Chapter VII: Part II (3)

The homage sparingly granted or callously refused to chiaroscuro by the two schools of design was with implicit devotion paid to it by the nurse of colour, the school of Venice. Whether as tradition, on the authority of Vasari, maintains, they received it as a principle of imitation from the perspicacity, or as a native discovery from the genius of Giorgione Barbarelli, though from what has been advanced on both sides of the question, it would be presumptuous positively to decide on either, it must be allowed, that if the Venetian received a hint from the Florentine, he extended it through a system, the harmony of which was all his own, and excelled in breadth and amenity the light which it could not surpass in splendour, added transparence to purity of shade, rounded by reflexes and discovered by the contrast of deep with aerial colour, that energy of effect which mere chiaroscuro could not have reached, and which was carried near perfection by Paolo Cagliari.

Among the varied mischief poured into this country by the rapacious sophistry of traders and the ambitious cullibility of wealthy collectors, no fraud perhaps has been more destructive to the genuine appreciation of original styles than the baptism of pictures with names not their own: by this prolific method worse ones than those of Luini, Aretusi, Timoteo della Vite, Bonifacio, are daily graced with the honours due to Lionardo, Correggio, Raffaello, Tizian; though none have suffered more by the multiplication than Giorgione, whom shortness of life, a peculiar fatality of circumstances, and the ravages of time, have conspired to render one of the scarcest as well as least authenticated artists even in Italy: to whom his earliest and latest biographers have been as critically unjust as chronologically inattentive; Vasari by transferring to another his principal work; Fiorillo by making him paint the portrait of Calvin the Reformer.[92]

To form our opinion therefore of Giorgione's chiaroscuro from a few portraits or single figures, if legitimate, often restored, or from the crumbling remnants of his decayed frescoes, would be to form an estimate of a magnificent fabric from some loose fragment or stone: to do full justice to his powers we must have recourse to his surprising work in the School of S. Marco at Venice; a composition whose terrific graces Vasari descants on with a fervour inferior only to the artist's own inspiration, though he unaccountably ascribes it to the elder Palma.[93]

"In the School of S. Marco he painted the story of the ship which conducts the body of St. Mark through a horrible tempest, with other barges assailed by furious winds; and besides, groups of aërial apparitions, and various forms of fiends who vent their blasts against the vessels, that by dint of oars and energy of arms strive to force their way through the mountainous and hostile waves which threaten to submerge them. You hear the howling blast, you see the grasp and fiery exertion of the men, the fluctuation of the waves, the lightning that bursts the clouds, the oars bent by the flood, the flood broke by the oars, and dashed to spray by the sinews of the rowers. What more? In vain I labour to recollect a picture that equals the terrors of this whose design, invention, and colour make the canvass tremble! Often when he finishes, an artist, absorbed in the contemplation of parts, forgets the main point of a design, and as the spirits cool, loses the vein of his enthusiasm; but this man, never losing sight of the subject, guided his conceit to perfection."

The effect of this work, when it drew such a stream of eulogy from lips else so frugal in Venetian praise, may be guessed at from the impression it makes in its present decay--for even now, it might defy the competition of the most terrific specimens in chiaroscuro, the boat of Charon in M. Angelo's Last Judgment, perhaps, only excepted. Yet its master was defrauded of its glory by his panegyrist, whilst it was exciting the wonder and curiosity of every beholder: Lanzi is the only historian who notices its remains, and the real author;[94] we look in vain for it in Ridolfi, who in his Life of Giorgione treats us instead of it with a delectable account of a night-piece which he painted, exhibiting the tragi-comedy of castrating a cat.

It has been treated as a mistake to confine the chiaroscuro of a subject exclusively to one source; nor can it be doubted that often it is and has been proved to be both necessary and advantageous to admit more; this is however a licence to be granted with considerable caution, and it appears to be the privilege of superior powers to raise a subject, by the admission of subordinate, sometimes diverging, sometimes opposite streams of light, to assist and invigorate the effect of the primary one, without impairing that unity which alone can ensure a breadth to effect, without which each part, for mastery striving, soon would be lost in confusion, or crumble into fragments. The best instances of the advantages gained by the superinduction of artificial light, appear to be the Pietro Martire and the S. Lorenzo of Tiziano: if selection can be made from the works of a master, where to count is to choose. In the first, the stern light of evening far advanced in the background, is commanded by the celestial emanation bursting from above, wrapping the summit in splendour, and diffusing itself in rays more or less devious over the scenery. The subject of S. Lorenzo, a nocturnal scene, admits light from two sources--the fire beneath the Saint, and a raised torch: but receives its principal splendour from the aërial reflex of the vision on high, which sheds its mitigating ray on the martyr.

The nocturnal studies of Tintoretto from models and artificial groups have been celebrated: these, prepared in wax or clay, he arranged, raised, suspended, to produce masses, foreshortening, and variety of effect: it was thence he acquired that decision of chiaroscuro unknown to more expanded daylight, by which he divided his bodies, and those wings of obscurity and light by which he separated the groups of his composition, though the mellowness of his eye nearly always instructed him to connect the two extremes by something intermediate that partook of both, as the extremes themselves by reflexes with the back-ground or the scenery. The general rapidity of his process, by which he baffled his competitors and often overwhelmed himself, did not indeed always permit him to attend deliberately to this principle, and often hurried him into an abuse of practice, which in the lights turned breadth into mannered or insipid flatness, and in the shadows into total extinction of parts: of all this, he has in the schools of S. Rocco and Marco given the most unquestionable instances; the Resurrection of Christ and the Massacre of the Innocents, comprehend every charm by which chiaroscuro fascinates its votaries: in the Vision, dewy dawn melts into deep but pellucid shade, itself rent or reflected by celestial splendour and angelic hues: whilst in the Infant-massacre at Bethlehem alternate sheets of stormy light and agitated gloom dash horror on the astonished eye.

He pursued, however, another method to create, without more assistance from chiaroscuro than individual light and shade, an effect equivalent and perhaps superior to what the utmost stretch of its powers could have produced, in the Crucifixion of the Albergo, or Guest-room of S. Rocco, the largest and most celebrated of his works. The multitudinous rabble dispersed over that picture, (for such, rather than composition, one group excepted, that assemblage of accidental figures deserves to be called,) he connected by a sovereign tone, ingulphing the whole in one mass of ominous twilight, an eclipse, or what precedes a storm, or hurricane, or earthquake; nor suffering the captive eye to rest on any other object than the faint gleam hovering over the head of the Saviour in the centre, and in still fainter tones dying on the sainted group gathered beneath the Cross. Yet this nearly superhuman contrivance, which raises above admiration a work whose incongruous parts else must have sunk it beneath mediocrity, Agostino Carracci, in his print, with chalcographic callus, has totally overlooked; for notwithstanding the iron sky that overhangs the whole, he has spread, if not sunshine, the most declared daylight from end to end, nor left the eye uninformed of one motley article, or one blade of grass.

With Iacopo Robusti may be named, though adopted by another school, Belisario Corenzio, an Achæan Greek, his pupil, his imitator in the magic of chiaroscuro, and with still less compunction his rival in dispatch and rapidity of hand: the immense compositions in which he overflowed, he encompassed, and carried to irresistible central splendour by streams of shade, and hemmed his glories in with clouds, or showery, or pregnant with thunder. The monasteries and churches of Naples and its dependencies abound in his frescoes.

The more adscititious effects of chiaroscuro produced by the opposition of dark to lucid, opaque to transparent bodies, and cold to warm tints, though fully understood by the whole Venetian school, were nearly carried to perfection by Paolo Cagliari. There is no variety of harmonious or powerful combination in the empire of colour, as a substitute of light and shade, which did not emanate from his eye, variegate his canvass, and invigorate his scenery. Many of his works, however, and principally the masses scattered over his Suppers, prove that he was master of that legitimate chiaroscuro which, independent of colour, animates composition: but the gaiety of his mind, which inspired him with subjects of magnificence and splendour, of numerous assemblies canopied by serene skies or roving lofty palaces, made him seek his effects oftener in opposed tints, than in powerful depths of light and shade.

But all preceding, contemporary, and subsequent schools, with their united powers of chiaroscuro, were far excelled both in compass and magnitude of its application by the genius of Antonio Allegri, from the place of his nativity surnamed Correggio. To them light and shade was only necessary as the more or less employed, or obedient attendant on design, composition, and colour. But design, composition, and colour, were no more than the submissive vehicles, or enchanted ministers of its charms to Correggio. If, strictly speaking, he was not the inventor of its element, he fully spanned its measure, and expanded the powers of its harmony through Heaven and earth; in his eye and hand it became the organ of sublimity; the process of his cupolas made it no longer a question whether an art circumscribed by lines and figure could convey ideas of reality and immensity at once. Entranced by his spell, and lapped in his elysium, we are not aware of the wide difference between the conception of the medium, the place, space, and mode in which certain beings ought, or may be supposed to move, and that of those beings themselves; and forget, though fully adequate to the first, that Correggio was unequal to the second; that though he could build Heaven, he could not people it. If M. Agnolo found in the depth of his mind and in grandeur of line the means of rendering the immediate effect of will and power intuitive in the Creation of Adam, by darting life from the finger of Omnipotence, the coalition of light and darkness opened to the entranced eye of Correggio the means of embodying the Mosaic "Let there be light," and created light in that stream of glory which, issuing from the divine Infant in his Notte, proclaims a God. If Thought be personified in the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel, he has made Silence audible in the slumbering twilight that surrounds the Zingara; and filled the gloom which enbosoms Jupiter and Io, with the whispers of Love.

And though perhaps we should be nearer truth by ascribing the cause of Correggio's magic to the happy conformation of his organs, and his calm serenity of mind, than to Platonic ecstasies, a poet might at least be allowed to say "that his soul, absorbed by the contemplation of infinity, soared above the sphere of measurable powers, knowing that every object whose limits can be distinctly perceived by the mind, must be within its grasp; and however grand, magnificent, beautiful, or terrific, fall short of the conception itself, and be less than sublime."--In this, from whatever cause, consists the real spell of Correggio--which neither Parmegiano nor Annibale Carracci seem to have been able to penetrate: the Bolognese certainly not; for if we believe himself in his letters to Ludovico, expressive of his emotions at the first sight of Correggio's cupolas, he confines his admiration to the foreshortening and grace of forms, the successful imitation of flesh, and rigorous perspective.

Of Correggio's numerous pretending imitators Ludovico Carracci appears to be the only one who penetrated his principle: the axiom, that the less the traces appear of the means by which a work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of nature, is not an axiom likely to spring from the infancy of art. The even colour, veiled splendour, the solemn twilight; that tone of devotion and cloistered meditation, which Ludovico Carracci spread over his works, could arise only from the contemplation of some preceding style, analogous to his own feelings and its comparison with nature; and where could that be met with in a degree equal to what he found in the infinite unity and variety of Correggio's effusions? They inspired his frescoes in the cloisters of St. Michele in Bosco: the foreshortenings of the muscular Labourers at the Hermitage, and of the ponderous Dæmon that mocks their toil, the warlike splendour in the homage of Totila, the nocturnal conflagration of Monte Cassino, the wild graces of deranged beauty, and the insidious charms of the sister nymphs in the garden-scene, equally proclaim the pupil of Correggio.

His triumph in oil is the altar-piece of St. John preaching, in a chapel of the Certosa at Bologna, whose lights seem embrowned by a golden veil, and the shadowy gleam of Vallombrosa; though he sometimes indulged in tones austere, pronounced, and hardy: such is the Flagellation of Christ in the same church, whose tremendous depth of flesh-tints contrasts the open wide-expanded sky, and less conveys than dashes its terrors on the astonished sense.

The schools of Bologna, Parma, Milano, with more or less geniality, imitated their predecessors, but added no new features to the theory of light and shade. As to its progress on this side of the Alps, it is better to say nothing than little on the wide range of Rubens, and the miracles of Rembrandt.

FOOTNOTES:

[90] Nella arte della pittura aggiunse costui alla maniera del colorire ad olio, una certa oscurità; donde hanno dato i moderni gran forza e rilievo alle loro figure. Vasari vita di Lion. da Vinci, p. 559. ed. 1550.

[91] In the greater part of the Cartoons, it does not appear that chiaroscuro had more than an ordinary share of attention.

In the Miraculous Draught plain day-light prevails.

In the Miracle at the Temple-gate a more forcible and more sublime effect would have been obtained from a cupola-light and pillars darkened on the foreground.

In the Excecation of Elymas, composition and expression owe little of their roundness and evidence to chiaroscuro.

Apposition seems to have arranged the Sacrifice at Lystra.

If Dionysius and Damaris, in the cartoon of the Areopagus, had more forcibly refracted by dark colours or shade, the light against the speaker, effect and subject would have gained.

Considered individually or in masses, the chiaroscuro in the cartoon of Ananias appears to be perfect; but the Donation of the Keys owes what impression it makes on us in a great measure to the skillful distribution of its light and shade.

[92] In the following absurd description of the well-known picture in the Palace Pitti: "It consists of three half-figures, one of which represents Martin Luther in the habit of an Augustine Monk, who plays on a harpsichord: Calvin stands by him in a chorister's dress, with a violin in his hand: opposite you see a young lively girl in a bonnet with a plume of white feathers; by her Giorgione meant to represent the noted Catharine, Luther's mistress and wife," &c. Fiorillo, vol. ii. p. 63. To expose the ignorant credulity which dictated this passage, it is sufficient to observe, that Giorgione died 1511, and that Calvin was born 1508.

[93] In every edition of the Vite subsequent to his own of 1550. The following passage deserves to be given in his own words: "Giorgione di Castel franco; il quale sfumò le sue pitture e dette una terribil' movenzia a certe cose come è una storia nella Scuola di San Marco a Venezia, dove è un tempo turbido che tuona, et trema il dipinto, et le figure si muovono & si spiccano da la tavola per una certa oscurità di ombre bene intese."--Proemio della terza Parle delle Vite, p. 558.

[94] A la Scuola di S. Marco la Tempestà Sedata dal Santo, ove fra le altre cose sono tre remiganti ignudi, pregiatissimi pel disegno, e per le attitudini. Lanzi Storia, &c. Tomo II. parte prima. Scuola Veneta.

SEVENTH LECTURE.

ON DESIGN.

SEVENTH LECTURE.

It is perhaps unnecessary to premise, that by the word Design I mean here not what that word denotes in a general sense, the plan of a whole, but what it applies in its narrowest and most specific sense, the _drawing_ of the figures and component parts of the subject. The Arts of Design have been so denominated from their nearly exclusive power of representing Form, the base and principal object of plastic in contradistinction to vocal imitation. In forms alone the idea of existence can be rendered intuitive and permanent. Languages perish; words succeed each other, become obsolete and die; even colours, the dressers and ornaments of bodies, fade; Lines alone can neither be obliterated nor misconstrued; by application to their standard alone, discrimination takes place, and description becomes intelligible. Here is the only ostensible seat of corporeal Beauty; here only it can strictly exist; for, as the notion of Beauty arises from the pleasure we feel in the harmonious co-operation of the component forms of some favourite object towards _one_ end at _once_--it implies their immediate co-existence in the mass they compose; and as that immediately and at once can be perceived and conveyed to the mind by the eye alone,--Figure is the legitimate vehicle of Beauty, and Design the physical element of the Art.

Of Design, the element is correctness and style; its extinction, incorrectness and manner. On the first principle of correctness, or the power of copying and drawing with precision the proportions of any object singly, or in relation with others,--as it may be considered in the light of an elementary qualification without which none would presume to enter himself a student of the Academy,--I should perhaps forbear to speak, did I not consider it as the basis of _Design_, and were I not apprehensive that from the prevalent bend of the reigning taste, you do not lay on it all the stress you ought, and that, if you neglect the acquisition of the power to _copy_ with purity and precision any given object, you will never acquire that of _imitating_ what you have chosen for your model.

Our language generally confounds, or rather those who use it, when they speak of the art, the two words _copy_ and _imitation_, though essentially different in their operation, as well as their meaning. An eye geometrically just, with a hand implicitly obedient, is the requisite of the former, without all choice, without selection, amendment, or omission; whilst choice, directed by judgment and taste, constitutes the essence of imitation, and raises the humble copyist to the noble rank of an artist.

Those who have stopped short at the acquisition of the former faculty have made a means their end, have debased the designer to the servile though useful draughtsman of natural history: and those who have aspired to the second without gaining the first, have substituted air for substance, and attempted to raise a splendid fabric on a quicksand: the first have retarded the progress of the art; the second have perverted its nature: each has erred, to prove that the coalition of both is indispensable.

It has been said by a high authority within these walls, and indeed in the whole province of modern art, that as painting is the student's ultimate aim, the sooner you acquire the power of using the pencil, the better; but I am persuaded that we should pervert the meaning of the great artist we speak of, were we to conclude, that by this observation rather than precept, he meant to discourage the acquisition of correctness. The zealous votary of M. Agnolo could never mean this; he was too well acquainted with the process of that great man's studies, who placed the compass in the eye, not to find in the precision with which he had traced the elements, the foundation of his style. His breadth, he knew, was only the vehicle of his comprehension, and not vacuity; for breadth might easily be obtained, if emptiness can give it. All he meant to say was, that it mattered not whether you acquired correctness by the pencil, the crayon, or the pen, and that, as the sculptor models, the painter may paint his line; for though neither he who anxiously forms lines without the power of embodying them, nor he who floats loosely on masses of colour, can be said to design, this being merely the slave of a brush, that of a point, yet both tools may serve alternately or indiscriminately the purposes of the real designer. It is with the same intention of emancipating your practice from an exclusive and slavish attachment to any particular tool, that you are reminded by the same authority of the proverbial expression "Io tengo il disegno alle punta dei pennelli," "My design is at the point of my brush;"--though I am afraid the expression is dignified with the great name of Correggio through a lapse of memory, as it appears from Vasari that it was the petulant effusion of Girolamo da Trevigi, an obscure painter, in derision of the elaborate cartoon prepared by Pierino del Vaga for his fresco-painting in the great saloon of the Palace Doria at Genoa.

The same authority has repeatedly told us, that if we mean to be correct, we must scrutinize the principles on which the ancients reared their forms. What were those principles?

I shall not digress in search of them to that primitive epoch when the cestrum performed the functions of light and shade, and perhaps supplied linear painting with the faint hues of a stained drawing; nor yet to the second period, when practice had rendered the artist bolder, and the pencil assisted the cestrum; when Parrhasius, on the subtile examination of line and outline, established the canon of divine and heroic form; we shall find them acknowledged with equal submission in the brightest æra of Grecian execution, and the honour of exclusively possessing them contested by the most eminent names of that æra, Apelles and Protogenes. The name of Apelles, in ancient record, is the synonyme of unrivalled and unattainable excellence--he is the favourite mortal in whom, if we believe tradition, Nature exhibited _for once_ a specimen of what her union with education and circumstances could produce; though the enumeration of his works by Pliny points out the modification which we ought to apply to the idea of that superiority. It consisted more in the union than in the extent of his powers; he knew better what he could do, what ought to be done, at what point he could arrive, and what lay beyond his reach, than any other artist. Grace of conception and refinement of taste were his elements, and went hand in hand with grace of execution and taste in finish. That he built both, not on the precarious and volatile blandishments of colour, or the delusive charms of light and shade, but on the solid foundation of form, acquired by precision and obedience of hand--not only the confessed inability of succeeding artists to finish his ultimate Venus, but his well-known contest of lines with Protogenes (the correctest finisher of his time), not a legendary tale, but a well attested fact, irrefragably proves. The panel on which they were drawn made part of the Imperial collection in the Palatium, existed in the time of Pliny, and was inspected by him; their evanescent subtilty, the only trait by which he mentions them, was not, as it appears, the effect of time, but of a delicacy, sweep, and freedom of hand nearly miraculous. What they were, drawn in different colours, and with the point of a brush, one upon the other, or rather within each other, it would be equally unavailing and useless for our purpose to enquire; but the corollaries we may deduce from the contest are obviously these: that all consists of elements; that the schools of Greece concurred in one elemental principle, fidelity of eye, and obedience of hand; that these form _precision_, precision _proportion_,[95] proportion _symmetry_, and symmetry _Beauty_: that it is the "little more or less," imperceptible to vulgar eyes, which constitutes _Grace_, and establishes the superiority of one artist over another: that the knowledge of the degrees of things, or _Taste_, presupposes a comparative knowledge of things themselves: that colour, grace, and taste are companions, not substitutes of form, expression, and character, and, when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid faults.

This precision of hand and eye presupposed, we now come to its application and object, Imitation, which rests on Nature.

Imitation is properly divided into Iconic and Ideal. Iconic imitation is confined to an individuum or model, whose parts it delineates according to their character and essence, already distinguishing the native and inherent, from the accidental and adventitious parts. By the first it forms its standard, and either omits or subordinates the second to them, so as not to impede or to affect the harmony of a whole. This is properly the province of the Portrait and the strictly Historic painter, whose chief object and essential requisite is Truth. Portrait in general, content to be directed by the rules of Physiognomy, which shows the animal being it represents at rest, seldom calls for aid on Pathognomy, which exhibits that being agitated, or at least animated and in motion; but when it does--and, though in a gentler manner than History, it always ought to do it--it differs in nothing from that, but in extent and degree, and already proceeds on the firm _permanent basis of_ NATURE.

By Nature, I understand the general and permanent principles of visible objects, not disfigured by accident or distempered by disease, not modified by fashion or local habits. Nature is a collective idea, and though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never _in its perfection_ inhabit a _single_ object: our ideas are the offspring of our senses; without a previous knowledge of many _central_ forms, though we may copy, we can no more imitate, or, in other words, rise to the principle of action and penetrate the character of our model, than we can hope to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we have. Meanness of manner is the infallible consequence that results from the exclusive recourse to one model: why else are those who have most closely adhered to, and most devoutly studied the model, exactly the most incorrect, the most remote from the real human form? Can there be any thing more disgusting to an eye accustomed to harmony of frame, than the starveling forms of Albert Durer, unless it be the swampy excrescences of Rembrandt? the figures of the former, proportions without symmetry; those of the Dutch artist, uniform abstracts of lumpy or meagre deformity: and yet the German was a scientific man, had measured, had in his opinion reduced to principles, the human frame; whilst the Dutchman, form only excepted, possessed every power that constitutes genius in art, seldom excelled in invention and composition, and the creator of that magic combination of colour with chiaroscuro, never perhaps before, and surely never since attained. And did not the greatest master of colour but one, Tintoretto, if we believe his biographer Ridolfi, declare, that "to design from natural bodies, or what is the same, from the model, was the task of men experienced in art, inasmuch as those bodies were generally destitute of grace and a good form." We are informed by the Latin Editor of Albert Durer's book on the Symmetry of the Human Body, that during his stay at Venice he was requested by Andrea Mantegna, who had conceived a high opinion of his execution and certainty of hand, to pay him a visit at Mantoua, for the express purpose of giving him an idea of that form, of which he himself had had a glimpse from the contemplation of the Antique. Andrea was then ill, and expired before Albert could profit by his instructions:[96] this disappointment, says the author of the anecdote, Albert never ceased to lament during his life. How fit the Mantouan was to instruct the German, is not the question here; the fact proves that Albert felt a want which he found his model could not supply, and had too just an idea of the importance of the art to be proud of dexterity of finger or facility of execution, when exerted only to transcribe or perpetuate defects--though these defects, almost incredible to tell, soon after invaded Italy, gave a check to the imitation of M. Agnolo, supplanted his forms, and produced a temporary revolution of style in the Tuscan School, of which the frescoes of Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio in S. Giovanni dei Scholchi, and the latter productions of Jacopo da Puntormo are indisputable proofs. But without recurring to other proofs, the method adopted by the Academy in the process of study, appears to be founded on the insufficiency of the model for attaining correctness. Why has it decreed that the student, before he be permitted to study life, should devote a certain period to the study of the Antique? If you fancy the motive lay in the comparative facility of drawing from a motionless object, you lend your own misconception to the Academy; for, though in general it be undoubtedly more easy to draw an immoveable object than one that, however imperceptibly, is in perpetual motion, and always varies its points of sight, it cannot be the case when applied to the Antique; for where is the great name among the moderns that ever could reach the line and the proportions of the ancients? M. Agnolo filled part of the Capella Sistina with imitations, and sometimes transcripts of the Torso,--will any one stand forth and say that he reached it? Compare the Restoration of Montorsoli, Giacomo della Porta and Bernini, or Baccio Bandinello's Laocoon, with the rest of the figures, or the original, and deplore the palpable inferiority. What was it that the Academy intended by making the Antique the basis of your studies? what? but to lead you to the sources of Form; to initiate you in the true elements of human essence; to enable you to judge at your transition from the marble to life what was substance and possession in the individual, and what excrescence and want, what homogeneous, what discordant, what deformity, what beauty. It intended, by making you acquainted with a variety of figures, to qualify you for classing them according to character and function, what exclusively belongs to some or one, and what is the common law of all; to make you sensible that the union of simplicity and variety produces harmony, and that monotony or confusion commences where either is neglected, or each intrudes upon the other; in short, to supply by its stores, as far as time and circumstances permitted, what the _public_ granted to the artists of Greece; what Zeuxis demanded and obtained from the people of Croton; what Eupompus pointed out to Lysippus; what Raffaello, with better will than success, searched in his own mind; and what Andrea Mantegna, however unqualified to find himself, desired to impress on the mind of Albert Durer--a standard of FORM.[97]

I shall not here recapitulate the reasons and the coincidence of fortunate circumstances which raised the Greeks to the legislation of form: the standard they erected, the canon they set, fell not from heaven; but as they fancied themselves of divine origin, and religion was the first mover of their art, it followed that they should endeavour to invest their authors with the most perfect forms, and finding _that_ the privilege of man, they were led to a complete and reasoned study of his elements and constitution; this with their climate, which allowed that form to grow and to show itself to the greatest advantage, with their civil and political institutions, which established and encouraged exercises, manners, and opportunities, of all others best calculated to rear, accomplish, and produce that form, gave in successive periods birth to that style which beginning with the _essence_, proportion, proceeded to _character_, and rose to its height by uniting both with Beauty. Of all three classes specimens in sufficient numbers have survived the ravages of time, the most considerable of which, accumulated within these walls, form the ample stores of information which the Academy displays before its students; but--I say it with reluctance, though as teacher my office, as your reader my duty, demand it--displays not always with adequate success. Too often the precipitation with which admission from the Plaster to the Life-room is solicited; the total neglect of the Antique after they have once invaded the model, and the equally slovenly, authoritative, and uninformed manner of drawing from it, prove the superficial impression of the forms previously offered to their selection. The reason of all this lies perhaps in a too early admission to either room. They enter without elements, and proceed without success; they are set to arrange and polish before they are acquainted with the rough materials. To one or both of these causes it is probably owing, that some consider it still as an undecided question whether the student, when admitted to draw from the living model, should confine himself to drawing punctiliously what he sees before him, or exercise that judgment which his course in the Antique Academy has matured, and draw forms corresponding with each other. To me, after considering carefully what has been advanced on either side, it appears demonstrated, that the student is admitted to the life to avail himself of the knowledge he acquired from the previous study of classic forms. Here the office and the essential duties of the _visitor_, I speak with deference, begin, to confirm him where he is right, to check presumption, to lend him his own eyes, and, if it be necessary, to convince him by demonstration and example. But the human system cannot be comprehended by mere contemplation, or even the copy of the surface. The centre of its motion must be fixed, justly to mark the emanation of the rays. The uninterrupted undulation of outward forms, the waves of life, originate within, and, without being traced to that source, instruct less than confound. The real basis of sight is knowledge, and that knowledge is internal; for though, to speak with Milton, in Poetry gods and demigods, "vital in every part, all heart, all eye, all ear, as they please limb themselves, and colour, shape, and size assume as likes them best;" in Art their substance is built on the brittle strength of bones, they act by human elements, and to descend must rise: hence, though a deep and subtle knowledge of _anatomy_ be less necessary to the painter than to the physician or surgeon; though the visible be his sphere and determine his limits, a precise and accurate acquaintance with the skeleton, the basis of the machine, is indispensable; he must make himself master of the muscles, tendons, and ligaments that knit the bones or cover and surround them, their antagonismus of action and reaction, their issues, their insertions, and the variety of shapes which they assume, when according to their relative foreshortenings, laxity, position, they indicate energy or slackness of action or of frame, its greater or less elasticity, furnish the characters of the passions, and by their irritability in louder or fainter tones become the echoes of every impression.

Nor can _Physiognomy_, the companion of Anatomy, which from the measure of the _solid_ parts ascertains the precise proportion of the _moveable_, be dispensed with. There have been, perhaps there are, teachers of art, who, whilst they admit physiognomy in the mass, refuse to acknowledge it in detail, or in other words, who admit a language, and reject its elements: as if the whole harmony of every proportionate object did not consist in the correspondence of singly imperceptible, or seemingly insignificant elements, and would not become a deformed mass without them. Let the twelfth part of an inch be added to, or taken from, the space between the upper lip of the Apollo, and the God is lost.

The want of this necessary qualification is one of the chief causes of MANNER, the capital blemish of Design, in contradistinction to Style: Style pervades and consults the subject, and co-ordinates its means to its demands; Manner subordinates the subject to its means. A Mannerist is the paltry epitomist of Nature's immense volume; a juggler, who pretends to mimic the infinite variety of her materials by the vain display of a few fragments of crockery. He produces, not indeed the monster which Horace recommends to the mirth of his friends, the offspring of grotesque fancy, and rejected with equal disdain or incredulity by the vulgar and refined, but others not less disgusting, though perhaps confined to a narrower circle of judges.

Mannerists may be divided into three classes:

1st. Those who never consult Nature, but at second hand; only see her through the medium of some prescription, and fix her to the test of a peculiar form.

2ndly. Those who persevere to look for her or to place her on a spot where she cannot be found, some individual one or analogous models; and

3rdly. Those who, without ascending to the principle, content themselves with jumbling together an aggregate of style and model, tack deformity to beauty, and meanness to grandeur.

Of all Taste, the standard lies in the middle between extravagance and scantiness; the best becomes a flaw, if carried to an extreme, or indiscriminately applied. The Apollo, the Hercules of Glycon, and the figure misnamed Gladiator, are each models of style in their respective classes; but their excellence would become a flaw if indiscriminately applied to the distinct demand of different subjects. Neither the Apollo, the Hercules, nor the Gladiator, can singly supply the forms of a Theseus, Meleager, or Achilles, any more than the heroes on Monte Cavallo theirs. It must however be owned, that he would commit a more venial error, and come nearer to the form we require in the Achilles of Homer, who should substitute the form of the Apollo or Hercules with the motion of the Gladiator to the real form, than he who should copy him from the best individual he could meet with: the reason is clear, there is a greater analogy between their form and action and that of Achilles, than between him and the best model we know alive. From the same principle, he who in a subject of pure history would attempt to introduce the generic and patriarchal forms in the Capella Sistina would become ludicrous by the excess of contrast; for to him the organic characteristics of national proportion are little less essential than to the draughtsman of natural history or the portrait painter. The skull of an European, though tinged with African hues, will not assimilate with the legitimate skull of a negro, nor can the foot of Meleager, or even of the Laocoon, ever be exchanged for that of a Mongul or Chinese; and he has probably mistaken his information, who fancies that the expression, gait, and limbs of the Apollo can find their counterpart on the Apalachian mountains, or are related to the unconquered tribes of Florida.

The least pardonable of all Mannerists appears to be he who applies to meanness to furnish him with the instruments to dignity and grandeur. He who relies for all upon his model, should treat no other subject but his model; and I will venture to say, that even the extravagant forms, and, if you will, caricatures of Goltzius seduced by Spranger are preferable to those of Albert Durer or Caravaggio, though recommended by the precision of the one and the chiaroscuro of the other, when applied to a pure heroic or symbolic subject; for though eccentric and extreme, they are eccentricities and extremes of the great style, in which meanness of conception is of all other blemishes the least excusable. From this blemish the mighty genius of Raffaello, before it emerged from the dregs of Pietro Perugino, was not entirely free;--whether from timidity or languor of conception, the Christ in the Dispute on the Sacrament, though the principal figure, the centre from which all the rest like radii emanate and ought to emanate in due subordination, is a tame, mean figure, and, the placidity of the face perhaps excepted, for even that has a tincture of meanness, inferior to all the patriarchs and doctors of that numerous composition.

The _third_ class, or those who mix up a motley assemblage of ideal beauty and common nature, such as was pounded together by Pietro Testa and Gherard Lairesse, and from which neither Guido nor Poussin were entirely free--though perhaps not strictly chargeable with the absolute impropriety of the first and the lowness of the second class, must be content with what we can spare of disapprobation from either: they surprise us into pleasure by glimpses of character and form, and as often disappoint us by the obtrusion of heterogeneous or vulgar forms. But this disappointment is not so general, because we want that critical acquaintance with the principles of ancient art which can assign each trunk its head, each limb its counterpart: a want even now so frequent, notwithstanding the boasted refinements of Roman and German criticisms, that a Mercury, if he have left his caduceus, may exchange his limbs with a Meleager, and he with an Antinous; perhaps a Jupiter on Ida his torso with that of a Hercules anapauomenos, an Ariadne be turned into the head of a hornless Bacchus, and an Isis be substituted for every ideal female.

FOOTNOTES:

[95] Analogia. Vitruv. Commensio?

[96] If this happened at all, it must have happened before 1505, at least before the expiration of that year: Giov. Bellino, with whom the author of the preface makes Albert acquainted too, died in 1512. Albert Durer was born in 1471.

[97] Idealismus.

EIGHTH LECTURE.

COLOUR.--IN FRESCO PAINTING.

EIGHTH LECTURE.

The Painter's art may be considered in a double light, either as exerting its power over _the senses_ to reach the intellect and heart, or merely as their handmaid, teaching its graces to charm their organs for their amusement only: in the first light, the senses, like the rest of its materials, are only a vehicle; in the second, they are the principal object and the ultimate aim of its endeavours.

I shall not enquire here whether the Arts, as mere ministers of sensual pleasure, still deserve the name of liberal, or are competent exclusively to fill up the time of an intellectual being. Nature, and the masters of Art, who pronounce the verdicts of Nature in Poetry and Painting, have decided, that they neither can attain their highest degree of accomplishment, nor can be considered as useful assistants to the happiness of society, unless they subordinate the vehicle, whatever it be, to the real object, and make sense the minister of mind.

When this is their object, _Design_, in its most extensive as in its strictest sense, is their basis; when they stoop to be the mere playthings, or debase themselves to be the debauchers of the senses, they make _Colour_ their insidious foundation.

The greatest master of Colour in our time, the man who might have been the rival of the first colourists in every age, Reynolds, in his public instruction uniformly persisted to treat Colour as a subordinate principle. Though fully aware that, without possessing at least a competent share of its numberless fascinating qualities, no man, let his style of design or powers of invention be what they may, can either hope for professional success, or can even properly be called a painter, and giving it as his opinion, on the authority of tradition, the excellence of the remaining monuments in sculpture, and the discovered though inferior relics of ancient painting, that, if the coloured masterpieces of antiquity had descended to us in tolerable preservation, we might expect to see works designed in the style of the Laocoon, painted in that of Titian;--he still persisted in the doctrine that even the colour of Titian, far from adding to the sublimity of the Great style, would only have served to retard, if not to degrade, its impression. He knew the usurping, the ambitious principle inseparable from Colour, and therefore thought it his duty, by making it the basis of ornamental styles, not to check its legitimate rights, but to guard against its indiscriminate demands.

It is not for me, (who have courted and still continue to court Colour as a despairing lover courts a disdainful mistress,) to presume, by adding my opinion, to degrade the great one delivered; but the attachments of fancy ought not to regulate the motives of a teacher, or direct his plan of art: it becomes me therefore to tell you, that if the principle which animates the art gives rights and privilege to Colour not its own; if from a medium, it raises it to a representative of all; if what is claimed in vain by form and mind, it fondly grants to colour; if it divert the public eye from higher beauties to be absorbed by its lures--then the art is degraded to a mere vehicle of sensual pleasure, an implement of luxury, a beautiful _but trifling_ bauble, or a splendid fault.

To Colour, when its bland purity tinges the face of innocence and sprouting life, or its magic charm traces in imperceptible transitions the forms of beauty; when its warm and ensanguined vigour stamps the vivid principle that animates full-grown youth and the powerful frame of manhood, or in paler gradations marks animal decline; when its varieties give truth with character to individual imitation, or its more comprehensive tone pervades the scenes of sublimity and expression, and dictates the medium in which they ought to move, to strike our eye in harmony;--to Colour, the florid attendant of form, the minister of the passions, the herald of energy and character, what eye, not tinged by disease or deserted by Nature, refuses homage?

But of Colour, when equally it overwhelms the forms of infancy, the milky germ of life, and the defined lines of manhood and of beauty with lumpy pulp; when from the dresser of the Graces it becomes the handmaid of deformity, and with their spoils decks her limbs--shakes hands with meanness, or haunts the recesses of loathsomeness and horror[98]--when it exchanges flesh for roses, and vigour for vulgarity--absorbs character and truth in hues of flattery, or changes the tone demanded by sublimity and pathos into a mannered medium of playful tints;--of Colour the slave of fashion and usurper of propriety, if still its charms retain our eye, what mind unseduced by prejudice or habit can forbear to lament the abuse?

The principles of Colour, as varied, are as immutable as those of Nature. The gradations of the system that connects _light_ with _shade_ are immense, but the variety of its imitation is regulated by the result of their union, Simplicity--Clearness if obtained by Harmony!

Simplicity represents of every individual its unity, its whole. Light, and its organ the eye, show us the whole of a being before its parts, and then diffuse themselves in visual rays over the limbs. Light with its own velocity fixes a point, the focus of its power; but as no central light can be conceived without radiation, nor a central form without extension, their union produces that immutable law of harmony which we call breadth.

One point is the brightest in the eye as on the object; this is the point of light: from it in all directions the existent parts advance or recede, by, before, behind each other; the two extremes of light and shade make a whole, which the local or essential colour defines,--its coalition with the demi-tint, the shade and reflexes, rounds,--and the correspondence of each colour with all, tunes.

The principles that regulate the choice of colours are in themselves as invariable as the light from which they spring, and as the shade that absorbs them. Their economy is neither arbitrary nor phantastic. Of this every one may convince himself who can contemplate a prism. Whatever the colours be, they follow each other in regular order; they emerge from, they flow into each other. No confusion can break or thwart their gradations, from blue to yellow, from yellow to red; the flame of every light, without a prisma, establishes this immutable scale.

From this theory you will not expect that I should enter into chemic disquisitions on the materials, or into technic ones on the methods of painting. When you are told that _simplicity and keeping_ are the basis of purity and harmony, that _one_ colour has a greater power than a combination of two, that a mixture of three impairs that power still more, you are in possession of the great elemental principles necessary for the economy of your palette. Method, handling, and the modes of execution are taught by trial, comparison, and persevering practice, but chiefly by the nature, of the object you pursue. The lessons of repetition, disappointment, and blunder, impress more forcibly than the lessons of all masters. Not that I mean to depreciate or to level the comparative value or inferiority of materials, or that instruction which may shorten your road to the essential parts of study; but he is as far from Nature who sees her only through the medium of his master, as he from colour who fancies it lies in costly, scarce, or fine materials, in curious preparations, or mouldy secrets, in light, in dark, in smooth, in rough, or in absorbent grounds: it may be in all, but is in none of these. The masters of ancient colour had for their basis only four, and this simplicity made Reynolds conclude that they must have been as great in colour as in form. He who cannot make use of the worst must disgrace the best materials; and he whose palette is set or regulated by another's eye, renounces his own, and must become a mannerist. There is no compendious method of becoming great; the price of excellence is labour, and time that of immortality.

Colour, like Design, has two essential parts, Imitation and Style. It begins in glare, is caught by deception, emerges to imitation, is finished by style, and debauched by manner.

Glare is always the first feature of a savage or an infant taste. The timid or barbarous beginner, afraid of impairing the splendour by diminishing the mass, exults in the Egyptian glare which he spreads over a surface unbroken by tint and not relieved by shade. Such are in general the flaming remnants of feudal decoration. This is the stage of missal painting; what Dante called "alluminar," the art of Cimabue; its taste continued, though in degrees less shocking, to the time of M. Agnolo and Raffaello. Gods, and mothers of Gods, Apostles and Martyrs, attracted devotion in proportion to the more or less gaudy colours in which they were arrayed. It was for this reason that Julius the Second wished M. Agnolo had added to the majesty of the Patriarchs and Sibyls by gold and lapis lazuli.

Deception follows glare; attempts to substitute by form or colour the image for the thing, always mark the puerility of taste, though sometimes its decrepitude. The microscopic precision of Denner, and even the fastidious, though broader detail of Gherard Douw, were symptoms of its dotage. The contest of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, if not a frolic, was an effort of puerile dexterity. But Deception, though at its ultimate pitch never more than the successful mimicry of absent objects, and for itself below the aim of art, is the mother of Imitation. We must penetrate the substances of things, acquaint ourselves with their peculiar hue and texture, and colour them in detail, before we can hope to seize their principle and give their general air.