Chapter III: Part 3

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, far from implicitly subscribing to a master’s dictates, was the sworn pupil of nature. To a modest style of form, to a simplicity eminently fitted for those subjects of religious gravity which his taste preferred, he joined that solemnity of hue, that sober twilight, the air of cloistered meditation, which you have so often heard recommended as the proper tone of historic colour. Too often content to rear the humbler graces of his subject, he seldom courted elegance, but always, when he did, with enviable success. Even now, though nearly in a state of evanescence, the three nymphs in the garden scene of St. Michele in Bosco, seem moulded by the hand, inspired by the breath of love. Agostino, with a singular modesty which prompted him rather to propagate the fame of others by his graver, than by steady exertion to rely on his own power for perpetuity of name, combined with some learning a cultivated taste, correctness, though not elegance of form, and a corregiesque colour. Annibale, superior to both in power of execution and academic prowess, was inferior to either in taste and sensibility and judgment; for the most striking proof of this inferiority I appeal to his master-work, the work on which he rests his fame, the gallery of the Farnese palace: a work whose uniform vigour of execution, nothing can equal but its imbecility and incongruity of conception. If impropriety of ornament were to be fixed by definition, the subjects of the Farnese gallery might be quoted as the most decisive instances. Criticism has attempted to dismiss Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto from the province of legitimate history with the contemptuous appellation of ornamental painters, not for having painted subjects inapplicable to the public and private palaces, the churches and convents, which they were employed to decorate, but because they treated them sometimes without regard to costume, or the simplicity due to sacred, heroic or allegoric subjects: if this be just, where shall we class him, who with the Capella Sistina, and the Vatican before his eye, fills the mansion of religious austerity and episcopal dignity, with a chaotic series of trite fable and bacchanalian revelry, without allegory, void of allusion, merely to gratify the puerile ostentation of dauntless execution and academic vigour? if the praise given to a work be not always transferable to its master; if, as Milton says, ‘the work some praise and some the architect,’ let us admire the splendour, the exuberance, the concentration of powers displayed in the Farnese gallery, whilst we lament their misapplication by Annibale Carracci.

The heterogeneous principle of the ecclectic school soon operated its own dissolution: the great talents which the Carracci had tutored, soon found their own bias, and abandoned themselves to their own peculiar taste. B. Schidone died young in 1615. Barto. Schidone, Guido Reni[56], Giovanni Lanfranco, Francesco Albani, Domenico Zampieri, and Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino, differed as much in their objects of imitation as their names. Schidone, all of whose mind was in his eye, embraced, and often to meaner subjects applied the harmony and colour of Correggio, whilst Lanfranco strove, but strove without success, to follow him through the expanse of his creation and masses. Grace attracted Guido, but it was the studied grace of theatres: his female forms are abstracts of antique beauty, attended by languishing attitudes, arrayed by voluptuous fashions. His male forms, transcripts of models, such as are found in a genial climate, are sometimes highly characteristic of dignified manhood or apostolic fervour, like his Peter and Paul, formerly in the Zampieri at Bologna: sometimes stately, courteous, insipid, like his Paris attending Helen, more with the air of an ambassadour, by proxy, than carrying her off with a lover’s fervour. His Aurora deserved to precede a more majestic sun, and hours less clumsy: his colour varies with his style, sometimes bland and harmonious, sometimes vigorous and stern, sometimes flat and insipid. Albani, chiefly attracted by soft mythologic conceits, formed nereids and oreads on plump Venetian models, and contrasted their pearly hues with the rosy tints of loves, the juicy brown of fauns and satyrs, and rich marine or sylvan scenery. Domenichino, more obedient than the rest to his masters, aimed at the beauty of the antique, the expression of Raphael, the vigour of Annibale, the colour of Lodovico, and mixing something of each, fell short of all; whilst Guercino broke like a torrent over all academic rules, and with an ungovernable itch of copying whatever lay in his way, sacrificed mind, form and costume, to effects of colour, fierceness of chiaroscuro, and intrepidity of hand.

Such was the state of art, when the spirit of machinery, in submission to the vanities and upstart pride of papal nepotism, destroyed what yet was left of meaning; when equilibration, contrast, grouping, engrossed composition, and poured a deluge of gay common-place over the platfonds, pannels, and cupolas of palaces and temples. Those who could not conceive a figure singly, scattered multitudes; to count, was to be poor. The rainbow and the seasons were ransacked for their hues, and every eye became the tributary of the great, but abused talents of Pietro da Cortona, and the fascinating but debauched and empty facility of Luca Giordano.[57]

The same revolution of mind that had organized the arts of Italy, spread, without visible communication, to Germany, and towards the decline of the fifteenth century, the uncouth essays of Martin Schön, Michael Wolgemuth, and Albrecht Altorfer, were succeeded by the finer polish and the more dextrous method of Albert Durer. The indiscriminate use of the words genius and talent has perhaps no where caused more confusion than in the classification of artists. Albert Durer was in my opinion a man of great ingenuity, without being a genius. He studied, and, as far as his penetration reached, established certain proportions of the human frame, but he did not invent a style: every work of his is a proof that he wanted the power of imitation, of concluding from what he saw, to what he did not see, that he copied rather than selected the forms that surrounded him, and sans remorse tacked deformity and meagreness to fulness, and sometimes to beauty.[58] Such is his design; in composition copious without taste, anxiously precise in parts, and unmindful of the whole, he has rather shewn us what to avoid than what to follow. He sometimes had a glimpse of the sublime, but it was only a glimpse: the expanded agony of Christ on the mount of Olives, and the mystic conception of his figure of Melancholy, are thoughts of sublimity, though the expression of the last is weakened by the rubbish he has thrown about her. His Knight, attended by Death and the Fiend, is more capricious than terrible; and his Adam and Eve are two common models shut up in a rocky dungeon. If he approached genius in any part of art, it was in colour. His colour went beyond his age, and as far excelled in truth and breadth and handling the oil colour of Raphael, as Raphael excels him in every other quality. I speak of easel-pictures—his drapery is broad though much too angular, and rather snapt than folded. Albert is called the father of the German school, though he neither reared scholars, nor was imitated by the German artists of his or the succeeding century. That the exportation of his works to Italy should have effected a temporary change in the principles of some Tuscans who had studied Michael Angelo, of Andrea del Sarto, and Jacopo da Pontormo, is a fact which proves that minds at certain periods may be subject to epidemic influence as well as bodies.

Lucas of Leyden[59] was the Dutch imitator of Albert; but the forms of Aldegraver, Sebald Beheim, and George Pentz, appear to have been the result of careful inspection of Marc Antonio’s prints from Raphael, of whom Pentz was probably a scholar; and ere long the style of Michael Angelo, as adopted by Pelegrino Tibaldi, and spread by the graver of Giorgio Mantuano, provoked those caravans of German, Dutch and Flemish students, who on their return from Italy, at the courts of Prague and Munich, in Flanders and the Netherlands, introduced that preposterous manner, the bloated excrescence of diseased brains, which in the form of man left nothing human, distorted action and gesture with insanity of affectation, and dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes; the style of Golzius and Spranger, Heynz and ab Ach: but though content to feed on the husks of Tuscan design, they imbibed the colour of Venice, and spread the elements of that excellence which distinguished the succeeding schools of Flanders and of Holland.

This frantic pilgrimage to Italy ceased at the apparition of the two meteors of art, Peter Paul Rubens[60], and Rembrandt Van Rhyn; both of whom disdaining to acknowledge the usual laws of admission to the temple of fame, boldly forged their own keys, entered and took possession, each, of a most conspicuous place by his own power. Rubens, born at Cologne, in Germany, but brought up at Antwerp, then the depository of western commerce, a school of religious and classic learning, and the pompous seat of Austrian and Spanish superstition, met these advantages with an ardour and success of which ordinary minds can form no idea, if we compare the period at which he is said to have seriously applied himself to painting, under the tuition of Otho Van Veen, with the unbounded power he had acquired over the instruments of art when he set out for Italy; where we instantly discover him not as the pupil, but as the successful rival of the masters whose works he had selected for the objects of his emulation. Endowed with a full comprehension of his own character, he wasted not a moment on the acquisition of excellence incompatible with its fervour, but flew to the centre of his ambition, Venice, and soon compounded from the splendour of Paolo Veronese and the glow of Tintoretto, that florid system of mannered magnificence which is the element of his art and the principle of his school. He first spread that ideal pallet, which reduced to its standard the variety of nature, and once methodized, whilst his mind tuned the method, shortened or superseded individual imitation. His scholars, however dissimilar in themselves, saw with the eye of their master; the eye of Rubens was become the substitute of nature: still the mind alone that had balanced these tints, and weighed their powers, could apply them to their objects, and determine their use in the pompous display of historic and allegoric magnificence; for _that_ they were selected, for _that_ the gorgeous nosegay swelled: but when in the progress of depraved practice they became the mere palliatives of mental impotence, empty representatives of themselves, the supporters of nothing but clumsy forms and clumsier conceits, they can only be considered as splendid improprieties, as the substitutes for wants which no colour can palliate and no tint supply.

In this censure I am under no apprehension of being suspected to include either the illustrious name of Vandyck[61], or that of Abraham Diepenbeck. Vandyck, more elegant, more refined, to graces, which the genius of Rubens disdained to court, joined that exquisite taste which, in following the general principle of his master, moderated, and adapted its application to his own pursuits. His sphere was portrait, and the imitation of Titiano insured him the second place in that. The fancy of Diepenbeck, though not so exuberant, if I be not mistaken, excelled in sublimity the imagination of Rubens: his Bellerophon, Dioscuri, Hippolytus, Ixion, Sisyphus, fear no competitor among the productions of his master.

Rembrandt[62] was, in my opinion, a genius of the first class in whatever relates not to form. In spite of the most portentous deformity, and without considering the spell of his chiaroscuro, such were his powers of nature, such the grandeur, pathos, or simplicity of his composition, from the most elevated or extensive arrangement to the meanest and most homely, that the best cultivated eye, the purest sensibility, and the most refined taste dwell on them, equally enthralled. Shakspeare alone excepted, no one combined with so much transcendent excellence, so many, in all other men unpardonable faults—and reconciled us to them. He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of all the tints that float between them: he tinged his pencil with equal success in the cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in the livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a stedfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity or baldness, and plucked a flower in every desart. None ever like Rembrandt knew to improve an accident into a beauty, or give importance to a trifle. If ever he had a master, he had no followers; Holland was not made to comprehend his power. The succeeding school of colourists were content to tip the cottage, the hamlet, the boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and the haze of winter, with orient hues, or the glow of setting summer suns.

In turning our eye to Switzerland we shall find great powers without great names, those of Hans Holbein[63] and Francis Mola only excepted. But the scrupulous precision, the high finish, and the tizianesque colour of Hans Holbein, make the least part of his excellence for those who have seen his Designs of the Passion, and that series of emblematic groups, known under the name of Holbein’s Dance of Death. From Belinzona to Basle, invention appears to have been the characteristic of Helvetic art: the works of Tobias Stimmer, Christopher Murer, Jost Amman, Gotthard Ringgli, are mines of invention, and exhibit a style of design, equally poised between the emaciated dryness of Albert Durer and the bloated corpulence of Golzius.

The seeds of mediocrity which the Carracci had attempted to scatter over Italy, found a more benign soil, and reared an abundant harvest in France: to mix up a compound from something of every excellence in the catalogue of art, was the principle of their theory and their aim in execution. It is in France where Michael Angelo’s right to the title of a painter was first questioned. The fierceness of his line, as they call it, the purity of the antique, and the characteristic forms of Raphael, are only the road to the academic vigour, the librated style of Annibale Carracci, and from that they appeal to the model; in composition they consult more the artifice of grouping, contrast and richness, than the subject or propriety; their expression is dictated by the theatre. From the uniformity of this process, not to allow that the school of France offers respectable exceptions, would be unjust; without recurring again to the name of Nicolas Poussin, the works of Eustache le Sueur[64], Charles le Brun, Sebastien Bourdon, and sometimes Pierre Mignard, contain original beauties and rich materials. Le Sueur’s series of pictures in the Chartreux exhibit the features of contemplative piety, in a purity of style and a placid breadth of manner that moves the heart. His dignified martyrdom of St. Laurence and the burning of the magic books at Ephesus, breathe the spirit of Raphael. The powerful comprehension of a whole, only equalled by the fire which pervades every part of the battles of Alexander, by Charles le Brun, would entitle him to the highest rank in history, had the characters been less mannered, had he not exchanged the Argyraspids and the Macedonian phalanx for the compact legionaries of the Trajan pillar; had he distinguished Greeks from barbarians, rather by national feature and form than by accoutrement and armour. The seven works of charity by Seb. Bourdon teem with surprising pathetic and always novel images; and in the plague of David, by Pierre Mignard, our sympathy is roused by energies of terrour and combinations of woe, which escaped Poussin and Raphael himself.

The obstinacy of national pride[65], perhaps more than the neglect of government or the frown of superstition, confined the labours of the Spanish school, from its obscure origin at Sevilla to its brightest period, within the narrow limits of individual imitation. But the degree of perfection attained by Diego Velasquez, Joseph Ribera, and Morillo, in pursuing the same object by means as different as successful, impresses us with deep respect for the variety of their powers.

That the great style ever received the homage of Spanish genius, appears not; neither Alfonso Berruguette, nor Pellegrino Tibaldi, left followers: but that the eyes and the taste fed by the substance of Spagnuoletto and Morillo, should without reluctance have submitted to the gay volatility of Luica Giordano, and the ostentatious flimsiness of Sebastian Conca, would be matter of surprize, did we not see the same principles successfully pursued in the platfonds of Antonio Raphael Mengs, the painter of philosophy, as he is stiled by his biographer D’Azara. The cartoons of the frescoes painted for the royal palace at Madrid, representing the apotheosis of Trajan and the temple of Renown, exhibit less the style of Raphael in the nuptials of Cupid and Psyche at the Farnesina, than the gorgeous but empty bustle of Pietro da Cortona.

From this view of art on the continent, let us cast a glance on its state in this country, from the age of Henry VIII. to our own.—From that period to this, Britain never ceased pouring its caravans of noble and wealthy pilgrims over Italy, Greece and Ionia, to pay their devotions at the shrines of virtù and taste: not content with adoring the obscure idols, they have ransacked their temples, and none returned without some share in the spoil: in plaister or in marble, on canvas or in gems, the arts of Greece and Italy were transported to England, and what Petronius said of Rome, that it was easier to meet there with a god than a man, might be said of London. Without inquiring into the permanent and accidental causes of the inefficacy of these efforts with regard to public taste and support of art, it is observable, that, whilst Francis I. was busied, not to aggregate a mass of painted and chiselled treasures merely to gratify his own vanity, and brood over them with sterile avarice, but to scatter the seeds of taste over France, by calling, employing, enriching Andrea del Sarto, Rustici, Rosso, Primaticcio, Cellini, Niccolo; in England, Holbein and Torregiano under Henry, and Federigo Zucchero under Elizabeth, were condemned to gothic work and portrait painting. Charles indeed called Rubens and his scholars to provoke the latent English spark, but the effect was intercepted by his destiny. His son, in possession of the cartoons of Raphael, and with the magnificence of Whitehall before his eyes, suffered Verio to contaminate the walls of his palaces, or degraded Lely to paint the Cymons and Iphigenias of his court; whilst the manner of Kneller swept completely what yet might be left of taste, under his successors: such was the equally contemptible and deplorable state of English art, till the genius of Reynolds first rescued from the mannered depravation of foreigners his own branch, and soon extending his view to the higher departments of art, joined that select body of artists who addressed the ever open ear, ever attentive mind of our Royal Founder, with the first idea of this establishment. His beneficence soon gave it a place and a name, his august patronage, sanction, and individual encouragement: the annually increased merits of thirty exhibitions in this place, with the collateral ones contrived by the speculations of commerce, have told the surprising effects: a mass of self-taught and tutored powers burst upon the general eye, and unequivocally told the world what might be expected from the concurrence of public encouragement—how far this have been or may be granted or withheld, it is not here my province to surmise: the plans lately adopted and now organizing within these walls for the dignified propagation and support of art, whether fostered by the great, or left to their own energy, must soon decide what may be produced by the unison of British genius and talent, and whether the painters school of that nation which claims the foremost honours of modern poetry, which has produced with Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough and Wilson, shall submit to content themselves with a subordinate place among the schools we have enumerated.

THIRD LECTURE.

INVENTION.

_PART I._

——ΤΙ Τ’ ΑΡ ΑΥ ΦΘΟΝΕΕΙΣ, ΕΡΗΙΡΟΝ ΑΟΙΔΟΝ
ΤΕΡΠΕΙΝ, ΟΠΠΗ ΟΙ ΝΟΟΣ ΟΡΝΥΤΑΙ; ΟΥ ΝΥ Τ’ ΑΟΙΔΟΙ
ΑΙΤΙΟΙ, ΑΛΛΑ ΠΟΘΙ ΖΕΥΣ ΑΙΤΙΟΣ, ὉΣΤΕ ΔΙΔΩΣΙΝ
ΑΝΔΡΑΣΙΝ ΑΛΦΗΣΤΗΣΙΝ, ΟΠΩΣ ΕΘΕΛΗΣΙΝ ΕΚΑΣΤΩΙ.

Homer. Odyss. A. 346.

ARGUMENT.

Introduction. Discrimination of Poetry and Painting. General idea of Invention—its right to select a subject from nature itself. Visiones—Theon—Agasias. Cartoon of Pisa—Incendio del Borgo. Specific idea of Invention: Epic subjects—Michael Angelo. Dramatic subjects—Raphael. Historic subjects—Poussin, &c. Invention has a right to adopt ideas—examples. Duplicity of subject and moment inadmissible. Transfiguration of Raphael.

THIRD LECTURE.

The brilliant antithesis ascribed to Simonides, that ‘painting is mute poesy and poetry speaking painting,’ made, I apprehend, no part of the technic systems of antiquity: for this we may depend on the general practice of its artists, and still more safely on the philosophic discrimination of Plutarch[66], who tells us, that as poetry and painting resemble each other in their uniform address to the senses, for the impression they mean to make on our fancy and by that on our mind, so they differ as essentially in their _materials_ and their _modes_ of application, which are regulated by the diversity of the organs they address, ear and eye. _Successive action_ communicated by sounds, and _time_, are the medium of poetry; _form_ displayed in _space_, and momentaneous energy, are the element of painting.

As, if these premises be true, the distinct representation of continued action is refused to an art which cannot express even in a series of subjects, but by a supposed mental effort in the spectator’s mind, the regular succession of their moments, it becomes evident, that instead of attempting to impress us by the indiscriminate usurpation of a principle out of its reach, it ought chiefly to rely for its effect on its great characteristics space and form, singly or in apposition. In forms alone the idea of existence can be rendered permanent. Sounds die, words perish or become obsolete and obscure, even colours fade, forms alone can neither be extinguished nor misconstrued; by application to their standard alone description becomes intelligible and distinct. Thus the effectual idea of corporeal beauty can strictly exist only in the plastic arts: for as the notion of beauty arises from the pleasure we feel in the harmonious co-operation of the various parts of some favourite object to one end at once, it implies their immediate co-existence in the mass they compose; and therefore can be distinctly perceived and conveyed to the mind by the eye alone: hence the representation of form in figure is the _physical_ element of the Art.

But as bodies exist in time as well as in space; as the pleasure arising from the mere symmetry of an object is as transient as it is immediate; as harmony of parts, if the body be the agent of an internal power, depends for its proof on their application, it follows, that the exclusive exhibition of inert and unemployed form, would be a mistake of the medium for the end, and that character or action is required to make it an interesting object of imitation. And this is the _moral_ element of the art.

Those important moments then which exhibit the united exertion of form and character in a single object or in participation with collateral beings, _at once_, and which with equal rapidity and pregnancy give us a glimpse of the past and lead our eye to what follows, furnish the true materials of those technic powers, that select, direct, and fix the objects of imitation to their centre.

The most eminent of these, by the explicit acknowledgment of all ages, and the silent testimony of every breast, is _invention_. He whose eye athwart the outward crust of the rock penetrates into the composition of its materials, and discovers a gold mine, is surely superiour to him who afterwards adapts the metal for use. Colombo, when he from astronomic and physical inductions concluded to the existence of land in the opposite hemisphere, was surely superiour to Amerigo Vespucci who took possession of its continent; and when Newton improving accident by meditation, discovered and established the laws of attraction, the projectile and centrifuge qualities of the system, he gave the clue to all who after him applied it to the various branches of philosophy, and was in fact the author of all the benefits accruing from their application to society. Homer, when he means to give the principal feature of man, calls him inventor (αλφηστης.)

From what we have said it is clear that the term invention never ought to be so far misconstrued as to be confounded with that of _creation_, incompatible with our notions of limited being, an idea of pure astonishment, and admissible only when we mention Omnipotence: to _invent_ is to find: to find something, presupposes its existence somewhere, implicitly or explicitly, scattered or in a mass: nor should I have presumed to say so much on a word of a meaning so plain, had it not been, and were it not daily confounded, and by fashionable authorities too, with the term creation.

Form in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelops our senses, and its counterpart the invisible one that agitates our mind with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the element and the realm of invention; it discovers, selects, combines the _possible_, the _probable_, the _known_, in a mode that strikes with an air of truth and novelty, at once. Possible strictly means an effect derived from a cause, a body composed of materials, a coalition of forms, whose union or co-agency imply in themselves no absurdity, no contradiction: applied to our art it takes a wider latitude; it means the representation of effects derived from causes, or forms compounded from materials, heterogeneous and incompatible among themselves, but rendered so plausible to our senses, that the transition of one part to another seems to be accounted for by an air of organization, and the eye glides imperceptibly or with satisfaction from one to the other and over the whole: that this was the condition on which, and the limits within which alone the ancients permitted invention to represent what was strictly speaking impossible, we may with plausibility surmise from the picture of Zeuxis, described by Lucian in the memoir to which he has prefixed that painter’s name, who was probably one of the first adventurers in this species of imagery.—Zeuxis had painted a family of centaurs; the dam a beautiful female to the middle, with the lower parts gradually sliding into the most exquisite forms of a young Thessalian mare half reclined in playful repose and gently pawing the velvet ground, offered her human nipple to one infant centaur, whilst another greedily sucked the ferine udder below, but both with their eyes turned up to a lyon-whelp held over them by the male centaur their father, rising above the hillock on which the female reclined, a grim feature, but whose ferocity was somewhat tempered by a smile. The scenery, the colour, the chiaroscuro, the finish of the whole was no doubt equal to the style and the conception. This picture the artist exhibited, expecting that justice from the penetration of the public which the genius deserved that taught him to give plausibility to a compound of heterogeneous forms, to inspire them with suitable soul, and to imitate the laws of existence: he was mistaken. The novelty of the conceit eclipsed the art that had embodied it, the artist was absorbed in his subject, and the unbounded praise bestowed, was that of idle restless curiosity, gratified. Sick of gods and goddesses, of demigods and pure human combinations, the Athenians panted only for what was new. The artist, as haughty as irritable, ordered his picture to be withdrawn; cover it, Micchio, said he to his attendant, cover it and carry it home, for this mob stick only to the clay of our art.—Such were the limits set to invention by the ancients; secure within these, it defied the ridicule thrown on that grotesque conglutination, which Horace exposes; guarded by these, their mythology scattered its metamorphoses, made every element its tributary, and transmitted the privilege to us, on equal conditions: their Scylla and the Portress of Hell, their dæmons and our spectres, the shade of Patroclus and the ghost of Hamlet, their naiads, nymphs, and oreads, and our sylphs, gnomes, and fairies, their furies and our witches, differ less in essence, than in local, temporary, social modifications: their common origin was fancy, operating on the materials of nature, assisted by legendary tradition and the curiosity implanted in us of diving into the invisible[67]; and they are suffered or invited to mix with or superintend real agency, in proportion of the analogy which we discover between them and ourselves. Pindar praises Homer less for that ‘winged power’ which whirls incident on incident with such rapidity, that absorbed by the whole, and drawn from the impossibility of single parts, we swallow a tale too gross to be believed in a dream; than for the greater power by which he contrived to connect his imaginary creation with the realities of nature and human passions[68]; without this the fiction of the poet and the painter will leave us stupified rather by its insolence than impressed by its power, it will be considered only as a superior kind of legerdemain, an exertion of ingenuity to no adequate end.

Before we proceed to the process and the methods of invention, it is not superfluous to advert to a question which has often been made, and by some has been answered in the negative; _whether it be within the artist’s province or not, to find or to combine a subject from himself, without having recourse to tradition or the stores of history and poetry?_ Why not, if the subject be within the limits of art and the combinations of nature, though it should have escaped observation? shall the immediate avenues of the mind, open to all its observers, from the poet to the novelist, be shut only to the artist? shall he be reduced to receive as alms from them what he has a right to share as common property? assertions like these, say in other words, that the Laocoon owes the impression he makes on us to his name alone, and that if tradition had not told a story and Pliny fixed it to that work, the artist’s conception of a father with his sons, surprised and entangled by two serpents within the recesses of a cavern or lonesome dell, was inadmissible and transgressed the laws of invention. I am much mistaken, if, so far from losing its power over us with its traditional sanction, it would not rouse our sympathy more forcibly, and press the subject closer to our breast, were it considered only as the representation of an incident common to humanity. The ancients were so convinced of their right to this disputed prerogative that they assigned it its own class, and Theon the Samian is mentioned by Quintilian, whom none will accuse or suspect of confounding the limits of the arts, in his list of primary painters, as owing his celebrity to that intuition into the sudden movements of nature, which the Greeks called φαντασιας, the Romans _visiones_, and we might circumscribe by the phrase of ‘unpremeditated conceptions’ the reproduction of associated ideas; he explains what he understood by it in the following passage adapted to his own profession, rhetoric.[69] ‘We give,’ says he, ‘the name of visions to what the Greeks call phantasies; that power by which the images of absent things are represented by the mind with the energy of objects moving before our eyes: he who conceives these rightly will be a master of passions; his is that well-tempered fancy which can imagine things, voices, acts, as they really exist, a power perhaps in a great measure dependent on our will. For if these images so pursue us, when our minds are in a state of rest, or fondly fed by hope, or in a kind of waking dream; that we seem to travel, to sail, to fight, to harangue in public, or to dispose of riches we possess not, and all this with an air of reality, why should we not turn to use this vice of the mind?—Suppose I am to plead the case of a murdered man, why should not every supposable circumstance of the act float before my eyes? shall I not see the murderer unawares rush in upon him? in vain he tries to escape—see how pale he turns—hear you not his shrieks, his entreaties? do you not see him flying, struck, falling? will not his blood, his ashy semblance, his groans, his last expiring gasp, seize on my mind?’

Permit me to apply this organ of the orator for one moment to the poet’s process: by this radiant recollection of associated ideas, the spontaneous ebullitions of nature, selected by observation, treasured by memory, classed by sensibility and judgment, Shakspeare became the supreme master of passions and the ruler of our hearts; this embodied his Falstaff and his Shylock, Hamlet and Lear, Juliet and Rosalind. By this power he saw Warwick uncover the corpse of Gloster, and swear to his assassination and his tugs for life; by this he made Banquo see the weird sisters bubble up from earth, and in their own air vanish; this is the hand that struck upon the bell when Macbeth’s drink was ready, and from her chamber pushed his dreaming wife, once more to methodize the murder of her guest.—

And this was the power of Theon[70]; such was the unpremeditated conception that inspired him with the idea of that warriour, who in the words of Ælian, seemed to embody the terrible graces and the enthusiastic furor of the god of war. Impetuous he rushed onward to oppose the sudden incursion of enemies; with shield thrown forward and high brandished faulchion, his step as he swept on, seemed to devour the ground: his eye flashed defiance; you fancied to hear his voice, his look denounce perdition and slaughter without mercy. This figure, single and without other accompaniments of war than what the havock of the distance shewed, Theon deemed sufficient to answer the impression he intended to make on those whom he had selected to inspect it. He kept it covered, till a trumpet, prepared for the purpose, after a prelude of martial symphonies, at once, by his command, blew with invigourated fierceness, a signal of attack—the curtain dropped, the terrific figure appeared to start from the canvass, and irresistibly assailed the astonished eyes of the assembly.

To prove the relation of Ælian no hyperbolic legend, I need not insist on the magic effect which the union of two sister powers must produce on the senses: of what our art alone and unassisted may perform, the most unequivocal proof exists within these walls; your eyes, your feelings, and your fancy have long anticipated it: whose mind has not now recalled that wonder of a figure, the misnomed gladiator of Agasias, a figure whose tremendous energy embodies every element of motion, whilst its pathetic dignity of character enforces sympathies, which the undisguised ferocity of Theon’s warriour in vain solicits. But the same irradiation which shewed the soldier to Theon, shewed to Agasias the leader: Theon saw the passion, Agasias[71] its rule.

But the most striking instance of the eminent place due to this intuitive faculty among the principal organs of invention, is that celebrated performance, which by the united testimony of cotemporary writers, and the evident traces of its imitation, scattered over the works of cotemporary artists, contributed alone more to the restoration of art and the revolution of style, than the united effort of the two centuries that preceded it: I mean the astonishing design commonly called the cartoon of Pisa, the work of Michael Agnolo Buonarrotti, begun in competition with Lionardo da Vinci, and at intervals finished at Florence. This work, whose celebrity subjected those who had not seen it to the supercilious contempt of the luckier ones who had; which was the common centre of attraction to all the students of Tuscany and Romagna, from Raphael Sanzio to Bastian da St. Gallo, called Aristotile, from his loquacious descants on its beauties; this inestimable work itself is lost, and its destruction is with too much appearance of truth fixed on the mean villany of Baccio Bandinelli, who, in possession of the key to the apartment where it was kept, during the revolutionary troubles of the Florentine republic, after making what use he thought proper of it, is said to have torn it in pieces. Still we may form an idea of its principal groups from some ancient prints and drawings; and of its composition from a small copy now existing at Holkham, the outlines of which have been lately etched. Crude, disguised, or feeble, as these specimens are, they will prove better guides than the half-informed rhapsodies of Vasari, the meagre account of Ascanio Condivi, better than the mere anatomic verdict of Benvenuto Cellini, who denies that the powers afterward exerted in the Capella Sistina, arrive at ‘half its excellence.’[72]

It represents an imaginary moment relative to the war carried on by the Florentines against Pisa: and exhibits a numerous group of warriours, roused from their bathing in the Arno, by the sudden signal of a trumpet and rushing to arms. This composition may without exaggeration be said to personify with unexampled variety that motion, which Agasias and Theon embodied in single figures: in imagining this transient moment from a state of relaxation to a state of energy, the ideas of motion, to use the bold figure of Dante, seem to have showered into the artist’s mind. From the chief, nearly placed in the centre, who precedes, and whose voice accompanies the trumpet, every age of human agility, every attitude, every feature of alarm, haste, hurry, exertion, eagerness, burst into so many rays, like sparks flying from the hammer. Many have reached, some boldly step, some have leaped on the rocky shore; here two arms emerging from the water grapple with the rock, there two hands cry for help, and their companions bend over or rush on to assist them; often imitated, but inimitable is the ardent feature of the grim veteran whose every sinew labours to force over the dripping limbs his cloaths, whilst gnashing he pushes the foot through the rending garment. He is contrasted by the slender elegance of a half averted youth, who, though eagerly buckling the armour to his thigh, methodizes haste; another swings the high-raised hauberk on his shoulder, whilst one who seems a leader, mindless of dress, ready for combat, and with brandished spear, overturns a third, who crouched to grasp a weapon—one naked himself buckles on the mail of his companion, and he, turned toward the enemy, seems to stamp impatiently the ground.—Experience and rage, old vigour, young velocity, expanded or contracted, vie in exertions of energy. Yet in this scene of tumult one motive animates the whole, eagerness to engage with subordination to command; this preserves the dignity of action, and from a straggling rabble changes the figures to men whose legitimate contest interests our wishes.

This intuition into the pure emanations of nature, Raphael Sanzio possessed in the most enviable degree, from the utmost conflict of passions, to the enchanting round of gentler emotion, and the nearly silent hints of mind and character. To this he devoted the tremendous scenery of that magnificent fresco, known to you all under the name of the _Incendio del Borgo_, in which he sacrificed the historic and mystic part of his subject to the effusion of the various passions roused by the sudden terrours of nocturnal conflagration. It is not for the faint appearance of the miracle which approaches with the pontiff and his train in the back-ground, that Raphael invites our eyes; the perturbation, necessity, hope, fear, danger, the pangs and efforts of affection grappling with the enraged elements of wind and fire, displayed on the fore-ground, furnish the pathetic motives that press on our hearts. That mother, who but half awake or rather in a waking trance, drives her children instinctively before her; that prostrate female half covered by her streaming hair, with elevated arms imploring heaven; that other who over the flaming tenement, heedless of her own danger, absorbed in maternal agony, boldly reaches over to drop the babe into the outstretched arms of its father; that common son of nature, who careless of another’s woe, intent only on his own safety, librates a leap from the burning wall; the vigorous youth who followed by an aged mother bears the palsied father on his shoulder from the rushing wreck; the nimble grace of those helpless females that vainly strive to administer relief—these are the real objects of the painter’s aim, and leave the pontiff and the miracle, with taper, bell and clergy—unheeded in the distance.

I shall not at present expatiate in tracing from this source the novel combinations of affection by which Raphael contrived to interest us in his numerous repetitions of Madonnas and holy Families, selected from the warmest effusions of domestic endearment, or in Milton’s phrase, from ‘all the charities of father, son, and mother.’ Nor shall I follow it in its more contaminated descent, to those representations of local manners and national modifications of society, whose characteristic discrimination and humorous exuberance, for instance, we admire in Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passions of the day, every hour contributes something to obliterate, which soon become unintelligible by time, or degenerate into caricature, the chronicle of scandal, the history-book of the vulgar.

Invention in its more specific sense receives its subjects from poetry or authenticated tradition; they are _epic_ or sublime, _dramatic_ or impassioned, _historic_ or circumscribed by truth. The first _astonishes_; the second _moves_; the third _informs_.

The aim of the epic painter is to impress one general idea, one great quality of nature or mode of society, some great maxim, without descending to those subdivisions, which the detail of character prescribes: he paints the elements with their own simplicity, height, depth, the vast, the grand, darkness, light; life, death; the past, the future; man, pity, love, joy, fear, terrour, peace, war, religion, government: and the visible agents are only engines to force _one_ irresistible idea upon the mind and fancy, as the machinery of Archimedes served only to convey _destruction_, and the wheels of a watch serve only to tell _time_.

Such is the first and general sense of what is called the _sublime_, epic, allegoric, lyric substance. Homer, to impress one forcible idea of _war_, its origin, its progress, and its end, set to work innumerable engines of various magnitude, yet none but what uniformly tends to enforce this and only this idea; gods and demigods are only actors, and nature but the scene of war; no character is discriminated but where discrimination discovers a new look of war; no passion is raised but what is blown up by the breath of war, and as soon absorbed in its universal blaze:—As in a conflagration we see turrets, spires, and temples illuminated only to propagate the honours of destruction, so through the stormy page of Homer, we see his heroines and heroes, but by the light that blasts them.

This is the principle of that divine series of frescoes, with which under the pontificates of Julius II. and Paul III. Michael Angelo adorned the lofty compartments of the _Capella Sistina_, and from a modesty or a pride for ever to be lamented, only not occupied the _whole_ of its ample sides. Its subject is _theocracy_ or the empire of religion, considered as the parent and queen of man; the origin, the progress, and final dispensation of Providence, as taught by the sacred records. Amid this imagery of primeval simplicity, whose sole object is the relation of the race to its Founder, to look for minute discrimination of character, is to invert the principle of the artist’s invention: here is only God with man. The veil of eternity is rent; time, space, and matter teem in the creation of the elements and of earth; life issues from God and adoration from man, in the creation of Adam and his mate; transgression of the precept at the tree of knowledge proves the origin of evil, and of expulsion from the immediate intercourse with God; the œconomy of justice and grace commences in the revolutions of the deluge, and the covenant made with Noah; and the germs of social character are traced in the subsequent scene between him and his sons; the awful synod of prophets and sibyls are the heralds of the Redeemer, and the host of patriarchs the pedigree of the Son of Man; the brazen serpent and the fall of Haman, the giant subdued by the stripling in Goliah and David, and the conquerour destroyed by female weakness in Judith, are types of his mysterious progress, till Jonah pronounces him immortal; and the magnificence of the last judgment by shewing the Saviour in the judge of man, sums up the whole, and reunites the founder and the race.

Such is the spirit of the Sistine chapel, and the outline of its _general_ invention, with regard to the cycle of its subjects—as in their choice they lead to each other without intermediate chasms in the transition; as each preceding one prepares and directs the conduct of the next, this the following; and as the intrinsic variety of all, conspires to the simplicity of one great end. The _specific_ invention of the pictures separate, as each constitutes an independent whole, deserves our consideration next: each has its centre, from which it disseminates, to which it leads back all secondary points; arranged, hid, or displayed, as they are more or less organs of the inspiring plan: each rigorously is circumscribed by its generic character, no inferiour merely conventional, temporary, local, or disparate beauty, however in itself alluring, is admitted; each finally turns upon that transient moment, the moment of suspense, big with the past, and pregnant with the future; the action no where expires, for action and interest terminate together. Thus in the creation of Adam, the Creator borne on a group of attendant spirits, the personified powers of omnipotence, moves on toward his last, best work, the lord of his creation: the immortal spark, issuing from his extended arm, electrifies the new-formed being, who tremblingly alive, half raised half reclined, hastens to meet his Maker. In the formation of Eve the astonishment of life, just organised, is absorbed in the sublimer sentiment of adoration; perfect, though not all disengaged from the side of her dreaming mate, she moves with folded hands and humble dignity towards the majestic Form whose half raised hand attracts her—what words can express the equally bland and irresistible velocity of that mysterious Being, who forms the sun and moon, and already past, leaves the earth, compleatly formed, behind him? Here apposition is the symbol of immensity.[73]

From these specimens of invention exerted in the more numerous compositions of this _sublime_ cycle, let me fix your attention for a few moments on the powers it displays in the single figures of the Prophets, those organs of embodied sentiment: their expression and attitude, whilst it exhibits the unequivocal marks of inspired contemplation in all; and with equal variety, energy, and delicacy, stamps character on each; exhibits in the occupation of the present moment the traces of the past and hints of the future. Esaiah, the image of _inspiration_, sublime and lofty, with an attitude expressive of the sacred trance in which meditation on the Messiah had immersed him, starts at the voice of an attendant genius, who seems to pronounce the words, ‘to us a child is born, to us a son is given.’ Daniel, the humbler image of eager _diligence_, transcribes from a volume held by a stripling, with a gesture natural to those who, absorbed in the progress of their subject, are heedless of convenience; his posture shews that he had inspected the volume from which now he is turned, and shall return to it immediately. Zachariah personifies _consideration_, he has read, and ponders on what he reads. _Inquiry_ moves in the dignified activity of Joel; hastening to open a sacred scrowl, and to compare the scriptures with each other. Ezechiel, the fervid feature of _fancy_, the seer of resurrection, represented as on the field strewn with bones of the dead, points downward and asks, ‘can these bones live?’ the attendant angel, borne on the wind that agitates his locks and the prophet’s vestments, with raised arm and finger, pronounces, they shall rise; last, Jeremiah, subdued by _grief_ and exhausted by lamentation, sinks in silent woe over the ruins of Jerusalem. Nor are the sibyls, those female oracles, less expressive, less individually marked—they are the echo, the counterpart of the prophets; Vigilance, Meditation, Instruction, Divination are personified. If the artist, who absorbed by the uniform power and magnitude of execution, saw only breadth and nature in their figures, must be told that he has discovered the least part of their excellence; the critic who charges them with affectation, can only be dismissed with our contempt.

On the immense plain of the last judgment, Michael Angelo has wound up the destiny of man, simply considered as the subject of religion, faithful or rebellious; and in one generic manner has distributed happiness and misery, the general feature of passions is given, and no more.—But had Raphael meditated that subject, he would undoubtedly have applied to our sympathies for his choice of imagery; he would have combined all possible emotions with the utmost variety of probable or real character: a father meeting his son, a mother torn from her daughter, lovers flying into each others arms, friends for ever separated, children accusing their parents, enemies reconciled; tyrants dragged before the tribunal by their subjects, conquerors hiding themselves from their victims of carnage; innocence declared, hypocrisy unmasked, atheism confounded, detected fraud, triumphant resignation; the most prominent features of connubial, fraternal, kindred connexion.—In a word, the heads of that infinite variety which Dante has minutely scattered over his poem—all domestic, politic, religious relations; whatever is not local in virtue and in vice: and the sublimity of the greatest of all events, would have been merely the minister of sympathies and passions[74].

If opinions be divided on the respective advantages and disadvantages of these two modes; if to some it should appear, though from consideration of the plan which guided Michael Angelo, I am far from subscribing to their notions, that the scenery of the last judgment, might have gained more by the dramatic introduction of varied pathos, than it would have lost by the dereliction of its generic simplicity: there can, I believe, be but one opinion with regard to the methods adopted by him and Raphael in the invention of the moment that characterises the creation of Eve: both artists applied for it to their own minds, but with very different success: the elevation of Michael Angelo’s soul, inspired by the operation of creation itself, furnished him at once with the feature that stamps on human nature its most glorious prerogative: whilst the characteristic subtilty, rather than sensibility of Raphael’s mind, in this instance, offered nothing but a frigid succedaneum; a symptom incident to all, when after the subsided astonishment on a great and sudden event, the mind recollecting itself, ponders on it with inquisitive surmise. In Michael Angelo, all self-consideration is absorbed in the sublimity of the sentiment which issues from the august Presence that attracts Eve; ‘her earthly,’ in Milton’s expression, ‘by his heavenly overpowered,’ pours itself in _adoration_: whilst in the inimitable cast of Adam’s figure, we trace the hint of that half conscious moment when sleep began to give way to the vivacity of the dream inspired. In Raphael, creation is complete—Eve is presented to Adam, now awake: but neither the new-born charms, the submissive grace and virgin purity of the beauteous image; nor the awful presence of her Introductor, draw him from his mental trance into effusions of love or gratitude; at ease reclined, with fingers pointing at himself and his new mate, he seems to methodize the surprising event that took place during his sleep, and to whisper the words ‘flesh of my flesh.’