Chapter VIII: Part III: The Influence of Piranesi on Decoration in the XVIII Century

There is still another side of Piranesi’s originality, public ignorance of which may be said to be complete--namely, his relation to architecture, and the very great debt owed him by that art. That he was an architect who signed himself as such on many plates during his entire life is a fact ignored even by many of those architects who are most indebted to him; but this fact is negligible, together with the work which he actually executed as an architect. The benefits which he conferred were rendered in other ways.

His first, and perhaps greatest, service consisted in the collection of materials. The classic motives which he gathered and etched form an inexhaustible store of ornament on which generation after generation of architects has drawn, and will continue to draw. The enormous quantity and variety of classic fragments of the best quality that Piranesi brought together is in itself astounding, but a fact of still greater importance is that it was he who, more than any one else, gave these motives currency. In his day no one, except Winckelmann--now known chiefly by his influence on Goethe, and by his tragic death--did as much as Piranesi to foster appreciation and spread knowledge of classic antiquity; while his plates, both by their greater currency and higher artistic merit, did wider and more enduring good than could ever be accomplished by the work of a critic and connoisseur, even of Winckelmann’s talent and prestige. His boundless enthusiasm and his real learning aroused more people than we shall ever know, at the same time that his labors, so indefatigable as to be incredible, spread abroad in prodigal profusion the reproductions of the remains of classic buildings, statues, and ornament. The greater part of these relics would have continued, but for him, to be known to only a few collectors and frequenters of museums; and it is certain that more classic motives have come into use, directly or indirectly, from the works of Piranesi than from any other one source, with the possible exception of modern photography.

In this connection it is impossible to insist too much on his exquisite taste, which, although it had its lapses, as in his designs for chimney-pieces, was on the whole of the highest. This fact seems quite incredible if the time and place of his life be considered. The intellectual degradation of all Italy at this period has already been alluded to, and, art being always a reflection and expression of contemporary life, it follows that the artistic degradation of Piranesi’s Italian contemporaries was complete. It is difficult to conceive the rococo horrors of eighteenth-century Italy. In France the most contorted productions of the Louis XV style, or the most far-fetched symbolic lucubrations under Louis XVI, never reached such depths of bad taste; for the French, in their most unfortunate moments, can never divest themselves entirely of an innate taste and a sense of measure which give some redeeming grace to their worst follies. The lack of tact, of a sense of limitations, which often characterizes Spanish and Italian art, and at times makes possible splendid flights never attempted by the French, also permits them, when misguided, to sink to abysmal depths. It would be hard to find much good in the heavy contortions of the rococo work of eighteenth-century Italy, which, starting from Bernini, exaggerated all his faults and kept none of even his perverted genius. Amid this riot of bad taste, Piranesi, with his love of classic simplicity, his sense of the noble, and his feeling for balance and distance, stands out an inexplicable phenomenon.

In certain plates, Piranesi, while using elements taken from antiquity, created a style of ornamental composition which inspired or was copied in work praised for its originality, and passing under the name of other styles. No one dreams of speaking of a Piranesi style, yet there is many a piece of decoration that calls itself Louis XVI, or Adam, or anything else, which comes directly from the work of this much-pilfered Italian. He stands in relation to a great deal of architectural decoration much as do, in science, those profound and creative minds who discover a great principle, but neglect its detailed application, only to have it taken up by lesser inventors of a practical trend, who put it to actual uses, the tangible value of which excites so great an admiration that no thought is taken of the man who discovered the very principle at the base of it all. In such plates as those dedicated to Robert Adam and Pope Clement XIII there can be found, fully developed, the style we call currently Louis XVI, although the greater part of it was produced under Louis XV contemporaneously with the work which goes by that name. The style in question is there, with its exquisite detail copied from the antique; we can see its inspiration taken from the classic which it wished to reproduce, together with its fortunate inability to do so, and its consequently successful creation of something entirely original but yet filled with classic spirit. That interruption of ornament, that alternation of the decorated and the plain, that sense of balance and of contrast, distinctive of the Louis XVI style--all are here. To think that these qualities came to Piranesi through French influence would be ridiculous, for the style under discussion obviously took for its model classic art, to which it was an attempted return; and as Piranesi was all his life in direct contact with the source of this inspiration, he could scarcely have been formed by a derivation of that which he knew directly.

If this be true, it may be asked why Piranesi’s work did not create in Italy at least sporadic attempts at a style analogous to that of Louis XVI. The reason for this lies in the already mentioned condition of the Italy of that day, for a work of art is absolutely conditioned by, and a result of, the environment in which it occurs. Here and there a work of art may, by some phenomenon, occur in opposition, or without apparent relation, to its surroundings; but in such circumstances it will have no successors, just as an unusually hardy orange-tree may thrive far to the north, but will not bear fruit and propagate itself. A great critic has said: “There is a reigning direction, which is that of the century; those talents who try to grow in an opposite direction find the issue closed; the pressure of public spirit and of surrounding manners compresses or turns them aside by imposing on them a fixed flowering.” The torpor and bad taste engendered in Italy by political and intellectual oppression precluded the work of Piranesi from bearing any fruit in his own country.

Size of the original engraving, 19⅞ × 12¾ inches]

From “Vasi. Candelabri. Cippi. Sarcofagi. Tripodi. Lucerne ed Ornamenti Antichi Disegn. ed inc. dal Cav. Gio. Batta. Piranesi.” (1778) Vol. II, plate No. 73. Piranesi’s dedication of this plate reads: “Al Suo Carissimo Amico Il. Sig. Riccardo Hayward Scuttore Inglese.”

Size of the original etching, 24 × 16⅜ inches]

To think, on the other hand, that Piranesi exerted an influence on French art of his day is not so fanciful as might at first be supposed. If it be true, as just stated, that it is impossible for the work of an artist to produce any result when his environment is hostile, it is equally true that an artist, or a body of artists, can exert an enormous influence when their surroundings favor and the ground is ready to receive the seed they sow. France was ripe for such seed as Piranesi cast abroad vainly in Italy, and in the former country an incalculable influence in the creation of the Louis XVI style was exerted by those men who accompanied Mme. de Pompadour’s brother, Abel Poisson, Marquis de Marigny, on his travels in Italy. Three years previously this great patron of art had caused her brother to be appointed to the succession of the “Surintendance des Beaux-Arts,” and after three years of apprenticeship, in order to make himself worthy of this important and exalted position, she sent him, in the company of a numerous suite, to Italy in December, 1749, to complete his education by remaining there until September, 1751. In his following were Soufflot, the architect, and Charles Nicholas Cochin _fils_, the celebrated engraver. On his return from Italy, M. de Marigny directed all the works of art undertaken by the government throughout France, while Soufflot built the church of Ste. Geneviève, now known as the Panthéon, and was one of the most conspicuous and influential men in the world of art in his day. Cochin, aside from being a great engraver, was intellectually one of the most interesting artists of the day, and, as M. de Marigny’s right-hand man, wielded an influence almost incomprehensible to us of to-day. The latter part of his life, he really ruled in M. de Marigny’s stead, and his absolute dictatorship in all matters of art in France can only be compared to that of Le Brun under Louis XIV.

That his Italian travels were the decisive influence of Cochin’s career is clearly shown in his own work, and is expressly stated by Diderot, who says of him that, “judge everywhere else, he was a scholar at Rome.” Soufflot was only seven years older than Piranesi, and Cochin but five. Now, when these distinguished Frenchmen were in Rome, Piranesi was already famous and frequented the most interesting artistic circles. His talents and his remarkably impetuous personality made him one of the curiosities of Rome, so that it is scarcely credible that these visiting foreigners should not have seen much of him. As their express object was the study of antiquity, and as no one in Rome knew more of the ruins or had so lively an enthusiasm for them as Piranesi, it is certainly probable that he influenced them deeply.

Robert Adam, Architect, 1767. Engraved by J. Zucchi in 1774

From “The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam.” (London, 1778)]

Robert Adam, Architect, 1761. Engraved by Piranesi

From “The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam.” (London, 1778)]

Aside from these men, the list is long of famous Frenchmen who studied in Rome during the height of Piranesi’s artistic production, and must certainly have felt his influence. It includes Augustin Pajou, the sculptor, who went to the Villa Médicis as Prix de Rome in 1748, at eighteen, and who afterward decorated the opera built at Versailles by Ange Gabriel, architect of the faultless buildings which ennoble the Place de la Concorde; Jean Jacques Caffieri, the sculptor, who was in Rome from 1749 to 1753; Chalgrin, Prix de Rome in 1758, successor to Soufflot as architect of the city of Paris, and architect of St. Philippe du Roule and of the Arc de Triomphe; Jean Antoine Houdon, the sculptor, Prix de Rome in 1761, at twenty, who came to America with Franklin to execute the statue of Washington now in Richmond; and finally Claude François Michel, known as Clodion, who gained the Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1763 and filled whatever he touched with unrivaled grace, raising the art of terra-cotta figurines to a degree of loveliness no one else ever attained. It must be remembered that these architects and sculptors did not confine themselves to architecture pure and simple, as do our prouder and less talented contemporaries. With the spirit which animates all periods of great art, they considered no object too insignificant to be made lovely by their talent. They decorated theaters and houses, designing furniture, clocks, vases, and every article of daily life; filling them all with the consummate, delicate art that remains the despair of all who have followed. If, therefore, as is to be supposed, they underwent Piranesi’s influence while in Rome, it would have made itself felt, through them, in all the decorative arts of France.

If Piranesi’s influence in France be a subject for hypothesis, in England it can be decisively proved in the case of the so-called Adam style, a vulgar caricature of which is at present so prevalent in New York. Robert Adam, a Scotchman who studied in Rome, was so delightfully original and adventurous as to fit out an expedition to explore the then totally unknown Palace of Diocletian at Spalato in Dalmatia. He was also a friend of Piranesi, who dedicated his views of the Campus Martius to “Robert Adam, a British cultivator of architecture, as a proof of his affection.” Now Adam, a man of unusually alert mind and delicate taste, was a poor architect, with a most defective sense of proportion in the composition of a building as a whole, who nevertheless possessed unusual and distinctive talent as a decorator. His fine taste led him to cover his work with detail executed and often conceived by remarkable persons, so that much of the credit for originality and delicacy given to him is due, as with so many an architect, to the artists whom he had the cleverness and good fortune to employ and the ability to direct. In the preparation of his monumental book he was assisted by “Eques J. B. Piranesi,” as he there signs himself, who actually engraved three plates with his own hand, while the rendering of every design in the book shows his influence. Knowing this, it is impossible to doubt that Adam’s taste and style were profoundly influenced by, and indebted to, so original and masterly a mind as that of Piranesi.

A comparison of Adam’s book with certain plates by Piranesi will clearly show the debt, while a careful study of only three of his compositions--namely, the title-page before mentioned as dedicated to Adam and the two plates inscribed with the name of Pope Clement XIII--will in itself make clear that much decorative work called either Louis XVI or Adam takes its forms as well as its inspiration directly from the creations of Giambattista Piranesi. Piranesi’s influence can also be proved in the case of George Dance, architect of old Newgate Prison; of Robert Mylne, architect of old Blackfriars Bridge; of Sir John Soane, architect of the Bank of England; and of many more. The subject of Piranesi’s influence in England has been so exhaustively treated by Mr. Arthur Samuels in his monograph as to make useless any attempt to rehandle the subject here.

(Rome, 1762)

The dedication to Robert Adam is upon the column to the left

Size of the original etching, 19⅞ × 13¼ inches]

Size of the original etching (of which the above is a part only), 53 × 45½ inches]

Still another example of Piranesi’s influence is to be found in the sketches of the present-day German, Otto Rieth, the originality of whose drawings is so vaunted. Very talented and individual they certainly are, but to any one thoroughly familiar with the architectural fantasies of Piranesi, the source of inspiration is so obvious as to make it impossible that Rieth should not have known the work of his great Italian predecessor.

The influence which Piranesi exerts on the École des Beaux-Arts, and consequently on the leading contemporary architects of both France and the United States, is enormous, if hard to define. The use of detail which he furnishes is never-ceasing, but more important than this is the constant inspiration sought in a study of those architectural fantasies which he has filled with the qualities of grandeur and immensity so much valued by the French to-day. The buildings of New York are covered with motives either inspired by Piranesi or taken directly from his work--ornament much of which would never have come into vogue but for him; while a recent number of a leading architectural periodical, without acknowledgment, printed a design of his for its cover.

It is ardently to be hoped that a wider and more just appreciation of Piranesi’s unique work may gradually gain currency. Mere productiveness is, of course, of no intrinsic value; but that any human being should be capable of so vast a labor as Piranesi must in itself excite in us a lively sense of wonder and admiration. When, moreover, it is found that his work, in addition to putting the art of architecture under an enormous debt, is distinguished by imagination, originality, sublimity, and immense skill of execution,--a certain portion of it at least possessing these qualities to a degree unsurpassed by any artist using the particular medium employed,--it is surely not unreasonable to attribute to their creator the rare quality of original genius.

NOTE: I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Arthur Samuel of London, both for material contained in his book and for personal courtesy.

FRANCISCO GOYA Y LUCIENTES

BY CHARLES H. CAFFIN

Author of “The Story of Spanish Painting,” “Old Spanish Masters, Engraved by Timothy Cole,” etc., etc.

The phenomenon of Goya is among the curiosities of the history of art. For in the latter half of the eighteenth century, when, under the feeble Bourbon dynasty, Spain had reached the lowest ebb of her national and artistic life, an artist arose who represented more than any other her racial characteristics and was destined to exert a world-wide influence on the art of the succeeding century.

While the rest of Europe was seething with the spirit of revolution, Goya, the man, was already in revolt, and at the same time had discovered for himself a revolutionary form of art, which anticipated by half a century the consciousness elsewhere of the need of a new method to fit the new point of view. In a word, he drove an entering wedge into the contemporary classicalism that was based upon a dry imitation of Roman marbles and Raphaelesque compositions, restored nature to art, and adapted his vision of nature to the spirit of inquiry, observation, and research that was in process of fermentation. Finally, he adjusted to his vision of life a method of composition, freer and more flexible than the older ones: that was preoccupied less with the representation of form than with the expression of movement and character; its aim, in fact, being primarily expressional. Thus he anticipated the motive of modern impressionism and determined in advance the methods of rendering it.

No less remarkable is the degree in which he was an avatar of the mingled traits of his race. For ethnologically the Spaniard is a Celt, who first was disciplined by Roman civilization, then merged in the flood of a Germanic wave, and later infused with the blood and culture of the Arab and the Moor. A truly wonderful amalgam--the ironic humor of the Celt; the mysticism, vigor, and grotesque imagination of the forest-bred Goth; the subtle inventiveness, sensuousness, and abstraction of the Orient, and the uncouth strain of the Black Man, whom to-day we are discovering to be the flotsam of a far-off submerged civilization in Darkest Africa. All these traits are recognizable in the work of Goya that he did to please himself: namely, in his painted figure-subjects, other than portraits, and in his drawings and etchings.

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Size of the original etching, 5⁵⁄₁₆ × 4⅞ inches]

From “_The Proverbs_” (Lefort No. 126)

A reference to the Spanish court, which rests on a dead branch over an abyss

Size of the original etching, 8⅜ × 12⁹⁄₁₆ inches]

In the modern craze for making over biographies of past worthies, so as to bring their lives into conformity with the standards of respectability in the present, there is a tendency to suggest that many of the records of Goya’s career may be apocryphal. This would rob the story of art of a very picturesque personality; one, moreover, which seems to be quite convincingly represented in his art. He was born in 1746, in the little town of Fuendetodos near Zaragoza in the province of Aragón, his father being a small farmer. Reared among the hills, he breathed independence, throve mightily in bodily vigor, and proved precociously disposed to art. Accordingly, at the age of fourteen he was put under a teacher, Luzan, in Zaragoza. But it was never Goya’s way to take instruction from a spoon, and at this period he distinguished himself less as a student than as a roistering young fellow, apt for gallantry and brawls and ready with his rapier. Having drawn on himself the attention of the authorities of the Inquisition, he found it convenient to proceed to Madrid. Here again his escapades aroused notoriety, so that he abandoned the capital and set forth for Rome, working his way to the sea-board by practising as a bull-fighter. In Rome he mainly nourished his artistic development by observation of the old masterpieces, meanwhile indulging in gallantries, which culminated in a plot to rescue a young lady from a convent. This time he found himself actually in the grip of the Inquisition and was only released from it by the Spanish ambassador, who undertook to ship him back to Spain. Arrived the second time in Madrid he found a friend in the painter Francisco Bayeu, who gave him his daughter, Josefa, in marriage and introduced him to Mengs, the arbiter of art at Court. Josefa bore him twenty children, none of whom survived him, and patiently put up with his infidelities. Mengs had been urged by the king, Charles III, to revive the Tapestry Works of Santa Barbara, and intrusted Goya with a series of designs, which to-day may be seen in the basement galleries of the Prado, while some of them, executed in the weave, adorn the walls of a room in the Escoriál. The vogue at the time was for Boucher’s pretty pastoral ineptitudes, but Goya took a hint from Teniers and represented the actual pastimes of the Spanish people. He, however, far outstripped the Flemish artist in the variety, naturalness, and vivacity of his subjects, while in the matter of composition he showed himself already a student of the harmonies of nature rather than a perpetuator of studio traditions.

These designs secured his general popularity and paved the way for his _entrée_ into royal favor at the accession of Charles IV in 1788. Goya, turned forty, was already the darling of the populace and now became the cynosure of the Court. He would pit his prowess against the professional strong man in the streets of Madrid and plunged with equal aplomb and assurance into the gallantries of the royal circle, which was a hotbed of intrigue under the lax régime of Queen Maria Luisa, whose amours were notorious. Foremost among her lovers was Manuel Godoy, whom she raised from the rank of a guardsman eventually to be prime minister. He embroiled his country in a war with England, and finally ratted to Napoleon, conniving at the invasion of the French troops and the placing of Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of Spain. Meanwhile, in the interval before this _débâcle_, Goya, while dipping into intrigue, notably with the beautiful Countess of Alba, and establishing his position as an artist to whom every one who would be anybody must sit for a portrait, maintained an attitude of haughty mental exclusiveness. He was the rebel, the insurgent, the nihilist; lashing with the impartial whip of his satire the rottenness of the Court and the shams and hypocrisies of the Middle Class, the Church, Law, Medicine, and even Painting. Also, like many devotees of sensual pleasures, he was hot in his denunciation of lust, a terrible exponent of its consequences in satiety and sapped vitality.

“Poor animal! The genealogists and the kings of heraldry have muddled his brain, and he is not the only one.”

Manuel Godoy, satirized in this print, had a long and fictitious genealogy made for himself, according to which he was a direct descendant of the ancient Gothic kings of Spain.

From “_The Caprices_” (Lefort No. 39).]

“The question is often raised whether men or women are superior. The vices of either proceed from bad upbringing; where the men are depraved the women likewise are depraved.”

From “_The Caprices_” (Lefort No. 5).]

This last is the theme of one of his most horribly arresting subjects in oils, an allegory of the Fates, wherein lust and its accompanying exhaustion represent the futility of man’s existence. It is painted in colors of extreme neutrality that almost amount to monochrome. Thus it illustrates a dictum of Goya’s that color no more than line exists in nature; there are only differences of light and shade. It accordingly prepares one for an appreciation of his etchings, in which aquatint plays so intrinsically important a rôle. As a painter he had begun with positive hues--to abandon them, as soon as he reached his maturity, for a sparing use of color and a liberal differentiation of color values. In this he was following Velasquez, whom he admitted to be one of his teachers, the others being Rembrandt and nature. It was Rembrandt, unquestionably, who helped him to a vision of nature that reduced itself to the principle of light and dark; but from nature herself he gained corroboration of the essential truth of such a vision. How true it is the artist of the present day has learned from Goya. Like the latter, he sees color in nature not as positive hues, but as a complex weave of varying intensities of light and shade that play over and transform the hues. It is by the correlation of these varying values that he builds up the structure and secures the planes of his composition, and realizes a unity and harmony of _ensemble_. And it is in Goya’s etchings that he finds these principles of color in relation to composition represented with most adequate reliance on simplification, organization, and expression--the three watchwords of contemporary artists who are working in the latest modern spirit.

Expression is the keynote of Goya’s etchings, as it is of his paintings. It is the quality of feeling rather than of seeing that is interpreted. Thus, in the oil painting of the _Maja_, _Nude_, it was Goya’s intent not so much to represent the young form as to interpret the expression of its youth through the play of light and shadow on the supple torso and limbs; an expression so exquisitely subtle and tender that it defies the copyist’s attempted imitation and eludes the resources of photographic reproduction. Similarly, in the splendid impressionism of the group-portrait of Charles IV and his family it is not the appearance of the jewels, clustered on the breasts of the royal pair, but the effect of their luster that he designed to render. And so throughout his drawings and etchings the prime purpose is not to represent the thing seen but to suggest its effect upon the feelings.

* * * * *

Goya’s etched work, as catalogued in 1907 by Julius Hofmann, comprises 268 pieces. These include 22 Various Subjects; 16 Studies after Velasquez; 83 Caprices; 21 Proverbs; 82 Disasters of War and 44 Tauromachies, or Scenes from the Bull-Fight. To this list of engraved work are to be added 20 lithographs.

The best known of these groups is _Los Caprichos_, etched in 1794-1798 but not published until 1803. These _Caprices_ represent the most spontaneous expression of Goya’s temperament and of his attitude toward the life and the society of his day. At the same time, the designs, as in the case of all his etchings and lithographs, were executed with due deliberation, worked out previously in drawings in which every effect was carefully calculated and assured. With corresponding fidelity the drawings were copied on the plate.

“The woman who does not know how to guard herself is the first to be attacked. And it is only when there is no longer time to protect herself that she is astonished that she was carried off.”

From “_The Caprices_” (Lefort No. 8).]

“Where go they across the shadows, this infernal cohort which makes the air ring with their cries? If only there were daylight-- ... Then it would be another thing: because with a gun we could bring them down.... But it is night and nobody can see them.” From “_The Caprices_” (Lefort No. 64).]

It is in this set that the creative quality of Goya’s imagination is most demonstrated. He could not only summon visions from the void, but clothe them in convincing shape. Whether he stretched some human type to the limit of caricature or invested it with attributes of bird, beast, or reptile, or used some familiar form of animal, or created a hybrid monster, he had the faculty of giving it an actuality that makes it seem reasonable. As to the meaning of the subjects, the titles which he himself gave them furnish, except in a few instances, an intelligible clue. Prints of this set were brought to England by officers engaged in the Peninsular War and later found their way to Paris and exercised a very conscious influence upon Delacroix. For they not only echoed the turbulence of his own spirit, but helped him to give expression to his own visions of the horrible and fantastic. The best proofs are those of the first edition, many of which were pulled by the artist himself.

_The Proverbs_, although engraved between 1800 and 1810, were not published until 1850. While their subjects are often difficult to comprehend, they show generally a marked technical advance over the previous work. This is apparent not only in the character of the drawing, but also in the increased simplification and more highly organized arrangement of the composition. Some of the latter, as for example in the case of _The Infuriated Stallion_ and _The Bird-Men_, present designs of extraordinary distinction.

The last prints of _La Tauromachie_ are dated 1815. This series falls short of the others in esthetic interest, being more conspicuously illustrative. It was, indeed, designed to represent the various phases through which the baiting of bulls in Spain had passed. Beginning with the early hunting of the bull in the open country, both on horseback and on foot, it proceeds to the methods introduced by the Moors, who are represented in the attire of Turks. Thence it gradually traces the development of a precise science and technique in the management of the sport and incidentally commemorates the prowess of individual bull-fighters, beginning with the Emperor Charles V, and passing to well-known professional toreadors. Contemporary proofs of Goya are very rare; and it was not until 1855 that a complete set was published in Madrid. A later issue, including seven extra prints, was published by Loizelet in Paris.

From “_The Proverbs_” (Lefort No. 133)

Size of the original etching, 8⅜ × 12½ inches]

From “_The Proverbs_” (Lefort No. 136)

Size of the original etching, 8⅝ × 12⅞ inches]

Of the _Disasters of War_ no prints exist prior to those of the set published by the Academy of San Fernando in 1863. Etched during 1810 and the succeeding years of the Peninsular War, the _Disasters_ are regarded as the finest products of Goya’s needle. Yet he was sixty-four years old when he commenced them. Though he had subscribed to the Bonaparte régime and still held the position of Court painter, he lived apart from active affairs in the seclusion of his country home. The prints are inspired by his country’s sufferings, but he did not publish them. To do so would have been to raise a protest against the crime of the French invasion and to stir his countrymen to increased patriotism. Under the circumstances of his equivocal position Goya may have thought such a course impolitic. Perhaps he felt the national condition to be hopeless. At any rate, he closed himself around in an atmosphere of profound pessimism. “Was it for this they were born?” is the legend beneath one of the prints which shows a heap of mangled corpses. It is the note of the whole series--the criminal horror of war, and its futility. Nowhere else is the element of the _macabre_ in his genius more fully revealed. The designs are in no sense illustrative; they are visions of his own brooding, projected against darkness and emptiness. Yet, just as in the _Caprices_ he gave bone and flesh to the eery fabrics of his imagination, so by the magic of his needle his abstract imaginings of the enormity of war became visualized into concrete actuality.

Of Goya’s lithographs it must suffice here to mention the set of four prints, _The Bulls of Bordeaux_. They were executed in that city in 1825. For after the expulsion of the French by Wellington and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in the person of Ferdinand VII, Goya again turned his coat. “For your treason you deserve to be hanged,” remarked the new king, “but you are a great artist and I overlook the past.” He was reappointed Court painter; but, broken in health and spirits, so deaf that he could no longer indulge his musical taste in playing, he obtained the king’s permission to retire to Bordeaux, where he was cared for by a Madame Weiss and her daughter. It was during this time that he visited Paris and was enthusiastically welcomed by Delacroix and the other Romanticists. When he drew _The Bulls_ _of Bordeaux_ he was in his seventy-ninth year and able to work only with the aid of a powerful magnifying-glass. Yet the prints in their intense and vigorous movement show no slackening of artistic power. He died three years later, in 1828, and was buried in the cemetery of Bordeaux. After lying there for seventy-one years, his body was claimed by his country and interred with honors in Madrid. For by this time the modern world of art had recognized Goya’s greatness and its own indebtedness to his genius.

* * * * *

Goya’s etchings reveal him a great master of design. The versatility of his invention suggests the exuberance of nature, yet calculated art determines each composition. It is architectonic, organic, functional; possessing the quality of a built-up structure, with perfect correlation of its parts and absolute adjustment of means to end. Moreover, it carries the final mark of distinction in that it appears to have grown: it has the vitality, movement, and character of a living organism. It is discovered to be the product of a new mating of nature and geometry, inspired by a wider and more penetrating observation of the former and a more extended and imaginative use of the latter. Hence, at times it strangely anticipates what we are now familiar with in Oriental composition.

Most remarkable also is the plastic quality, which is realized not only in the _ensemble_ but also in the component parts. Goya’s compositions are no mere patterning of surfaces, but an example of actual space-filling, in the true sense that they occupy the third dimension. The substance of his forms and their position in space are so concretely realized that they most actively excite the tactile sense. And yet, for all their concreteness, they are permeated with a quality of abstraction. Thus they fascinate alike by their actuality and their suggestion of a vision. They are frequently hideous, but in their capacity of sense-enhancement and in their stimulus to the esthetic intellectuality they are beautiful.

“And this advice is worthy of her who gives it. Worse yet is the damsel who follows it to the letter, and misfortune to the first one who accosts her!” From “_The Caprices_” (Lefort No. 15).]

“The damsel while young left her native land, served her apprenticeship in Cadiz, and is now returned to Madrid. She has drawn a prize in the lottery, goes one day to the Prado, and is accosted by an old and decrepit beggar--she repulses her; the beggar woman insists. The beauty turns and recognizes her--this poor old woman is her mother.”

From “_The Caprices_” (Lefort No. 16).]

And the beauty of these compositions is materially increased by the sense of color which they suggest. In consequence of Goya’s influence aquatint is coming largely into vogue with modern etchers; but he with this process, and his contemporary, Turner, with mezzotint, were the first to explore fully the resources of tint in combination with line. The English artist, however, used it mainly as a convenient method of representation. In Goya’s hand it became a medium of intellectual and emotional expression, comparable to tone in music. Goya, in fact, by his study of nature, advanced the circle of his art, so that, on the one hand, it embraced more of the universal geometry and, on the other, intersected more freely the circles of the other arts. Thus he anticipated the latest modern thought, in its consciousness of the essential unity of the arts and of the essential unity of art with life.

A NOTE ON GOYA

BY WILLIAM M. IVINS, JR.

No other artist in black and white has ever exhibited such tremendous vitality as Goya. Look back along the line, and there is no maker of prints who has put into them the same exuberant, full-blooded delight in life. For sheer physical strength Mantegna only may be compared with him. And, strangely, with this often almost delirious overflow of animal spirits there is the most remarkable sensitiveness to the significance of gesture. Who, except Hokusai, has ever expressed, in black and white, _weight_--the heaviness of tired bodies, the leaden fall of an unconscious woman’s arm, or the buoyancy of excitement--as this Spaniard? Who has ever made motion so moving--made young limbs so supple, elastic, and graceful? His every line is kinetic--he does not relate motion, he exhibits it--and in art as elsewhere deeds are worth more than words.

For sensitiveness to the beauty of the human body, for curious research in the esthetic inversion, the beauty of the hideous, Goya stands alone. No one, not even Leonardo, has plumbed so deep in the hidden shadowy parts. No one has so pictured _fear_--theatricalities a plenty--but only here real terror.

“Here is a lover who, like those in Calderon, because he could not refrain from mocking his rival, is dying in the arms of his beloved, and by his temerity has lost all. It is not well to draw the sword too often.” From “_The Caprices_” (Lefort No. 10).]

“The teeth of those who have been hanged are very efficacious in bringing luck. Without this ingredient nothing worth while can be done. Is it not pitiful that the common folk believe such foolishness?” From “_The Caprices_” (Lefort No. 12).]

On the purely technical side--the broad massing of sharply contrasted light and shade, the ability to tell a tale with the simplest means, the instinctive choice of the pictorially dramatic detail--Rembrandt and Goya stand alone.

On another side that is purely technical, it should be borne in mind that Goya is the only one who has availed himself of all the possibilities of aquatint--the only one who has used the medium with audacity and resolution and success; the only one who has dared use it to express powerful and fundamental things.

Goya, both in himself and for his influence, is one of the greatest artists that the world has seen these last hundred and fifty years--and his greatest work is his black and white.

THE ETCHINGS OF FORTUNY

BY ROYAL CORTISSOZ

Literary and Art Editor of the New York _Tribune_

The etchings of Fortuny make an inviting theme, inviting in itself and doubly sympathetic because it provokes talk about Fortuny. I have always had a weakness for that endearing personality and I cannot, for the life of me, go with foot-rule and a spirit of cold analysis through the twenty-five or thirty plates--twenty-nine, to be exact--recorded in the useful compendium of Beraldi. You cannot be pedantic about an artist whose work has meant to you an early enthusiasm and a lifelong sense of gaiety and brilliance. The first work of art I ever yearned to possess was a drawing by Fortuny. I did not get it into my hands. The spell faded, but it was revived, and long afterward it involved me in an enchanting task. In Paris, one summer, the late Philip Gilbert Hamerton asked me to write a memoir of Fortuny and for two years I spent a good deal of my leisure going hither and yon, collecting material. The book never got itself written, for reasons which I found both pathetic and comic. Too much of the “material” aforesaid proved too heart-breakingly expensive. Mr. Hamerton and I and his London publisher, the late Mr. Seeley, ruefully concluded as we counted up the figures, that, humorously speaking, ruin stared us in the face. We turned to other things.

(Beraldi No. 1)

Size of the original etching, 7½ × 15¼ inches]

(Beraldi No. 4)

Size of the original etching, 7⅝ × 5½ inches]

That, as I have said, was years ago, but every now and then I go back to Fortuny, for old sake’s sake if for no other reason, though he was, of course, a remarkable artist to whom one would be bound, anyway, frequently to return. As a matter of fact, his genius has needed, of late, to be restored to the public consciousness. When the Impressionists came in, Fortuny, or perhaps I should more specifically say, the hypothesis for which he stood, went out. One of the results of my understanding with Mr. Hamerton was a series of visits to the _palazzo_ in Venice which is still the home of Fortuny’s family, and there you found a contrast that was full of meaning. On the _piano nobile_ Fortuny’s art held its own in numerous unfinished pictures, sketches, and the like. But, up-stairs, in his son’s studio, all was changed. When young Marianito sought inspiration as a painter, he did not follow in his father’s footsteps, but went to Munich, and on his walls I saw huge canvases illustrating Wagnerian motives in a huge and splashy manner, strongly suggestive of Franz Stuck and his followers. I confess that at this distance of time I do not recall very accurately just what they were all about; but I can remember as though it were yesterday how extremely different they were from the paintings down-stairs. Of course no one could blame Marianito. An artist must seek salvation in his own way. But it is impossible not to feel a certain indignation over the ignorance of those who have tried to wave Fortuny aside as a painter of bric-a-brac.

We saw too much of that sort of thing when the works of Sorolla and Zuloaga were shown at the Hispanic Museum and people went into hysterics over them, talking especially about how the first of these painters was rejuvenating Spanish art. I used to hear such talk in Madrid, some fifteen years ago, amongst the younger men who were even then hailing Sorolla as a pioneer. They were right, and it is right, as I have argued elsewhere, to recognize in this painter’s work an influence of the highest value to the modern Spanish school. But there were great men before Agamemnon, and it is stupid to ignore what was done for Spanish painting by Fortuny long before any one ever heard of Sorolla. I have great respect and plenty of admiration for that accomplished technician, and yet I think that he himself, if pressed in the matter, would cheerfully admit that nothing he ever painted could quite touch the portrait in the Metropolitan Museum, _A Spanish Lady_, which Fortuny painted in 1865. Outside of France that was not a particularly good year amongst painters, but Fortuny, then twenty-seven years old, was proving himself not unworthy of Velasquez. He was drawing with mastery and he was painting blacks with amazing skill and taste, with amazing sensitiveness to the beauties lying entangled in one of the most difficult of a colorist’s problems. Indeed, I may note in passing that this picture alone would show Fortuny to have enforced lessons in tone which no Spaniard since his time, not even the prodigiously clever Sorolla, has begun to commence to prepare to equal.

(Beraldi No. 10)

Size of the original etching, 15½ × 12¼ inches]

(Beraldi No. 19)

Size of the original etching, 5½ × 4 inches]

There are many other paintings of his over which it would be pleasant to linger, but, having the etchings in view, I forbear. At the same time I have driven at nothing irrelevant in speaking of Fortuny’s command over the brush, for that is very closely related to his command over the needle. It is important to remember, in the first place, that he was a born draughtsman. The fact was brought home to me when I made a pilgrimage to Barcelona, to see the big Moroccan battle-piece which he painted for the municipality not long after he had won the Prix de Rome. I saw in the spirited picture the Fortuny we all know, but I saw also, in some earlier pieces, the kind of academic work that he did under the influence of old Soberano, his master at Reus, where he was born in 1838. Yes, it was academic work, but it was the work of a youngster of genius who had a _flair_ for form and drew it with astonishing adroitness. There, to be sure, you have the essence of Fortuny, more even than in the glitter of light and color conventionally associated with his name. The artists and critics who think that the history of painting began with Manet are wont to damn Fortuny with faint praise, talking about his dexterity as though that were a very ordinary and perhaps specious gift. Well, there is a dexterity, there is a sleight of hand, as honest as anything that you will find in Manet, and Fortuny had it. There are moments, no doubt, in which it takes your breath away as though by some deceptive stroke of conjuror’s work. But at bottom there is a sterling sincerity about it, and this, I think, is sharply perceptible in the etchings.

Paradoxically, these do not proclaim Fortuny what the master of etching is wont to be--a lover of line for its own sake, a user of it as a language possessing its own special character and charm. Rembrandt’s strength and Whistler’s exquisiteness were alike unknown to him. The truth is that Fortuny employed the needle somewhat as he employed the pen, simply for purposes of swift and free expression. There are some bewitching drawings of his, reproduced by the Amand-Durand process in the memoir by Baron Davillier, and there are others in the catalogue of the great sale of his studio effects in 1875, which, for the impression they leave, might almost be regarded as etchings. The impression in either category is very much one of “black-and-white.” Has not Fortuny been the master of a generation of illustrators? Nevertheless his drawings and his etchings are not absolutely interchangeable. In the latter there is too much of the painter for that; his figures are too closely modeled and his backgrounds are too transparent. Some of his plates, such as _The Serenade_, _The Anchorite_, the _Kabyle Mort_, and _The Farrier_, are wonderfully rich in color such as no pen draughtsman could secure. He knew how to fill his backgrounds with deep warm tone, and he could use the same vivifying touch in his treatment of the figure. It is worth while to go carefully through the little collection of etchings that he left, looking more particularly for those rather thin staccato effects which his imitators affect--one is so delightfully disappointed. I have spoken of his sincerity, his honesty. Amongst all the plates there is only one, _La Victoire_, which hints a contradiction. There is something factitious about the composition, recalling the Sicilian nudities hawked about by the photographers in Southern Italy. But even this etching has undeniable brilliance as a piece of technique, and, for the rest, Fortuny is the quite artless connoisseur of picturesqueness, etching his Moorish types and his portraits in the mood of the serious observer of nature aiming at the truth. On two or three occasions he appears to have let his fancy rove. His _Amateur de Jardin_ and his _Méditation_ both belong amongst those graceful studies of costume and pseudo-romantic sentiment with which his paintings have made us so familiar. And once he turned poet in a small way, etching that charming _Idylle_ which may reflect no emotion whatever, but has, at all events, a certain dainty elegance; but do not think that Fortuny was really a poet. It was not in his temperament. He was sensuous, mundane, in the soul of him; the very man to enjoy just the career that fell to his lot.

(Beraldi No. 20)

Size of the original etching, 4¼ × 6¼ inches]

(Beraldi No. 21)

Size of the original etching, 5⅜ × 9¼ inches]

New Yorkers will recall the sale here of the collection formed by the late W. H. Stewart in Paris, the “Cher Monsieur Guillermo” of more than one of the artist’s letters printed by Davillier. It was full of Fortunys, which made a dazzling array when they were put up at auction. But it was better to see them scattered about in Mr. Stewart’s home by the Seine, and there they breathed the atmosphere of a clearly defined character. You did not think of Fortuny in Spain, quietly painting at Granada; you did not think of him on the more adventurous soil of Morocco, nor did you dwell on thoughts of his days in Rome and on the beach at Portici. You thought, instead, of the Fortuny who took the collectors of Paris by storm, who moved Théophile Gautier to jeweled eloquence, who was young, successful, and happy, who had a great gift and used it truly with a _gaillard_ grace. He was not the specious entertainer, bemusing his audience with incredible tricks. All his wizardry, all his diabolical cleverness, was quite natural to him, springing from his heart and in no wise diminishing his weight and seriousness as a student of nature. Beraldi applauds his etchings for their originality. Let us honor them too for their fidelity to life, for their simple strength, as well as for their light, vivacious charm.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SIR SEYMOUR HADEN, P.R.E.