance,
only mean, that the artist followed those who have enlarged the
principles of imitation and execution.

146. Style pervades the object; manner floats on the surface.

147. Antient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece, and
the servant of Rome.

148. The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of
climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the
uniformity of their means. If they had schools, the Ionian, that of
Athens and of Sicyon appear to have directed their instruction to one
grand principle, proportion: this was the stamen which they drew out
into one immense connected web; whilst modern art, with its schools of
designers, colourists, machinists, eclectics, is but a tissue of
adventitious threads. Apollonius and the sculptor of the small Hesperian
Hercules in bronze are distinguished only by the degree of execution;
whilst M. Angelo and Bernini had no one principle in common but that of
making groups and figures.

149. Art among a religious race produces reliques; among a military one,
trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.

150. Modern art, reared by superstition in Italy, taught to dance in
France, plumped up to unwieldiness in Flanders, reduced to "chronicle
small beer" in Holland, became a rich old woman by "suckling fools" in
England.

151. The rules of art are either immediately supplied by Nature herself,
or selected from the compendiums of her students who are called masters
and founders of schools. The imitation of Nature herself leads to style,
that of the schools to manner.

_Coroll._--The line of Michael Angelo is uniformly grand; character and
beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to
grandeur:--the child, the female, meanness, deformity were indiscriminately
stamped with grandeur; a beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of
poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are
moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man, his men are a race
of giants.

The design of Raphael is either historic or poetic. The forms of his
historic style are characteristic, those of his poetic style he himself
calls ideal:[30] the former are regulated by nature, but these are only
exaggerations of another style.

The forms of Julio Pipi are poised between character and caricature, but
verge to this; even his dresses and ornaments are caricatures; but no
poet or painter ever rocked the cradle of infant mythology with simpler
or more primitive grace; none ever imparted to allegory a more
insinuating power, or swayed the strife of elemental war with a bolder
hand. What ever equalled the exuberance of invention scattered over the
T of Mantoua?

The line of Polydoro, is that of the antique basso-relievo, seen from
beneath (da sotto in su).

The forms of Titian are those of sanguine health; robust, not grand;
soft without delicacy.

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michael Angelo with colour,
without tracing its principle.

As Michael Angelo was impressed with an idea of grandeur, so Correggio
was charmed with a notion of harmony: his line was correct when harmony
permitted; it strayed as harmony commanded.

Elegance (sueltezza) was the principle of Parmegiano's line, but he
forgot proportion.

Annibale Carracci, one of the founders of the Eclectic school, attempted
to combine in his line the appearance of Nature with style, and became
the standard of academic drawing.

The medium, not the thing, was the object of the _Tuscan_ and _Venetian_
schools; the school of Urbino[31] aimed at subjecting the medium to the
character of things; the _Lombards_ strove to unite the separate
attainments of the three with the unattainable spell of Correggio; the
_Germans_, with their Flemish and Dutch branches, now humbly followed,
now boldly attempted to improve their Italian masters; the French passed
the Alps to study at Rome and Venice what they were to forget at Paris.

Domenichino aimed at the characteristic line of Raffaelle, the
compactness of Annibale, and the beauty of the antique; and mixing
something of each fell short of all.

Rosso carried anatomy, and the Bolognese Abbate the poetry of their art
to the court of Francis. To the haggard melancholy of the Tuscan and the
laboured richness of the Lombard, the French added their own cold
gaiety, and the French school arose.

The forms of Guido's female heads are abstracts of the antique. The
forms of his male bodies are transcripts of models, such as are found in
a genial climate, though sometimes distorted by fatigue or emaciated by
want.

Pietro Testa copied the Torsos of antiquity, and supplied them with
extremities drawn from the dregs of Nature.

The forms[32] of Caravaggio are either substantial flesh or the
starveling produce of beggary rendered important by ideal light and
shade.

The limbs of Joseph Ribera are excrescences of disease on hectic bodies.

Andrea Mantegna was in Italy what Albert Durer was at Nuremberg; Nature
seems not to have existed in any shape of health in his time: though a
servile copyist of the antique, he never once adverted from the
monuments he copied to the originals that inspired them.

The forms of Albert Durer are blasphemies on Nature, the thwarted growth
of starveling labour and dry sterility--formed to inherit his hell of
paradise. To extend the asperity of this verdict beyond the forms of
Albert Durer, would be equally unjust and ungrateful to the father of
German art, on whom invention often flashed, whom melancholy marked for
her own, whose influence even on Italian art was such that he produced a
temporary revolution in the style of the Tuscan school. Andrea del Sarto
and Giacopo da Puntormo became his imitators and his copyists; nor was
his influence unfelt by Raffaelle himself, but his Christ led to the
Cross (engraved by E. Sadler),[33] compared with that of the Madonna del
Spasimo, leaves the claim of superiority doubtful for sublimity and
pathos. It is a likewise probable that we owe the horrors of the St.
Felicitas to the abominations of his Martyr scenes. The felicity of his
organs, the delicacy of his finger, the freedom and sweep of his touch,
have found an encomiast in the author of the life prefixed to the Latin
edition of his works. What would have been the result of his intended
interview, when in Italy, with Andrea Mantegna, had the death of the
latter (1505) not prevented it, is difficult to guess: if some
amelioration, certainly not the entire change of style, which the
uninterrupted study of the antique, during a long life, had failed to
produce in Andrea himself.

The forms of Luke of Leyden are the vegetation of a swamp.

The forms of Martin Hemskerck are dislocated lankness.[34]

The forms of Spranger and Goltzius are blasphemies on art; the monstrous
incubations of dropsied fancy on phlegm run mad. This verdict, though
uniformly true of every male figure of Goltzius that demanded energy of
exertion, cannot be equally applied to his females, the features of the
face excepted. On limbs and bodies resembling the antique in elegance if
not correctness, he placed heads with Dutch features, ideally, often
voluptuously dressed: such are his Venus between Ceres and Bacchus; and
still more his Diana and Calisto, a composition which in elegance and
dignity excels that of Tiziano. In the dreadful familiarity with which
the guardian snake of the Beotian well approaches the companions of
Cadmus, he has touched the true vein of terror and its limits, and
atoned in some degree for the loathsome horror that had polluted his
graver, when he condescended to copy the abominable process of that
scene from the design of Pistor.

The male forms of Rubens are the brawny pulp of slaughtermen, his
females are hillocks of roses: overwhelmed muscles, dislocated bones,
and distorted joints are swept along in a gulph of colours, as herbage,
trees and shrubs are whirled, tossed, or absorbed by vernal inundation.

The female forms of Rembrandt are prodigies of deformity; his males are
the crippled produce of shuffling industry and sedentary toil.

The line of Vandycke is balanced between Flemish corpulence and English
slenderness.

Sebastian Bourdon, sublime in his conceptions, filled classic ground and
eastern vests with local limbs and Gallic actors.

Poussin renounced his national character to follow the antique; but
could not separate the spirit from the stone.

152. The imitator seldom mounts to the investigation of the principles
that formed his model; the copier probably never.

153. Many beauties in art come by accident, that are preserved by
choice.

_Coroll._--Neither the froth formed on the mouth of Jalysus' hound by a
lucky dash from the sponge of Protogenes, nor the modern experiments of
extracting composition from an ink-splashed wall, are relatives of the
beauties alluded to in this aphorism.

154. The praise due to a work, reflects not always on its master; and
superiority may beam athwart the blemishes that we despise or pity;
some, says Milton, praised the work and some the master: would you
prefer him who is able to finish the image which he was unable to
conceive, to its inventor?

155. It is the privilege of Nature alone to be equal. Man is the slave
of a part; the most equal artist is only the first in the list of
mediocrity.

156. He who seeks the grand, will find it in a trifle: but some seem
made to find it only there. Rösel saw man like an insect, and insects as
Michael Angelo men.

157. Physiognomy teaches what is homogeneous and what is heterogeneous
in forms.

158. The solid parts of the body are the base of physiognomy, the
muscular that of pathognomy; the former contemplates the animal at rest,
this its action.

159. Pathognomy allots expression to character.

160. Those who allow physiognomy to regulate the great outlines of
character, and reject its minute discriminations, admit a language and
reject its elements.

161. The difficulty of physiognomy is to separate the essence from
accident, growth from excrescence.

162. He who aims at the sublime, consults the classes assigned to
character by physiognomy, not its anatomy of individuals; the oak in its
full majesty, and not the thwarted pollard.

163. None ever escaped from himself by crossing seas; none ever peopled
a barren fancy and a heart of ice with images or sympathies by
excursions into the deserts of mythology or allegory.

164. The principles of allegory and votive composition are the same;
they unite with equal right the most distant periods of time and the
most opposite modes of society: both surround a real being, or allude to
a real act, with symbols by long general consent adopted, as expressive
of the qualities, motives, and circumstances that distinguished or gave
evidence to the person or the transaction. Such is the gallery of the
Luxembourg, such the Attila of the Vatican.

165. Pure history rejects allegory.

_Coroll._--The armed figure of Rome, with Fortune behind her frowning at
Coriolanus, surrounded by the Roman matrons in the Volscian camp (by
Poussin), is a vision seen by that warrior, and not an allegory; it is a
sublime image, which, without diminishing the credibility of the fact,
adds to its importance, and raises the hero, by making him submit, not
to the impulse of private ties, but to the destiny of his country.

166. All ornament ought to be allegoric.

167. Dignity is the salt of art.

_Coroll._--In the Salutation of Michael Angelo,[35] the angelic
messenger emerges from solitary twilight, his countenance seems to
labour with the awful message, and his knees to bend as he approaches
the mysterious personage: with virgin majesty and humble grace Mary bows
to the extended arm of the lucid herald, as if waked from sacred
meditation, and appears entranced by celestial sounds.

The Madonnas of Raffaelle, whether hailed parents of a God, or pressing
the divine offspring to their breast, whether receiving him from his
slumbers, or contemplating his infant motions, are uniformly transcripts
from the daily domestic images of common life and of some favourite face
matronized: the eyes of his Fornarina beamed with other fires than those
of sanctity; the sense and native dignity of her lover could veil their
fierceness, but not change their language.

The Madonna of Titiano receives her celestial visitant under an open
portico of Palladian structure, and skirted by gay gardens; the usual
ray precedes the floating angel; gold-ringleted and in festive attire,
he waves a lily wand: in sable weeds the Virgin receives the gorgeous
homage, proudly devout, like a young abbess amidst her cloistered lambs.

Tintoretto has turned salutation into irruption. The angel bursts
through the shattered casement and terrifies a vulgar female; but his
wings are tipped in heaven.[36]

168. Dignity gives probability to the impossible: we listen to the
monstrous tale of Ulysses with all the devotion due to a creed. By
dignity, even deformity becomes an instrument of art: Vulcan limps like
a god at the hand of Homer: the hump and withered arm of Richard are
engines of terror or persuasion in Shakspeare; the crook-back of Michael
Angelo strikes with awe.

169. Luxuriance of ornament destroys simplicity and repose, the
attendants of dignity.

_Coroll._--"Simon Mosca, one of the most distinguished sculptors of
ornament and foliage in the sixteenth century, when proposed by Vasari
to embellish by his designs the monument of the Cardinal di Monte, was
discountenanced by Michael Angelo on this principle." Vasari, vita de
Simone Mosca.

170. Judge not an artist from the exertions of accidental vigour or some
unpremeditated flights of fancy, but from the uniform tenor, the
never-varying principle of his works: the line and style of Titian
sometimes expand themselves like those of Michael Angelo; the heads and
groups of Raphael sometimes glow and palpitate with Titiano's tints; and
there are masses of both united in Correggio: but if you aim at
character, let Raphael be your guide; if at colour, Tiziano; if harmony
allure, Correggio: they indulged in alternate excursions, but never lost
sight of their own domain.

_Coroll._--No one, of whatever period of art, of whatever eminence or
school, out-told Rembrandt in telling the story of a subject, in the
choice of its real crisis, in simplicity, in perspicuity: still, as the
vile crust that involves his ore, his local vulgarity of style, the
ludicrous barbarity of his costume, prepossess eyes less penetrating
than squeamish against him, it requires some confidence to place him
with the classics of invention. Yet with all these defects, with every
prejudice or superiority of taste and style against him, what school has
produced a work (M. Angelo's Creation of Adam, and the Death of Ananias
by Raffaelle excepted,) which looks not pale in the superhuman splendour
that irradiates his conception of Christ before Pilate, unless it be the
raising of Lazarus by Lievens, a name comparatively obscure, whose awful
sublimity reduces the same subject as treated by Rembrandt and
Sebastian of Venice, to artificial parade or common-place?

171. Tone is the moral part of colour.

172. If tone be the legitimate principle of colour, he who has not tone,
though he should excel in individual imitation, colours in fragments and
produces discord.

173. Harmony of colour consists in the due balance of all, equally
remote from monotony and spots.

174. The eye tinges all nature with its own hue. The eye of the Dutch
and Flemish schools, though shut to forms, tipped the cottage, the boor,
the ale-pot, the shambles, and even the haze of winter, with orient hues
and the glow of setting suns.

175. Clearness, freshness, force of colour, are produced by simplicity;
one pure, is more than a mixture of many.

176. Colour affects or delights like sound. Scarlet or deep crimson
rouses, determines, invigorates the eye, as the war-horn or the trumpet
the ear; the flute soothes the ear, as pale celestial blue or rosy red
the eye.

177. The colours of sublimity are negative or generic--such is the
colouring of Michael Angelo.

178. The passions that sway features and limbs equally reside,
fluctuate, flash and lower in colour.

179. The colours of pleasure and love are hues.

180. The colour of gravity, reverie, solemnity, approaches to twilight.

181. Colour in Raffaelle was the assistant of expression; to Titian it
was the vehicle of truth; Correggio made it the minister of harmony. It
was sometimes seized, and though reluctant held, but oftener neglected
by the first; it was embraced, it domineered over, it coalesced with
the second; it attended the third like an enchanted spirit.

182. Lodovico Carracci was the first who gave in oil the colours of
gravity, the dignified twilight of cloistered meditation.

183. Annibale Carracci, from want of feelings, though impressed by a
grave principle, changed the mild evening-ray of his master to the bleak
light of a sullen day.

184. Colour owes its effect sometimes more to position and gradation
than to its intrinsic value.[37]

185. The colour of Titian is the most independent of surrounding
objects; their union may assist, but their discrepance cannot destroy
it.

186. The harmony of Correggio is independent of colour.

187. Historic colour imitates, but copies not.

188. The portrait-painter copies the colour of his object, but chooses
the medium through which that object is seen.

189. The mixtures that anticipate the beauties of time are big with the
seeds of premature decay.

190. The colours of health are neither cadaverous nor flushed like
meteors.

191. There are works whose effect is entirely founded on the contrast of
tints, of what is termed warm and cold colour, and on reflected hues:
strip them of this charm, reduce them to the principles of light and
shade and masses, and as far as the want of those can degrade a
picture, they will be fit to take their places on sign-posts.

192. Him who has freshness without frigidity, who glows without being
adust, whose tints luxuriate though not fermented by putrefaction; who
is juicy yet not clammy, though broad not empty, sharp without dryness,
clear not pellucid, airy not volatile, without being clumsy plump--him
you may venture to call a colourist.

193. Breadth is not vacuity--Breadth might easily be obtained if
emptiness could give it.

194. The forms of virtue are erect, the forms of pleasure undulate:
Minerva's drapery descends in long uninterrupted lines; a thousand
amorous curves embrace the limbs of Flora.

195. Subordination is the character of drapery. The heraldry of dress,
the rows of aggregated mitres and pontifical trappings, are noticed only
for the sake of their wearers in the compositions of the Vatican.

_Coroll._--The superiority of style in drapery over that of the limbs
which it covers in the earliest essays of art after its restoration, is
not accounted for by the assertion that it is transcribed from the
antique: if it is, by what unaccountable perverseness did the forms of
the nudities uniformly escape observation? In painting, this dissonance
continues more or less offensively from the epoch of Cimabue to that of
Masaccio, and, him excepted, down to Pinturicchio; and ceases not to
shock us in sculpture from the Pisani, to the appearance of Lorenzo
Ghiberti. Nor did that style of drapery mark only the productions of
Italian art; on this side of the Alps it invested that of Germany, from
the Angels and Madonnas of Martin Schongaver and Albert Durer, to those
of Aldegraver and Sebald Behm: in nearly all their performances, Trans
and Cisalpine, the wearer is the appendix of his garment, chucked into
vestments not his own, a dwarfish thief hid in a giant's robe.

196. Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character; in Michael Angelo
it envelopes grandeur; it is in Rubens the ponderous robe of pomp.

197. If Nature has not taught you to sketch, you apply in vain to art to
finish your work.[38]

198. Some must be idle lest others should want work.[39]

199. He who submits to follow, is not made to precede.[40]

200. Consider it as the unalterable law of Nature that all your power
upon others depends on your own emotions. Shakspeare wept, trembled,
laughed first at what now sways the public feature; and where he did
not, he is stale, outrageous or disgusting.

201. None but indelible materials can support the epic. Whatever is
local, or the volatile creature of the time, beauties of fashion and
sentiments of sects, tears shed over roses, epigrammatic sparkling,
passions taught to rave, and graces trained to move, the antiquary's
mouldering stores, the bubbles of allegorists--are all with equal
contempt passed over or crushed by him who claims the lasting empire of
the human heart.

202. The invention of machines to supersede manual labour will at length
destroy population and commerce;[41] and the methods contrived to
shorten the apprenticeship of artists annihilate art.

203. Expect no religion in times when it is easier to meet with a saint
than a man; and no art in those that multiply their artists beyond their
labourers.

204. Expect nothing but trifles in times when those who ought to
encourage the arts are content to debase them by their own
performances.

205. Mediocrity despatches and exults; the man of talent congratulates
himself on the success of his exertions--Genius alone mourns over
defeated expectation.

206. Pride.--Call not him proud who is influenced by the tide and ebb of
opinion.

207. Modesty.--The touchstone of genuine modesty is the attention paid
to criticism, and the temper with which it is received, or its advice
adopted; the most arrogant pretence, the most fiery ambition, the most
towering conceit, may fence themselves with smoothness, silence and
submissive looks--Oil, the smoothest of substances, swims on all.

208. Praise.--Despise all praise but what he gives who has been praised
for similar efforts; or his whose interest it is to blame.

209. Emulation.--The vindication of the innate powers, of the individual
dignity of man, careless of appendages and accidental advantage, grasps
the substance of its object.

210. Envy, the bantling of desperate self-love, grasps the appendages,
heedless of things. Emulation embalms the dead; Envy the vampire, blasts
the living.

211. Flattery, the midwife of half-born conceits and struggling wishes,
sometimes persuades, a boy that he is a man, a dwarf that he is a giant,
but too often enervates the limbs of energy.

212. Vanity.--The vain is the most humble of mortals: the victim of a
pimple.

213. Those reduced to live on the alms of genius, are the first to deny
its existence.

214. Shakspeare is to Sophocles what the incessant flashes of a
tempestuous night are to daylight.

215. Things came to Raffaelle and Shakspeare; Michael Angelo and Milton
came to things.

216. The women of Michael Angelo are the sex.

_Coroll._--Eve emerging from the side of Adam; Eve reclining under the
tree of knowledge, in the Capella Sistina; the figures of Night and Dawn
on the tombs of the Medici, are pure generic forms, little discriminated
by character, and more expressive by action than emotion of features;
solidity without heaviness separates them from the females in the Last
Judgment, which, with the exception of the Madonna and St. Catharine,
are less beholden to grace than anatomy. The Cartoon of the Leda proves
that he was not inattentive to the detail of female charms, but beauty
did not often visit his slumbers, guide his hand, or interrupt the
gravity of his meditation.

217. The women of Raffaelle are either his own mistress, or mothers.

_Coroll._--This relates chiefly to his Madonnas--Of his saints the St.
Cecilia at Bologna has most of antique beauty, and, whether imitated or
conceived, resembles the Niobe; but pride is absorbed in devotion, she
is the enraptured victim of divine love, and glows with celestial fire:
the goddesses of the Farnesina, however gracefully imagined, are too
ponderous for aërial forms and amorous conceits.

218. The women of Correggio are seraglio beauties.

_Coroll._--The enchantment of the Magdalen, in the picture of the St.
Jerome in the Pilotta at Parma, is produced by chiaroscuro and attitude.
Sensuality personified is the general character of his females, and the
grace of his children, less naiveté than grimace, the caricature of
jollity.

219. The women of Titiano are the plump, fair, marrowy Venetian race.

_Coroll._--Venus taking a reluctant farewell of Adonis; Diana starting
at the intrusion of Acteon, with every allure of attitude, with heads
dressed by the Graces, are local beauties, sink under the weight of
Venetian limbs, and are only distinguished by contrast from the model
that plumped herself down for his Danae. The reposing figure commonly
called the Venus of the Tribuna, is an exquisite portrait of some
favourite female, but not a Venus.

220. The women of Parmegiano are coquettes.

221. The women of Annibale Carracci are made up by imitation and
vulgarity.

_Coroll._--Venus with Anchises, Juno with Jupiter, Omphale with
Hercules, Diana and Calisto in the Farnese gallery, owe their charms and
dignity of action to imitation; the celebrated three Maries, Magdalen
penitent in her hempen shroud, are the conceptions of his own mind.

222. The women of Guido are actresses.

223. The forms of Domenichino's female faces are ideal; their expression
is poised between pure helpless virginity and sainted ecstasy.

224. The veiled eyes of Guercino's females dart insidious fire.

225. Such is the fugitive essence, such the intangible texture of female
genius, that few combinations of circumstances ever seemed to favour its
transmission to posterity.

226. In an age of luxury women have taste, decide and dictate; for in an
age of luxury woman aspires to the functions of man, and man slides into
the offices of woman. The epoch of eunuchs was ever the epoch of
viragoes.

227. Female affection is ever in proportion to the impression of
superiority in the object. Woman fondles, pities, despises and forgets
what is below her; she values, bears and wrangles with her equal; she
adores what is above her.

228. Be not too squeamish in the choice of your materials; you will
disgrace the best, if you cannot give value to the worst: the gold and
azure wasted on Rosselli's[42] draperies cannot give value to their
folds or hide the wants beneath.

229. There are moments when all are men, and only men, and ought to be
no more; but the artist, who when his daily task is over can lock his
meditation up with his tools--ranks with mechanics.

230. Date the death of emulation and of excellence from the moment of
your employer's indifference; and mediocrity of success from the moment
of his meddling with the process of your work.

231. One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams, and what may
be called the personification of sentiment: the Prophets, Sibyls and
Patriarchs of Michael Angelo are so many branches of one great
sentiment. The dream of Raffaello is a characteristic representation of
a dream; the dream of Michael Angelo is moral inspiration, a sublime
sentiment.

_Coroll._--Of three visionary subjects ascribed to Raffaello and known
from the prints of Marc Antonio, Georgio Mantuano, and Agostino
Veneziano, this alludes to the last, called by the Italians Stregozzo,
by the French "La Carcasse:" an association of ideas big with the very
elements of dreams, and almost a definition. That it be a conception of
Raffaello rests on no other proof than the tablet of Marc Antonio and
its own internal merit; which is so uniform that although one principal
figure is undoubtedly transcribed from another in the cartoon of Pisa,
the whole can never be considered as a pasticcio.

232. A trite subject becomes interesting by the introduction of
appropriate ornaments; a small statue of Moses breaking the tables in
the back-ground of a Salutation; and a number of Baptists in that of a
Madonna with her son and Joseph, expressing the dissolution of the old
and the institution of the new doctrine, both by Michael Angelo,[43]
give unexpected sublimity to subjects for which Raffaelle and Titiano
had ransacked in vain the nursery and heaven.

233. Compilation is the lowest degree in art, but let him who means to
borrow with impunity, follow the statesman's maxim: "strip the mean and
spare the great."

_Coroll._--A composition of which every thing was borrowed from himself,
being shown to Michael Angelo, and his opinion asked, "I commend it,"
said he, "but when on the day of judgement each body shall claim its
original limbs, what will remain in this picture?"

234. He ought to possess some himself, who attempts to make use of
borrowed excellence: a golden goblet on a beggar's table, serves only to
expose its companions of lead.

235. Resemblance, character, costume, are the three requisites of
portrait: the first distinguishes, the second classifies, the third
assigns place and time to an individual.

236. Landscape is either the transcript of a spot, or a picturesque
combination of homogeneous objects, or the scene of a phenomenon. The
first pleases by precision and taste; the second adds variety and
grandeur; the third may be an instrument of sublimity, affect our
passions, or wake a sentiment.

237. Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

238. He never can be great who honours what is little.

_Coroll._--Grandeur of style and execution do not exclusively depend
upon dimensions: but in an age and amidst a race who have erected
littleness or rather diminutiveness of size to the only credentials of
admissibility into collections, to the passports without which Raffaelle
himself finds it difficult to penetrate the sanctuaries of pigmy art,
that which ennobled the age of Pericles, of Julio, and Leone, must be
content to look to posterity for its reward. If it were physiognomically
true, that the structure of every human face bears some analogy to that
of some brute, it might reasonably surprise, that an individual marked
by nature with no very remote resemblance to a Hippopotamus, should be
considered as the legislator of a taste equally noted for tameness of
conception and effeminate finish; but as it is improbable that one
individual, however favoured by circumstances or endowed with
all-persevering activity, or arrogance, could stamp the taste of a
nation exclusively with his own, it may be fairly surmised that he did
no more than find and rear the seeds of that Micromania which infects
the public taste.

239. The medium of poetry is time and action; that of the plastic arts,
space and figure. Poetry then is at its summit, when its hand arrests
time and embodies action: and these, when they wing the marble or the
canvass, and from the present moment dart rays back to the past and
forward to the future.

_Coroll._--Subjects are positive, negative, repulsive. The first are the
proper materials, the voluntary servants of invention; to the second she
gives interest and value; from the last she can escape only by the help
of execution, for execution alone can palliate her defeat by the last.
The Laocoon, the Hæmon and Antigone, the Niobe and her daughters, the
death of Ananias, the Sacrifice at Lystra, Elymas struck blind, are
positive subjects, speak their meaning with equal evidences to the
scholar and the unlettered man, and excite the sympathy due to the calls
of terror and pity with equal energy in every breast. St. Jerome
presenting the translation of his Bible to the Infant Jesus, St. Peter
at the feet of the Madonna receiving the thanksgivings of victorious
Venice, with every other votive altar-piece, little interesting to
humanity in general, owe the impression they make on us to the dexterous
arrangement, the amorous or sublime enthusiasm of the artist;--but we
lament to see invention waste its powers, and execution its skill, to
excite our feelings for an action or event that receives its real
interest from a motive which cannot be rendered intuitive; such as
Alceste expiring, the legacy of Eudamidas, the cause of Demetrius's
disorder.


FOOTNOTES:

[2] Tacit. Annal. lib. VI. "Nullam ob eximiam artem, sed quod par
negotiis, neque supra erat."

[3] D. Longin. περι ὑψους, § 34.

[4] "Les hommes qui ont changé l'univers, n'y sont jamais parvenus en
gagnant des chefs; mais toujours en remuant des masses. Le premier moyen
est du ressort de l'intrigue, et n'amène que des résultats secondaires; le
second est la marche du Génie, et change la face du monde."--_Napoleon._

[5] Tacit. Annal. lib. xiv. et xvi.

[6] Difficile est proprie communia dicere. Hor. A.P.

[7] Τον δ' αρ' ὑπο ζυγοφιν προσεφη ποδας αἰολος ἱππος. Iliad xix. 404.
----Rhœbe diu, etc.--_Virg._ x.

[8] Plin. lib. xxxv.

[9] This picture, during a period of nearly half a century, graced the
collection of Charles Lambert, Esq. of Paper-buildings, Temple; where it
remained without having been washed or varnished. At his death it was
purchased by my friend Mr. Knowles, has been cleaned by a skilful hand,
and restored to nearly its pristine state.

[10] Sea Voyage, Act 3rd. sc. 1st.

[11] Dante Inferno, Cant. xxiv.

[12] ΗΘΗ. Mores. Plin. l. xxxv.

[13] The Necromantia of Nicias--the sacking of a town, by Aristides.
Plin. l. xxxv.

[14] A group of Stephanus in the Villa Ludovisi, known by the name of
Papyrius and his mother, called a Phædra and Hippolytus, or an Electra
with Orestes, by J. Winkelmann, bears more resemblance to an Æthra with
Theseus, or a Penelope with Telemachus.

[15] Gallum inficetissime linguam exserentem.--Plin. l. xxxv.

[16] Plin. l. xxx. W. c. xiv.

[17] Commonly named the Dying Gladiator; by J. Winkelmann called a
Herald; with more probability the "Vulneratus deficiens, in quo possit
intelligi quantum restet animæ." A work of Ctesilas in bronze, was
probably the model of this. Plin. l. xxxiv.

[18] Sueton. l. vi.

[19] In one of the cartoons of Raffaello, now lost, but still in some
degree existing in tapestry and in print.

[20] Engraved by G. Audran.

[21] In the cartoon of Peter and John.

[22] Iliad, L. xviii. l. 93; L. xvi. l. 74 and 75; L. ix. l. 346.

[23] Commonly called the Castor and Pollux of Monte Cavallo,--the name
given from their horses to the Quirinal.

[24] Plin. N.H. l. xxxv. c. ix. Tantus diligentia, ut Agrigentinis
facturus tabulam, quam in templo Junonis Lucinæ publice dicarent,
inspexerit virgines eorum nudas, et quinque elegerit, ut quod in quaque
laudatissimum esset, pictura redderet.

[25] Mengs Lettera à don A. Ponz. Opere di A.R. Mengs, t. ii. p. 83.

[26] Such was probably that austerity of tone in the works of Athenion,
which the ancients preferred to the sweetness or gayer tints of
Nicias--"austerior colore et in austeritate jucundior."--Plin. l. xxxv.
c. xi.

[27] See the sonnet of Agostino Carracci, which begins "Chi farsi un bon
Pittor cerca e desia," &c. which the author himself seems to ridicule by
the manner in which he concludes.

[28] Οὐκ ἀγαθον πολυκοιρανιη εἱς κοιρανος ἐστω. Il. ii. 204. The
conception of every great work must originate in one, though it may be
above the power or strength of one to execute the whole.

[29] Pliny, l. xxxiv. c. 8.

[30] In the Letter to C.B. Castiglione. Ideal is properly the
representation of pure human essence.

[31] Raffaelle and the best of his pupils; their successors, commonly
known by the name of the Roman school, followed principles diametrically
opposite.

[32] "Macinava carne," said Annibale Carracci.

[33] Ægidius Sadeler sculpsit ex Prototypo Alberti Dureri.

[34] "Elumbis," as applied by the author of the Dialogue on Orators to
the style of Brutus, will nearly suit all imitators of Michael Angelo.

[35] In the Sacristy of St. Giovanni in Laterano, painted from the
cartoon by Marcello Venusti.

[36] This and the foregoing picture are in the Scuola di S. Rocco at
Venice. The skeleton of the former is known by an etching of _Le Fevre_.

[37] "Whoever looks at a picture by Correggio of a glorified Madonna
with a St. Sebastian and other figures, at Dresden, is instantly
surprised by the light of the glory, which has all the splendour of a
sun, though painted with a low-toned yellow, and dim at the
extremities."

Opere di R. Mengs, t. ii. p. 161.

[38] John, called da Bologna, showed a model to Michael Angelo smoothly
polished; Michael Angelo took, and, heedless of its finish, twisted it
about; then giving it back to the student, "Learn," said he, "to sketch
before you attempt to finish."

[39] Such was the proud answer of Frà Sebastian del Piombo, grown fat by
the signet of St. Peter, when asked why he had entirely resigned all
exercise of his art.

[40] Said Michael Angelo, when asked whether the copy of the Laocoon by
Baccio Bandinelli was not equal or superior to the original. Titiano,
with more mordacity though surely with less discrimination, ridiculed
the copyist by a caricature in which the Trojan with his sons were
changed to baboons.

[41] "Sineret se plebeculam pascere," said Vespasian to the artist who
had contrived a machine to convey some large columns with a trifling
expense to the Capitol, and rewarded him without accepting his offer.

[42] Cosmo Rosselli, one of the Tuscan painters who preceded Michael
Angelo in decorating the Chapel of Sixtus IV.

[43] This is the Madonna painted for Angelo Doni, now in the Tribuna of
Florence, and probably the only existing oil-picture of Michael Angelo,
though Lanzi rejects its title to that. Vasari mentions it with his
usual extravagance of praise, but appears ignorant of the real meaning
of the figures.




A HISTORY OF ART IN THE SCHOOLS OF ITALY.




THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.


The analogy of style observable in the figures impressed on Tuscan coins
of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth century, and those found in the
miniatures that decorate the manuscripts of the contemporary periods,
proves that Tuscany had its artists long before the epoch which Vasari
and his copyists fix for the importation of Greek art with Greek
artists: whether those paintings be all pure Tuscan, or here and there
interspersed with Greek ones, none will venture to decide, who knows the
impossibility of drawing a limitary line sufficiently severe to
distinguish the last spasms of an expiring art from the first
stammerings of an infant one. Of the still surviving monuments of
painting during those epochs, it may be sufficient to mention the famed
Christ, painted on canvass and glued to a wooden cross, of a date
anterior to 1003.

In subsequent times, the earliest and least unsuccessful essays in art,
were made by the Pisano. Whilst a Greek sarcophagus at Pisa, storied
with the incidents of Hippolytus and Phædra, furnished some elements of
form to the sculptors Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, painting made some
progress with Giunta Pisano: his composition of Christ on the Cross at
the Angeli of Assisi, though defective in design, possesses life and
expression.[44]

A similar progress was made by his contemporary Guido or Guidone of
Sienna; a name not mentioned by Vasari, though in his frequent
excursions to Sienna, he could not remain unacquainted with the works of
Guido, at least one which still exists in the chapel of the Malevolti
in S. Dominico, with the following often repeated inscription and
date:--

    Me Guido de senis diebus depinxit amenis
    Quem Christus lenis nullis velit agere penis.
          A.D. M.CCXXI.

This Madonna, twenty years anterior to the birth of Cimabue, is superior
to his Madonna in expression, and nearly equal in taste and colour,
though inferior in style.

Duccio di Boninsegna, probably of his school, was celebrated as the
restorer of that inlaid kind of Mosaic, called "Lavoro di Commesso." His
works are from 1275, the year in which he received a commission for
Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, to 1311, the period at which he was
employed in the Domo of Sienna. If these dates be genuine, he can
scarcely have lived till 1357, the year at which Fiorillo fixes his
death. It is not probable that he should have stretched his span beyond
a century, which must have been the case, if we suppose that he was
twenty at the time he painted in S. Maria Novella; it is not probable
that he should have chosen, or been suffered, to remain idle with the
celebrity he had acquired in the labours of the Domo; and it is still
less probable, that, if he was employed, what he produced in the
interval, between that period and his death, should have perished or
been destroyed, whilst we are still in possession of the paintings in
the Domo, which made nearly an epoch in art, at which he laboured three
years, for which he was paid upwards of 3000 scudi d'oro, the expense of
gilding and ultramarine included. That part of it which faced the
audience, represented in large figures the Madonna and various saints;
that which fronted the choir, divided into many compartments, exhibited
numerous compositions of Gospel subjects in figures of small proportion;
it cannot be denied, that with all its copiousness, the whole savours
strongly of the Greek manner.

Andrea Taffi, born 1213, the scholar of Apollonius, a Greek painter, and
his assistant in some mosaics at S. Giovanni of Florence, is not
mentioned out of that line by Vasari and Baldinucci: but the discovery
of a picture with his name by Ignazio Stugford adds another legitimate
name to the predecessors of Cimabue.

Buonamico di Cristofano, or Buffalmacco, of facetious memory, was the
pupil of Taffi. His best works are lost, but from the remains it may be
suspected that he owes at least as much to the tales of Boccaccio and
Sacchetti, for the preservation of his name, as to his own powers. There
still exists in Campo Santo at Pisa, a fresco of the Creation with a God
Father five ells high, supporting Heaven and the elements; and three
other stories of Adam, Noah and his Sons; a Crucifix, a Resurrection,
and an Ascension. We must not look here for much symmetry of design or
Giottesque elegance; his heads have little variety, and less beauty;
sameness of features, a vulgar cast, and a gaping deformity of mouth,
characterize his women; but now and then attention rests on the vivacity
or physiognomy of some male countenance, especially that of Cain.
Sometimes he snatches some movement from nature, such as that of the
terrified man who flies from Calvary: he overflows in particoloured
drapery, and delights in laboured ornaments of flowers and lace. A St.
John the Baptist of his, yet existing, deserves to be mentioned as an
instance of the utility of comparing works in painting and sculpture
with contemporary coins, in order to ascertain their dates; for the
same figure is exactly repeated on the Florentine scudo d'oro of that
age. A jocular host of artists, scholars of this school, we pass over,
as more important to the reader of the Decamerone and the Novelle, than
to the student of art.

Lucca, about 1235, possessed Bonaventura Berlingieri, whose St. Francis
still exists in the castle of Guiglia, near Modena, and is described as
a work of considerable merit for its time: Margaritone of Arezzo, a
pupil and follower of the Greeks, appears to have been several years
anterior to Cimabue. He painted on canvass, and was the first, according
to Vasari, who found the method of giving a more solid texture to
pictures. Some crucifix of his is still seen at Arezzo, and another at
Santa Croce in Florence, facing one of Cimabue. The style of both is
antiquated, but not so different in merit to make us refuse a painter's
name to Margaritone if we grant it to Cimabue.

Giovanni Cimabue,[45] of noble lineage, was an architect and painter. He
is considered as the father of Italian art, because with him legitimate
history and a less interrupted series of dates, begin; because he
succeeded better than his predecessors in disentangling himself from the
shackles of Greek barbarity, and chiefly because he discovered and
called forth the genius of Giotto. Vasari may be right in making him the
scholar of those Greeks whom the Florentine Government had employed to
paint the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but he errs in placing them in
the Chapel Gondi, which, with the body of the church, was not erected
till the subsequent century; he should have assigned them another chapel
under the church, where time has discovered some vestiges of ancient
painting. It seems, however, more probable, that Giunta Pisano gave
Cimabue instruction, if it be ascertained, as Fiorillo asserts, that he
worked in the great church of Assisi, 1253, when he was in his
thirteenth year, and Giunta superintended the decorations of that
fabric.

The pompous visit which Charles of Anjou paid to Cimabue in passing
through Florence, sufficiently proves the celebrity he enjoyed, if it
has not been sanctioned by the authority of Dante, who calls him the
unrivalled champion of his day. Cimabue was then painting the Madonna
with the Infant adored by six angels; the picture when finished was
carried in procession from Borgo Allegro to Santa Maria Novella, and
placed in the Chapel Rucellai, where it still exists. The heraldic
arrangement of the figures, their physiognomic monotony, the exility of
the detail and barbarous execution, contrast strangely with the
elevation and novelty of the artist's conception. Cimabue lost the
female and the mother in the Queen of Heaven. Insensible to the
blandishments of beauty, fierce like the age in which he lived, he
excelled in male, especially aged characters; these he impressed with
something of a stern grandeur, not often surpassed since. Vast and
comprehensive in his ideas, he seized on subjects of numerous
composition, and expressed them in large proportions; those features of
prophetic grandeur which surprise in his frescoes at the Dominicans and
Santa Trinità of Florence, are still excelled by the features which he
displayed in the upper church of Assisi--meteors of the age in which he
lived. They still exist, nor is it easily conceived how works of so
different style, against the testimony of Vasari, and the uniform
tradition of five centuries, could, as they were of late, be ascribed
to the more regulated hand and gentler spirit of Giotto.

Giotto's year of birth has been disputed; Vasari fixes it to 1276,
Baldinucci to 1265. He was the son of a cottager at Vespignano, and bred
to be a shepherd; but, a painter born, he amused himself from infancy
with attempts to draw whatever object struck his fancy. A sheep which he
had copied on a flat stone caught the eye of Cimabue, who was in the
neighbourhood, happened to pass by, demanded him of his father, and
carried him to Florence to instruct him; but he soon rivalled, and in a
short time eclipsed his master by a grace and an amenity of execution
which remained unequalled to the time of Masaccio.

For the rapidity of this progress, unless we were to ascribe it to
inspiration, we must account from the happy coincidence of external
advantages with the genius of the man. A period so obscure, admits of
little more than conjecture, but there is no improbability in supposing
that Giotto outstripped his master and the times by the same means which
rendered Michael Agnolo so soon superior to Ghirlandaio,--modelling
and the study of the antique. We know that he was a sculptor, and that
his models still existed in the time of Lorenzo Ghiberti. Good originals
he could find among the fragments of antiquity discovered before his
time, and scattered over Florence and Rome: from what other source could
he derive the character of his male heads, and that squareness of form
so different from the exility and indecision of all contemporary styles?
The few majestic natural folds of his draperies, and the composure and
unaffected air of his figures, breathe the spirit of the antique. His
very defects are the consequences of such a study. His manner has been
charged with a kind of _statuine_ precision (del statuino), unknown to
other schools, and unknown to artists who do not form themselves on the
antique.

If to these conjectures it be objected, that the want of uniformity,
dryness of design, extremities either faulty or hid under a preposterous
length of drapery, rather betray a nurseling of Pisa than a pupil of the
ancients; it ought to be considered that uniformity is the result of
settled principles; that he who had to remove the rubbish could not be
expected to give the polish; that he who had to teach eyes to look,
hands to move, and feet to stand, could not be supposed to make them do
it with all the correctness, propriety or elegance, they were capable
of; that a certain gymnophobia equally attends the infancy and the
decrepitude of taste, and that the approbation of a public and an
artist's flattery are always reciprocal.

And no artist commanded more of public favour than Giotto. Legislator of
taste, not in Tuscany alone, but at Rome, Naples, Bologna, and the
Venetian State, he excelled his master as much in celebrity as he had
excelled him in grace and method. How soon he did this may be seen on
comparing his earliest works at Assisi with those of his master in the
same place. Genuine elements of composition, expressions inspired by
Nature, accuracy of design, progressively appear. It is no hyperbole to
affirm, that in certain characters no artist ever went nearer the source
of expression than Giotto, and that in the maiden airs of untainted
virginity none ever excelled, and perhaps, Raphael and Domenichino
excepted, few ever approached him.

Though not the inventor, Giotto was the restorer of portrait-painting;
resemblance, with character of face and attitude, date from him. He gave
us Dante, Brunetto Latini, Corso Donato, &c. Mosaic was improved by him,
and his powers in it shown by the celebrated Navicella, or boat of Saint
Peter, in the portico of the Basilica at Rome; though restoration has
transformed it to a work of shreds and patches, and reduced his claim on
it to the mere name. Missal painting likewise owes him some gratitude;
and in architecture the grand steeple of the Domo at Florence is the
work of Giotto.

Implicit imitation checks progress; the numerous school of Giotto were
for the greater part content to walk behind their master. Taddeo Gaddi,
the most familiar and most favoured of his pupils, is said by Vasari,
whom time still suffered to judge with some competence, to have excelled
him in colouring and mellowness. The works of Taddeo in Sta. Croce
are inferior in originality and execution to his compositions in the
Capitolo degli Spagnuoli, where, in the ceiling, he represented some
Gospel subjects, and in the Cenacolo the Descent of the Holy Spirit, one
of the beautiful relics of the fourteenth century. On the sides he
painted the Sciences, with their most eminent professors under each, no
unfair specimen of poetic conception; here is what remains of vivacity
and brightness in his tints. Taddeo outlived the period assigned him by
Vasari; we find him mentioned as late as 1352, which still might not be
the ultimate date of his life.

Another conspicuous name among his pupils is Stefano of Florence,
(Fiorentino,) whom Vasari, without hesitation, in every part of the art
prefers to his master. He was the son of one Catharina, a daughter of
Giotto; an ardent and inquisitive spirit, quick to discover and eager to
overcome difficulties; the first who ventured on foreshortening, and if
success did not fully second his efforts in that, it favoured him in
perspective, which he much improved, and in the attitudes, variety and
vivacity of heads. Landino fancied to compliment his memory by repeating
the silly epithet of "Scimia della Natura," "Ape of Nature," which, from
the resemblance of his portraits, was given him by the vulgar and the
dilettanti of his day. His works in Ara Cœli at Rome, at S. Spirito of
Florence, and elsewhere, perished, and nothing can safely be stamped
with his name, if it be not a Madonna in Campo Santo at Pisa, grander in
style than those of his master, but retouched.

Of Tommaso, his son and reputed scholar, a Pietà, which might be taken
for a work of Giotto, exists at S. Remigi of Florence; and still some
frescoes at Assisi. They entitle him to the surname of "Giottino," given
him by his fellow-citizens, who used to say that the spirit of Giotto
had passed into him and animated his hand.

Without embarrassing ourselves with conjectures on Ugolino da Sienna, we
pass to the more celebrated name of Simone Memmi, or Simon di Martino, a
native of the same place, the painter of Laura, and the friend of
Petrarca, who in two affected sonnets has transmitted him to posterity.
Whether Simone were the pupil of Maestro Mino as the Siennese, or of
Giotto as the Florentine writers pretend, is a point beyond decision: he
restored a picture of the first, and his style has some analogy to that
of the second, though with more suavity of colour, and more poetry of
conception. He was the first who dared to fill a spacious façade with
one composition without dividing it into compartments. Such is that in
the Capitolo degli Spagnuoli of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, where
Vasari discovered every beauty of his own time, and where, in the crowd
of introduced portraits, many have fancied, in spite of chronology, to
discover the portraits of Laura and her friend; whom probably he did not
become personally acquainted with till four years after the completion
of that work, 1336, when he was sent to the Pope at Avignon, became
familiar with Petrarca, painted Laura, and, strange to tell, reached the
expectation of the lover, who saw

    "Il lampegiar dell' angelico riso."

Miniature, though the last object of this work, was not the least of
Memmi's powers. Lanzi has noticed one which fronts a MS. Virgil with the
commentary of Servius, now in the Ambrosiana at Milan, but formerly
possessed by Petrarca, who probably dictated the subject, and added the
following lines:-

    Mantua Virgilium qui talia carmina finxit,
    Sena tulit Simonem digito qui talia pinxit.

The painting represents Virgil in a sitting attitude ready to write,
with his face turned upwards as invoking the Muse. Æneas, in martial
vest and attitude, stands before him, and pointing to his sword, alludes
to the subject of the Æneis, "Arma Virumque." A shepherd and a
husbandman, symbols of the Pastorals and Georgics, placed somewhat
lower, listen to the theme; whilst Servius draws a transparent curtain,
to denote his labours in unveiling the beauties and removing the
obscurities of the poet. In this miniature, the originality of
conception, the beauty and harmony of colour, the varied and appropriate
drapery, are, however, balanced by rudeness of design, vulgarity of
character, and deformed extremities.

It was a barbarous singularity of Simone, promiscuously to admit
different proportions on the same plane: to flank or cross figures of
natural size with figures a third less than nature.

Lippo, or Filippo Memmi, was the relative, scholar, and imitator, of
Simone: assisted by his designs, Lippo often executed works, which, had
he not marked them with his name, would be ascribed to the master: when
left to his own invention, he rose in nothing above mediocrity, but in
colour. Sometimes they were partners in the same picture, as in that at
S. Ansano di Castel Vecchio, at Sienna; sometimes the second finished
what the first began, as in some works at Ancona and Assisi; and at
Sienna there remains still something entirely executed by Lippo.

Simone co-operated in the works of S. Maria Novella with Taddeo Gaddi,
who, with his son, Angelo Gaddi, left a number of pupils, imitators
through him of Giotto, inferior to both, not much distinguished by
tradition, and less favoured by time. Of Jacopo di Casentino, the most
conspicuous, what vestiges remain in the church of Orsanmichele at
Florence, are in conformity with the style of Taddeo; barriers soon
overleaped by the vivid fancy of his scholar, Spinello the Aretine, whom
his own conception of a demon is said to have terrified into insanity
and death. His son, Parri Spinelli, with barbarous incongruities of
line, possessed exquisite colour; and his pupil, Lorenzo di Bicci, has
been compared to Vasari, for the number, dispatch, and opinion of his
works. Antonio, surnamed Veneziano, whether he were a Venetian or a
Florentine, is, against evidence of dates and style, supposed to have
been a pupil of Angelo Gaddi, and to have educated Paolo Uccello, the
first master of perspective, and Gherardo Starnina, an artist of gay
style, whose relics live still a chapel of Sta. Croce. They are
numbered among the last productions of Giotto's expiring epoch, and the
verge of the fourteenth century, in which we have still to mark, though
pupils of some other school, the family of Orcagna; Bernardo, a painter;
Jacopo, a sculptor; but chiefly Andrea, conspicuous for writing,
painting, sculpture, and architecture, in a degree little inferior to
Giotto himself. Architects date from him the abolition of the acute
angle and restoration of semicircular arches, as in the Loggia of the
Lanzi, which he likewise decorated with sculpture. Some, without
attention to time, have supposed him the pupil of Angelo Gaddi, but he
was probably trained to the art by his brother Bernardo, jointly with
whom he painted in the Capella Strozzi of Sta. Maria Novella, in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, and alone and better in Sta. Croce, Death,
Judgement, Paradise, and Hell, placing with Dantesque licence his
friends among the elect, his enemies with the damned.

The downfall of Pisa had raised Florence to the metropolis of Tuscany,
and the spirit of its citizens to render its appearance worthy of that
pre-eminence. Cosmo, styled the father of his country, who tuned the
public affairs, might with better right have been called the father of
distinguished talents: never was tyranny meditated on a less suspicious
plan, or approached by more popular means. The house of the Medici, in
the quaint Italian phrase, became the Lyceum of Philosophers, the
Arcadia of Poets, the Academy of Artists. Dello, Paolo, Masaccio, the
two Peselli, both the Lippi, Benozzo, Sandro, the Ghirlandai, were the
clients of the family, and emulated each other in their homage. Their
pictures, according to the usage of the age, full of portraits,
perpetually presented to the people likenesses of the Medici, and often
in the characters of the Magi royally robed, the sceptre firmly held in
the gripe of the Medici, to prepare the public eye gradually for what it
was soon to witness, the firm establishment of sovereignty in that
House. The competition of rival citizens, and still more the
wide-extended influence of religion, diffused Taste and beckoned Talent
to Florence as to its centre, from every part of Italy. At her call
Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Filarete, the Rossellini, Verrocchio
arose, and with their works spread the Elements of Art.

Poetry, that supplies the real features and materials of expression when
it inspires the thought, arrives at the full display of its powers long
before its sisters have disentangled themselves from the impediments of
infancy; and of these, Sculpture, whose aim is infinitely less complex,
raises the vigorous fabric of forms, whilst Painting is still impotently
struggling with the rudiments of line, perspective, keeping,
chiaroscuro, colour; which to unite in an equal degree has hitherto been
found above the lot of humanity. The imitators of Giotto were in this
state of struggle; they saw little in chiaroscuro, and less in
perspective and line; their figures still slip from their planes, their
fabrics have no true point of sight, their fore-shortenings depended
solely on the eye: Stefano dal Ponte rather saw than overcame; the rest
either avoided or palliated these difficulties. The Umbrian Pietro della
Francesca seems to have been the first who called geometry to the
assistance of painting, and taught by his works at Arezzo the
principles of perspective; Brunelleschi formed it into system for
architecture, and the mathematician Manetti roused the attention of
Paolo Uccello, who owes the perpetuity of his name nearly exclusively to
the study of that science. His immoderate attachment to perspective is
become proverbial;[46] and almost equalled his fondness for birds, from
which he got his surname. He applied it, from grounds and buildings, to
the human body, which he foreshortened with a skill unknown to his
predecessors: and some proofs of it still exist in the figures of God
and Noè among the chiaroscuroes in the chiostro of Sta. Maria
Novella, and in the equestrian colossus of Gio. Aguto (John Montacute),
which he painted in chiaroscuro of terra verde, and which is still in
the duomo. The art, since its revival, perhaps for the first time showed
that, if it had dared much, it had dared well: nor did he fall short of
it in the gigantic imagery of the House Vitali at Bologna; he was,
however, more employed in painting private furniture: the triumphs of
Petrarch on some small presses in the gallery of Florence are supposed
to come from his hand. That he was a master of expression, the instances
adduced by Vasari leave no doubt; and in describing the flying drapery
of some friar in the series of pictures relative to S. Benedetto, the
same writer tells us, that it served as a model to all succeeding
artists: to such powers, praise of variety is added by the truth and
diligence with which he copied trees, plants, birds and animals, and for
which some critic styles him the Bassano of the first epoch. In the
nearly general wreck of Paolo's works, it is difficult to form a
judgment of his technic character independent of tradition: but,
comparing what remains with what we are told, it is evident that he
reached from one extreme of the Art to the other; and that, if he was
blameable for frequently playing with a tool instead of using it,
mistaking an instrument of the Art for Art itself, and means for the end
of execution, he has been deprived by partiality of the praise due to
powers which he appears to have possessed in a degree unknown to the
times that preceded Masaccio.

Masolino da Panicale cultivated chiaroscuro: he was enabled to treat it
with more truth than his predecessors, by a long practice of modelling
under the tuition of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the master of design and grouping
in those days, but whose animation he did not attain. Starnina
instructed him in colour; and thus by uniting the characteristics of two
schools, he produced that new style, which, though still infected by
dryness and clogged by inelegance, possesses grandeur, union and
breadth: the proofs still remain in the chapel of S. Pietro al Carmine,
where, besides the Evangelists, he painted several subjects from the
story of that Apostle. The remaining ones, which he did not live to
finish, were some years afterward added by his scholar Tomaso Gisioli,
celebrated by the name of Masaccio from his careless way of living.

Historians, biographers, and poets, unite in dating a new period from
Masaccio. The compass of his mind led him to uniformity of pursuit, and
the introduction of style; he had formed his principles on the works of
Ghiberti and Donatello; perspective he had learnt of Brunelleschi, and
in an excursion to Rome, it is unreasonable to suppose that he did not
improve himself on the antique. Gentile da Fabriano and Vittore
Pisanello were then at Rome, and the high opinion which they are said to
have expressed of him[47] as the first painter of the age has been
recorded: it is, however, difficult to say on what that opinion could be
founded: they were too far advanced in life to see more of Masaccio than
his juvenile essays, perhaps such as the S. Anna in S. Ambrogio at
Florence, or what he painted in the chapel of St. Catherine, in the
church of St. Clemens of Rome, the figures of the ceiling excepted, all
retouched, and though fine works for the time, of doubtful authority,
and in no manner to be compared to the pictures del Carmine. Here appear
the virility of his powers and the legitimacy of his superior claim:
here the figures, however varied by attitude, pose or are foreshortened
with that truth and uniformity of success which the less established
principles of Paolo Uccello did not always reach. In expression,
sublimity distinguishes Donatello; he always aims at, and sometimes
succeeds in personifying a sentiment or a passion.[48] Masaccio, more
dramatic, poises expression by character and propriety; hence he has
been said, and truly said, to resemble Raffaello.

To be praised immoderately for what, with regard to judgment, deserved
it least, has, as of others, been likewise the lot of Masaccio: the
introduction and masterly execution of the man who, in the baptism of
St. Peter, appears to shiver with cold, is extolled by Vasari, and
makes, by the verdict of Lanzi, an epoch in art. Had the apostle
immersed the race of a Northern clime, a man frost-bitten, (_assiderando
di freddo_,) or impatient of cold, might have been admitted without
impropriety, but under an Asiatic sun he is worse than superfluous. This
either Masaccio did not consider, or if he did, fondly sacrificed
propriety to the expression of an incident, which, had it even been
admissible, had in itself less dignity, and incomparably less pathos,
than that of the sick monk on whose eyes and lips the hope of recovery
seemed to tremble, introduced among the series of pictures from the life
of St. Benedict, by Paolo Uccello.[49]

A higher and more legitimate praise of Masaccio's expression is, that
Raffaello not only imitated its general character, but in the same or
similar subjects sometimes individually adopted it, as in the gesture of
Paul in the Cartoon of the Areopagus, and that of Adam dismissed from
Paradise, in the Loggia; and that, if he improved the taste and added
elegance to the Tuscan's drapery, he closely adhered to its principles,
simplicity, propriety, and breath.

Of Masaccio's colour, what remains possesses truth, variety, delicacy,
union, and great relief. He lived not to finish the whole of the Chapel,
some stories still remaining to be added in 1443, the reputed year of
his death,[50] which was not without suspicion of having been hastened
by poison. His other frescoes at Florence have been destroyed by time,
and perhaps no gallery can produce an authentic picture by his hand, if
we except the portrait of a youth in the Pitti palace, a work that
breathes life.

Ghiberti and Donatello had taught Masaccio to find style by selection
from nature; his followers for half a century, content to look at him
without adhering to his method, gradually shrunk back to the exility and
meagreness of the preceding age: without embarrassing ourselves with the
angelic prettinesses of Frà Giovanni da Fiesole, a name dearer to
sanctity than to art, and whom both his age and missal-taste prove the
nursling of another school, we pass to Benozzo Gozzoli, his pupil, who
strove to forget his puny lessons in the bolder dictates of Masaccio.

That he could not soon do it, is evident from the profusion of
ornamental glitter and tinsel colouring in the frescoes of the Chapel
Riccardi. He succeeded better at Pisa, where his Scripture stories cover
an entire wing of Campo Santo. This enormous enterprise, which, in the
phrase of Vasari might smite with fear a legion of painters,[51] he is
said to have completely achieved in two years. Everywhere inferior to
his model in composition, design, and expression, he often goes beyond
him in vastness and amenity of scenery, a certain play of ideas and
picturesque exuberance. After all, perhaps more than one hand shared in
the execution. Benozzo lived long, and lies buried near his work, where
public gratitude had placed his sepulchre, and inscribed it with an
eulogy.[52]

Filippo Lippi, a Carmelitan friar, studied and imitated the works of
Masaccio, especially in compositions of small proportion, with great
success. Suavity of conception and colour animates his angels and
Madonnas: in the large historic frescoes at Pieve di Prato, he
introduced proportions exceeding the natural size, praised as his
masterpieces by Vasari, who has related Lippi's escape from the convent;
his captivity among the Moors; the pictures which he painted at Naples,
Padoua, and elsewhere; his premature death by poison from the relatives
of the female by whom he had a natural son, Filippino Lippi. Frà Filippo
died at Spoleti, 1469, on the point of finishing his great work in the
dome, where Lorenzo de' Medici, who had demanded but not obtained his
ashes from the citizens, entombed them under a stately monument
inscribed by Angelo Poliziano. His scholars and imitators were F.
Diamante of Prato, the partner of his last work; F. Pesello of Florence,
and Pesellino his son, whom, if we believe Vasari, shortness of life
alone intercepted from superior excellence.

About this period the first attempts of painting in oil were made at
Florence, by Andrea dal Castagno, of detested memory, who had improved
himself by looking at Masaccio. Domenico, called Veneziano, to whom
Antonello of Messina had communicated the novel mystery of Johan Van
Eyk, after practising it with success at home, Loretto, and other parts
of the Papal State, came to exercise it at Florence: caressed and
encouraged, he excited the envy and cupidity of Castagno, who under the
mask of submissive attachment, wheedled himself into his confidence,
obtained the secret, and then assassinated the hapless donor. The
treacherous but complete acquisition added lustre to his practice during
life, but time has swept the sacrilegious produce of his hand, and left
nothing to the memory of "Andrea degli Impiccati," but the execration of
posterity.[53]

The farther we leave Masaccio behind, the nearer we approach the golden
epoch, the more lurid becomes the atmosphere of art. Mediocrity, tinsel
ostentation, and tasteless diligence mark the greater number of that
society of craftsmen whom Sixtus IV. conscribed (1474, Manni,) to
decorate or rather to disfigure the panels of the grand Chapel which
took its name from him (La Sistina): one of its sides was to be occupied
by subjects from the Pentateuch, the other by Gospel stories. Pietro
Perugino excepted, the artists convoked were nearly all Florentines or
Tuscans; viz. Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Bigordi, Cosimo Rosselli,
Luca, Signorelli of Cortona, and Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, with their
assistants. The superintendence of the whole the Pope, with the usual
vanity and ignorance of princes, gave to Sandro, the least qualified of
the group, whose barbarous taste and dry minuteness palsied, or
assimilated with his own, the powers of his associates, and rendered the
whole a monument of puerile ostentation, and conceits unworthy of its
place. Nor is it from what there remains of either, that the names of
Luca Signorelli and Domenico Bigordi claim that attention which history
owes to the first as the real precursor of Michael Angelo, and to the
second as the master of his rudiments.

Luca Egidio Signorelli, of Cortona,[54] less to be considered as the
reviver of Masaccio's style than as the founder of that which
distinguished the succeeding epoch, might have led its banners, as his
life stretched beyond that of Raphael and Lionardo, had his principle
been more uniform. The greater part of his works exhibit the evident
struggle of his own perceptions with the prescriptive ones of his time,
and a kind of coalition between the barbarity of the expiring and the
emancipated taste of the rising æra. The best evidence of this is in the
Duomo of Orvieto, where in the mixed imagery of final dissolution and
infernal punishment, he has scattered ideas of original conception,
character and attitude, in copious variety, but not without numerous
remnants of Gothic alloy. The angels who announce the impending doom or
scatter plagues, exhibit with awful simplicity bold foreshortenings,
whilst the St. Michael presents only the tame heraldic figure and
attitude of a knight all cased in armour. In the expression of the
condemned groups and dæmons, he chiefly dwells on the supposed perpetual
renewal of the pangs attending on the last struggles of life with death,
contrasted with the inexorable scowl or malignant grin of fiends
methodizing torture: a horrid feature reserved by Dante for the last pit
of his Inferno, and far beyond the culinary abominations of Sandro
Botticelli.[55]

Though Luca's style of design was no more that of Masaccio than Michael
Agnolo's that of Raphael, less characteristic than grand, and fit to be
the vehicle of those conceptions and attitudes which furnished hints of
imitation to the painter of the Last Judgement in the Sistina, yet he
was master of a grace in celestial scenery and angelic attitudes
unapproached by his contemporaries, seldom equalled and never surpassed
by his successors.

Luca Signorelli was a painter of much popularity. Urbino, Volterra,
Florence, Rome, his native and many other towns, possess or possessed
works of his. He was related to the family of the Vasari of Arezzo, and
caressed and encouraged to the art his infant biographer.[56]

Another of the artists employed in the Sistina, inferior to Luca, but
of no despicable (though, if we look at Masaccio, too highly rated)
powers, was Domenico Bigordi, commonly called Del Ghirlandajo;[57] this
is he under whose auspices not only his son Ridolfo, but even Bonaroti
and the best artists of the succeeding epoch, began their course.
Precision of outline, decorum of countenance, variety of ideas, facility
and diligence, distinguish his works. He is the first of Florentines,
who gave depth and keeping to composition: if gold and tinsel glitter
are not entirely banished from his colours, they appear at least less
often. He was fond of introducing portraits among his actors, but with
selection and of distinguished characters; though hands and feet had no
part in his attention to physiognomy. The churches Degli Innocenti,
Santa Trinità, and Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, possess his most
celebrated productions, and many are scattered over Tuscany and the
Ecclesiastic State. Of the two which he painted in the Sistina, the
Resurrection of Christ perished; the Vocation of Peter and Andrew to the
Apostolate Survives.

Cosimo Rosselli and Pier di Cosimo likewise employed at the Sistina,
inferior in all essential parts to their competitors, owe the perpetuity
of their names less to their parti-coloured glare and immoderate display
of gold and azure, which attracted the vulgar eye of their employer the
Pope, than to the luck of having been the masters of Bartolomeo della
Porta, and Andrea del Sarto.

Piero and Antonio Pollajuoli, though employed only as statuaries in the
same Chapel, possessed no inconsiderable powers as painters. Piero's
pictures at S. Miniato discover the scholar of Castagno, austere
countenances and deep and massy colour; but in novelty of composition
and design he yields to his brother and pupil Antonio, whose Martyrdom
of St. Sebastian in the Chapel Pucci of that church, though humble in
style, crude in colour, and oddly rather than originally conceived, has
been numbered with the first productions of the age, because with the
earliest traces of legitimate anatomy it exhibits its application, and
subordinates enumeration to function. Both the Pollajuoli died at Rome.

Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, having nothing to add of his own to the works
of the Sistina, is mentioned here only as the helper of Luca Signorelli
and Pietro Perugino; nor is Filippino Lippi, the natural son of Frà
Filippo, numbered among the companions of Sandro his master, though the
perpetual recurrence of antique customs and dresses in his works makes
it probable that he formed his juvenile studies at Rome. Inferior in
real capacity to his father, he may be praised rather for the accessory
than the substantial parts of his works: he filled with an unequal hand
the remaining panels left by Masaccio al Carmine; and in the Minerva at
Rome, yields the palm in expression and amenity of ideas to his own
scholar Raffaelino del Garbo, whose early works at Monte Oliveto of
Florence, and elsewhere, give sufficient evidence that he might have
raised himself to the first artists of his day, had not the cravings of
a numerous family crushed his powers, and poverty and dejection hastened
his death. His contemporary Andrea Verocchio, though a celebrated
statuary, and a designer of style, has deserved our notice as a
painter, only because he was the master of Lionardo da Vinci, the first
name in the annals of Tuscany's golden epoch.

Vinci, a burgh of Lower Valdarno, had the honour of giving a surname to
Lionardo, the natural son[58] of one Ser Piero, a state notary at
Florence. Elevated by nature above the common standard of men, born to
discover, he joined to boundless inquiry intrepidity of pursuit, and
lofty conception to minute investigation, nor only in the arts connected
with his own, music and poesy, but in science, philosophy, mathematics,
mechanics, hydrostatics: this wide mental range, supported by equal
vigour and gracefulness of body, was commended by every accomplishment
of a gentleman. Such was the genius whom Nature had destined to
establish art on elements, to open the realms of light and shade, to
inspire the subject with its tone, and to poise expression between
insipidity and caricature.

Notwithstanding the distractions of so many diverging inclinations, for
powers they could not yet be called, an innate attachment to the art
appears to have predominated at the earliest period to such a degree
that Ser Piero determined to place Lionardo under his friend Verocchio,
whom he soon excelled in painting,[59] and in modelling equalled.

The obscurity which involves the life of Lionardo from his boyish years,
through the bloom of youth, to the vigour of manhood, can only be
accounted for by that independence of mind which made him prefer
indulgence of his own various inclinations to a decided, steady, and if
more confined, more lucrative pursuit of art. By what means he, whom
Vasari describes as possessing "nothing,"[60] was enabled to gratify
studies and fancies equally expensive, no where appears; it appears not
that he was patronized by the great and rich; he escaped the eye of the
Medici;[61] it was reserved for Lodovico Sforza to discover and to
conduct the first citizen of Florence to Milano, and for aught we are
told, rather from expectation of amusement than motives of homage.
Lodovico was a dilettante in music, and wished to increase the harmony
of his concerts with the silver tones of the lyre, invented and
constructed by Lionardo, who, we are told, soon distanced all rival
performers, and by the aid of his powers as an "Improvisatore," became
the object of general admiration: it was then, and perhaps not till
then, that the Duke cast a steadier eye on his superior accomplishments,
and allowed the musician to become a benefactor to the public in
adopting his plans for the establishment and direction of an academy;
and granting the means for carrying into effect the still more important
ones of conducting the Adda to Milano, and a navigable canal from
Martisana to Chiavenna, and the Valteline, &c. plans and effects only
interrupted by the fall of the Sforzas and the captivity of Lodovico.

FOOTNOTES:

[44] This picture has been confounded with another of the same subject
by the same master, and the addition of the Donor's portrait, Frate
Elia, which exists no more. The mutilated inscription on that mentioned
above, has been thus restored by Lanzi,

    JuNTA PISanus
    JunTINI Me fecit.


[45] Born 1240, died 1300.

[46] "Oh che dolce cosa è questa prospettiva!" Oh what a dulcet thing is
this perspective! This exclamation, usual with Paolo nodding over his
compasses when his wife called him to bed, though too late to furnish
the hint of a Novel to Boccaccio, has been fondly repeated by some grave
writers from Vasari to the author of Lorenzo de' Medici, and has
contributed to place Paolo, with the mystic help of his surname, in
rather a ludicrous light.

[47] Maffei's Verona Illustrata, t. iii. p. 277.

[48] He was the precursor of Michael Agnolo, and deserved the motto by
which Borghini marked some of their designs in the portfolio of Vasari,
(Vita di Donato.) viz.

    Ἠ Δωνατος Βοναρρωτιζει,
    Ἠ Βοναρρωτος Δωνατιζει.


[49] "Vi è un monacho vecchio con due grucce sotto le braccia, nel qual
si vide un affetto mirabile, e forse speranza di riaver la
sanità."--Vasari, Vita di P. Uccello, t. ii. p. 56.

[50] Born in 1401.

[51] "Opera Terribilissima--impresa chi arebbe giustamente fatto paura a
una legione di pittori." On the whole, Vasari seems to lay more stress
on the quantity than the quality of Benozzo's works.

[52] 1478.

[53] 1478, when by the conspiracy of the Pazzi and their adherents,
Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated in S. Maria del Fiore, and his
brother Lorenzo wounded, it was resolved by the Signoria that paintings
of the conspirators, hung by their feet, should be exposed in front of
the Governor's palace; and the commission being given to Andrea, he
executed it with such felicity of resemblance, such variety of hanging
attitudes, and so much to the contentment of connoisseurs, that from
that instant he lost the name of Andrea dal Castagno in that of "Andrea
degli Impiccati," or of the hanged.--_Vasari._ Of this exhibition the
loss may be regretted, as it would have showed us Andrea in his element.

[54] 1439-40--1521.

[55] There is to the old edition in folio, of Dante, by Niccolo della
Magna, a print of the Inferno annexed, which bears the name of Sandro
Botticelli; Vasari in his Life says, that he commented a part of Dante
and figured his Inferno and published it.

[56] He was the nephew of Lazzaro Vasari, a helper of Pietro della
Francesca, and great uncle of Giorgio the biographer; who in the Life of
Luca, with not less fondness than vanity, relates the admonition and
encouragement he gave to his father and himself, in a visit which he
paid in his old age to their family at Arezzo.--Vita di L. Signorelli,
t. iii. p. 9.

[57] His father, who was a goldsmith, invented and first manufactured
the garlands which were at that time the fashionable head-dress of the
Florentine girls.--Vasari, Vita di D. Ghirlandajo, vol. ii. p. 410.

[58] Among the uncertainties of dates, those relative to the birth of
illegitimate children, for obvious reasons the most frequent, are the
most perplexing. The birth of Lionardo has been fixed at various dates,
viz. 1443; Lett. Pittor. t. ii. p. 192; 1445, according to the
computation of Vasari; 1455, by Dargenville; 1467, by Padre Resta; with
more probability 1444, by D.V. Pagave of Milano, followed by Fiorillo;
but with most at 1452, by Durazzini, adopted by Lanzi. It seems
improbable that Verocchio, the friend of Ser Piero, should have been
only twelve years older than his pupil. Lionardo died in 1519.

[59] In the figure of the Angel, conceived and executed by him, in the
Baptism of the Saviour, at St. Salvi, which excelled the work of
Verocchio so much, that indignant to be outdone by a boy, he dropped the
pencil, and for ever abandoned painting. The statues of St. Thomas, in
Orsanmichele at Florence, and of the Horse of Collevere at Venice, prove
that Verocchio's real talent was sculpture: but the models of the three
statues cast in bronze, by Rustici, for S. Giov. at Florence, and that
of the great horse at Milano, place the pupil at least upon a level with
the master in that branch of art.

[60] "E non avendo egli, si può dir nulla, e poco lavorando, del
continuo tenne servitori, e cavalli, &c." For all this it is the more
difficult to account, as an attempt to possess himself of the
philosopher's stone has never been mentioned among Lionardo's
eccentricities, though he was familiar with alchymists.

[61] Lorenzo de' Medici occurs not in the Life of Lionardo, and his
acquaintance with Leo X. and Giuliano de' Medici relates to the latter
periods of it.




THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.


We are now arrived at the epoch which forms the distinctive character of
the Tuscan school, the epoch of Michael Agnolo. In placing him here,
chronology has been less attended to than the spirit of works; for Frà
Bartolomeo, Andrea del Sarto, and others, his contemporaries or juniors,
belong more properly to the period of Lionardo than his; the elements of
which he gave in the Cartoon of Pisa, and the consummation in the
Capella Sistina, on which his school and the imitation of his style were
founded; and to which the politics of his time, the splendid oligarchy
of the Medici, and the fierce republican spirit of their opponents, gave
an energy and produced efforts, unknown to society in repose.

Notwithstanding the insinuating arts by which the Medici had debauched
public affection, and that undermining power which at last changed
influence to tyranny, they were in less than a century[62] three times
exiled from their country. The first, the banishment of Cosmo, called
the Father of his Country, lasted not above one year, and drew no
consequences; for the interval between it and the next (1494) was marked
with uniform success, and its last twenty years[63] with the splendid
administration and the extended patronage of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
His Garden near the church of S. Marco, which he opened as a repository
and a school of art, has been little less celebrated than the Hesperian
ones of old: it contained, if not all that had been discovered, what
could be purchased of antique statues, basso-relievoes, and fragments of
every kind; and the apartments were hung with pictures, cartoons, and
designs of Donatello, Brunellesco, Paolo Uccello. Frà Giovanni da
Fiesole, Masaccio, &c.; here the student was not only instructed, but,
by the magnificence of the founder, supported; and it may without
exaggeration be asserted, that whatever rose to eminence in the art at
that period, was the offspring of Lorenzo's garden.

His death was followed by the expulsion of his sons, Pietro, Giovanni,
afterwards Leo X., and Julian, in the sequel Duke of Nemours. An
immediate anarchy succeeded the expulsion; the populace broke into their
houses, destroyed or carried off their furniture, and demolished the
residence of Giovanni, the garden of Lorenzo, and the palace on the Via
Larga,[64] at once. The numerous partisans of the family, however,
contrived to save much.[65]

Other circumstances conspired to render this interval of anarchy
pernicious to art, till the return of the Medici in 1512. Towards the
close of the fifteenth century, the Dominican Frà Girolamo Savonarola,
of enthusiastic memory, by prophecies and sermons, loaded with
democratic principles, gained gradually such an ascendancy over the
minds of the people, that the Signoria found themselves forced to adopt
a senate at large; in other words, to submit to a democracy. But
Savonarola, not content with political victory, aimed at a total
revolution in morals, and continued to lash the profligacy of public
manners, overflowing in voluptuous song and music, or gazing at the
lascivious nudities of statues and pictures, as irresistible incentives
to vice. It had been customary during carnival, to erect certain cabins
in the market-place, to set them on fire on the eve of Ash-Wednesday,
and bid them farewell amid the shouts of convivial mirth and the frolic
of amorous dalliance. Savonarola instituted in 1497 a public festival of
another kind: a large scaffold was erected in the market-place, a vast
number of the finest specimens in painting and sculpture, offensive from
their nudities, were collected; the pictures placed on the first step;
the sculptures, especially when portraits of first-rate Florentine
belles, disposed on the second; the whole inclosed by foreign precious
tapestry, and that, with great solemnity, set on fire. The scaffolding
of the next year excelled the first in magnificence; its gorgeous
apparel invested the busts of the most celebrated beauties of former
years; those of the Bencina, Lena Morella, Bina and Maria de'Lenzi,
works of the most eminent sculptors; on it was placed a copy of
Petrarca, decorated with gold, missal-painting, and miniatures,
estimated at fifty scudi d'oro

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