Chapter VI: Part 6

198. Lastly. The Greeks have not, it appears, in any supreme way, given to their statues character, beauty, or divine strength. Can they give divine sadness? Shall we find in their art-work any of that pensiveness and yearning for the dead which fills the chants of their tragedy? I suppose, if anything like nearness or firmness of faith in after-life is to be found in Greek legend, you might look for it in the stories about the Island of Leuce, at the mouth of the Danube, inhabited by the ghosts of Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax the son of Oileus, and Helen; and in which the pavement of the Temple of Achilles was washed daily by the sea-birds with their wings, dipping them in the sea.

Now it happens that we have actually on a coin of the Locrians the representation of the ghost of the Lesser Ajax. There is nothing in the history of human imagination more lovely than their leaving always a place for his spirit, vacant in their ranks of battle. But here is their sculptural representation of the phantom, (lower figure, Plate XIX.); and I think you will at once agree with me in feeling that it would be impossible to conceive anything more completely unspiritual. You might more than doubt that it could have been meant for the departed soul, unless you were aware of the meaning of this little circlet between the feet. On other coins you find his name inscribed there, but in this you have his habitation, the haunted Island of Leuce itself, with the waves flowing round it.

ZEUS OF MESSENE.

AJAX OF OPUS.]

199. Again and again, however, I have to remind you, with respect to these apparently frank and simple failures, that the Greek always intends you to think for yourself, and understand, more than he can speak. Take this instance at our hands, the trim little circlet for the Island of Leuce. The workman knows very well it is not like the island, and that he could not make it so; that, at its best, his sculpture can be little more than a letter; and yet, in putting this circlet, and its encompassing fretwork of minute waves, he does more than if he had merely given you a letter L, or written 'Leuce.' If you know anything of beaches and sea, this symbol will set your imagination at work in recalling them; then you will think of the temple service of the novitiate sea-birds, and of the ghosts of Achilles and Patroclus appearing, like the Dioscuri, above the storm-clouds of the Euxine. And the artist, throughout his work, never for an instant loses faith in your sympathy and passion being ready to answer his;--if you have none to give, he does not care to take you into his counsel; on the whole, would rather that you should not look at his work.

200. But if you have this sympathy to give, you may be sure that whatever he does for you will be right, as far as he can render it so. It may not be sublime, nor beautiful, nor amusing; but it will be full of meaning, and faithful in guidance. He will give you clue to myriads of things that he cannot literally teach; and, so far as he does teach, you may trust him. Is not this saying much?

And as he strove only to teach what was true, so, in his sculptured symbol, he strove only to carve what was--Right. He rules over the arts to this day, and will forever, because he sought not first for beauty, not first for passion, or for invention, but for Rightness; striving to display, neither himself nor his art, but the thing that he dealt with, in its simplicity. That is his specific character as a Greek. Of course every nation's character is connected with that of others surrounding or preceding it; and in the best Greek work you will find some things that are still false, or fanciful; but whatever in it is false, or fanciful, is not the Greek part of it--it is the Phoenician, or Egyptian, or Pelasgian part. The essential Hellenic stamp is veracity:--Eastern nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with two;--Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and exalting themselves into restricted and demonstrable truth.

201. And now, having cut away the misconceptions which incumbered our thoughts, I shall be able to put the Greek school into some clearness of its position for you, with respect to the art of the world. That relation is strangely duplicate; for, on one side, Greek art is the root of all simplicity; and, on the other, of all complexity.

On one side, I say, it is the root of all simplicity. If you were for some prolonged period to study Greek sculpture exclusively in the Elgin room of the British Museum, and were then suddenly transported to the Hotel de Cluny, or any other museum of Gothic and barbarian workmanship, you would imagine the Greeks were the masters of all that was grand, simple, wise, and tenderly human, opposed to the pettiness of the toys of the rest of mankind.

GREEK AND BARBARIAN SCULPTURE.]

202. On one side of their work they are so. From all vain and mean decoration--all wreak and monstrous error, the Greeks rescue the forms of man and beast, and sculpture them in the nakedness of their true flesh, and with the fire of their living soul. Distinctively from other races, as I have now, perhaps to your weariness, told you, this is the work of the Greek, to give health to what was diseased, and chastisement to what was untrue. So far as this is found in any other school, hereafter, it belongs to them by inheritance from the Greeks, or invests them with the brotherhood of the Greek. And this is the deep meaning of the myth of Daedalus as the giver of motion to statues. The literal change from the binding together of the feet to their separation, and the other modifications of action which took place, either in progressive skill, or often, as the mere consequence of the transition from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides,) these literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at Branchidae sitting with their hands on their knees. And, briefly, the work of Daedalus is the giving of deceptive life, as that of Prometheus the giving of real life; and I can put the relation of Greek to all other art, in this function, before you, in easily compared and remembered examples.

203. Here, on the right, in Plate XX., is an Indian bull, colossal, and elaborately carved, which you may take as a sufficient type of the bad art of all the earth. False in form, dead in heart, and loaded with wealth, externally. We will not ask the date of this; it may rest in the eternal obscurity of evil art, everywhere, and forever. Now, beside this colossal bull, here is a bit of Daedalus-work, enlarged from a coin not bigger than a shilling: look at the two together, and you ought to know, henceforward, what Greek art means, to the end of your days.

204. In this aspect of it, then, I say it is the simplest and nakedest of lovely veracities. But it has another aspect, or rather another pole, for the opposition is diametric. As the simplest, so also it is the most complex of human art. I told you in my Fifth Lecture, showing you the spotty picture of Velasquez, that an essential Greek character is a liking for things that are dappled. And you cannot but have noticed how often and how prevalently the idea which gave its name to the Porch of Polygnotus, "[Greek: stoa poikile]," occurs to the Greeks as connected with the finest art. Thus, when the luxurious city is opposed to the simple and healthful one, in the second book of Plato's Polity, you find that, next to perfumes, pretty ladies, and dice, you must have in it "[Greek: poikilia]," which observe, both in that place and again in the third book, is the separate art of joiners' work, or inlaying; but the idea of exquisitely divided variegation or division, both in sight and sound--the "ravishing division to the lute," as in Pindar's "[Greek: poikiloi hymnoi]"--runs through the compass of all Greek art-description; and if, instead of studying that art among marbles, you were to look at it only on vases of a fine time, (look back, for instance, to Plate IV. here,) your impression of it would be, instead of breadth and simplicity, one of universal spottiness and checkeredness, "[Greek: en angeou Herkesin pampoikilois];" and of the artist's delighting in nothing so much as in crossed or starred or spotted things; which, in right places, he and his public both do unlimitedly. Indeed they hold it complimentary even to a trout, to call him a 'spotty.' Do you recollect the trout in the tributaries of the Ladon, which Pausanias says were spotted, so that they were like thrushes, and which, the Arcadians told him, could speak? In this last [Greek: poikilia], however, they disappointed him. "I, indeed, saw some of them caught," he says, "but I did not hear any of them speak, though I waited beside the river till sunset."

205. I must sum roughly now, for I have detained you too long.

The Greeks have been thus the origin, not only of all broad, mighty, and calm conception, but of all that is divided, delicate, and tremulous; "variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made." To them, as first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple, burnishings in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian roof,--quartering of the Christian shield,--rubric and arabesque of Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the Pisan Chapel of the Thorn.

THE BEGINNINGS OF CHIVALRY.]

And in their doing all this, they stand as masters of human order and justice, subduing the animal nature, guided by the spiritual one, as you see the Sicilian Charioteer stands, holding his horse-reins, with the wild lion racing beneath him, and the flying angel above, on the beautiful coin of early Syracuse; (lowest in Plate XXI.)

And the beginnings of Christian chivalry were in that Greek bridling of the dark and the white horses.

206. Not that a Greek never made mistakes. He made as many as we do ourselves, nearly;--he died of his mistakes at last--as we shall die of them; but so far as he was separated from the herd of more mistaken and more wretched nations--so far as he was Greek--it was by his rightness. He lived, and worked, and was satisfied with the fatness of his land, and the fame of his deeds, by his justice, and reason, and modesty. He became Graeculus esuriens, little, and hungry, and every man's errand-boy, by his iniquity, and his competition, and his love of talk. But his Graecism was in having done, at least at one period of his dominion, more than anybody else, what was modest, useful, and eternally true; and as a workman, he verily did, or first suggested the doing of, everything possible to man.

Take Daedalus, his great type of the practically executive craftsman, and the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Daedalus invents,--he, or his nephew,

The potter's wheel, and all work in clay;
The saw, and all work in wood;
The masts and sails of ships, and all modes of motion;
(wings only proving too dangerous!)
The entire art of minute ornament;
And the deceptive life of statues.

By his personal toil, he involves the fatal labyrinth for Minos; builds an impregnable fortress for the Agrigentines; adorns healing baths among the wild parsley-fields of Selinus; buttresses the precipices of Eryx, under the temple of Aphrodite; and for her temple itself--finishes in exquisiteness the golden honeycomb.

207. Take note of that last piece of his art: it is connected with many things which I must bring before you when we enter on the study of architecture. That study we shall begin at the foot of the Baptistery of Florence, which, of all buildings known to me, unites the most perfect symmetry with the quaintest [Greek: poikilia]. Then, from the tomb of your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division, interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons--reminiscences of the honeycomb of Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the noblest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But Daedalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him, by his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; and his seeking refuge, under blood-guiltiness, with Minos, who can judge evil, and measure, or remit, the penalty of it, but not reward good; Rhadamanthus only can measure _that_; but Minos is essentially the recognizer of evil deeds "conoscitor delle peccata," whom, therefore, you find in Dante under the form of the [Greek: erpeton]. "Cignesi con la coda tante volte, quantunque gradi vuol che giu sia messa."

And this peril of the influence of Daedalus is twofold; first, in leading us to delight in glitterings and semblances of things, more than in their form, or truth;--admire the harlequin's jacket more than the hero's strength; and love the gilding of the missal more than its words;--but farther, and worse, the ingenuity of Daedalus may even become bestial, an instinct for mechanical labor only, strangely involved with a feverish and ghastly cruelty:--(you will find this distinct in the intensely Daedal work of the Japanese); rebellious, finally, against the laws of nature and honor, and building labyrinths for monsters,--not combs for bees.

208. Gentlemen, we of the rough northern race may never, perhaps, be able to learn from the Greek his reverence for beauty; but we may at least learn his disdain of mechanism:--of all work which he felt to be monstrous and inhuman in its imprudent dexterities.

We hold ourselves, we English, to be good workmen. I do not think I speak with light reference to recent calamity, (for I myself lost a young relation, full of hope and good purpose, in the foundered ship _London_,) when I say that either an AEginetan or Ionian shipwright built ships that could be fought from, though they were under water; and neither of them would have been proud of having built one that would fill and sink helplessly if the sea washed over her deck, or turn upside-down if a squall struck her topsail.

Believe me, gentlemen, good workmanship consists in continence and common sense, more than in frantic expatiation of mechanical ingenuity; and if you would be continent and rational, you had better learn more of Art than you do now, and less of Engineering. What is taking place at this very hour,[40] among the streets, once so bright, and avenues, once so pleasant, of the fairest city in Europe, may surely lead us all to feel that the skill of Daedalus, set to build impregnable fortresses, is not so wisely applied as in framing the [Greek: treton ponon],--the golden honeycomb.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] The closing Lecture, on the religious temper of the Florentine, though necessary for the complete explanation of the subject to my class, at the time, introduced new points of inquiry which I do not choose to lay before the general reader until they can be examined in fuller sequence. The present volume, therefore, closes with the Sixth Lecture, and that on Christian art will be given as the first of the published course on Florentine Sculpture.

[38] These plates of coins are given for future reference and examination, not merely for the use made of them in this place. The Lacinian Hera, if a coin could be found unworn in surface, would be very noble; her hair is thrown free because she is the goddess of the cape of storms, though in her temple, there, the wind never moved the ashes on its altar. (Livy, xxiv. 3.)

[39] 'Ancient Cities and Kings,' Plate IV., No. 20.

[40] The siege of Paris, at the time of the delivery of this Lecture, was in one of its most destructive phases.

LECTURE VII.

THE RELATION BETWEEN MICHAEL ANGELO AND TINTORET.[41]

209. In preceding lectures on sculpture I have included references to the art of painting, so far as it proposes to itself the same object as sculpture, (idealization of form); and I have chosen for the subject of our closing inquiry, the works of the two masters who accomplished or implied the unity of these arts. Tintoret entirely conceives his figures as solid statues: sees them in his mind on every side; detaches each from the other by imagined air and light; and foreshortens, interposes, or involves them as if they were pieces of clay in his hand. On the contrary, Michael Angelo conceives his sculpture partly as if it were painted; and using (as I told you formerly) his pen like a chisel, uses also his chisel like a pencil; is sometimes as picturesque as Rembrandt, and sometimes as soft as Correggio.

It is of him chiefly that I shall speak to-day; both because it is part of my duty to the strangers here present to indicate for them some of the points of interest in the drawings forming part of the University collections; but still more, because I must not allow the second year of my professorship to close, without some statement of the mode in which those collections may be useful or dangerous to my pupils. They seem at present little likely to be either; for since I entered on my duties, no student has ever asked me a single question respecting these drawings, or, so far as I could see, taken the slightest interest in them.

210. There are several causes for this which might be obviated--there is one which cannot be. The collection, as exhibited at present, includes a number of copies which mimic in variously injurious ways the characters of Michael Angelo's own work; and the series, except as material for reference, can be of no practical service until these are withdrawn, and placed by themselves. It includes, besides, a number of original drawings which are indeed of value to any laborious student of Michael Angelo's life and temper; but which owe the greater part of this interest to their being executed in times of sickness or indolence, when the master, however strong, was failing in his purpose, and, however diligent, tired of his work. It will be enough to name, as an example of this class, the sheet of studies for the Medici tombs, No. 45, in which the lowest figure is, strictly speaking, neither a study nor a working drawing, but has either been scrawled in the feverish languor of exhaustion, which cannot escape its subject of thought; or, at best, in idly experimental addition of part to part, beginning with the head, and fitting muscle after muscle, and bone after bone, to it, thinking of their place only, not their proportion, till the head is only about one-twentieth part of the height of the body: finally, something between a face and a mask is blotted in the upper left-hand corner of the paper, indicative, in the weakness and frightfulness of it, simply of mental disorder from over-work; and there are several others of this kind, among even the better drawings of the collection, which ought never to be exhibited to the general public.

211. It would be easy, however, to separate these, with the acknowledged copies, from the rest; and, doing the same with the drawings of Raphael, among which a larger number are of true value, to form a connected series of deep interest to artists, in illustration of the incipient and experimental methods of design practiced by each master.

I say, to artists. Incipient methods of design are not, and ought not to be, subjects of earnest inquiry to other people; and although the re-arrangement of the drawings would materially increase the chance of their gaining due attention, there is a final and fatal reason for the want of interest in them displayed by the younger students;--namely, that these designs have nothing whatever to do with present life, with its passions, or with its religion. What their historic value is, and relation to the life of the past, I will endeavor, so far as time admits, to explain to-day.

212. The course of Art divides itself hitherto, among all nations of the world that have practiced it successfully, into three great periods.

The first, that in which their conscience is undeveloped, and their condition of life in many respects savage; but, nevertheless, in harmony with whatever conscience they possess. The most powerful tribes, in this stage of their intellect, usually live by rapine, and under the influence of vivid, but contracted, religious imagination. The early predatory activity of the Normans, and the confused minglings of religious subjects with scenes of hunting, war, and vile grotesque, in their first art, will sufficiently exemplify this state of a people; having, observe, their conscience undeveloped, but keeping their conduct in satisfied harmony with it.

The second stage is that of the formation of conscience by the discovery of the true laws of social order and personal virtue, coupled with sincere effort to live by such laws as they are discovered.

All the Arts advance steadily during this stage of national growth, and are lovely, even in their deficiencies, as the buds of flowers are lovely by their vital force, swift change, and continent beauty.

213. The third stage is that in which the conscience is entirely formed, and the nation, finding it painful to live in obedience to the precepts it has discovered, looks about to discover, also, a compromise for obedience to them. In this condition of mind its first endeavor is nearly always to make its religion pompous, and please the gods by giving them gifts and entertainments, in which it may piously and pleasurably share itself; so that a magnificent display of the powers of art it has gained by sincerity, takes place for a few years, and is then followed by their extinction, rapid and complete exactly in the degree in which the nation resigns itself to hypocrisy.

The works of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Tintoret belong to this period of compromise in the career of the greatest nation of the world; and are the most splendid efforts yet made by human creatures to maintain the dignity of states with beautiful colors, and defend the doctrines of theology with anatomical designs.

Farther, and as an universal principle, we have to remember that the Arts express not only the moral temper, but the scholarship, of their age; and we have thus to study them under the influence, at the same moment of, it may be, declining probity, and advancing science.

214. Now in this the Arts of Northern and Southern Europe stand exactly opposed. The Northern temper never accepts the Catholic faith with force such as it reached in Italy. Our sincerest thirteenth-century sculptor is cold and formal compared with that of the Pisani; nor can any Northern poet be set for an instant beside Dante, as an exponent of Catholic faith: on the contrary, the Northern temper accepts the scholarship of the Reformation with absolute sincerity, while the Italians seek refuge from it in the partly scientific and completely lascivious enthusiasms of literature and painting, renewed under classical influence. We therefore, in the north, produce our Shakspeare and Holbein; they their Petrarch and Raphael. And it is nearly impossible for you to study Shakspeare or Holbein too much, or Petrarch and Raphael too little.

I do not say this, observe, in opposition to the Catholic faith, or to any other faith, but only to the attempts to support whatsoever the faith may be, by ornament or eloquence, instead of action. Every man who honestly accepts, and acts upon, the knowledge granted to him by the circumstances of his time, has the faith which God intends him to have;--assuredly a good one, whatever the terms or form of it--every man who dishonestly refuses, or interestedly disobeys the knowledge open to him, holds a faith which God does not mean him to hold, and therefore a bad one, however beautiful or traditionally respectable.

215. Do not, therefore, I entreat you, think that I speak with any purpose of defending one system of theology against another; least of all, reformed against Catholic theology. There probably never was a system of religion so destructive to the loveliest arts and the loveliest virtues of men, as the modern Protestantism, which consists in an assured belief in the Divine forgiveness of all your sins, and the Divine correctness of all your opinions. But in the first searching and sincere activities, the doctrines of the Reformation produced the most instructive art, and the grandest literature, yet given to the world; while Italy, in her interested resistance to those doctrines, polluted and exhausted the arts she already possessed. Her iridescence of dying statesmanship--her magnificence of hollow piety,--were represented in the arts of Venice and Florence by two mighty men on either side--Titian and Tintoret,--Michael Angelo and Raphael. Of the calm and brave statesmanship, the modest and faithful religion, which had been her strength, I am content to name one chief representative artist at Venice, John Bellini.

216. Let me now map out for you roughly the chronological relations of these five men. It is impossible to remember the minor years, in dates; I will give you them broadly in decades, and you can add what finesse afterwards you like.

Recollect, first, the great year 1480. Twice four's eight--you can't mistake it. In that year Michael Angelo was five years old; Titian, three years old; Raphael, within three years of being born.

So see how easily it comes. Michael Angelo five years old--and you divide six between Titian and Raphael,--three on each side of your standard year, 1480.

Then add to 1480, forty years--an easy number to recollect, surely; and you get the exact year of Raphael's death, 1520.

In that forty years all the new effort and deadly catastrophe took place. 1480 to 1520.

Now, you have only to fasten to those forty years, the life of Bellini, who represents the best art before them, and of Tintoret, who represents the best art after them.

217. I cannot fit you these on with a quite comfortable exactness, but with very slight inexactness I can fit them firmly.

John Bellini was ninety years old when he died. He lived fifty years before the great forty of change, and he saw the forty, and died. Then Tintoret is born; lives eighty[42] years after the forty, and closes, in dying, the sixteenth century, and the great arts of the world.

Those are the dates, roughly; now for the facts connected with them.

John Bellini precedes the change, meets, and resists it victoriously to his death. Nothing of flaw or failure is ever to be discerned in him.

Then Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian, together, bring about the deadly change, playing into each other's hands--Michael Angelo being the chief captain in evil; Titian, in natural force.

Then Tintoret, himself alone nearly as strong as all the three, stands up for a last fight; for Venice, and the old time. He all but wins it at first; but the three together are too strong for him. Michael Angelo strikes him down; and the arts are ended. "Il disegno di Michael Agnolo." That fatal motto was his death-warrant.

218. And now, having massed out my subject, I can clearly sketch for you the changes that took place from Bellini, through Michael Angelo, to Tintoret.

The art of Bellini is centrally represented by two pictures at Venice: one, the Madonna in the Sacristy of the Frari, with two saints beside her, and two angels at her feet; the second, the Madonna with four Saints, over the second altar of San Zaccaria.

In the first of these, the figures are under life size, and it represents the most perfect kind of picture for rooms; in which, since it is intended to be seen close to the spectator, every right kind of finish possible to the hand may be wisely lavished; yet which is not a miniature, nor in any wise petty, or ignoble.

In the second, the figures are of life size, or a little more, and it represents the class of great pictures in which the boldest execution is used, but all brought to entire completion. These two, having every quality in balance, are as far as my present knowledge extends, and as far as I can trust my judgment, the two best pictures in the world.

219. Observe respecting them--

First, they are both wrought in entirely consistent and permanent material. The gold in them is represented by painting, not laid on with real gold. And the painting is so secure, that four hundred years have produced on it, so far as I can see, no harmful change whatsoever, of any kind.

Secondly, the figures in both are in perfect peace. No action takes place except that the little angels are playing on musical instruments, but with uninterrupted and effortless gesture, as in a dream. A choir of singing angels by La Robbia or Donatello would be intent on their music, or eagerly rapturous in it, as in temporary exertion: in the little choirs of cherubs by Luini in the Adoration of the Shepherds, in the Cathedral of Como, we even feel by their dutiful anxiety that there might be danger of a false note if they were less attentive. But Bellini's angels, even the youngest, sing as calmly as the Fates weave.

220. Let me at once point out to you that this calmness is the attribute of the entirely highest class of art: the introduction of strong or violently emotional incident is at once a confession of inferiority.

Those are the two first attributes of the best art. Faultless workmanship, and perfect serenity; a continuous, not momentary, action,--or entire inaction. You are to be interested in the living creatures; not in what is happening to them.

Then the third attribute of the best art is that it compels you to think of the spirit of the creature, and therefore of its face, more than of its body.

And the fourth is that in the face you shall be led to see only beauty or joy;--never vileness, vice, or pain.

Those are the four essentials of the greatest art. I repeat them, they are easily learned.

1. Faultless and permanent workmanship.

2. Serenity in state or action.

3. The Face principal, not the body.

4. And the Face free from either vice or pain.

221. It is not possible, of course, always literally to observe the second condition, that there shall be quiet action or none; but Bellini's treatment of violence in action you may see exemplified in a notable way in his St. Peter Martyr. The soldier is indeed striking the sword down into his breast; but in the face of the Saint is only resignation, and faintness of death, not pain--that of the executioner is impassive; and, while a painter of the later schools would have covered breast and sword with blood, Bellini allows no stain of it; but pleases himself by the most elaborate and exquisite painting of a soft crimson feather in the executioner's helmet.

222. Now the changes brought about by Michael Angelo--and permitted, or persisted in calamitously, by Tintoret--are in the four points these:

1st. Bad workmanship.

The greater part of all that these two men did is hastily and
incompletely done; and all that they did on a large scale in
color is in the best qualities of it perished.

2d. Violence of transitional action.

The figures flying,--falling,--striking,--or biting. Scenes of
Judgment,--battle,--martyrdom,--massacre; anything that is in
the acme of instantaneous interest and violent gesture. They
cannot any more trust their public to care for anything but
that.

3d. Physical instead of mental interest. The body, and its
anatomy, made the entire subject of interest: the face,
shadowed, as in the Duke Lorenzo,[43] unfinished, as in the
Twilight, or entirely foreshortened, backshortened, and
despised, among labyrinths of limbs, and mountains of sides and
shoulders.

4th. Evil chosen rather than good. On the face itself, instead
of joy or virtue, at the best, sadness, probably pride, often
sensuality, and always, by preference, vice or agony as the
subject of thought. In the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, and
the Last Judgment of Tintoret, it is the wrath of the Dies Irae,
not its justice, in which they delight; and their only
passionate thought of the coming of Christ in the clouds, is
that all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him.

Those are the four great changes wrought by Michael Angelo. I repeat them:

Ill work for good.
Tumult for Peace.
The Flesh of Man for his Spirit.
And the Curse of God for His blessing.

223. Hitherto, I have massed, necessarily, but most unjustly, Michael Angelo and Tintoret together, because of their common relation to the art of others. I shall now proceed to distinguish the qualities of their own. And first as to the general temper of the two men.

Nearly every existing work by Michael Angelo is an attempt to execute something beyond his power, coupled with a fevered desire that his power may be acknowledged. He is always matching himself either against the Greeks whom he cannot rival, or against rivals whom he cannot forget. He is proud, yet not proud enough to be at peace; melancholy, yet not deeply enough to be raised above petty pain; and strong beyond all his companion workmen, yet never strong enough to command his temper, or limit his aims.

Tintoret, on the contrary, works in the consciousness of supreme strength, which cannot be wounded by neglect, and is only to be thwarted by time and space. He knows precisely all that art can accomplish under given conditions; determines absolutely how much of what can be done he will himself for the moment choose to do; and fulfills his purpose with as much ease as if, through his human body, were working the great forces of nature. Not that he is ever satisfied with what he has done, as vulgar and feeble artists are satisfied. He falls short of his ideal, more than any other man; but not more than is necessary; and is content to fall short of it to that degree, as he is content that his figures, however well painted, do not move nor speak. He is also entirely unconcerned respecting the satisfaction of the public. He neither cares to display his strength to them, nor convey his ideas to them; when he finishes his work, it is because he is in the humor to do so; and the sketch which a meaner painter would have left incomplete to show how cleverly it was begun, Tintoret simply leaves because he has done as much of it as he likes.

224. Both Raphael and Michael Angelo are thus, in the most vital of all points, separate from the great Venetian. They are always in dramatic attitudes, and always appealing to the public for praise. They are the leading athletes in the gymnasium of the arts; and the crowd of the circus cannot take its eyes away from them, while the Venetian walks or rests with the simplicity of a wild animal; is scarcely noticed in his occasionally swifter motion; when he springs, it is to please himself; and so calmly, that no one thinks of estimating the distance covered.

I do not praise him wholly in this. I praise him only for the well-founded pride, infinitely nobler than Michael Angelo's. You do not hear of Tintoret's putting any one into hell because they had found fault with his work. Tintoret would as soon have thought of putting a dog into hell for laying his paws on it. But he is to be blamed in this--that he thinks as little of the pleasure of the public, as of their opinion. A great painter's business is to do what the public ask of him, in the way that shall be helpful and instructive to them. His relation to them is exactly that of a tutor to a child; he is not to defer to their judgment, but he is carefully to form it;--not to consult their pleasure for his own sake, but to consult it much for theirs. It was scarcely, however, possible that this should be the case between Tintoret and his Venetians; he could not paint for the people, and in some respects he was happily protected by his subordination to the Senate. Raphael and Michael Angelo lived in a world of court intrigue, in which it was impossible to escape petty irritation, or refuse themselves the pleasure of mean victory. But Tintoret and Titian, even at the height of their reputation, practically lived as craftsmen in their workshops, and sent in samples of their wares, not to be praised or caviled at, but to be either taken or refused.

225. I can clearly and adequately set before you these relations between the great painters of Venice and her Senate--relations which, in monetary matters, are entirely right and exemplary for all time--by reading to you two decrees of the Senate itself, and one petition to it. The first document shall be the decree of the Senate for giving help to John Bellini, in finishing the compartments of the great Council Chamber; granting him three assistants--one of them Victor Carpaccio.

The decree, first referring to some other business, closes in these terms:[44]

"There having moreover offered his services to this effect our
most faithful citizen, Zuan Bellin, according to his agreement
employing his skill and all speed and diligence for the
completion of this work of the three pictures aforesaid,
provided he be assisted by the under-written painters.

"Be it therefore put to the ballot, that besides the aforesaid
Zuan Bellin in person, who will assume the superintendence of
this work, there be added Master Victor Scarpaza, with a
monthly salary of five ducats; Master Victor, son of the late
Mathio, at four ducats per month; and the painter, Hieronymo,
at two ducats per month; they rendering speedy and diligent
assistance to the aforesaid Zuan Bellin for the painting of the
pictures aforesaid, so that they be completed well and
carefully as speedily as possible. The salaries of the which
three master painters aforesaid, with the costs of colors and
other necessaries, to be defrayed by our Salt Office with the
moneys of the great chest.

"It being expressly declared that said pensioned painters be
tied and bound to work constantly and daily, so that said three
pictures may be completed as expeditiously as possible; the
artists aforesaid being pensioned at the good pleasure of this
Council.

"Ayes 23

"Noes 3

"Neutrals 0"

This decree is the more interesting to us now, because it is the precedent to which Titian himself refers, when he first offers his services to the Senate.

The petition which I am about to read to you, was read to the Council of Ten, on the last day of May, 1513, and the original draft of it is yet preserved in the Venice archives.

"'Most Illustrious Council of Ten.
"'Most Serene Prince and most Excellent Lords.

"'I, Titian of Serviete de Cadore, having from my boyhood
upwards set myself to learn the art of painting, not so much
from cupidity of gain as for the sake of endeavoring to
acquire some little fame, and of being ranked amongst those who
now profess the said art.

"'And altho heretofore, and likewise at this present, I have
been earnestly requested by the Pope and other potentates to go
and serve them, nevertheless, being anxious as your Serenity's
most faithful subject, for such I am, to leave some memorial in
this famous city; my determination is, should the Signory
approve, _to undertake, so long as I live, to come and paint in
the Grand Council with my whole soul and ability_; commencing,
provided your Serenity think of it, with the battle-piece on
the side towards the "Piaza," that being the most difficult;
nor down to this time has any one chosen to assume so hard a
task.

"'I, most excellent Lords, should be better pleased to receive
as recompense for the work to be done by me, such
acknowledgments as may be deemed sufficient, and much less; but
because, as already stated by me, I care solely for my honor,
and mere livelihood, should your Serenity approve, you will
vouchsafe to grant me for my life, the next brokers-patent in
the German factory,[45] by whatever means it may become vacant;
notwithstanding other expectancies; with the terms, conditions,
obligations, and exemptions, as in the case of Messer Zuan
Bellini; besides two youths whom I purpose bringing with me as
assistants; they to be paid by the Salt Office; as likewise the
colors and all other requisites, as conceded a few months ago
by the aforesaid most Illustrious Council to the said Messer
Zuan; for I promise to do such work and with so much speed and
excellency as shall satisfy your lordships to whom I humbly
recommend myself.'"

226. "This proposal," Mr. Brown tells us, "in accordance with the petitions presented by Gentil Bellini and Alvise Vivarini, was immediately put to the ballot," and carried thus--the decision of the Grand Council, in favor of Titian, being, observe, by no means unanimous:

"Ayes 10

"Noes 6

"Neutrals 0"

Immediately follows on the acceptance of Titian's services, this practical order:

"We, Chiefs of the most Illustrious Council of Ten, tell and
inform you Lords Proveditors for the State; videlicet the one
who is cashier of the Great Chest, and his successors, that for
the execution of what has been decreed above in the most
Illustrious Council aforesaid, you do have prepared all
necessaries for the above written Titian according to his
petition and demand, and as observed with regard to Juan
Bellini, that he may paint ut supra; paying from month to month
the two youths whom said Titian shall present to you at the
rate of four ducats each per month, as urged by him because of
their skill and sufficiency in said art of painting, tho' we do
not mean the payment of their salary to commence until they
begin work; and thus will you do. Given on the 8th of June,
1513."

This is the way, then, the great workmen wish to be paid, and that is the way wise men pay them for their work. The perfect simplicity of such patronage leaves the painter free to do precisely what he thinks best: and a good painter always produces his best, with such license.

227. And now I shall take the four conditions of change in succession, and examine the distinctions between the two masters in their acceptance of, or resistance to, them.

(I.) The change of good and permanent workmanship for bad and insecure workmanship.

You have often heard quoted the saying of Michael Angelo, that oil-painting was only fit for women and children.

He said so, simply because he had neither the skill to lay a single touch of good oil-painting, nor the patience to overcome even its elementary difficulties.

And it is one of my reasons for the choice of subject in this concluding lecture on Sculpture, that I may, with direct reference to this much quoted saying of Michael Angelo, make the positive statement to you, that oil-painting is the Art of arts;[46] that it is sculpture, drawing, and music, all in one, involving the technical dexterities of those three several arts; that is to say--the decision and strength of the stroke of the chisel;--the balanced distribution of appliance of that force necessary for graduation in light and shade;--and the passionate felicity of rightly multiplied actions, all unerring, which on an instrument produce right sound, and on canvas, living color. There is no other human skill so great or so wonderful as the skill of fine oil-painting; and there is no other art whose results are so absolutely permanent. Music is gone as soon as produced--marble discolors,--fresco fades,--glass darkens or decomposes--painting alone, well guarded, is practically everlasting.

Of this splendid art Michael Angelo understood nothing; he understood even fresco, imperfectly. Tintoret understood both perfectly; but he--when no one would pay for his colors (and sometimes nobody would even give him space of wall to paint on)--used cheap blue for ultramarine; and he worked so rapidly, and on such huge spaces of canvas, that between damp and dry, his colors must go, for the most part; but any complete oil-painting of his stands as well as one of Bellini's own: while Michael Angelo's fresco is defaced already in every part of it, and Lionardo's oil-painting is all either gone black, or gone to nothing.

228. (II.) Introduction of dramatic interest for the sake of excitement. I have already, in the _Stones of Venice_, illustrated Tintoret's dramatic power at so great length, that I will not, to-day, make any farther statement to justify my assertion that it is as much beyond Michael Angelo's as Shakspeare's is beyond Milton's--and somewhat with the same kind of difference in manner. Neither can I speak to-day, time not permitting me, of the abuse of their dramatic power by Venetian or Florentine; one thing only I beg you to note, that with full half of his strength, Tintoret remains faithful to the serenity of the past; and the examples I have given you from his work in S. 50,[47] are, one, of the most splendid drama, and the other, of the quietest portraiture ever attained by the arts of the Middle Ages.

Note also this respecting his picture of the Judgment, that, in spite of all the violence and wildness of the imagined scene, Tintoret has not given, so far as I remember, the spectacle of any one soul under infliction of actual pain. In all previous representations of the Last Judgment there had at least been one division of the picture set apart for the representation of torment; and even the gentle Angelico shrinks from no orthodox detail in this respect; but Tintoret, too vivid and true in imagination to be able to endure the common thoughts of hell, represents indeed the wicked in ruin, but not in agony. They are swept down by flood and whirlwind--the place of them shall know them no more, but not one is seen in more than the natural pain of swift and irrevocable death.

229. (III.) I pass to the third condition; the priority of flesh to spirit, and of the body to the face.

In this alone, of the four innovations, Michael Angelo and Tintoret have the Greeks with them;--in this, alone, have they any right to be called classical. The Greeks gave them no excuse for bad workmanship; none for temporary passion; none for the preference of pain. Only in the honor done to the body may be alleged for them the authority of the ancients.

You remember, I hope, how often in my preceding lectures I had to insist on the fact that Greek sculpture was essentially [Greek: aprosopos];--independent, not only of the expression, but even of the beauty of the face. Nay, independent of its being so much as seen. The greater number of the finest pieces of it which remain for us to judge by, have had the heads broken away;--we do not seriously miss them either from the Three Fates, the Ilissus, or the Torso of the Vatican. The face of the Theseus is so far destroyed by time that you can form little conception of its former aspect. But it is otherwise in Christian sculpture. Strike the head off even the rudest statue in the porch of Chartres and you will greatly miss it--the harm would be still worse to Donatello's St. George:--and if you take the heads from a statue of Mino, or a painting of Angelico--very little but drapery will be left;--drapery made redundant in quantity and rigid in fold, that it may conceal the forms, and give a proud or ascetic reserve to the actions, of the bodily frame. Bellini and his school, indeed, rejected at once the false theory, and the easy mannerism, of such religious design; and painted the body without fear or reserve, as, in its subordination, honorable and lovely. But the inner heart and fire of it are by them always first thought of, and no action is given to it merely to show its beauty. Whereas the great culminating masters, and chiefly of these, Tintoret, Correggio, and Michael Angelo, delight in the body for its own sake, and cast it into every conceivable attitude, often in violation of all natural probability, that they may exhibit the action of its skeleton, and the contours of its flesh. The movement of a hand with Cima or Bellini expresses mental emotion only; but the clustering and twining of the fingers of Correggio's S. Catherine is enjoyed by the painter just in the same way as he would enjoy the twining of the branches of a graceful plant, and he compels them into intricacies which have little or no relation to St. Catherine's mind. In the two drawings of Correggio (S. 13 and 14) it is the rounding of limbs and softness of foot resting on cloud which are principally thought of in the form of the Madonna; and the countenance of St. John is foreshortened into a section, that full prominence may be given to the muscles of his arms and breast.

So in Tintoret's drawing of the Graces (S. 22), he has entirely neglected the individual character of the Goddesses, and been content to indicate it merely by attributes of dice or flower, so only that he may sufficiently display varieties of contour in thigh and shoulder.

230. Thus far, then, the Greeks, Correggio, Michael Angelo, Raphael in his latter design, and Tintoret in his scenic design (as opposed to portraiture), are at one. But the Greeks, Correggio, and Tintoret, are also together in this farther point; that they all draw the body for true delight in it, and with knowledge of it living; while Michael Angelo and Raphael draw the body for vanity, and from knowledge of it dead.

The Venus of Melos,--Correggio's Venus, (with Mercury teaching Cupid to read),--and Tintoret's Graces, have the forms which their designers truly _liked_ to see in women. They may have been wrong or right in liking those forms, but they carved and painted them for their pleasure, not for vanity.

But the form of Michael Angelo's Night is not one which he delighted to see in women. He gave it her, because he thought it was fine, and that he would be admired for reaching so lofty an ideal.[48]

231. Again. The Greeks, Correggio, and Tintoret, learn the body from the living body, and delight in its breath, color, and motion.[49]

Raphael and Michael Angelo learned it essentially from the corpse, and had no delight in it whatever, but great pride in showing that they knew all its mechanism; they therefore sacrifice its colors, and insist on its muscles, and surrender the breath and fire of it, for what is--not merely carnal,--but osseous, knowing that for one person who can recognize the loveliness of a look, or the purity of a color, there are a hundred who can calculate the length of a bone.

The boy with the doves, in Raphael's cartoon of the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, is not a child running, but a surgical diagram of a child in a running posture.

Farther, when the Greeks, Correggio, and Tintoret, draw the body active, it is because they rejoice in its force, and when they draw it inactive, it is because they rejoice in its repose. But Michael Angelo and Raphael invent for it ingenious mechanical motion, because they think it uninteresting when it is quiet, and cannot, in their pictures, endure any person's being simple-minded enough to stand upon both his legs at once, nor venture to imagine anyone's being clear enough in his language to make himself intelligible without pointing.

In all these conditions, the Greek and Venetian treatment of the body is faithful, modest, and natural; but Michael Angelo's dishonest, insolent, and artificial.