SECOND LECTURE.ART OF THE MODERNS.
ὉΙ ΤΙΝΕΣ ΗΓΕΜΟΝΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΚΟΙΡΑΝΟΙ ΗΣΑΝ.ΠΛΗΘΥΝ Δ’ ΟΥΚ ΑΝ ΕΓΩ ΜΥΘΗΣΟΜΑΙ ΟΥΔ’ ΟΝΟΜΗΝΩΟΥΔ’ ΕΙ ΜΟΙ ΔΕΚΑ ΜΕΝ ΓΛΩΣΣΑΙ, ΔΕΚΑ ΔΕ ΣΤΟΜΑΤ’ ΕΙΕΝ,ΦΩΝΗ Δ’ ΑΡΡΗΚΤΟΣ.Homer. Iliad. B. 487.
ὉΙ ΤΙΝΕΣ ΗΓΕΜΟΝΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΚΟΙΡΑΝΟΙ ΗΣΑΝ.ΠΛΗΘΥΝ Δ’ ΟΥΚ ΑΝ ΕΓΩ ΜΥΘΗΣΟΜΑΙ ΟΥΔ’ ΟΝΟΜΗΝΩΟΥΔ’ ΕΙ ΜΟΙ ΔΕΚΑ ΜΕΝ ΓΛΩΣΣΑΙ, ΔΕΚΑ ΔΕ ΣΤΟΜΑΤ’ ΕΙΕΝ,ΦΩΝΗ Δ’ ΑΡΡΗΚΤΟΣ.Homer. Iliad. B. 487.
ὉΙ ΤΙΝΕΣ ΗΓΕΜΟΝΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΚΟΙΡΑΝΟΙ ΗΣΑΝ.ΠΛΗΘΥΝ Δ’ ΟΥΚ ΑΝ ΕΓΩ ΜΥΘΗΣΟΜΑΙ ΟΥΔ’ ΟΝΟΜΗΝΩΟΥΔ’ ΕΙ ΜΟΙ ΔΕΚΑ ΜΕΝ ΓΛΩΣΣΑΙ, ΔΕΚΑ ΔΕ ΣΤΟΜΑΤ’ ΕΙΕΝ,ΦΩΝΗ Δ’ ΑΡΡΗΚΤΟΣ.
ὉΙ ΤΙΝΕΣ ΗΓΕΜΟΝΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΚΟΙΡΑΝΟΙ ΗΣΑΝ.
ΠΛΗΘΥΝ Δ’ ΟΥΚ ΑΝ ΕΓΩ ΜΥΘΗΣΟΜΑΙ ΟΥΔ’ ΟΝΟΜΗΝΩ
ΟΥΔ’ ΕΙ ΜΟΙ ΔΕΚΑ ΜΕΝ ΓΛΩΣΣΑΙ, ΔΕΚΑ ΔΕ ΣΤΟΜΑΤ’ ΕΙΕΝ,
ΦΩΝΗ Δ’ ΑΡΡΗΚΤΟΣ.
Homer. Iliad. B. 487.
Homer. Iliad. B. 487.
Introduction—different direction of the art. Preparative style—Masaccio—Lionardo da Vinci. Style of establishment—Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titiano, Correggio. Style of refinement, and depravation. Schools—of Tuscany, Rome, Venice, Lombardy. The Ecclectic school. Machinists. The German school—Albert Durer. The Flemish school—Rubens. The Dutch school—Rembrandt. Observations on art in Switzerland. The French school. The Spanish school. England—Conclusion.
In the preceding discourse I have endeavoured to impress you with the general features of ancient art in its different periods of preparation, establishment, and refinement. We are now arrived at the epoch of its restoration in the fifteenth century of our æra, when religion and wealth rousing emulation, reproduced its powers, but gave to their exertion a very different direction. The reigning church found itself indeed under the necessity of giving more splendour to the temples and mansions destined to receive its votaries, of subduing their senses with the charm of appropriate images and the exhibition of events and actions, which might stimulate their zeal and inflame their hearts: but the sacred mysteries of divine Being, the method adopted by Revelation, the duties its doctrine imposed, the virtues it demanded from its followers, faith, resignation, humility, sufferings, substituted a medium of art as much inferior tothe resources of Paganism in a physical sense as incomparably superior in a spiritual one. Those public customs, that perhaps as much tended to spread the infections of vice as they facilitated the means of art, were no more; the heroism of the Christian and his beauty were internal, and powerful or exquisite forms allied him no longer exclusively to his God. The chief repertory of the artist, the sacred records, furnished indeed a sublime cosmogony, scenes of patriarchal simplicity and a poetic race, which left nothing to regret in the loss of heathen mythology; but the stem of the nation whose history is its exclusive theme, if it abounded in characters and powers fit for the exhibition of passions, did not teem with forms sufficiently exalted, to inform the artist and elevate the art. Ingredients of a baser cast mingled their alloy with the materials of grandeur and of beauty. Monastic legend and the rubric of martyrology claimed more than a legitimate share from the labours of the pencil and the chisel, made nudity the exclusive property of emaciated hermits or decrepit age, and if the breast of manhood was allowed to bare its vigour, or beauty to expand her bosom, the antidotes of terrour and of horrour were ready at their side to check the apprehended infection of their charms. When we add to this the heterogeneous stock on which thereviving system of arts was grafted, a race indeed inhabiting a genial climate, but itself the fœces of barbarity, the remnants of Gothic adventurers, humanised only by the cross, mouldering amid the ruins of the temples they had demolished, the battered fragments of the images their rage had crushed—when we add this, I say, we shall less wonder at the languor of modern art in its rise and progress, than be astonished at the vigour by which it adapted and raised materials partly so unfit and defective, partly so contaminated, to the magnificent system which we are to contemplate.
Sculpture had already produced respectable specimens of its reviving powers in the bassorelievos of Lorenzo Ghiberti, some works of Donato, and the Christ of Philippo Brunelleschi[27], when the first symptoms of imitation appeared in the frescos of Tommaso da St. Giovanni, commonly called Masaccio, from the total neglect of his appearance and person[28]: Masacciofirst conceived that parts are to constitute a whole; that composition ought to have a centre; expression, truth; and execution, unity: his line deserves attention, though his subjects led him not to investigation of form, and the shortness of his life forbade his extending those elements which Raphael, nearly a century afterward, carried to perfection—it is sufficiently glorious for him to have been more than once copied by that great master of expression, and in some degree to have been the herald of his style: Masaccio lives more in the figure of Paul preaching on the areopagus, of the celebrated cartoon in our possession, and in the borrowed figure of Adam expelled from paradise in the loggia of the Vatican, than in his own mutilated or retouched remains.
The essays of Masaccio in imitation and expression, Andrea Mantegna[29]attempted to unite with form; led by the contemplation of the antique, fragments of which he ambitiously scattered over his works: though a Lombard, and born prior to the discovery of the best ancient statues, he seems to have been acquainted with a variety of characters, from forms thatremind us of the Apollo, Mercury or Meleager, down to the fauns and satyrs: but his taste was too crude, his fancy too grotesque, and his comprehension too weak to advert from the parts that remained to the whole that inspired them: hence in his figures of dignity or beauty we see not only the meagre forms of common models, but even their defects tacked to ideal Torso’s; and his fauns and satyrs, instead of native luxuriance of growth and the sportive appendages of mixed being, are decorated with heraldic excrescences and arabesque absurdity. His triumphs are known to you all; they are a copious inventory of classic lumber, swept together with more industry than taste, but full of valuable materials. Of expression he was not ignorant: his burial of Christ furnished Raphael with the composition, and some of the features and attitudes in his picture on the same subject in the palace of the Borghese’s—the figure of St. John, however, left out by Raphael, proves that Mantegna sometimes mistook grimace for the highest degree of grief. His oil-pictures exhibit little more than the elaborate anguish of missal-painting; his frescoes destroyed at the construction of the Clementine museum, had freshness, freedom and imitation.
To Luca Signorelli, of Cortona[30], nature more than atoned for the want of those advantages which the study of the antique had offered to Andrea Mantegna. He seems to have been the first who contemplated with a discriminating eye his object, saw what was accident and what essential; balanced light and shade, and decided the motion of his figures. He foreshortened with equal boldness and intelligence, and thence it is, probably, that Vasari fancies to have discovered in the last judgment of Michael Angelo traces of imitation from the Lunetta, painted by Luca, in the church of the Madonna, at Orvieto; but the powers which animated him there, and before at Arezzo, are no longer visible in the Gothic medley with which he filled two compartments in the chapel of Sixtus IV. at Rome.
Such was the dawn of modern art, when Lionardo da Vinci[31]broke forth with a splendour which distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius, favoured by education and circumstances, all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor, anatomist, architect, engineer, chemist, machinist, musician, man of science, andsometimes empiric[32], he laid hold of every beauty in the enchanted circle, but without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed in her turn each. Fitter to scatter hints than to teach by example, he wasted life, insatiate, in experiment. To a capacity which at once penetrated the principle and real aim of the art, he joined an inequality of fancy that at one moment lent him wings for the pursuit of beauty, and the next, flung him on the ground to crawl after deformity: we owe him chiaroscuro with all its magic, we owe him caricature with all its incongruities. His notions of the most elaborate finish and his want of perseverance were at least equal:—want of perseverance alone could make him abandon his cartoon destined for the great council-chamber at Florence, of which the celebrated contest of horsemen was but one group;for to him who could organize that composition, Michael Angelo himself ought rather to have been an object of emulation than of fear: and that he was able to organize it, we may be certain from the remaining imperfect sketch in the ‘Etruria Pittrice;’ but still more from the admirable print of it by Edelinck, after a drawing of Rubens, who was Lionardo’s great admirer, and has said much to impress us with the beauties of his last supper in the refectory of the Dominicans at Milano, the only one of his great works which he carried to ultimate finish, through all its parts, from the head of Christ to the least important one: it perished soon after him, and we can estimate the loss only from the copies that survive.
Bartolomeo della Porta, or di S. Marco, the last master of this period[33], first gave gradation to colour, form and masses to drapery, and a grave dignity, till then unknown, to execution. If he was not endowed with the versatility and comprehension of Lionardo, his principles were less mixed with base matter and less apt to mislead him. As a member of a religious order, he confined himself to subjects and characters of piety, but the few nudities which heallowed himself to exhibit, show sufficient intelligence and still more style: he foreshortened with truth and boldness, and whenever the figure did admit of it, made his drapery the vehicle of the limb it invests. He was the true master of Raphael, whom his tuition weaned from the meanness of Pietro Perugino, and prepared for the mighty style of Michael Angelo Buonarroti.
Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner are the elements of Michael Angelo’s style.[34]By these principles he selected or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter, as sculptor, as architect, he attempted, and above any other man succeeded to unite magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts with the utmost simplicity and breadth. His line is uniformly grand: character and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to grandeur. The child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teemwith the man; his men are a race of giants. This is the ‘terribil via’ hinted at by Agostino Carracci, though perhaps as little understood by the Bolognese as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To give the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty, was the exclusive power of Michael Angelo. He is the inventor of epic painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine chapel, which exhibits the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He has personified motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; embodied sentiment on the monuments of St. Lorenzo, unravelled the features of meditation in the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine chapel; and in the last judgment, with every attitude that varies the human body, traced the master-trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though as sculptor, he expressed the character of flesh more perfectly than all who went before or came after him, yet he never submitted to copy an individual; Julio the second only excepted, and in him he represented the reigning passion rather than the man.[35]In painting he contented himself with anegative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected all meretricious ornament.[36]The fabric of St. Peter, scattered into infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex gave the air of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him all in all, was M. Angelo, the salt of art: sometimes he no doubt had his moments of dereliction, deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his forms with futile and ostentatious anatomy: both met with armies of copyists, and it has been his fate to have been censured for their folly.
The inspiration of Michael Angelo was followed by the milder genius of Raphael Sanzio[37], the father ofdramatic painting, the painter of humanity; less elevated, less vigorous, but more insinuating, more pressing on our hearts, the warm master of our sympathies. What effect of human connexion, what feature of the mind, from the gentlest emotion to the most fervid burst of passion, has been left unobserved, has not received a characteristic stamp from that examiner of man? M. Angelo came to nature, nature came to Raphael—he transmitted her features like a lucid glass unstained, unmodified. We stand with awe before M. Angelo, and tremble at the height to which he elevates us—we embrace Raphael, and follow him wherever he leads us. Energy, with propriety of character and modest grace poise his line and determine his correctness. Perfect human beauty he has not represented; no face of Raphael’s is perfectly beautiful; no figure of his, in the abstract, possesses the proportions that could raise it to a standard of imitation: form to him was only a vehicle of character or pathos, and to those he adapted it in a mode and with a truth which leaves all attempts at emendation hopeless. His invention connects the utmost stretch of possibility, with the most plausible degree of probability, in a manner that equally surprizes our fancy, persuades our judgment, and affects our heart. His composition always hastens to themost necessary point as its centre, and from that disseminates, to that leads back as rays, all secondary ones. Group, form, and contrast are subordinate to the event, and common-place ever excluded. His expression, in strict unison with and decided by character, whether calm, animated, agitated, convulsed, or absorbed by the inspiring passion, unmixed and pure, never contradicts its cause, equally remote from tameness and grimace: the moment of his choice never suffers the action to stagnate or to expire; it is the moment of transition, the crisis big with the past and pregnant with the future.—If, separately taken, the line of Raphael has been excelled in correctness, elegance, and energy; his colour far surpassed in tone and truth, and harmony; his masses in roundness, and his chiaroscuro in effect—considered as instruments of pathos, they have never been equalled; and in composition, invention, expression, and the power of telling a story, he has never been approached.
Whilst the superiour principles of the art were receiving the homage of Tuscany and Rome, the inferiour but more alluring charm of colour began to spread its fascination at Venice, from the pallet ofGiorgione da Castel Franco[38], and irresistibly entranced every eye that approached the magic of Titiano Vecelli of Cador.[39]To no colourist before or after him, did nature unveil herself with that dignified familiarity in which she appeared to Titiano. His organ, universal and equally fit for all her exhibitions, rendered her simplest to her most compound appearances with equal purity and truth. He penetrated the essence and the general principle of the substances before him, and on these established his theory of colour. He invented that breadth of local tint which no imitation has attained; and first expressed the negative nature of shade: his are the charms of glazing, and the mystery of reflexes, by which he detached, rounded, connected, or enriched his objects. His harmony is less indebted to the force of light and shade, or the artifices of contrast, than to a due balance of colour, equally remote from monotony and spots. His backgrounds seem to be dictated by nature. Landscape, whether it be considered as the transcript of a spot, or the rich combination of congenial objects, or as the scene of a phœnomenon, datesits origin from him: he is the father of portrait painting, of resemblance with form, character with dignity, and costume with subordination.
Another charm was yet wanting to complete the round of art—harmony: it appeared with Antonio Læti[40]called Correggio, whose works it attended like an enchanted spirit. The harmony and the grace of Correggio are proverbial: the medium which by breadth of gradation unites two opposite principles, the coalition of light and darkness by imperceptible transition, are the element of his style.—This inspires his figures with grace, to this their grace is subordinate: the most appropriate, the most elegant attitudes were adopted, rejected, perhaps sacrificed to the most awkward ones, in compliance with this imperious principle: parts vanished, were absorbed, or emerged in obedience to it. This unison of a whole, predominates over all that remains of him, from the vastness of his cupolas to the smallest of his oil-pictures.—The harmony of Correggio, though assisted by exquisitehues, was entirely independent of colour: his great organ was chiaroscuro in its most extensive sense; compared with the expanse in which he floats, the effects of Lionardo da Vinci are little more than the dying ray of evening, and the concentrated flash of Giorgione discordant abruptness. The bland central light of a globe, imperceptibly gliding through lucid demi-tints into rich reflected shades, composes the spell of Correggio, and affects us with the soft emotions of a delicious dream.
Such was the ingenuity that prepared, and such the genius that raised to its height the fabric of modern art. Before we proceed to the next epoch, let us make an observation:
Form not your judgment of an artist from the exceptions which his conduct may furnish, from the exertions of accidental vigour, some deviations into other walks, or some unpremeditated flights of fancy, but from the predominant rule of his system, the general principle of his works. The line and style of Titian’s design, sometimes expand themselves like those of Michael Angelo. His Abraham prevented from sacrificing Isaac; his David adoring over the giant-trunk of Goliah; the Friar escaping from themurderer of his companion in the forest, equal in loftiness of conception and style of design, their mighty tone of colour and daring execution: the heads and groups of Raphael’s frescos and portraits sometimes glow and palpitate with the tints of Titian, or coalesce in masses of harmony, and undulate with graces superior to those of Correggio; who in his turn once reached the highest summit of invention, when he embodied silence and personified the mysteries of love in the voluptuous group of Jupiter and Io; and again exceeded all competition of expression in the divine features of his Ecce-Homo. But these sudden irradiations, these flashes of power are only exceptions from their wonted principles; pathos and character own Raphael for their master, colour remains the domain of Titian, and harmony the sovereign mistress of Correggio.
The resemblance which marked the two first periods of ancient and modern art, vanishes altogether as we extend our view to the consideration of the third, or that of refinement, and the origin of schools. The pre-eminence of ancient art, as we have observed, was less the result of superiour powers, than of simplicity of aim and uniformity of pursuit. The Helladic and the Ionian schools appear to have concurredin directing their instruction to the grand principles of form and expression: this was the stamen which they drew out into one immense connected web. The talents that succeeded genius, applied and directed their industry and polish to decorate the established system, the refinements of taste, grace, sentiment, colour, adorned beauty, grandeur and expression. The Tuscan, the Roman, the Venetian, and the Lombard schools, whether from incapacity, want of education, of adequate or dignified encouragement, meanness of conception, or all these together, separated, and in a short time substituted the medium for the end. Michael Angelo lived to see the electric shock which his design and style had given to art, propagated by the Tuscan and Venetian schools, as the ostentatious vehicle of puny conceits and emblematic quibbles, or the palliative of empty pomp and degraded luxuriance of colour. He had been copied but was not imitated by Andrea Vannucchi, surnamed del Sarto, who in his series of pictures on the life of John the Baptist, in preference adopted the meagre style of Albert Durer. The artist who appears to have penetrated deepest to his mind, was Pelegrino Tibaldi, of Bologna[41]; celebrated as the painter of the frescos in the academic institute of that city, and as the architect of the Escurial under Philip II. Thecompositions, groups, and single figures of the institute exhibit a singular mixture of extraordinary vigour and puerile imbecility of conception, of character and caricature, of style and manner. Polypheme groping at the mouth of his cave for Ulysses, and Æolus granting him favourable winds, are striking instances of both: than the cyclops, Michael Angelo himself never conceived a form of savage energy, with attitude and limbs more in unison; whilst the god of winds is degraded to a scanty and ludicrous semblance of Thersites, and Ulysses with his companions travestied by the semibarbarous look and costume of the age of Constantine or Attila; the manner of Michael Angelo is the style of Pelegrino Tibaldi; from him Golzius, Hemskerk, and Spranger borrowed the compendium of the Tuscan’s peculiarities. With this mighty talent, however, Michael Angelo seems not to have been acquainted, but by that unaccountable weakness incident to the greatest powers, and the severe remembrancer of their vanity, he became the superintendant and assistant tutor of the Venetian Sebastiano[42], and of Daniel Ricciarelli, of Volterra[43]; the first of whom, with an exquisiteeye for individual, had no sense for ideal colour, whilst the other rendered great diligence and much anatomical erudition, useless by meagreness of line and sterility of ideas: how far Michael Angelo succeeded in initiating either in his principles, the far-famed pictures of the resuscitation of Lazarus, by the first, once in the cathedral of Narbonne, and since inspected by us all at the Lyceum here[44], and the fresco of the descent from the cross, in the church of La Trinità del Monte, at Rome, by the second, sufficiently evince: pictures which combine the most heterogeneous principles. The group of Lazarus in Sebastian del Piombo’s and that of the women, with the figure of Christ, in Daniel Ricciarelli’s, not only breathe the sublime conception that inspired, but the master-hand that shaped them: offsprings of Michael Angelo himself, models of expression, style, and breadth, they cast on all the rest an air of inferiority, and only serve to prove the incongruity of partnership between unequal powers; this inferiority however is respectable, when compared with the depravations of Michael Angelo’s style by the remainder of the Tuscan school, especially those of Giorgio Vasari[45], the most superficial artistand the most abandoned mannerist of his time, but the most acute observer of men and the most dextrous flatterer of princes. He overwhelmed the palaces of the Medici and of the popes, the convents and churches of Italy, with a deluge of mediocrity, commended by rapidity and shameless ‘bravura’ of hand: he alone did more work than all the artists of Tuscany together, and to him may be truly applied, what he had the insolence to say of Tintoretto, that he turned the art into a boy’s toy.
Whilst Michael Angelo was doomed to lament the perversion of his style, death prevented Raphael from witnessing the gradual decay of his. The exuberant fertility of Julio Pipi called Romano[46], and the less extensive but classic taste of Polydoro da Caravaggio deserted indeed the standard of their master, but with a dignity and magnitude of compass which command respect. It is less from his tutored works in the Vatican, than from the colossal conceptions, the pathetic or sublime allegories, and the voluptuous reveries which enchant the palace del T, near Mantoua, that we must form our estimate of Julio’s powers; they were of a size to challenge all competition,had he united purity of taste and delicacy of mind with energy and loftiness of thought; as they are, they resemble a mighty stream, sometimes flowing in a full and limpid vein, but oftener turbid with rubbish. He has left specimens of composition from the most sublime to the most extravagant; to a primeval simplicity of conception in his mythologic subjects, which transports us to the golden age of Hesiod, he joined a rage for the grotesque; to uncommon powers of expression a decided attachment to deformity and grimace, and to the warmest and most genial imagery, the most ungenial colour.
With nearly equal, but still more mixed fertility, Francesco Primaticcio[47]propagated the style and the conceptions of his master Julio on the gallic side of the Alps, and with the assistance of Nicolo, commonly called Dell’ Abbate after him, filled the palaces of Francis I. with mythologic and allegoric works, in frescos of an energy and depth of tone till then unknown. Theirs was the cyclus of pictures from the Odyssea of Homer at Fontainbleau, a mine of classic and picturesque materials: they are destroyed, and we may estimate their loss, even throughthe disguise of the mannered and feeble etchings of Theodore Van Tulden.
The compact style of Polydoro[48], formed on the antique, such as it is exhibited in the best series of the Roman military bassorelievos, is more monumental, than imitative or characteristic. But the virility of his taste, the impassioned motion of his groups, the simplicity, breadth, and never excelled elegance and probability of his drapery, with the forcible chiaroscuro of his compositions, make us regret the narrowness of the walk, to which he confined his powers.
No painter ever painted his own mind so forcibly as Michael Angelo Amerigi, surnamed Il Caravaggi.[49]To none nature ever set limits with a more decided hand. Darkness gave him light; into his melancholy cell light stole only with a pale reluctant ray, or broke on it, as flashes on a stormy night. The most vulgar forms he recommended by ideal light and shade, and a tremendous breadth of manner.
The aim and style of the Roman school deserve little further notice here, till the appearance of Nicolas Poussin[50]a Frenchman, but grafted on the Roman stock. Bred under Quintin Varin a French painter of mediocrity, he found on his arrival in Italy that he had more to unlearn than to follow of his master’s principles, renounced the national character, and not only with the utmost ardour adopted, but suffered himself to be wholly absorbed by the antique. Such was his attachment to the ancients, that it may be said he less imitated their spirit than copied their relics and painted sculpture; the costume, the mythology, the rites of antiquity were his element; his scenery, his landscape are pure classic ground. He has left specimens to shew that he was sometimes sublime, and often in the highest degree pathetic, but history in the strictest sense, was his property, and in that he ought to be followed. His agents only appear, to tell the fact, they are subordinate to the story. Sometimes he attempted to tell a story that cannot be told: of his historic dignity the celebrated series of Sacraments; of his sublimity, the vision he gave to Coriolanus; of his pathetic power, the infant Pyrrhus; and of the vain attempt to tell by figureswhat words alone can tell, the testament of Eudamidas, are striking instances. His eye, though impressed with the tint, and breadth, and imitation of Titiano, seldom inspired him to charm with colour, crudity and patches frequently deform his effects. He is unequal in his style of design; sometimes his comprehension fails him, he supplies, like Pietro Testa, ideal heads and torso’s with limbs and extremities transcribed from the model. Whether from choice or want of power he has seldom executed his conceptions on a larger scale than that which bears his name, and which has perhaps as much contributed to make him the darling of this country, as his merit.
The wildness of Salvator Rosa[51]opposes a powerful contrast to the classic regularity of Poussin. Terrific and grand in his conceptions of inanimate nature, he was reduced to attempts of hiding by boldness of hand, his inability of exhibiting her impassioned, or in the dignity of character: his line is vulgar: his magic visions less founded on principles of terrour than on mythologic trash and caprice, are to the probable combinations of nature, what the paroxysms of a fever are to the flights ofvigorous fancy. Though so much extolled and so ambitiously imitated, his banditti are a medley made up of starveling models, shreds and bits of armour from his lumber-room, brushed into notice by a daring pencil. Salvator was a satyrist and a critic, but the rod which he had the insolence to lift against the nudities of Michael Angelo, and the anachronism of Raphael, would have been better employed in chastising his own misconceptions.
The principle of Titiano, less pure in itself and less decided in its object of imitation, did not suffer so much from its more or less appropriate application by his successors, as the former two. Colour once in a very high degree attained, disdains subordination and engrosses the whole. Mutual similarity attracts, body tends to body, as mind to mind, and he, who has once gained supreme dominion over the eye, will hardly resign it to court the more coy approbation of mind, of a few opposed to nearly all. Add to this the character of the place and the nature of the encouragement held out to the Venetian artists. Venice was the centre of commerce, the repository of the riches of the globe, the splendid toy-shop of the time: its chief inhabitants princely merchants, or a patrician race elevated to rank by accumulations from trade, ornaval prowess; the bulk of the people mechanics or artisans, administering the means, and in their turn fed by the produce of luxury. Of such a system, what could the art be more than the parasite? Religion itself had exchanged its gravity for the allurements of ear and eye, and even sanctity disgusted, unless arrayed by the gorgeous hand of fashion.—Such was, such will always be the birth-place and the theatre of colour: and hence it is more matter of wonder that the first and greatest colourists should so long have forborne to overstep the modesty of nature in the use of that alluring medium, than that they yielded by degrees to its golden solicitations.[52]
The principle of Correggio vanished with its author, though it found numerous imitators of its parts. Since him, no eye has conceived that expanse of harmony with which the voluptuous sensibility of his mind arranged and enchanted all visible nature. His grace, so much vaunted and so little understood, was adopted and improved to elegance by Francesco Mazzuoli, called il Parmegiano[53], but instead of making her the measure of propriety he degraded her to affectation: in Parmegiano’s figures action is the adjective of the posture; the accident of attitude; they ‘make themselves air, into which they vanish.’ That disengaged play of delicate forms, the ‘Sueltezza’ of the Italians, is the prerogative of Parmegiano, though nearly always obtained at the expence of proportion. His grandeur as conscious as his grace, sacrifices the motive to the mode, simplicity to contrast: his St. John loses the fervour of the apostle in the orator;his Moses the dignity of the lawgiver in the savage. With incredible force of chiaroscuro, he united bland effects and fascinating hues, but their frequent ruins teach the important lesson, that the mixtures which anticipate the beauties of time, are big with the seeds of premature decay.
Such was the state of the art, when, towards the decline of the sixteenth century, Lodovico Carracci[54], with his cousins Agostino and Annibale, founded at Bologna that ecclectic school, which by selecting the beauties, correcting the faults, supplying the defects and avoiding the extremes of the different styles, attempted to form a perfect system. But as the mechanic part was their only object, they did not perceive that the projected union was incompatible with the leading principle of each master. Let us hear this plan from Agostino Carracci himself, as it islaid down in his sonnet[55]on the ingredients required to form a perfect painter, if that may be called a sonnet, which has more the air of medical prescription. ‘Take,’ says Agostino, ‘the design of Rome, Venetian motion and shade, the dignified tone of Lombardy’s colour, the terrible manner of Michael Angelo, the just symmetry of Raphael, Titiano’s truth of nature, and the sovereign purity ofCorreggio’s style: add to these the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, the learned invention of Primaticcio, and a little of Parmegiano’s grace: but to save so much study, such weary labour, apply your imitation to the works which our dear Nicolo has left us here.’ Of such advice, balanced between the tone of regular breeding and the cant of an empiric, what could be the result? excellence or mediocrity? who ever imagined that a multitude of dissimilar threads could compose an uniform texture, that dissemination of spots would make masses, or a little of many things produce a legitimate whole? indiscriminate imitation must end in the extinction of character, and that in mediocrity—the cypher of art.
And were the Carracci such? separate the precept from the practice, the artist from the teacher; and the Carracci are in possession of my submissive homage. Lodovico, far from implicitly subscribing to a master’s dictates, was the sworn pupil of nature. To a modest style of form, to a simplicity eminently fitted for those subjects of religious gravity which his taste preferred, he joined that solemnity of hue, that sober twilight, the air of cloistered meditation, which you have so often heard recommended as the proper tone of historiccolour. Too often content to rear the humbler graces of his subject, he seldom courted elegance, but always, when he did, with enviable success. Even now, though nearly in a state of evanescence, the three nymphs in the garden scene of St. Michele in Bosco, seem moulded by the hand, inspired by the breath of love. Agostino, with a singular modesty which prompted him rather to propagate the fame of others by his graver, than by steady exertion to rely on his own power for perpetuity of name, combined with some learning a cultivated taste, correctness, though not elegance of form, and a corregiesque colour. Annibale, superior to both in power of execution and academic prowess, was inferior to either in taste and sensibility and judgment; for the most striking proof of this inferiority I appeal to his master-work, the work on which he rests his fame, the gallery of the Farnese palace: a work whose uniform vigour of execution, nothing can equal but its imbecility and incongruity of conception. If impropriety of ornament were to be fixed by definition, the subjects of the Farnese gallery might be quoted as the most decisive instances. Criticism has attempted to dismiss Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto from the province of legitimate history with the contemptuous appellation of ornamental painters, not for having painted subjectsinapplicable to the public and private palaces, the churches and convents, which they were employed to decorate, but because they treated them sometimes without regard to costume, or the simplicity due to sacred, heroic or allegoric subjects: if this be just, where shall we class him, who with the Capella Sistina, and the Vatican before his eye, fills the mansion of religious austerity and episcopal dignity, with a chaotic series of trite fable and bacchanalian revelry, without allegory, void of allusion, merely to gratify the puerile ostentation of dauntless execution and academic vigour? if the praise given to a work be not always transferable to its master; if, as Milton says, ‘the work some praise and some the architect,’ let us admire the splendour, the exuberance, the concentration of powers displayed in the Farnese gallery, whilst we lament their misapplication by Annibale Carracci.
The heterogeneous principle of the ecclectic school soon operated its own dissolution: the great talents which the Carracci had tutored, soon found their own bias, and abandoned themselves to their own peculiar taste. B. Schidone died young in 1615. Barto. Schidone, Guido Reni[56], Giovanni Lanfranco,Francesco Albani, Domenico Zampieri, and Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino, differed as much in their objects of imitation as their names. Schidone, all of whose mind was in his eye, embraced, and often to meaner subjects applied the harmony and colour of Correggio, whilst Lanfranco strove, but strove without success, to follow him through the expanse of his creation and masses. Grace attracted Guido, but it was the studied grace of theatres: his female forms are abstracts of antique beauty, attended by languishing attitudes, arrayed by voluptuous fashions. His male forms, transcripts of models, such as are found in a genial climate, are sometimes highly characteristic of dignified manhood or apostolic fervour, like his Peter and Paul, formerly in the Zampieri at Bologna: sometimes stately, courteous, insipid, like his Paris attending Helen, more with the air of an ambassadour, by proxy, than carrying her off with a lover’s fervour. His Aurora deserved to precede a more majestic sun, and hours less clumsy: his colour varies with his style, sometimes bland and harmonious, sometimes vigorous and stern, sometimes flat and insipid. Albani, chieflyattracted by soft mythologic conceits, formed nereids and oreads on plump Venetian models, and contrasted their pearly hues with the rosy tints of loves, the juicy brown of fauns and satyrs, and rich marine or sylvan scenery. Domenichino, more obedient than the rest to his masters, aimed at the beauty of the antique, the expression of Raphael, the vigour of Annibale, the colour of Lodovico, and mixing something of each, fell short of all; whilst Guercino broke like a torrent over all academic rules, and with an ungovernable itch of copying whatever lay in his way, sacrificed mind, form and costume, to effects of colour, fierceness of chiaroscuro, and intrepidity of hand.
Such was the state of art, when the spirit of machinery, in submission to the vanities and upstart pride of papal nepotism, destroyed what yet was left of meaning; when equilibration, contrast, grouping, engrossed composition, and poured a deluge of gay common-place over the platfonds, pannels, and cupolas of palaces and temples. Those who could not conceive a figure singly, scattered multitudes; to count, was to be poor. The rainbow and the seasons were ransacked for their hues, and every eye became the tributary of the great, but abused talents of Pietroda Cortona, and the fascinating but debauched and empty facility of Luca Giordano.[57]
The same revolution of mind that had organized the arts of Italy, spread, without visible communication, to Germany, and towards the decline of the fifteenth century, the uncouth essays of Martin Schön, Michael Wolgemuth, and Albrecht Altorfer, were succeeded by the finer polish and the more dextrous method of Albert Durer. The indiscriminate use of the words genius and talent has perhaps no where caused more confusion than in the classification of artists. Albert Durer was in my opinion a man of great ingenuity, without being a genius. He studied, and, as far as his penetration reached, established certain proportions of the human frame, but he did not invent a style: every work of his is a proof that he wanted the power of imitation, of concluding from what he saw, to what he did not see, that he copied rather than selected the forms that surrounded him, and sans remorse tacked deformity and meagrenessto fulness, and sometimes to beauty.[58]Such is his design; in composition copious without taste, anxiously precise in parts, and unmindful of the whole, he has rather shewn us what to avoid than what to follow. He sometimes had a glimpse of the sublime, but it was only a glimpse: the expanded agony of Christ on the mount of Olives, and the mystic conception of his figure of Melancholy, are thoughts of sublimity, though the expression of the last is weakened by the rubbish he has thrown about her. His Knight, attended by Death and the Fiend,is more capricious than terrible; and his Adam and Eve are two common models shut up in a rocky dungeon. If he approached genius in any part of art, it was in colour. His colour went beyond his age, and as far excelled in truth and breadth and handling the oil colour of Raphael, as Raphael excels him in every other quality. I speak of easel-pictures—his drapery is broad though much too angular, and rather snapt than folded. Albert is called the father of the German school, though he neither reared scholars, nor was imitated by the German artists of his or the succeeding century. That the exportation of his works to Italy should have effected a temporary change in the principles of some Tuscans who had studied Michael Angelo, of Andrea del Sarto, and Jacopo da Pontormo, is a fact which proves that minds at certain periods may be subject to epidemic influence as well as bodies.
Lucas of Leyden[59]was the Dutch imitator of Albert; but the forms of Aldegraver, Sebald Beheim, and George Pentz, appear to have been the result of careful inspection of Marc Antonio’s prints from Raphael, of whom Pentz was probably a scholar; and ere longthe style of Michael Angelo, as adopted by Pelegrino Tibaldi, and spread by the graver of Giorgio Mantuano, provoked those caravans of German, Dutch and Flemish students, who on their return from Italy, at the courts of Prague and Munich, in Flanders and the Netherlands, introduced that preposterous manner, the bloated excrescence of diseased brains, which in the form of man left nothing human, distorted action and gesture with insanity of affectation, and dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes; the style of Golzius and Spranger, Heynz and ab Ach: but though content to feed on the husks of Tuscan design, they imbibed the colour of Venice, and spread the elements of that excellence which distinguished the succeeding schools of Flanders and of Holland.
This frantic pilgrimage to Italy ceased at the apparition of the two meteors of art, Peter Paul Rubens[60], and Rembrandt Van Rhyn; both of whom disdaining to acknowledge the usual laws of admission to the temple of fame, boldly forged their own keys, entered and took possession, each, of amost conspicuous place by his own power. Rubens, born at Cologne, in Germany, but brought up at Antwerp, then the depository of western commerce, a school of religious and classic learning, and the pompous seat of Austrian and Spanish superstition, met these advantages with an ardour and success of which ordinary minds can form no idea, if we compare the period at which he is said to have seriously applied himself to painting, under the tuition of Otho Van Veen, with the unbounded power he had acquired over the instruments of art when he set out for Italy; where we instantly discover him not as the pupil, but as the successful rival of the masters whose works he had selected for the objects of his emulation. Endowed with a full comprehension of his own character, he wasted not a moment on the acquisition of excellence incompatible with its fervour, but flew to the centre of his ambition, Venice, and soon compounded from the splendour of Paolo Veronese and the glow of Tintoretto, that florid system of mannered magnificence which is the element of his art and the principle of his school. He first spread that ideal pallet, which reduced to its standard the variety of nature, and once methodized, whilst his mind tuned the method, shortened or superseded individual imitation. His scholars, however dissimilar in themselves,saw with the eye of their master; the eye of Rubens was become the substitute of nature: still the mind alone that had balanced these tints, and weighed their powers, could apply them to their objects, and determine their use in the pompous display of historic and allegoric magnificence; forthatthey were selected, forthatthe gorgeous nosegay swelled: but when in the progress of depraved practice they became the mere palliatives of mental impotence, empty representatives of themselves, the supporters of nothing but clumsy forms and clumsier conceits, they can only be considered as splendid improprieties, as the substitutes for wants which no colour can palliate and no tint supply.
In this censure I am under no apprehension of being suspected to include either the illustrious name of Vandyck[61], or that of Abraham Diepenbeck. Vandyck, more elegant, more refined, to graces, which the genius of Rubens disdained to court, joined that exquisite taste which, in following the general principle of his master, moderated, and adapted its application to his own pursuits. His sphere wasportrait, and the imitation of Titiano insured him the second place in that. The fancy of Diepenbeck, though not so exuberant, if I be not mistaken, excelled in sublimity the imagination of Rubens: his Bellerophon, Dioscuri, Hippolytus, Ixion, Sisyphus, fear no competitor among the productions of his master.
Rembrandt[62]was, in my opinion, a genius of the first class in whatever relates not to form. In spite of the most portentous deformity, and without considering the spell of his chiaroscuro, such were his powers of nature, such the grandeur, pathos, or simplicity of his composition, from the most elevated or extensive arrangement to the meanest and most homely, that the best cultivated eye, the purest sensibility, and the most refined taste dwell on them, equally enthralled. Shakspeare alone excepted, no one combined with so much transcendent excellence, so many, in all other men unpardonable faults—and reconciled us to them. He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of all the tints that float between them: he tinged his pencil with equal success in the cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, inthe livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a stedfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity or baldness, and plucked a flower in every desart. None ever like Rembrandt knew to improve an accident into a beauty, or give importance to a trifle. If ever he had a master, he had no followers; Holland was not made to comprehend his power. The succeeding school of colourists were content to tip the cottage, the hamlet, the boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and the haze of winter, with orient hues, or the glow of setting summer suns.
In turning our eye to Switzerland we shall find great powers without great names, those of Hans Holbein[63]and Francis Mola only excepted. But the scrupulous precision, the high finish, and the tizianesque colour of Hans Holbein, make the least part of his excellence for those who have seen his Designs of the Passion, and that series of emblematic groups, known under the name of Holbein’s Dance of Death. From Belinzona to Basle, invention appearsto have been the characteristic of Helvetic art: the works of Tobias Stimmer, Christopher Murer, Jost Amman, Gotthard Ringgli, are mines of invention, and exhibit a style of design, equally poised between the emaciated dryness of Albert Durer and the bloated corpulence of Golzius.
The seeds of mediocrity which the Carracci had attempted to scatter over Italy, found a more benign soil, and reared an abundant harvest in France: to mix up a compound from something of every excellence in the catalogue of art, was the principle of their theory and their aim in execution. It is in France where Michael Angelo’s right to the title of a painter was first questioned. The fierceness of his line, as they call it, the purity of the antique, and the characteristic forms of Raphael, are only the road to the academic vigour, the librated style of Annibale Carracci, and from that they appeal to the model; in composition they consult more the artifice of grouping, contrast and richness, than the subject or propriety; their expression is dictated by the theatre. From the uniformity of this process, not to allow that the school of France offers respectable exceptions, would be unjust; without recurring again to the name of Nicolas Poussin, the works of Eustache leSueur[64], Charles le Brun, Sebastien Bourdon, and sometimes Pierre Mignard, contain original beauties and rich materials. Le Sueur’s series of pictures in the Chartreux exhibit the features of contemplative piety, in a purity of style and a placid breadth of manner that moves the heart. His dignified martyrdom of St. Laurence and the burning of the magic books at Ephesus, breathe the spirit of Raphael. The powerful comprehension of a whole, only equalled by the fire which pervades every part of the battles of Alexander, by Charles le Brun, would entitle him to the highest rank in history, had the characters been less mannered, had he not exchanged the Argyraspids and the Macedonian phalanx for the compact legionaries of the Trajan pillar; had he distinguished Greeks from barbarians, rather by national feature and form than by accoutrement and armour. The seven works of charity by Seb. Bourdon teem with surprising pathetic and always novel images; and in the plague of David, by Pierre Mignard, our sympathy is roused by energies of terrour and combinations of woe, which escaped Poussin and Raphael himself.
The obstinacy of national pride[65], perhaps more than the neglect of government or the frown of superstition, confined the labours of the Spanish school, from its obscure origin at Sevilla to its brightest period, within the narrow limits of individual imitation. But the degree of perfection attained by Diego Velasquez, Joseph Ribera, and Morillo, in pursuing the same object by means as different as successful, impresses us with deep respect for the variety of their powers.
That the great style ever received the homage of Spanish genius, appears not; neither Alfonso Berruguette, nor Pellegrino Tibaldi, left followers: but that the eyes and the taste fed by the substance of Spagnuoletto and Morillo, should without reluctance have submitted to the gay volatility of Luica Giordano, and the ostentatious flimsiness of Sebastian Conca, would be matter of surprize, did we not see the same principles successfully pursued in the platfonds of Antonio Raphael Mengs, the painter of philosophy, as he is stiled by his biographer D’Azara. The cartoons of the frescoes painted for the royal palace atMadrid, representing the apotheosis of Trajan and the temple of Renown, exhibit less the style of Raphael in the nuptials of Cupid and Psyche at the Farnesina, than the gorgeous but empty bustle of Pietro da Cortona.
From this view of art on the continent, let us cast a glance on its state in this country, from the age of Henry VIII. to our own.—From that period to this, Britain never ceased pouring its caravans of noble and wealthy pilgrims over Italy, Greece and Ionia, to pay their devotions at the shrines of virtù and taste: not content with adoring the obscure idols, they have ransacked their temples, and none returned without some share in the spoil: in plaister or in marble, on canvas or in gems, the arts of Greece and Italy were transported to England, and what Petronius said of Rome, that it was easier to meet there with a god than a man, might be said of London. Without inquiring into the permanent and accidental causes of the inefficacy of these efforts with regard to public taste and support of art, it is observable, that, whilst Francis I. was busied, not to aggregate a mass of painted and chiselled treasures merely to gratify his own vanity, and brood over them with sterile avarice, but to scatter the seeds of taste over France,by calling, employing, enriching Andrea del Sarto, Rustici, Rosso, Primaticcio, Cellini, Niccolo; in England, Holbein and Torregiano under Henry, and Federigo Zucchero under Elizabeth, were condemned to gothic work and portrait painting. Charles indeed called Rubens and his scholars to provoke the latent English spark, but the effect was intercepted by his destiny. His son, in possession of the cartoons of Raphael, and with the magnificence of Whitehall before his eyes, suffered Verio to contaminate the walls of his palaces, or degraded Lely to paint the Cymons and Iphigenias of his court; whilst the manner of Kneller swept completely what yet might be left of taste, under his successors: such was the equally contemptible and deplorable state of English art, till the genius of Reynolds first rescued from the mannered depravation of foreigners his own branch, and soon extending his view to the higher departments of art, joined that select body of artists who addressed the ever open ear, ever attentive mind of our Royal Founder, with the first idea of this establishment. His beneficence soon gave it a place and a name, his august patronage, sanction, and individual encouragement: the annually increased merits of thirty exhibitions in this place, with the collateral ones contrived by the speculations of commerce,have told the surprising effects: a mass of self-taught and tutored powers burst upon the general eye, and unequivocally told the world what might be expected from the concurrence of public encouragement—how far this have been or may be granted or withheld, it is not here my province to surmise: the plans lately adopted and now organizing within these walls for the dignified propagation and support of art, whether fostered by the great, or left to their own energy, must soon decide what may be produced by the unison of British genius and talent, and whether the painters school of that nation which claims the foremost honours of modern poetry, which has produced with Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough and Wilson, shall submit to content themselves with a subordinate place among the schools we have enumerated.