IXPAINTED MUSIC
Painted music. The common identity of the Seven Arts was a master theory of Richard Wagner and a theory he endeavored his life long to put into practice. Walter Pater, in his essay on The School of Giorgione, has dwelt upon the same theme, declaring music the archetype of the arts. In his Essays Speculative, John Addington Symonds has said some pertinent things on the subject. Camille Mauclair, in Idées Vivantes, seriously proposed a scheme for the fusion of the arts. The fusion would be cerebral, as the actual mingling of sculpture, architecture, music, drama, acting, painting, and dancing could never evoke the sensation of unity. Not thus is synthesis to be attained. It must be the “idea” of the arts rather than their material blending. A pretty chimera! Yet one that has piqued the attention of artists for centuries. It was the half-crazy E. T. W. Hoffmann, composer, dramatist, painter, poet, stage manager, and a dozen other professions, including those of genius and drunkard, who set off a train of fireworks that dazzled the brains of Poe, Baudelaire, and the later symbolists.
Persons who hear painting, see music, touch poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are now classed by the psychical police as decadent, though such notions are as old as art and literature. In his L’Audition Colorée, Suarez de Mendoza has said that the sensation of color-hearing, the faculty of associating tones and colors, is often a consequence of an association of ideas established in youth. The colored vowels of Arthur Rimbaud, which should be taken as a poet’s crazy prank; the elaborate treatises by René Ghil, which are terribly earnest; the casual remarks that one hears, such as “scarlet is like a trumpet blast”—it was scarlet to the young Mozart; certain pages of Huysmans and Mallarmé, all furnish examples of the curious muddling of the five senses and the mixing of artistic genres. Naturally, this confusion has invaded criticism, which, limited in imagery, sometimes seeks to transpose the technical terms of one art to another.
Whistler, with his Nocturnes, Color-Notes, Symphonies in Rose and Silver, his Color-Sonatas, boldly annexed well-worn musical phrases that, in their new estate, took on fresher meanings, while remaining knee-deep in the swamp of the nebulous. Modern composers have retaliated. Musical Impressionism is enjoying its vogue and the New Poetry is desperately pictorial. Soul-landscapes and etched sonnets are titles not unpleasing to the ear. What if they do not mean much! There was atime when to say “she had a sweet voice” aroused a smile. What has sugar to do with sound? It may be erratic symbolism, this mélange of terminologies, yet, occasionally, it strikes sparks. There is a deeply rooted feeling that the arts have a common matrix, that, emotionally, they are akin. “Her slow smile” in fiction has had marked success, but when I wrote of the “slow Holland landscape,” the phrase was suspiciously regarded. (I probably found it in Verlaine or Rodin.) The bravest critic of the arts was Huysmans, who pitched pell-mell into the hell-broth of his critiques any image that assaulted his fecund brain. He forces us to see his picture; for he was primarily concerned with the eye, not the ear. Flaubert represents in its highest estate a fusion of sound and sense and seeing; he was both an auditive and a visualist. His prose sings, while its imagery sharply impinges upon the optic nerve. Nor are taste and smell neglected—recall the very flavor of arsenic that killed Emma Bovary or the scents of the woodland where that adorable girl lingered with her lover. Joined to those evocations of the five senses there is a classic balance of sentence, phrase, paragraph, page; the syntactic architecture is magnificent, though not excelling the eloquent Bossuet or the pictorial Châteaubriand as to complex, harmonious structure. These three great French writers had polyphonic minds, and their books and the orations of the superb Bossuetenglobe a world of ideas and sensations, music and painting.
And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a “comprehensive,” as those with the sixth, or synthetic, sense have been named by Lombroso-Levi? Beginning as a goldsmith’s apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle), Botticelli as a painter became the most original in all Italy. His canvases possess powers of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and of the Brothers Poliajuolo, and his vision must have been something more than paint and pattern. A palimpsest may be discerned by the imaginative—rather let us say fanciful, since Coleridge set forth the categories—whose secrets are not to be easily deciphered, and are something more than those portrayed on the flat surfaces of his pictures. Like most artists of his period he painted the usual number of Madonnas; nevertheless, he did not convince his world, or succeeding generations, that his piety was orthodox. During his lifetime suspected of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, is now definitely ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and yet a mystic. Does not the perverse clash in such a temperament produce exotic dissonances?
All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli paced its narrow streets and lived its splendid colored life. His sensitive nature absorbed, as does a sponge water, theimpulses and motives of his contemporaries. The secrets lurking in the “new learning”—doctrines that made for damnation, such as the recrudescence of the mediæval conception of an angelic neuter host, neither for heaven nor hell, not on the side of Lucifer, nor yet with the starry hosts—were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its note is in Città di Vita, in the heresies of the Albigenses, and it may well go back to Origen. Those who could read his paintings—and there were clairvoyant theologians abroad in Florence—might make of them what they would. Painted music is less understandable than painted heresy. Matteo Palmieri is reported to have dragged Botticelli into dark corners of disbelief; there was in the Medicean days a cruel order of intelligence that delighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals of the young. A nature like Botticelli’s, which frankly surrendered to new ideas if they but wore the mask of subtlety, was swept, no doubt, away in the eddying cross currents of Florentine intellectual movements. Mere instinct never moved him from his moral anchorage, for he was a sexless sort of man. Always the vision. He did not palter with the voluptuous frivolities of his fellow artists, yet his canvases are feverishly disquieting. The sting of the flesh is remote. Love is transfigured, though not spiritually, and not served to us as a barren parable, but made more intense by the breaking down of the thin partition between the sexes; a consumingemotion, not quite of this world nor of the next. However, the rebellion that stirred in the bosom of Botticelli never took on concrete aspects. His religious subjects are Hellenized, not after the sterner, more inflexible method of Mantegna, but resembling those of a philosophic Athenian who has read and comprehended Dante. His illustrations show us a different Dante, one who might not have altogether pleased that gloomy exile. The transpositions of the Divine Comedy by William Blake seem to sound the depths; Botticelli, notwithstanding the grace of his “baby Centaurs” and the wreathed car of Beatrice, is the profounder man of the pair.
His life, veiled toward the last, was not happy, although he was recognized as a great painter. Watteau concealed a cankering secret; so Botticelli. Melancholy is the base of the Florentine’s work. As a young man he created in joy and freedom; but the wings of Dürer’s Bat were outstretched over his brooding head. Melencolia! He could ask if there is anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of sadness. There is more poignant music in his Primavera, in the weary, indifferent countenances of his lean, neuropathic Madonnas—Pater calls them “peevish”—in his Venus at the Uffizi, than in the paintings of any other Renaissance artist. The veils are there, the consoling veils of an exquisite art, which are missing in the lacerated and realistic holy folk of the Flemish Primitives. Joyfulnesscannot be denied Botticelli; but it is not the golden joy of Giorgione; “Big George of Castelfranco.” An emaciated music emanates from the eyes of that sad, restless Venus, to whom love has become a scourge of sense and spirit. Music? Yes, there is the “colored-hearing” of Mendoza. The canvases of Botticelli sound the opalescent overtones of an unearthly composition. Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin, whose right hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor from invisible orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, supremely impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven paces tread the measures of a dance we but overhear. Garlanded in blossoms, a glorious girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric moods; her gesture, surely a divine one, shows her casting flowers upon the richly embroidered floor of the earth. The light filters through the thick trees, its rifts as rigid as a candle. The nymph in the brake is threatening. Another epicene creature flies by her. Love shoots his bolt in mid-air. Is it from Paphos or Mitylene? What the fable? Music plucked down from vibrating skies, music made visible. A mere masque, laden with the prim, sweet allegories of the day, it is not. That blunt soul, Vasari, saw at best its surfaces. The poet Politian got closer to the core. Centuries later our perceptions sharpened by the stations traversed of sorrowand experience, lend to this immortal canvas a more sympathetic, less literal interpretation.
There is music, too, in the Anadyomene of the Uffizi. Still stranger music. Those sudden little waves that lap an immemorial strand; that shimmering shell, its fan-spokes converging to the parted feet of the goddess; her hieratic pose, its modesty symbolic, the hair that serpentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders that slope into delicious arms; the Japanese group blowing tiny gem-like buds with their puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tiptoe offering her mantle to Venus; and enveloping all are vernal breezes, the wind that weeps in little corners, unseen, yet sensed, on every inch of the picture—what are these mundane things but the music of an art, original at its birth, and since never reborn? The larger, simpler, curved rhythms of the greater men, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven, are not in Botticelli. Nevertheless, his voice is irresistible.
Modern as is his spirit, as modern as Watteau, Chopin, or Shelley, he is no less ethereal; ethereal and also realistic. We can trace his artistic ancestry; but what he became no man could have predicted. Technically, as one critic has written, “he was the first to understand the charm of silhouettes, the first to linger in expressing the joining of the arm and body, the flexibility of the hips, the roundness of the shoulder, the elegance of the leg, the littleshadow that marks the springing of the neck, and, above all, the carving of the hand; but even more, he understood “le prestige insolent des grands yeux”.”
Pater found his color cold and cadaverous, “and yet the more you come to understand what imaginative coloring really is, that all color is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you like this peculiar quality of color.” Bernard Berenson goes further. To him the entire canvas, Venus Rising from the Sea, presents us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and movement.... The vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life-communicating motion is always there. And writing of the Pallas in the Pitti galleries, he most eloquently declares: “As to the hair—imagine shapes having the supreme life of line you may see in the contours of licking flames, and yet possessed of all the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to its own desire!” And, after speaking of Botticelli’s stimulating line, he continues: “Imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences of movement-values and you will have something that holds the same relation to representation that music holds to speech—and this art exists and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro Botticelli may have hadrivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but in Europe never!... He is the greatest master of lineal design that Europe ever had.”
Again, painted music; not the sounding symbolism of the emotions, but the abstract music of design. Nevertheless, the appeal of Botticelli is auditive. Other painters have spun more intricate, more beautiful webs; have made more sensuous color-music; but the subtle sarabands of Botticelli they have not composed. Here is a problem for the psychiatrist. In paint, manifestations of this order could be set down to mental lesion; that is how Maurice Spronck classifies the sensation. He studied it in the writings of the Goncourts and Flaubert. The giant of Croisset told the Goncourts that to him Salammbo was purple and L’Education Sentimentale grey, Carthage and Paris. A characteristic fancy. But why is it that scientific gentlemen, who predicate genius as eye-strain, do not reprove poets for their sensibility to the sound of words, to the shape and cadence of the phrase? It would appear that only prose-men are the culpable ones if they overhear the harping of invisible harps from Ibsen’s Steeplejacks, or describe the color of the thoughts of Zarathustra. In reality, not one but thousands of people listen in the chill galleries of Florence to the sweet, nervous music of Botticelli. This testimony of the years is for the dissenters to explain. “Fantastico, Stravagante,” as Vasari nicknamed Botticelli, has literally created anaudience which learned to use its eyes as he did, fantastically and extravagantly.
He passed through the three stages dear to arbitrary criticism. Serene in his youthful years; troubled, voluptuous, and visionary during the Medicean period; sombre, mystic, a convert to Savonarola at the end. He traversed a great crisis not untouched. Certain political assassinations and the Pazzi conspiracy hurt him to the quick. He noted the turbulence of Rome and Florence, saw behind the gayly tinted arras of the Renaissance the sinister figures of supermen and criminals. He never married. When Tommaso Soderini begged him to take a wife he responded: “The other night I dreamed I was married. I awoke in such horror and chagrin that I could not fall asleep again. I arose and wandered about Florence like one possessed.” Evidently not intended by nature to be husband or father. Like Watteau, like Baudelaire, like Nietzsche, grand visionaries abiding on the thither side of the facile joys of life, Botticelli was not tempted by the usual baits of happiness. His great Calumnia, in the Uffizi, might be construed as an image of the soul of Botticelli. Truth, naked and scorned—we see again the matchless silhouette of his Venus—misunderstood and calumniated, stands in the hall of a vast palace. She points to the heavens. She is a living interrogation-mark. Pilate’s question? Botticelli was adored. But understood? An enigmatic malady ravagedhis innermost being. He died poor, solitary, did this composer of luminous chants and pagan poems, this moulder of exotic dreams, and of angels who long for gods other than those of Good and Evil. You think of the mystic Joachim of Flora and his Third Kingdom; the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit which is to follow the Kingdom of the Father and the Kingdom of the Son; the same Joachim who declared that the true ascetic counts nothing of his own, save only his harp. “Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.” And you also recallSt.Anselm, who said that he would rather go to hell sinless than be in heaven smudged by a single transgression.
A grievously wounded, timid soul, an intruder at the portals of Paradise, Botticelli had not the courage either to enter or withdraw. He experienced visions that rapt him into the ninth heaven, but when he reported them in the language of his design his harassed, divided spirit chilled the ardors of his art. In sooth, a spiritual dichotomy. And thus it is that the multitude does not worship at his shrine as at the shrine of Raphael. Do they unconsciously note the adumbration of a paganism long dead, but revived for a brief Botticellian hour? Venus or Madonna! Adonais or Christ! Under which god? The artist never frankly tells us. Legends are revived of fauns turned monks, of the gods in exile and at servile labor in a world that has forgotten them, but with a sublimatedecstasy not Heine’s. When we stand before Botticelli and hear the pallid, muted music of his canvases we are certain that the last word concerning him shall not be uttered until his last line has vanished; even then his archaic harmonies may reverberate in the ears of mankind. But always music painted.