Chapter VI: Part II (2)

[87] In a picture which he painted at Rome for Bindo Altoviti, it represented "Un Cristo quanto il vivo, levato di croce, e posto in terra a' piedi della Madre; e nell' aria Febo, che oscura la faccia del sole, e Diana quella della Luna. Nel paese poi, oscurato da queste Tenebre, si veggiono spezzarsi alcuni monti di pietra, mossi dal terremoto, e certi corpi morti di santi risorgendo, uscire de sepolcri in vari modi; il quale quadro, finito che fu, per sua grazia non dispiacque al maggior pittore, scultore, e architetto, che sia stato a' tempi nostri passati?" The compliment was not paid to M. Agnolo himself, for the word "passati" tells that he was no more, but it levied a tribute on posterity.

Vita di Giorgio Vasari.

FIFTH LECTURE.

COMPOSITION, EXPRESSION.

=POLLA D' EN
KARDIAIS ANDRÔN EBALON
HÔRAI POLYANTHEMOI AR
CHAIA SOPHISMATH'. HAPAN D' EURONTOS ERGON.=

=PINDAR. OLYMP. P.=

ARGUMENT.

Elements of Composition; Grouping; M. Agnolo; Correggio;
Raffaello; Breadth;--Expression; its Classes, its Limits.

FIFTH LECTURE.

Invention is followed by Composition. Composition, in its stricter sense, is the dresser of Invention, it superintends the disposition of its materials.

Composition has physical and moral elements: those are Perspective and Light with shade; these, Unity, Propriety and Perspicuity; without Unity it cannot span its subject; without Propriety it cannot tell the story; without Perspicuity it clouds the fact with confusion; destitute of light and shade it misses the effect, and heedless of perspective it cannot find a place.

Composition, like all other parts of style, had a gradual progress; it began in monotony and apposition, emerged to centre and depth, established itself on harmony and masses, was debauched by contrast and by grouping, and finally supplanted by machinery, common-place, and manner.

Of sculpture, as infant painting had borrowed its first theory of forms, so it probably borrowed its method of arranging them; and this is Apposition, a collateral arrangement of figures necessary for telling a single or the scattered moments of a fact. If statuary indulged in the combination of numerous groups, such as those of the Niobe, it might dispose them in composition, it might fix a centre and its rays, and so produce an illusion as far as colourless form is capable of giving it. But sculpture, when it was first consulted by painting, was not yet arrived at that period which allowed the display of such magnificence; a single figure or a single group could not sufficiently inform the painter; he was reduced to consult basso-relievo, and of that, Apposition is the element.

And in this light we ought to contemplate a great part of the Capella Sistina. Its plan was monumental, and some of its compartments were allotted to Apposition, not because M. Agnolo was a sculptor, but because it was a more comprehensive medium to exhibit his general plan than the narrower scale of composition. He admitted and like a master treated composition, whenever his subject from the primeval simplicity of elemental nature retreated within the closer bounds of society: his Patriarchs, his Prophets and his Sibyls, singly considered or as groups, the scenery of the Brazen Serpent, of David and of Judith, of Noah and his sons, are models of the roundest and grandest composition. What principle of composition do we miss in the creation of Adam and of Eve? Can it grasp with more unity, characterise with more propriety, present with brighter perspicuity, give greater truth of place or round with more effect? If collateral arrangement be the ruling plan of the Last Judgment, if point of sight and linear and aerial perspective in what is elevated, comes forward or recedes, if artificial masses and ostentatious roundness, on the whole, be absorbed by design or sacrificed to higher principles, what effects has the greatest power of machinery ever contrived to emulate the conglobation of those struggling groups where light and shade administered to terror or sublimity? What, to emulate the boat of Charon disemboguing its crew of criminals, flung in a murky mass of shade across the pallid concave and bleak blast of light that blows it on us? A meteor in the realms of chiaroscuro which obscures whatever the most daring servants of that power elsewhere produced.

If the plan of M. Agnolo must be estimated by other principles, his process must be settled by other rules than the plan and process of Correggio at Parma. Though the first and greatest, Correggio was no more than a Machinist. It was less the Assumption of the Virgin, less a monument of triumphant Religion he meditated to exhibit by sublimity of conception or characteristic composition, than by the ultimate powers of linear and aerial perspective at an elevation which demanded eccentric and violent fore-shortening, set off and tuned by magic light and shade, to embody the medium in which the actors were to move; and to the splendour and loftiness of that he accommodated the subject and subordinated the agents. Hence his work, though moving in a flood of harmony, is not legitimate Composition. The synod that surrounds the glory, the glory itself that embosoms the Virgin and her angelic choir, Christ who precipitates himself to meet the glory, are equally absorbed in the _bravura_ of the vehicle, they radiate, reflect and mass, but show us little more than limbs. This makes the cupola of Correggio less epic or dramatic than ornamental. The technic part of Composition alone, though carried to the highest pitch of perfection, if its ostentation absorb the subject, stamps inferiority on the master. Take away Homer's language, and you take much, but you leave the epic poet unimpaired; take it from Virgil, strip him of the majesty, the glow, the propriety of his diction, and the remainder of his claim to epic poetry will nearly be reduced to what he borrowed from Homer's plan. What is it we remember when we leave the cupolas of Correggio? what when we leave the Chapel of Sixtus? There, a man who transferred to a colossal scale the dictates of his draped or naked model, applied them with a comprehensive eye and set them off by magic light and shade and wide expanded harmony of tone; here an epic plan combined and told in simple modes of grandeur. Each man gave what he had: Correggio, limbs and effect; M. Agnolo, being, form and meaning. If the cupola of Correggio be in its kind unequalled by earlier or succeeding plans, if it leave far behind the effusions of Lanfranchi and Pietro da Cortona, it was not the less their model; the ornamental style of machinists dates not the less its origin from him.

Various are the shapes in which Composition embodies its subject and presents it to our eye. The cone or pyramid, the globe, the grape, flame and stream, the circle and its segments, lend their figure to elevate, concentrate, round, diffuse themselves or undulate in its masses. It towers in the Apollo, it darts its flame forward in the warrior of Agasias, its lambent spires wind upward with the Laocoon; it inverts the cone in the Hercules of Glycon, it doubles it or undulates in Venus and the Graces. In the bland central light of a globe imperceptibly gliding through lucid demi-tints into rich reflected shades, it composes the spell of Correggio, and entrances like a delicious dream; whilst like a torrent it rushes from the hand of Tintorett over the trembling canvass in enormous wings of light and shade, and sweeps all individual importance in general effects. But whether its groups be imbrowned on a lucid sky, or emerge from darkness, whether it break like a meridian sun on the reflected object with Rubens, or from Rembrandt, flash on it in lightning, whatever be its form or its effect, if it be more or less than what it ought to be--a vehicle, if it branch not out of the subject as the produce of its root, if it do not contain all that distinguishes it from other subjects, if it leave out aught that is characteristic and exclusively its own, and admit what is superfluous or common-place--it is no longer composition, it is grouping only, an ostentatious or useless scaffolding about an edifice without a base; such was not the Composition of Raffaello.

The leading principle of Raffaello's composition is that simple air, that artlessness which persuades us that his figures have been less composed by skill than grouped by Nature; that the fact must have happened as we see it represented. Simplicity taught him to grasp his subject, propriety to give it character and form, and perspicuity to give it breadth and place. The School of Athens in the Vatican, the Death of Ananias, and the Sacrifice at Lystra, among the Cartoons, may serve as instances.

A metaphysical composition, if it be numerous, will be oftener mistaken for dilapidation of fragments than regular distribution of materials. The School of Athens communicates to few more than an arbitrary assemblage of speculative groups. Yet if the subject be the dramatic representation of Philosophy, as it prepares for active life, the parts of the building are not connected with more regular gradation than those groups. Archimedes and Pythagoras, Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Democritus, Epictetus, Diogenes and Aristippus, in different degrees of characteristic modes, tell one great doctrine, that, fitted by physical and intellectual harmony, man ascends from himself to society, from society to God. For this, group balances group, action is contrasted by repose, each weight has its counterpoise; unity and variety shed harmony over the whole.

In the Cartoon of Ananias, at the first glance, and even before we are made acquainted with the particulars of the subject, we become partners of the scene. The disposition is amphitheatric, the scenery a spacious hall, the heart of the action is the centre, the wings assist, elucidate, connect it with the ends. The apoplectic man before us is evidently the victim of a supernatural power, inspiring the apostolic figures, who on the raised platform with threatening arm pronounced, and with the word enforced his doom. The terror occasioned by the sudden stroke is best expressed by the features of youth and middle age on each side of the sufferer; it is instantaneous, because its shock has not yet spread beyond them, a contrivance not to interrupt the dignity due to the sacred scene, and to stamp the character of devout attention on the assembly. What preceded and what followed is equally implied in their occupation, and in the figure of a matron entering and absorbed in counting money, though she approaches the fatal centre, and whom we may suppose to be Sapphira, the accomplice and the wife of Ananias, and the devoted partner of his fate. In this composition of near thirty figures, none can be pointed out as a figure of common place or mere convenience; legitimate offsprings of one subject, they are linked to each other and to the centre by one common chain, all act and all have room to act; repose alternates with energy.

The Sacrifice at Lystra, though as a whole it has more of collateral arrangement than depth of Composition, as it traces in the moment of its choice the motive that produced and shows the disappointment that checks it, has collected actors and faces the most suitable to express both: actors and features of godlike dignity, superstitious devotion and eager curiosity: the scene is the vestibule of the temple of Hermes, and Paul, the supposed representative of that deity, though not placed in the centre or a central light, by his elevation, gesture, and the whole of the composition streaming toward him, commands the first glance. At the very onset of the ceremony the sacrificer is arrested in the act of smiting the victim, by the outstretched arm of a young man bursting through the hymning throng of priests and victimarii, observing Paul indignant rending his garment in horror of the idolatrous perversion of his miracle.[88] The miracle itself is personified in that characteristic figure of the healed man, who with eyes flashing joy and gratitude on the Apostle, and hands joined in adoration, rushes in, accompanied by an aged man of gravity and rank, who, lifting up part of the garment that covered his thigh, attests him to have been the identic owner of those crutches that formerly supported him, though now as useless thrown on the pavement.

Among the Cartoons which we do not possess, and probably exist only in the tapestries of Rome and Madrid, and engravings copied from them, the Resurrection of Christ and his Ascension, equally mark Raphael's discriminative powers in their contrasted compositions. The Resurrection derives its interest from the convulsive rapidity, the Ascension from its calmness of motion. In that, the hero like a ball of fire shoots up from the bursting tomb and sinking cerements, and scatters astonishment and dismay. What apprehension dared not to suspect, what fancy could not dream of, no eye had ever beheld and no tongue ever uttered, blazes before us: the passions dart in rays resistless from the centre. Fear, terror, conviction, wrestle with dignity and courage in the centurion; convulse brutality, overwhelm violence, enervate resistance, absorb incredulity in the guard. The whole is tempestuous. The Ascension is the majestic last of many similar scenes: no longer with the rapidity of a conqueror, but with the calm serenity of triumphant power, the Hero is borne up in splendour, and gradually vanishes from those who by repeated visions had been taught to expect whatever was amazing. Silent and composed, with eyes more absorbed in adoration than wonder, they follow the glorious emanation; till addressed by the white-robed messengers of their departed king, they relapse to the feelings of men.

We have considered hitherto the mental part of Raffaello's composition, let us say a word of the technic. His excellence in this is breadth of masses, and of positive light and shade.

Breadth, or that quality of execution which makes a whole so predominate over the parts as to excite the idea of uninterrupted unity amid the greatest variety, modern art, as it appears to me, owes to M. Agnolo. The breadth of M. Agnolo resembles the tide and ebb of a mighty sea: waves approach, arrive, retreat, but in their rise and fall, emerging or absorbed, impress us only with the image of the power that raises, that directs them; whilst the discrepance of obtruding parts in the works of the infant Florentine, Venetian and German schools, distracts our eye like the numberless breakers of a shallow river, or as the brambles and creepers that entangle the paths of a wood, and instead of showing us our road, perplex us only with themselves. By breadth the artist puts us into immediate possession of the whole, and from that, gently leads us to the examination of the parts according to their relative importance: hence it follows, that in a representation of organized surfaces, breadth is the judicious display of fullness, not a substitute of vacuity. Breadth might be easily obtained if emptiness could give it. Yet even in that degraded state, if gratification of the eye be a first indispensable duty of an art that can impress us only by that organ, it is preferable to the laboured display of parts ambitiously thronging for admittance at the expense of the whole; to that perplexed diligence which wearies us with impediment before we can penetrate a meaning or arrive at the subject, whose clear idea must be first obtained before we can judge of the propriety or impropriety of parts. The principle which constitutes the breadth of Raphael was neither so absolute nor so comprehensive as that of M. Agnolo's. But his perspicacity soon discovered, that great, uninterrupted masses of light and shade, bespeak, satisfy, conduct and give repose to the eye; that opposition of light and shade gives perspicuity. Convinced of this, he let their mass fall as broad on his figures as their importance, attitude and relation to each other permitted, and as seldom as possible, interrupted it. Masses of shade he opposed to light, and lucid ones to shade. The strict observation of this rule appears to be the cause why every figure of Raffaello, however small, even at a considerable distance, describes itself, and strikes the eye with distinctness; so that even the comparatively diminutive figures of his Loggia are easily discriminated from the Cortile below. To this maxim he remained faithful in all his works, a few instances excepted, when instead of light and shade he separated figures by reflexes of a different colour; exceptions more dictated by necessity than choice, and which serve rather to confirm than to impair the rule.

It cannot be denied that, if this positive opposition gave superior distinctness, it occasioned sometimes abruptness. Each part is broad, but separation is too visible. Reflexes he uniformly neglects, and, from whatever cause, is often inattentive to transition; he does not sufficiently connect with breadth of demi-tint the two extremes of his masses; and, though much less in fresco than in oil, seems not always to have had a distinct idea of the gradations required completely to round as well as to spread a whole; to have been more anxious to obtain breadth itself than its elemental harmony.

It does not appear that the great masters of legitimate composition in the sixteenth century attended to or understood the advantages which elevation of site and a low horizon are capable of giving to a subject. They place us in the gallery to behold their scenes; but, from want of keeping, the horizontal line becomes a perpendicular, and drops the distance on the foreground; the more remote groups do not approach, but fall or stand upon the foremost actors. As this impedes the principles of unity and grandeur in numerous compositions, so it impairs each individual form; which, to be grand, ought to rise upward in moderate foreshortening, command the horizon, or be in contact with the sky. Reverse this plan in the composition of Pietro Martyre by Tizian, let the horizontal line be raised above the friar on the fore-ground, space, loftiness, and unity, vanish together. What gives sublimity to Rembrandt's Ecce Homo more than this principle?--a composition, which though complete, hides in its grandeur the limits of its scenery. Its form is as a pyramid whose top is lost in the sky, as its base in tumultuous murky waves. From the fluctuating crowds who inundate the base of the tribunal, we rise to Pilate, surrounded and perplexed by the varied ferocity of the sanguinary synod, to whose remorseless gripe he surrenders his wand; and from him we ascend to the sublime resignation of innocence in Christ, and regardless of the roar below, securely repose on his countenance. Such is the grandeur of a conception, which in its blaze absorbs the abominable detail of materials too vulgar to be mentioned; had the materials been equal to the conception and composition, the Ecce Homo of Rembrandt, even unsupported by the magic of its light and shade, or his spell of colours, would have been an assemblage of superhuman powers.

* * * * *

Far, too far, from having answered all the demands of composition, my limits force me, and my subject requires, to give a faint sketch of the most prominent features of Expression, its assistant and interpreter. They interweave themselves so closely with each other, and both with Invention, that we can scarcely conceive one without supposing the presence of the rest, and applying the principles of each to all; still they are separate powers, and may be possessed singly. The figure of Christ by M. Agnolo in the Minerva, embracing his cross and the instruments of suffering, is sublimely conceived, powerfully arranged; but neither his features nor expression are those of Christ.

Expression is the vivid image of the passion that affects the mind; its language, and the portrait of its situation. It animates the features, attitudes, and gestures, which Invention selected, and Composition arranged; its principles, like theirs, are simplicity, propriety, and energy.

It is important to distinguish the materials and the spirit of expression. To give this we must be masters of the forms and of the hues that embody it. Without truth of line no true expression is possible; and the passions, whose inward energy stamped form on feature, equally reside, fluctuate, flash or lower on it in colour, and give it energy by light and shade.

To make a face speak clearly and with propriety, it must not only be well constructed, but have its own exclusive character. Though the element of the passions be the same in all, they neither speak in all with equal energy, nor are circumscribed by equal limits. Though joy be joy, and anger anger, the joy of the sanguine is not that of the phlegmatic, nor the anger of the melancholy that of the fiery character; and the discriminations established by complexion are equally conspicuous in those of climate, habit, education, and rank. Expression has its classes. Decebalus and Syphax, though both determined to die, meet death with eye as different as hues. The tremulous emotion of Hector's breast when he approaches Ajax, is not the palpitation of Paris when he discovers Menelaus; the frown of the Hercynian Phantom may repress the ardour, but cannot subdue the dignity of Drusus; the fear of Marius cannot sink to the panic of the Cimber, who drops the dagger at entering his prison, nor the astonishment of Hamlet degenerate into the fright of vulgar fear.

Le Sueur was not aware of this when he painted his Alexander. Perhaps no picture is, in spite of common sense, oftener quoted for its expression than Alexander sick on his bed, with the cup at his lips, observing the calumniated physician. The manner in which he is represented is as inconsistent with the story as injurious to the character of the Macedonian hero. The Alexander of Le Sueur has the prying look of a spy. He who was capable of that look would no more have ventured on quaffing a single drop of the suspected medicine, than on the conquest of the Persian empire. If Alexander, when he drank the cup, had not the most positive faith in the incorruptibility of Philippus, he was more than an idiot, he was a felon against himself and a traitor to his army, whose safety depended on the success of the experiment. His expression ought to be open and unconcerned confidence--as that of his physician, a contemptuous smile, or curiosity suspended by indignation, or the indifference of a mind conscious of innocence, and fully relying on its being known to his friend. Le Sueur, instead of these, has given him little more than a stupid stare and vulgar form.

The emanations of the passions, which pathognomy has reduced to the four principal sources of _calm emotion_, _joy_, _grief simple, or with pain_, and _terror_;--may be divided into internal and external ones: those hint their action only, they influence a feature or some extremity: these extend their sway over the whole frame--they animate, agitate, depress, convulse, absorb form. The systematic designers of pathognomy have given their element, their extremes, the mask; the ancients have established their technic standard, and their degrees of admissibility in art. The Apollo is animated; the Warrior of Agasias is agitated; the dying Gladiator or herald suffers in depression; the Laocoon is convulsed; the Niobe is absorbed. The greater the mental vigour, dignity, or habitual self-command of a person, the less perceptible to superficial observation or vulgar eyes will be the emotion of his mind. The greater the predominance of fancy over intellect, the more ungovernable the conceits of self-importance, so much the more will passion partake of outward and less dignified energy. The Jupiter of Homer manifests his will and power by the mere contraction of his eyebrows; Socrates in the School of Athens only moves his finger, and Ovid in the Parnassus only lays it over his lips, and both say enough; but Achilles throws himself headlong, and is prevented from slaying himself by the grasp of his friend. Only then, when passion or suffering become too big for utterance, the wisdom of ancient art has borrowed a feature from tranquillity, though not its air. For every being seized by an enormous passion, be it joy or grief, or fear sunk to despair, loses the character of its own individual expression, and is absorbed by the power of the feature that attracts it. Niobe and her family are assimilated by extreme anguish; Ugolino is petrified by the fate that swept the stripling at his foot, and sweeps in pangs the rest. The metamorphoses of ancient mythology are founded on this principle, are allegoric. Clytia, Biblis, Salmacis, Narcissus, tell only the resistless power of sympathetic attraction.

Similar principles award to Raffaello the palm of expression among the moderns: driven to extremes after his demise by Julio Romano and a long interval of languor, it seemed to revive in Domenichino; I say seemed, for his sensibility was not supported by equal comprehension, elevation of mind, or dignity of motion; his sentiment wants propriety, he is a mannerist in feeling, and tacks the imagery of Theocritus to the subjects of Homer. A detail of petty though amiable conceptions, is rather calculated to diminish than to enforce the energy of a pathetic whole: a lovely child taking refuge in the lap or bosom of a lovely mother, is an idea of nature, and pleasing in a lowly, pastoral or domestic subject; but, perpetually recurring, becomes common-place, and amid the terrors of martyrdom is a shred sewed to a purple robe. In touching the characteristic circle that surrounds the Ananias of Raffaello, you touch the electric chain, a genuine spark irresistibly darts from the last as from the first, penetrates, subdues; at the Martyrdom of St. Agnes by Domenichino, you saunter among the adventitious mob of a lane, where the silly chat of neighbouring gossips announces a topic as silly, till you find with indignation, that instead of a broken pot or a petty theft, you are to witness a scene for which heaven opens, the angels descend, and Jesus rises from his throne.

It is however but justice to observe, that there is a subject in which Domenichino has not unsuccessfully wrestled, and, in my opinion, even excelled Raffaello; I mean the demoniac boy among the series of frescoes at Grotto Ferrata: that inspired figure is evidently the organ of an internal, superior, preternatural agent, darted upward without contortion, and considered as unconnected with the story, never to be confounded with a merely tumultuary distorted maniac, which is not perhaps the case of the boy in the Transfiguration; the subject too being within the range of Domenichino's powers, domestic, the whole of the persons introduced is characteristic: awe, with reliance on the Saint who operates the miracle or cure, and terror at the redoubled fury of his son, mark the rustic father; nor could the agonizing female with the infant in her arm, as she is the mother, be exchanged to advantage, and with propriety occupies that place which the fondling females in the pictures of St. Sebastian, St. Andrew, and St. Agnes only usurp.

The Martyrdom, or rather the brutally ostentatious murder of St. Agnes leads us to the _limits_ of expression: sympathy and disgust are the irreconcileable parallels that must for ever separate legitimate terror and pity from horror and aversion. We cannot sympathise with what we detest or despise, nor fully pity what we shudder at or loathe. So little were these limits understood by the moderns, M. Agnolo excepted, that even the humanity and delicacy of Raffaello did not guard him from excursions into the realms of horror and loathsomeness: it is difficult to conceive what could provoke him to make a finished design of the inhumanities that accompany the martyrdom of St. Felicitas at which even description shudders; a design made on purpose to be dispersed over Europe, perpetuated and made known to all by the graver of Marc Antonio: Was it to prove to Albert Durer and the Germans of his time that they had not exhausted the sources of abomination? He made an equal mistake in the Morbetto, where, though not with so lavish a hand as Poussin after him, instead of the moral effects of the plague, he has personified the effluvia of putrefaction. What _he_ had not penetration to avoid, could not be expected to be shunned by his scholars. Julio Romano delighted in studied images of torture as well as of the most abandoned licentiousness. Among his contemporaries, Correggio even attempted to give a zest to the most wanton cruelty by an affectation of grace in the picture of the Saints Placido and Flavia: but the enamoured trance of Placido with his neck half cut, and the anthem that quivers on the lips of Flavia whilst a sword is entering her side, in vain bespeak our sympathy, for whilst we detest the felons who slaughter them, we loathe to inspect the actual process of the crime; mangling is contagious, and spreads aversion from the slaughterman to the victim. If St. Bartholomew and St. Erasmus are subjects for painting, they can only be so before, and neither under nor after the operation of the knife or windlass. A decollated martyr represented with his head in his hand, as Rubens did, and a headless corpse with the head lying by it, as Correggio, can only prove the brutality, stupidity, or bigotry of the employer, and the callus or venality of the artist.

The gradations of expression within, close to, and beyond its limits cannot perhaps be elucidated with greater perspicuity than by comparison; and the different moments which Julio Romano, Vandyke and Rembrandt, have selected to represent the subject of Samson betrayed by Delilah, offers one of the fairest specimens furnished by art. Considering it as a drama, we may say that Julio forms the plot, Vandyke unravels it, and Rembrandt shows the extreme of the catastrophe.

In the composition of Julio, Samson, satiated with pleasure, plunged into sleep, and stretched on the ground, rests his head and presses with his arm the thigh of Delilah on one side, whilst on the other a nimble minion busily, but with timorous caution, fingers and clips his locks; such is his fear, that, to be firm, he rests one knee on a foot-stool tremblingly watching the sleeper, and ready to escape at his least motion. Delilah, seated between both, fixed by the weight of Samson, warily turns her head toward a troop of warriors in the back ground, with the left arm stretched out she beckons their leader, with the finger of the right hand she presses her lip to enjoin silence and noiseless approach. The Herculean make and lion port of Samson, his perturbed though ponderous sleep, the quivering agility of the curled favourite employed, the harlot graces and meretricious elegance contrasted by equal firmness and sense of danger in Delilah, the attitude and look of the grim veteran who heads the ambush, whilst they give us the clue to all that followed, keep us in anxious suspense, we palpitate in breathless expectation; this is the plot.

The terrors which Julio made us forebode, Vandyke summons to our eyes. The mysterious lock is cut; the dreaded victim is roused from the lap of the harlot-priestess. Starting unconscious of his departed power, he attempts to spring forward, and with one effort of his mighty breast and expanded arms to dash his foes to the ground and fling the alarmed traitress from him--in vain; shorn of his strength he is borne down by the weight of the mailed chief that throws himself upon him, and overpowered by a throng of infuriate satellites. But though overpowered, less aghast than indignant, his eye flashes reproach on the perfidious female whose wheedling caresses drew the fatal secret from his breast; the plot is unfolded, and what succeeds, too horrible for the sense, is left to fancy to brood upon, or drop it.

This moment of horror the gigantic but barbarous genius of Rembrandt chose, and, without a metaphor, _executed_ a subject, which humanity, judgment and taste taught his rivals, only to _treat_; he displays a scene which no eye but that of Domitian or Nero could wish or bear to see. Samson, stretched on the ground, is held by one Philistine under him, whilst another chains his right arm, and a third clenching his beard with one, drives a dagger into his eye with the other hand. The pain that blasts him, darts expression from the contortions of the mouth and his gnashing teeth to the crampy convulsions of the leg dashed high into the air. Some fiend-like features glare through the gloomy light which discovers Delilah, her work now done, sliding off, the shears in her left, the locks of Samson in her right hand. If her figure, elegant, attractive, such as Rembrandt never conceived before or after, deserve our wonder rather than our praise, no words can do justice to the expression that animates her face, and shows her less shrinking from the horrid scene than exulting in being its cause. Such is the work whose magic of colour, tone and chiaroscuro irresistibly entrap the eye, whilst we detest the brutal choice of the moment.[89]

Let us in conclusion contrast the stern pathos of this scenery with the placid emotions of a milder subject, in the celebrated pictures which represent the Communion or death of St. Jerome by Agostino Caracci and his scholar Domenichino--that an altar-piece in the Certosa near Bologna, this in the church of St. Girolamo della Carità at Rome; but for some time both exhibited in the gallery of the Louvre at Paris. What I have to say on the Invention, Expression, Characters, Tone and Colour of either is the result of observations lately made on both in that gallery, where then they were placed nearly opposite to each other.

In each picture, St. Jerome, brought from his cell to receive the sacrament, is represented on his knees, supported by devout attendants; in each the officiating priest is in the act of administering to the dying saint; the same clerical society fills the portico of the temple in both, in both the scene is witnessed from above by infant angels.

The general opinion is in favour of the Pupil, but if in the economy of the whole Domenichino surpasses his master, he appears to me greatly inferior both in the character and expression of the hero. Domenichino has represented Piety scarcely struggling with decay, Agostino triumphant over it, his saint becomes in the place where he is, a superior being, and is inspired by the approaching god: that of Domenichino seems divided between resignation, mental and bodily imbecility and desire. The saint of Agostino is a lion, that of Domenichino a lamb.

In the sacerdotal figure administering the viaticum, Domenichino has less improved than corrected the unworthy choice of his master. The priest of Agostino is one of the Frati Godenti of Dante, before they received the infernal hood; a gross, fat, self-conceited terrestrial feature, a countenance equally proof to elevation, pity or thought. The priest of Domenichino is a minister of grace, stamped with the sacred humility that characterized his master, and penetrated by the function of which he is the instrument.

We are more impressed with the graces of youth than the energies of manhood verging on age: in this respect, as well as that of contrast with the decrepitude of St. Jerome, the placid contemplative beauty of the young deacon on the foreground of Domenichino, will probably please more than the poetic trance of the assistant friar with the lighted taper in the foreground of Agostino. This must however be observed, that as Domenichino thought proper to introduce supernatural witnesses of the ceremony in imitation of his master, their effect seems less ornamental, and more interwoven with the plan, by being perceived by the actors themselves.

If the attendant characters in the picture of Agostino are more numerous, and have on the whole, furnished the hints of admission to those of Domenichino, this, with one exception, may be said to have used more propriety and judgment in the choice. Both have introduced a man with a turban, and opened a portico to characterize an Asiatic scene.

With regard to composition, Domenichino undoubtedly gains the palm. The disposition on the whole he owes to his master, though he reversed it, but he has cleared it of that oppressive bustle which rather involves and crowds the principal actors in Agostino than attends them. He spreads tranquillity with space, and repose without vacuity.

With this corresponds the tone of the whole. The evening-freshness of an oriental day tinges every part; the medium of Agostino partakes too much of the fumigated inside of a Catholic chapel.

The draperies of both are characteristic, and unite subordination with dignity, but their colour is chosen with more judgment by Domenichino; the imbrowned gold and ample folds of the robe of the administering priest are more genial than the cold blue, white and yellow on the priest of his master; in both, perhaps, the white draperies on the foreground figures have too little strength for the central colours, but it is more perceived in Carracci than in Domenichino.

The forms of the saint in Carracci are grander and more ideal than in the saint of Domenichino; some have even thought them too vigorous: both, in my opinion, are in harmony with the emotion of the face and expression of either. The eagerness that animates the countenance of the one may be supposed to spread a momentary vigour over his frame. The mental dereliction of countenance in the other with equal propriety relaxes and palsies the limbs which depend on it.

The colour of Carracci's saint is much more characteristic of fleshy though nearly bloodless substance than that chosen by his rival, which is withered, shrivelled, leathery in the lights, and earthy in the shades; but the head of the officiating priest in Domenichino, whether considered as a specimen of colour independent of the rest or as set off by it, for truth, tone, freshness, energy, is not only the best Domenichino ever painted, but perhaps the best that can be conceived.

FOOTNOTES:

[88] A miracle means an act performed by virtue of an unknown law of Nature.

[89] The form, but not the soul, of Julio's composition has been borrowed by Rubens, or the master of the well-known picture in the gallery of Dulwich college. Few can be unacquainted with the work of Vandyke, spread by the best engravers of that school. The picture of Rembrandt is the chief ornament of the collection in the garden-house of the Schönborn family, in one of the suburbs of Vienna: has been etched on a large scale, and there is a copy of it in the gallery at Cassel. A circumstantial account of it may be found in the Eighth Letter, vol. iii. of Kütner's Travels.

SIXTH LECTURE.

CHIAROSCURO.

Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem.

Horat. de Arte Poet. L. 143.

ARGUMENT.

Definition.--Lionardo da Vinci.--Giorgione.--Antonio da
Correggio.

SIXTH LECTURE.

The term Chiaroscuro, adopted from the Italian, in its primary and simplest sense means the division of a single object into light and shade, and in its widest compass comprises their distribution over a whole composition: whether the first derive its splendour by being exposed to a direct light, or from colours in its nature luminous; and whether the second owe their obscurity directly to the privation of light, or be produced by colours in themselves opaque. Its exclusive power is, to give substance to form, place to figure, and to create space. It may be considered as legitimate or spurious: it is legitimate when, as the immediate offspring of the subject, its disposition, extent, strength or sweetness are subservient to form, expression, and invigorate or illustrate character, by heightening the primary actor or actors, and subordinating the secondary; it is spurious when from an assistant aspiring to the rights of a principal, it becomes a substitute for indispensable or more essential demands. As such, it has often been employed by the machinists of different schools, for whom it became the refuge of ignorance, a palliative for an incurable disease, and the asylum of emptiness; still, as even a resource of this kind proves a certain vigour of mind, it surprises into something like unwilling admiration and forced applause.

Of every subject Unity is the soul: unity, of course, is inseparable from legitimate chiaroscuro: hence the individual light and shade of every figure that makes part of a given or chosen subject, whether natural or ideal, as well as the more compound one of the different intermediate groups, must act as so many rays emanating from one centre and terminate, blazing, evanescent, or obscured, in rounding it to the eye.

Truth is the next requisite of chiaroscuro, whatever be the subject. Some it attends without ambition, content with common effects; some it invigorates or inspires: but in either case, let the effect be that of usual expanded day-light, or artificial and condensed, it ought to be regulated by truth in extent, strength, brilliancy, softness, and above all, by simplicity in its positive and purity in its negative parts. As shade is the mere absence of light, it cannot, except from reflexes, possess any hue or colour of its own, and acquires all its charms from transparency.

But to the rules which art prescribes to Chiaroscuro, to round each figure of a composition with truth, to connect it with the neighbouring groups, and both with the whole--it adds, that all this should be done with strict adherence to propriety, at the least possible expense of the subordinate parts, and with the utmost attainable degree of effect and harmony--demands which it is not my duty to inquire, whether they entered ever with equal evidence the mind of any one artist, ancient or modern: whether, if it be granted possible that they did, they were ever balanced with equal impartiality; and grant this, whether they ever were or could be executed with equal felicity. A character of equal universal power is not a human character--and the nearest approach to perfection can only be in carrying to excellence one great quality with the least alloy of defects. Thus in the School of Athens, Raffaello's great aim being to embody on the same scene the gradations, varieties and utmost point of human culture _as it proceeds from the individual to society, and from that ascends to God_; he suffered expression and character to preponderate over effect and combination of masses, and contriving to unite the opposite wings with the centre by entrance and exit at each extremity, as far as expression could do it, succeeded, to make what in itself is little more than apposition of single figures or detached groups, one grand whole.--I say, as far as expression could satisfy a mind qualified to contemplate and penetrate his principle, however unsatisfied a merely picturesque eye might wander over a scattered assemblage of figures equally illuminated and unconnected by a commanding mass of light and shade.

From this deficiency of effect in the composition we speak of, it is evident, that mere natural light and shade, however separately or individually true, is not always legitimate Chiaroscuro in art. Nature sheds or withholds her ray indiscriminately, and every object has what share it can obtain by place and position, which it is the business of art to arrange by fixing a centre and distributing the rays according to the more or less important claims of the subject: as long as it regulates itself by strict observance of that principle, it matters not whether its principal mass radiate from the middle, wind in undulating shapes, dart in decided beams from the extremities; emanate from one source, or borrow additional effect from subordinate ones: let it mount like flame or descend in lightning; dash in stern tones terror on the eye, emergent from a dark or luminous medium; through twilight immerse itself in impenetrable gloom or gradually vanish in voluptuous repose, guided by the subject the most daring division of light and shade becomes natural and legitimate, and the most regular, spurious and illegitimate without it.

To attain in the execution the highest possible and widest expanded effect of light, with equal depth and transparence in the shade, brilliancy of colour is less required than unison: a sovereign tone must pervade the whole, which, though arbitrary and dependent on choice, decides all subordinate ones, as the tone of the first instrument in a regular concert tunes all the rest; their effect entirely depends on being in unison with it, and discord is produced whenever they revolt: by thus uniting itself with the whole, the simplest tone well managed may become, not only harmonious, but rich and splendid, it is then the tone of Nature: whilst the most brilliant one, if contradicted or disappointed by the detail of the inferior, may become heavy, leathern, and discordant.

Though every work of Correggio is an illustration of this principle, and none with brighter evidence than his "Notte," in which the central light of the infant irradiates the whole; perhaps the most decisive, because the most appropriate proof of it, is in its companion the less known picture of St. Sebastian, at Dresden; in which the central light of a glory, not only surprises the eye with all the splendour of a sun, though its colour is a yellow comparatively faint, and terminates in brown, but tinges the whole, perfectly transparent, with its emanation.

That not before the lapse of two hundred years after the resurrection of Art, the discovery of Chiaroscuro, as a principle of beauty in single figures and of effect in composition, should be awarded to Lionardo da Vinci, a patriarch of that school which time has shown of all others the least inclined to appreciate its advantages, is at once a proof of the singularity that marks the local distribution of powers, and of the inconceivable slowness which attends human perception in the progress of study: but without generally admitting what has been said with more energy than judgment or regard to truth, that modern art literally sprang from the loins of Lionardo, it must be granted that no work anterior or contemporary with his essays in Chiaroscuro now exists to disprove his claim to the first vision of its harmony; its magic lent the charm, by which his females allure, to forms neither ideal nor much varied; sisters of one family, they attract by the light in which they radiate, by the shade that veils them--for the features of Giotto's or Memmi's Madonnas or virgin-saints floating in the same medium, would require little more to be their equals.

This principle Lionardo seems seldom if ever to have extended to relieve or recommend his larger compositions and male figures, if we except the group of contending horsemen which made or was intended for some part of his rival Cartoon in the Sala del Consiglio: a knot of supreme powers in Composition and Chiaroscuro: though, as we know it chiefly from a copy of P. P. Rubens engraved by Edelinck, the gross evidence of Flemish liberties taken with the style, makes it probable that the original simplicity of light and shade has been invigorated by the artificial contrasts of the copyist. Lionardo's open scenery, tinged with the glareless evenness of plain daylight, seldom warrants effects so concentrated. Unostentatious gravity marks the characters of his Last Supper, and in sober evening tones marked probably the Chiaroscuro of the groups and scenery, if we may be allowed to form our judgment from the little that remains unimpaired by the ravages of time and the more barbarous ones of renovators.

To the discovery of central radiance the genius of Lionardo with equal penetration added its counterpart, _purity_ of shade and the coalescence of both through imperceptible demi-tints. Whatever tone of light he chose, he never forgot that the shade intended to set it off was only its absence, and not a positive colour, and that both were to be harmonized by demi-tints composed of both; a principle of which no school anterior to him has left a trace.

That the discovery of a principle big with advantages as obvious as important to art should have been reserved for the penetration of Lionardo, however singular, is less strange than that, when discovered and its powers demonstrated, it should, with the exception of one name, have not only met with no imitators, but with an ambiguous and even discouraging reception from the pupils of his own school, and some next allied to it. Vasari, his panegyrist rather than biographer, talks of it more as a singular phænomenon than as an evident principle, and avowing that he introduced a certain depth of shade into oil-painting, which enabled succeeding artists to relieve their figures more forcibly,[90] persevered to discolour walls and pannels with washy flat insipidity. Bartolomeo della Porta alone appears to have had sufficient compass of mind to grasp its energy and connect it with colour: from him, through Andrea del Sarto down to Pietro Berettini, who owed his effects rather to opposition of tints than to legitimate Chiaroscuro, the Tuscan school gradually suffered it to dwindle into evanescence. Unless we were to consider its astonishing effects in some of Michael Angelo's works in the light of imitations rather than as emanations of his own genius; which perhaps we are the less warranted to presume, as he seems to have paid no attention to Lionardo's discovery in its brightest period; for the groups of his celebrated cartoon exhibit little more than individual light and shade.

What the Tuscan school treated with neglect, the Roman appears not to have been eager to adopt: if Raffaello did not remain a stranger to the theories of Lionardo and Frà Bartolomeo, he suffered the principle to lie dormant; for no production of his during his intercourse with them is marked by concentration of light or purity of shade or subordinate masses: nor is the interval between his last departure from Florence and his entrance of the Vatican discriminated by any visible progress in massing and illuminating a whole: the upper and lower parts of the Dispute on the Sacrament, cut sheer asunder, as a whole, are little relieved in either; and if the Parnassus and the School of Athens have the beginning, middle, and end of legitimate composition, they owe it to expression and feeling; nor can the more vigorous display of Chiaroscuro in the works of the second stanza, the Deliverance of Peter, the Fall of Heliodorus, the Attila, the Mass of Bolsena be referred to a principle of imitation, when we see it neglected in a subject where it might have ruled with absolute sway, in the Incendio del Borgo, and on the whole in every Composition of the third and fourth stanza; a series of evidence that Raffaello considered Chiaroscuro as a subordinate vehicle, and never suffered its blandishments or energies to absorb meaning or to supplant expression and form:[91] but the harmony which immediately after him Giulio Pipi, and Polydoro only excepted, the rest of his pupils had sacrificed or consecrated to higher beauties, their successors, the subsequent Roman school from the Zuccari through Giuseppe Cesari down to C. Maratta, if they did not entirely lose in a heavy display of academic pedantry, or destroy by the remorseless "bravura" of mannered practice, the uniformly polluted by bastard theories and adulterated methods of shade.

When I say that the Roman school uniformly erred in their principle of shade, I have not forgot M. Angelo da Caravaggio, whose darks are in such perfect unison with the lights of his chiaroscuro, that A. Caracci declared he did not grind colour but flesh itself for his tints ("che macinava carne"), and whom for that reason and on such authority I choose rather to consider as the head of his own school than as the member of another: in some of his surviving works, but far more frequently in those which without sufficient authenticity are ascribed to him, an abrupt transition from light to darkness, without an intervening demi-tint, has offended the eye and provoked the sarcasm of an eminent critic: but as long as the picture of the Entombing of Christ in the Chiesa Nuova at Rome may be appealed to; as long as the Pilgrim's kneeling before the Madonna with the child in her arms, of St. Agostino at Rome, shall retain their tone; or the Infant Jesus, once in the Spada palace, crushing the serpent's head, shall resist the ravages of time--it will be difficult to produce in similar works of any other master or any other school, from Lionardo down to Rembrandt, a system of chiaroscuro which shall equal the severe yet mellow energy of the first; the departing evening ray and veiled glow of the second; or, with unimpaired harmony, the bold decision of masses and stern light and shade of the third.