Lectures on Painting

ERRATA.

FIRST LECTURE. ANCIENT ART. — ARGUMENT. — FIRST LECTURE.

SECOND LECTURE. ART OF THE MODERNS. — ARGUMENT. — SECOND LECTURE

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 to the 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 the reviving 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]: Masaccio first 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 that remind 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, and sometimes 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 he allowed 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 teem with 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 a negative 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 of dramatic 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 the most 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 of Giorgione 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, dates its 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 exquisite hues, 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 the murderer 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 concurred in 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. The compositions, 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 exquisite eye 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 artist and 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 through the 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 figures what 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 of vigorous 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, or naval 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 is laid 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 of Correggio’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 historic colour. 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 subjects inapplicable 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, chiefly attracted 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 Pietro da 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 meagreness to 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 long the 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 a most 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; for that they were selected, for that the 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 was portrait, 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, in the 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 appears to 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 le Sueur[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 at Madrid, 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.

THIRD LECTURE. INVENTION. PART I. — ARGUMENT. — THIRD LECTURE.

Introduction. Discrimination of Poetry and Painting. General idea of Invention—its right to select a subject from nature itself. Visiones—Theon—Agasias. Cartoon of Pisa—Incendio del Borgo. Specific idea of Invention: Epic subjects—Michael Angelo. Dramatic subjects—Raphael. Historic subjects—Poussin, &c. Invention has a right to adopt ideas—examples. Duplicity of subject and moment inadmissible. Transfiguration of Raphael.

The brilliant antithesis ascribed to Simonides, that ‘painting is mute poesy and poetry speaking painting,’ made, I apprehend, no part of the technic systems of antiquity: for this we may depend on the general practice of its artists, and still more safely on the philosophic discrimination of Plutarch[66], who tells us, that as poetry and painting resemble each other in their uniform address to the senses, for the impression they mean to make on our fancy and by that on our mind, so they differ as essentially in their materials and their modes of application, which are regulated by the diversity of the organs they address, ear and eye. Successive action communicated by sounds, and time, are the medium of poetry; form displayed in space, and momentaneous energy, are the element of painting.

As, if these premises be true, the distinct representation of continued action is refused to an art which cannot express even in a series of subjects, but by a supposed mental effort in the spectator’s mind, the regular succession of their moments, it becomes evident, that instead of attempting to impress us by the indiscriminate usurpation of a principle out of its reach, it ought chiefly to rely for its effect on its great characteristics space and form, singly or in apposition. In forms alone the idea of existence can be rendered permanent. Sounds die, words perish or become obsolete and obscure, even colours fade, forms alone can neither be extinguished nor misconstrued; by application to their standard alone description becomes intelligible and distinct. Thus the effectual idea of corporeal beauty can strictly exist only in the plastic arts: for as the notion of beauty arises from the pleasure we feel in the harmonious co-operation of the various parts of some favourite object to one end at once, it implies their immediate co-existence in the mass they compose; and therefore can be distinctly perceived and conveyed to the mind by the eye alone: hence the representation of form in figure is the physical element of the Art.

But as bodies exist in time as well as in space; as the pleasure arising from the mere symmetry of an object is as transient as it is immediate; as harmony of parts, if the body be the agent of an internal power, depends for its proof on their application, it follows, that the exclusive exhibition of inert and unemployed form, would be a mistake of the medium for the end, and that character or action is required to make it an interesting object of imitation. And this is the moral element of the art.

Those important moments then which exhibit the united exertion of form and character in a single object or in participation with collateral beings, at once, and which with equal rapidity and pregnancy give us a glimpse of the past and lead our eye to what follows, furnish the true materials of those technic powers, that select, direct, and fix the objects of imitation to their centre.

The most eminent of these, by the explicit acknowledgment of all ages, and the silent testimony of every breast, is invention. He whose eye athwart the outward crust of the rock penetrates into the composition of its materials, and discovers a gold mine, is surely superiour to him who afterwards adapts the metal for use. Colombo, when he from astronomic and physical inductions concluded to the existence of land in the opposite hemisphere, was surely superiour to Amerigo Vespucci who took possession of its continent; and when Newton improving accident by meditation, discovered and established the laws of attraction, the projectile and centrifuge qualities of the system, he gave the clue to all who after him applied it to the various branches of philosophy, and was in fact the author of all the benefits accruing from their application to society. Homer, when he means to give the principal feature of man, calls him inventor (αλφηστης.)

From what we have said it is clear that the term invention never ought to be so far misconstrued as to be confounded with that of creation, incompatible with our notions of limited being, an idea of pure astonishment, and admissible only when we mention Omnipotence: to invent is to find: to find something, presupposes its existence somewhere, implicitly or explicitly, scattered or in a mass: nor should I have presumed to say so much on a word of a meaning so plain, had it not been, and were it not daily confounded, and by fashionable authorities too, with the term creation.

Form in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelops our senses, and its counterpart the invisible one that agitates our mind with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the element and the realm of invention; it discovers, selects, combines the possible, the probable, the known, in a mode that strikes with an air of truth and novelty, at once. Possible strictly means an effect derived from a cause, a body composed of materials, a coalition of forms, whose union or co-agency imply in themselves no absurdity, no contradiction: applied to our art it takes a wider latitude; it means the representation of effects derived from causes, or forms compounded from materials, heterogeneous and incompatible among themselves, but rendered so plausible to our senses, that the transition of one part to another seems to be accounted for by an air of organization, and the eye glides imperceptibly or with satisfaction from one to the other and over the whole: that this was the condition on which, and the limits within which alone the ancients permitted invention to represent what was strictly speaking impossible, we may with plausibility surmise from the picture of Zeuxis, described by Lucian in the memoir to which he has prefixed that painter’s name, who was probably one of the first adventurers in this species of imagery.—Zeuxis had painted a family of centaurs; the dam a beautiful female to the middle, with the lower parts gradually sliding into the most exquisite forms of a young Thessalian mare half reclined in playful repose and gently pawing the velvet ground, offered her human nipple to one infant centaur, whilst another greedily sucked the ferine udder below, but both with their eyes turned up to a lyon-whelp held over them by the male centaur their father, rising above the hillock on which the female reclined, a grim feature, but whose ferocity was somewhat tempered by a smile. The scenery, the colour, the chiaroscuro, the finish of the whole was no doubt equal to the style and the conception. This picture the artist exhibited, expecting that justice from the penetration of the public which the genius deserved that taught him to give plausibility to a compound of heterogeneous forms, to inspire them with suitable soul, and to imitate the laws of existence: he was mistaken. The novelty of the conceit eclipsed the art that had embodied it, the artist was absorbed in his subject, and the unbounded praise bestowed, was that of idle restless curiosity, gratified. Sick of gods and goddesses, of demigods and pure human combinations, the Athenians panted only for what was new. The artist, as haughty as irritable, ordered his picture to be withdrawn; cover it, Micchio, said he to his attendant, cover it and carry it home, for this mob stick only to the clay of our art.—Such were the limits set to invention by the ancients; secure within these, it defied the ridicule thrown on that grotesque conglutination, which Horace exposes; guarded by these, their mythology scattered its metamorphoses, made every element its tributary, and transmitted the privilege to us, on equal conditions: their Scylla and the Portress of Hell, their dæmons and our spectres, the shade of Patroclus and the ghost of Hamlet, their naiads, nymphs, and oreads, and our sylphs, gnomes, and fairies, their furies and our witches, differ less in essence, than in local, temporary, social modifications: their common origin was fancy, operating on the materials of nature, assisted by legendary tradition and the curiosity implanted in us of diving into the invisible[67]; and they are suffered or invited to mix with or superintend real agency, in proportion of the analogy which we discover between them and ourselves. Pindar praises Homer less for that ‘winged power’ which whirls incident on incident with such rapidity, that absorbed by the whole, and drawn from the impossibility of single parts, we swallow a tale too gross to be believed in a dream; than for the greater power by which he contrived to connect his imaginary creation with the realities of nature and human passions[68]; without this the fiction of the poet and the painter will leave us stupified rather by its insolence than impressed by its power, it will be considered only as a superior kind of legerdemain, an exertion of ingenuity to no adequate end.

Before we proceed to the process and the methods of invention, it is not superfluous to advert to a question which has often been made, and by some has been answered in the negative; whether it be within the artist’s province or not, to find or to combine a subject from himself, without having recourse to tradition or the stores of history and poetry? Why not, if the subject be within the limits of art and the combinations of nature, though it should have escaped observation? shall the immediate avenues of the mind, open to all its observers, from the poet to the novelist, be shut only to the artist? shall he be reduced to receive as alms from them what he has a right to share as common property? assertions like these, say in other words, that the Laocoon owes the impression he makes on us to his name alone, and that if tradition had not told a story and Pliny fixed it to that work, the artist’s conception of a father with his sons, surprised and entangled by two serpents within the recesses of a cavern or lonesome dell, was inadmissible and transgressed the laws of invention. I am much mistaken, if, so far from losing its power over us with its traditional sanction, it would not rouse our sympathy more forcibly, and press the subject closer to our breast, were it considered only as the representation of an incident common to humanity. The ancients were so convinced of their right to this disputed prerogative that they assigned it its own class, and Theon the Samian is mentioned by Quintilian, whom none will accuse or suspect of confounding the limits of the arts, in his list of primary painters, as owing his celebrity to that intuition into the sudden movements of nature, which the Greeks called φαντασιας, the Romans visiones, and we might circumscribe by the phrase of ‘unpremeditated conceptions’ the reproduction of associated ideas; he explains what he understood by it in the following passage adapted to his own profession, rhetoric.[69] ‘We give,’ says he, ‘the name of visions to what the Greeks call phantasies; that power by which the images of absent things are represented by the mind with the energy of objects moving before our eyes: he who conceives these rightly will be a master of passions; his is that well-tempered fancy which can imagine things, voices, acts, as they really exist, a power perhaps in a great measure dependent on our will. For if these images so pursue us, when our minds are in a state of rest, or fondly fed by hope, or in a kind of waking dream; that we seem to travel, to sail, to fight, to harangue in public, or to dispose of riches we possess not, and all this with an air of reality, why should we not turn to use this vice of the mind?—Suppose I am to plead the case of a murdered man, why should not every supposable circumstance of the act float before my eyes? shall I not see the murderer unawares rush in upon him? in vain he tries to escape—see how pale he turns—hear you not his shrieks, his entreaties? do you not see him flying, struck, falling? will not his blood, his ashy semblance, his groans, his last expiring gasp, seize on my mind?’

Permit me to apply this organ of the orator for one moment to the poet’s process: by this radiant recollection of associated ideas, the spontaneous ebullitions of nature, selected by observation, treasured by memory, classed by sensibility and judgment, Shakspeare became the supreme master of passions and the ruler of our hearts; this embodied his Falstaff and his Shylock, Hamlet and Lear, Juliet and Rosalind. By this power he saw Warwick uncover the corpse of Gloster, and swear to his assassination and his tugs for life; by this he made Banquo see the weird sisters bubble up from earth, and in their own air vanish; this is the hand that struck upon the bell when Macbeth’s drink was ready, and from her chamber pushed his dreaming wife, once more to methodize the murder of her guest.—

And this was the power of Theon[70]; such was the unpremeditated conception that inspired him with the idea of that warriour, who in the words of Ælian, seemed to embody the terrible graces and the enthusiastic furor of the god of war. Impetuous he rushed onward to oppose the sudden incursion of enemies; with shield thrown forward and high brandished faulchion, his step as he swept on, seemed to devour the ground: his eye flashed defiance; you fancied to hear his voice, his look denounce perdition and slaughter without mercy. This figure, single and without other accompaniments of war than what the havock of the distance shewed, Theon deemed sufficient to answer the impression he intended to make on those whom he had selected to inspect it. He kept it covered, till a trumpet, prepared for the purpose, after a prelude of martial symphonies, at once, by his command, blew with invigourated fierceness, a signal of attack—the curtain dropped, the terrific figure appeared to start from the canvass, and irresistibly assailed the astonished eyes of the assembly.

To prove the relation of Ælian no hyperbolic legend, I need not insist on the magic effect which the union of two sister powers must produce on the senses: of what our art alone and unassisted may perform, the most unequivocal proof exists within these walls; your eyes, your feelings, and your fancy have long anticipated it: whose mind has not now recalled that wonder of a figure, the misnomed gladiator of Agasias, a figure whose tremendous energy embodies every element of motion, whilst its pathetic dignity of character enforces sympathies, which the undisguised ferocity of Theon’s warriour in vain solicits. But the same irradiation which shewed the soldier to Theon, shewed to Agasias the leader: Theon saw the passion, Agasias[71] its rule.

But the most striking instance of the eminent place due to this intuitive faculty among the principal organs of invention, is that celebrated performance, which by the united testimony of cotemporary writers, and the evident traces of its imitation, scattered over the works of cotemporary artists, contributed alone more to the restoration of art and the revolution of style, than the united effort of the two centuries that preceded it: I mean the astonishing design commonly called the cartoon of Pisa, the work of Michael Agnolo Buonarrotti, begun in competition with Lionardo da Vinci, and at intervals finished at Florence. This work, whose celebrity subjected those who had not seen it to the supercilious contempt of the luckier ones who had; which was the common centre of attraction to all the students of Tuscany and Romagna, from Raphael Sanzio to Bastian da St. Gallo, called Aristotile, from his loquacious descants on its beauties; this inestimable work itself is lost, and its destruction is with too much appearance of truth fixed on the mean villany of Baccio Bandinelli, who, in possession of the key to the apartment where it was kept, during the revolutionary troubles of the Florentine republic, after making what use he thought proper of it, is said to have torn it in pieces. Still we may form an idea of its principal groups from some ancient prints and drawings; and of its composition from a small copy now existing at Holkham, the outlines of which have been lately etched. Crude, disguised, or feeble, as these specimens are, they will prove better guides than the half-informed rhapsodies of Vasari, the meagre account of Ascanio Condivi, better than the mere anatomic verdict of Benvenuto Cellini, who denies that the powers afterward exerted in the Capella Sistina, arrive at ‘half its excellence.’[72]

It represents an imaginary moment relative to the war carried on by the Florentines against Pisa: and exhibits a numerous group of warriours, roused from their bathing in the Arno, by the sudden signal of a trumpet and rushing to arms. This composition may without exaggeration be said to personify with unexampled variety that motion, which Agasias and Theon embodied in single figures: in imagining this transient moment from a state of relaxation to a state of energy, the ideas of motion, to use the bold figure of Dante, seem to have showered into the artist’s mind. From the chief, nearly placed in the centre, who precedes, and whose voice accompanies the trumpet, every age of human agility, every attitude, every feature of alarm, haste, hurry, exertion, eagerness, burst into so many rays, like sparks flying from the hammer. Many have reached, some boldly step, some have leaped on the rocky shore; here two arms emerging from the water grapple with the rock, there two hands cry for help, and their companions bend over or rush on to assist them; often imitated, but inimitable is the ardent feature of the grim veteran whose every sinew labours to force over the dripping limbs his cloaths, whilst gnashing he pushes the foot through the rending garment. He is contrasted by the slender elegance of a half averted youth, who, though eagerly buckling the armour to his thigh, methodizes haste; another swings the high-raised hauberk on his shoulder, whilst one who seems a leader, mindless of dress, ready for combat, and with brandished spear, overturns a third, who crouched to grasp a weapon—one naked himself buckles on the mail of his companion, and he, turned toward the enemy, seems to stamp impatiently the ground.—Experience and rage, old vigour, young velocity, expanded or contracted, vie in exertions of energy. Yet in this scene of tumult one motive animates the whole, eagerness to engage with subordination to command; this preserves the dignity of action, and from a straggling rabble changes the figures to men whose legitimate contest interests our wishes.

This intuition into the pure emanations of nature, Raphael Sanzio possessed in the most enviable degree, from the utmost conflict of passions, to the enchanting round of gentler emotion, and the nearly silent hints of mind and character. To this he devoted the tremendous scenery of that magnificent fresco, known to you all under the name of the Incendio del Borgo, in which he sacrificed the historic and mystic part of his subject to the effusion of the various passions roused by the sudden terrours of nocturnal conflagration. It is not for the faint appearance of the miracle which approaches with the pontiff and his train in the back-ground, that Raphael invites our eyes; the perturbation, necessity, hope, fear, danger, the pangs and efforts of affection grappling with the enraged elements of wind and fire, displayed on the fore-ground, furnish the pathetic motives that press on our hearts. That mother, who but half awake or rather in a waking trance, drives her children instinctively before her; that prostrate female half covered by her streaming hair, with elevated arms imploring heaven; that other who over the flaming tenement, heedless of her own danger, absorbed in maternal agony, boldly reaches over to drop the babe into the outstretched arms of its father; that common son of nature, who careless of another’s woe, intent only on his own safety, librates a leap from the burning wall; the vigorous youth who followed by an aged mother bears the palsied father on his shoulder from the rushing wreck; the nimble grace of those helpless females that vainly strive to administer relief—these are the real objects of the painter’s aim, and leave the pontiff and the miracle, with taper, bell and clergy—unheeded in the distance.

I shall not at present expatiate in tracing from this source the novel combinations of affection by which Raphael contrived to interest us in his numerous repetitions of Madonnas and holy Families, selected from the warmest effusions of domestic endearment, or in Milton’s phrase, from ‘all the charities of father, son, and mother.’ Nor shall I follow it in its more contaminated descent, to those representations of local manners and national modifications of society, whose characteristic discrimination and humorous exuberance, for instance, we admire in Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passions of the day, every hour contributes something to obliterate, which soon become unintelligible by time, or degenerate into caricature, the chronicle of scandal, the history-book of the vulgar.

Invention in its more specific sense receives its subjects from poetry or authenticated tradition; they are epic or sublime, dramatic or impassioned, historic or circumscribed by truth. The first astonishes; the second moves; the third informs.

The aim of the epic painter is to impress one general idea, one great quality of nature or mode of society, some great maxim, without descending to those subdivisions, which the detail of character prescribes: he paints the elements with their own simplicity, height, depth, the vast, the grand, darkness, light; life, death; the past, the future; man, pity, love, joy, fear, terrour, peace, war, religion, government: and the visible agents are only engines to force one irresistible idea upon the mind and fancy, as the machinery of Archimedes served only to convey destruction, and the wheels of a watch serve only to tell time.

Such is the first and general sense of what is called the sublime, epic, allegoric, lyric substance. Homer, to impress one forcible idea of war, its origin, its progress, and its end, set to work innumerable engines of various magnitude, yet none but what uniformly tends to enforce this and only this idea; gods and demigods are only actors, and nature but the scene of war; no character is discriminated but where discrimination discovers a new look of war; no passion is raised but what is blown up by the breath of war, and as soon absorbed in its universal blaze:—As in a conflagration we see turrets, spires, and temples illuminated only to propagate the honours of destruction, so through the stormy page of Homer, we see his heroines and heroes, but by the light that blasts them.

This is the principle of that divine series of frescoes, with which under the pontificates of Julius II. and Paul III. Michael Angelo adorned the lofty compartments of the Capella Sistina, and from a modesty or a pride for ever to be lamented, only not occupied the whole of its ample sides. Its subject is theocracy or the empire of religion, considered as the parent and queen of man; the origin, the progress, and final dispensation of Providence, as taught by the sacred records. Amid this imagery of primeval simplicity, whose sole object is the relation of the race to its Founder, to look for minute discrimination of character, is to invert the principle of the artist’s invention: here is only God with man. The veil of eternity is rent; time, space, and matter teem in the creation of the elements and of earth; life issues from God and adoration from man, in the creation of Adam and his mate; transgression of the precept at the tree of knowledge proves the origin of evil, and of expulsion from the immediate intercourse with God; the œconomy of justice and grace commences in the revolutions of the deluge, and the covenant made with Noah; and the germs of social character are traced in the subsequent scene between him and his sons; the awful synod of prophets and sibyls are the heralds of the Redeemer, and the host of patriarchs the pedigree of the Son of Man; the brazen serpent and the fall of Haman, the giant subdued by the stripling in Goliah and David, and the conquerour destroyed by female weakness in Judith, are types of his mysterious progress, till Jonah pronounces him immortal; and the magnificence of the last judgment by shewing the Saviour in the judge of man, sums up the whole, and reunites the founder and the race.

Such is the spirit of the Sistine chapel, and the outline of its general invention, with regard to the cycle of its subjects—as in their choice they lead to each other without intermediate chasms in the transition; as each preceding one prepares and directs the conduct of the next, this the following; and as the intrinsic variety of all, conspires to the simplicity of one great end. The specific invention of the pictures separate, as each constitutes an independent whole, deserves our consideration next: each has its centre, from which it disseminates, to which it leads back all secondary points; arranged, hid, or displayed, as they are more or less organs of the inspiring plan: each rigorously is circumscribed by its generic character, no inferiour merely conventional, temporary, local, or disparate beauty, however in itself alluring, is admitted; each finally turns upon that transient moment, the moment of suspense, big with the past, and pregnant with the future; the action no where expires, for action and interest terminate together. Thus in the creation of Adam, the Creator borne on a group of attendant spirits, the personified powers of omnipotence, moves on toward his last, best work, the lord of his creation: the immortal spark, issuing from his extended arm, electrifies the new-formed being, who tremblingly alive, half raised half reclined, hastens to meet his Maker. In the formation of Eve the astonishment of life, just organised, is absorbed in the sublimer sentiment of adoration; perfect, though not all disengaged from the side of her dreaming mate, she moves with folded hands and humble dignity towards the majestic Form whose half raised hand attracts her—what words can express the equally bland and irresistible velocity of that mysterious Being, who forms the sun and moon, and already past, leaves the earth, compleatly formed, behind him? Here apposition is the symbol of immensity.[73]

From these specimens of invention exerted in the more numerous compositions of this sublime cycle, let me fix your attention for a few moments on the powers it displays in the single figures of the Prophets, those organs of embodied sentiment: their expression and attitude, whilst it exhibits the unequivocal marks of inspired contemplation in all; and with equal variety, energy, and delicacy, stamps character on each; exhibits in the occupation of the present moment the traces of the past and hints of the future. Esaiah, the image of inspiration, sublime and lofty, with an attitude expressive of the sacred trance in which meditation on the Messiah had immersed him, starts at the voice of an attendant genius, who seems to pronounce the words, ‘to us a child is born, to us a son is given.’ Daniel, the humbler image of eager diligence, transcribes from a volume held by a stripling, with a gesture natural to those who, absorbed in the progress of their subject, are heedless of convenience; his posture shews that he had inspected the volume from which now he is turned, and shall return to it immediately. Zachariah personifies consideration, he has read, and ponders on what he reads. Inquiry moves in the dignified activity of Joel; hastening to open a sacred scrowl, and to compare the scriptures with each other. Ezechiel, the fervid feature of fancy, the seer of resurrection, represented as on the field strewn with bones of the dead, points downward and asks, ‘can these bones live?’ the attendant angel, borne on the wind that agitates his locks and the prophet’s vestments, with raised arm and finger, pronounces, they shall rise; last, Jeremiah, subdued by grief and exhausted by lamentation, sinks in silent woe over the ruins of Jerusalem. Nor are the sibyls, those female oracles, less expressive, less individually marked—they are the echo, the counterpart of the prophets; Vigilance, Meditation, Instruction, Divination are personified. If the artist, who absorbed by the uniform power and magnitude of execution, saw only breadth and nature in their figures, must be told that he has discovered the least part of their excellence; the critic who charges them with affectation, can only be dismissed with our contempt.

On the immense plain of the last judgment, Michael Angelo has wound up the destiny of man, simply considered as the subject of religion, faithful or rebellious; and in one generic manner has distributed happiness and misery, the general feature of passions is given, and no more.—But had Raphael meditated that subject, he would undoubtedly have applied to our sympathies for his choice of imagery; he would have combined all possible emotions with the utmost variety of probable or real character: a father meeting his son, a mother torn from her daughter, lovers flying into each others arms, friends for ever separated, children accusing their parents, enemies reconciled; tyrants dragged before the tribunal by their subjects, conquerors hiding themselves from their victims of carnage; innocence declared, hypocrisy unmasked, atheism confounded, detected fraud, triumphant resignation; the most prominent features of connubial, fraternal, kindred connexion.—In a word, the heads of that infinite variety which Dante has minutely scattered over his poem—all domestic, politic, religious relations; whatever is not local in virtue and in vice: and the sublimity of the greatest of all events, would have been merely the minister of sympathies and passions[74].

If opinions be divided on the respective advantages and disadvantages of these two modes; if to some it should appear, though from consideration of the plan which guided Michael Angelo, I am far from subscribing to their notions, that the scenery of the last judgment, might have gained more by the dramatic introduction of varied pathos, than it would have lost by the dereliction of its generic simplicity: there can, I believe, be but one opinion with regard to the methods adopted by him and Raphael in the invention of the moment that characterises the creation of Eve: both artists applied for it to their own minds, but with very different success: the elevation of Michael Angelo’s soul, inspired by the operation of creation itself, furnished him at once with the feature that stamps on human nature its most glorious prerogative: whilst the characteristic subtilty, rather than sensibility of Raphael’s mind, in this instance, offered nothing but a frigid succedaneum; a symptom incident to all, when after the subsided astonishment on a great and sudden event, the mind recollecting itself, ponders on it with inquisitive surmise. In Michael Angelo, all self-consideration is absorbed in the sublimity of the sentiment which issues from the august Presence that attracts Eve; ‘her earthly,’ in Milton’s expression, ‘by his heavenly overpowered,’ pours itself in adoration: whilst in the inimitable cast of Adam’s figure, we trace the hint of that half conscious moment when sleep began to give way to the vivacity of the dream inspired. In Raphael, creation is complete—Eve is presented to Adam, now awake: but neither the new-born charms, the submissive grace and virgin purity of the beauteous image; nor the awful presence of her Introductor, draw him from his mental trance into effusions of love or gratitude; at ease reclined, with fingers pointing at himself and his new mate, he seems to methodize the surprising event that took place during his sleep, and to whisper the words ‘flesh of my flesh.’

Thus, but far better adapted, has Raphael personified Dialogue, moved the lips of Soliloquy, unbent or wrinkled the features, and arranged the limbs and gesture of Meditation, in the pictures of the Parnassus and of the school of Athens, parts of the immense allegoric drama that fills the stanzas, and displays the brightest ornament of the Vatican; the immortal monument of the towering ambition, unlimited patronage, and refined taste of Julius II. and Leo X., its cycle represents the origin, the progress, extent, and final triumph of church empire, or ecclesiastic government; in the first subject, of the Parnassus, Poetry led back to its origin and first duty, the herald and interpreter of a first Cause, in the universal language of imagery addressed to the senses, unites man, scattered and savage, in social and religious bands. What was the surmise of the eye and the wish of hearts, is gradually made the result of reason, in the characters of the school of Athens, by the researches of philosophy, which from bodies to mind, from corporeal harmony to moral fitness, and from the duties of society, ascends to the doctrine of God and hopes of immortality. Here revelation in its stricter sense commences, and conjecture becomes a glorious reality: in the composition of the dispute on the sacrament, the Saviour after ascension seated on his throne, the attested son of God and Man, surrounded by his types, the prophets, patriarchs, apostles and the hosts of heaven, institutes the mysteries and initiates in his sacrament the heads and presbyters of the church militant, who in the awful presence of their Master and the celestial synod, discuss, explain, propound his doctrine. That the sacred mystery shall clear all doubt and subdue all heresy, is taught in the miracle of the blood-stained wafer; that without arms, by the arm of Heaven itself, it shall release its votaries, and defeat its enemies, the deliverance of Peter, the overthrow of Heliodorus, the flight of Attila, the captive Saracens, bear testimony; that nature itself shall submit to its power and the elements obey its mandates, the checked conflagration of the Borgo, declares: till hastening to its ultimate triumphs, its union with the state, it is proclaimed by the vision of Constantine, confirmed by the rout of Maxentius, established by the imperial pupils receiving baptism, and submitting to accept his crown at the feet of the mitred pontiff.

Such is the rapid outline of the cycle painted or designed by Raphael on the compartments of the stanzas sacred to his name. Here is the mass of his powers in poetic conception and execution, here is every period of his style, his emancipation from the narrow shackles of Pietro Perugino, his discriminations of characteristic form, on to the heroic grandeur of his line. Here is that master-tone of fresco painting, the real instrument of history, which with its silver purity and breadth unites the glow of Titiano and Correggio’s tints. Every where we meet the superiority of genius, but more or less impressive, with more or less felicity in proportion as each subject was more or less susceptible of dramatic treatment. From the bland enthusiasm of the Parnassus, and the sedate or eager features of meditation in the school of Athens, to the sterner traits of dogmatic controversy in the dispute of the sacrament, and the symptoms of religious conviction or inflamed zeal at the mass of Bolsena. Not the miracle, as we have observed, the fears and terrours of humanity inspire and seize us at the conflagration of the Borgo: if in the Heliodorus the sublimity of the vision balances sympathy with astonishment, we follow the rapid ministers of grace to their revenge, less to rescue the temple from the gripe of sacrilege, than inspired by the palpitating graces, the helpless innocence, the defenceless beauty of the females and children scattered around; and thus we forget the vision of the labarum, the angels and Constantine in the battle, to plunge in the wave with Maxentius, or to share the agonies of the father who recognizes his own son in the enemy he slew.

With what propriety Raphael introduced portrait, though in its most dignified and elevated sense, into some compositions of the great work which we are contemplating, I shall not now discuss; the allegoric part of the work may account for it: he has, however, by its admission, stamped that branch of painting at once with its essential feature, character, and has assigned it its place and rank: ennobled by character, it rises to dramatic dignity, destitute of that, it sinks to mere mechanic dexterity, or floats, a bubble of fashion. Portrait is to historic painting in art, what physiognomy is to pathognomy in science; that shews the character and powers of the being which it delineates, in its formation and at rest: this shews it in exertion. Bembo, Bramante, Dante, Gonzaga, Savonarola, Raphael himself may be considered in the inferior light of mere characteristic ornament; but Julius the second authenticating the miracle at the mass of Bolsena, or borne into the temple, rather to authorize than to witness the punishment inflicted on its spoiler; Leo with his train calmly facing Attila, or deciding on his tribunal the fate of the captive Saracens, tell us by their presence that they are the heroes of the drama, that the action has been contrived for them, is subordinate to them, and has been composed to illustrate their character. For as in the epic, act and agent are subordinate to the maxim, and in pure history are mere organs of the fact; so the drama subordinates both fact and maxim to the agent, his character and passion: what in them was end is but the medium here.

Such were the principles on which he treated the beautiful tale of Amor and Psyche: the allegory of Apuleius became a drama under the hand of Raphael, though it must be owned, that with every charm of scenic gradation and lyric imagery, its characters, as exquisitely chosen as acutely discriminated, exhibit less the obstacles and real object of affection, and its final triumph over mere appetite and sexual instinct, than the voluptuous history of his own favourite passion. The faint light of the maxim vanishes in the splendour which expands before our fancy the enchanted circle of wanton dalliance and amorous attachment.

But the power of Raphael’s invention exerts itself chiefly in subjects where the drama, divested of epic or allegoric fiction, meets pure history, and elevates, invigourates, impresses the pregnant moment of a real fact, with character and pathos: The summit of these is that magnificent series of coloured designs commonly called the cartoons, so well known to you all, part of which we happily possess; formerly when complete and united, and now, in the copies of the tapestry annually exhibited in the colonnade of the Vatican, they represent in thirteen compositions the origin, sanction, œconomy and progress of the Christian religion. In whatever light we consider their invention, as parts of one whole relative to each other, or independent each of the rest, and as single subjects, there can be scarcely named a beauty or a mystery of which the cartoons furnish not an instance or a clue; they are poised between perspicuity and pregnancy of moment; we shall have opportunities to speak of all or the greater part of them, but that of Paul on the areopagus, will furnish us at present with conclusions for the remainder.

It represents the Apostle announcing his God from the height of the areopagus. Enthusiasm and curiosity make up the subject; simplicity of attitude invests the speaker with sublimity; the parallelism of his action invigorates his energy; situation gives him command over the whole; the light in which he is placed, attracts the first glance; he appears the organ of a superior Power. The assembly, though selected with characteristic art for the purpose, are the natural offspring of place and moment. The involved meditation of the Stoic, the Cynic’s ironic sneer, the incredulous smile of the elegant Epicurean, the eager disputants of the Academy, the elevated attention of Plato’s school, the rankling malice of the Rabbi, the Magician’s mysterious glance, repeat in louder or in lower tones the novel doctrine; but whilst curiosity and meditation, loud debate and fixed prejudice, tell, ponder on, repeat, reject, discuss it, the animated gesture of conviction in Dionysius and Damaris, announce the power of its tenets, and hint the established belief of immortality.

But the powers of Raphael in combining the drama with pure historic fact, are best estimated when compared with those exerted by other masters on the same subject. For this we select from the series we examine that which represented the massacre, as it is called, of the innocents, or of the infants at Bethlem; an original, precious part of which still remains in the possession of a friend of art among us. On this subject Baccio Bandinelli, Tintoretto, Rubens, Le Brun, and Poussin, have tried their various powers.

The massacre of the infants by Baccio Bandinelli, contrived chiefly to exhibit his anatomic skill, is a complicated tableau of every contorsion of human attitude and limbs that precedes dislocation; the expression floats between a studied imagery of frigid horrour and loathsome abomination.

The stormy brush of Tintoretto swept individual woe away in general masses. Two immense wings of light and shade divide the composition, and hide the want of sentiment in tumult.

To Rubens magnificence and contrast dictated the actors and the scene. A loud lamenting dame, in velvet robes, with golden locks dishevelled, and wide extended arms, meets our first glance. Behind, a group of steel-clad satellites open their rows of spears to admit the nimble, naked ministers of murder, charged with their infant prey, within their ranks, ready to close again against the frantic mothers who pursue them: the pompous gloom of the palace in the middle ground is set off by cottages and village scenery in the distance.

Le Brun surrounded the allegoric tomb of Rachel with rapid horsemen, receiving the children whom the assassins tore from their parents arms, and strewed the field with infant-slaughter.

Poussin tied in one vigorous group what he conceived of blood-trained villany and maternal frenzy. Whilst Raphael, in dramatic gradation, disclosed all the mother through every image of pity and of terrour; through tears, shrieks, resistance, revenge, to the stunned look of despair; and traced the villain from the palpitations of scarce initiated crime to the sedate grin of veteran murder.

History, strictly so called, follows the drama: fiction now ceases, and invention consists only in selecting and fixing with dignity, precision, and sentiment, the moments of reality. Suppose that the artist choose the death of Germanicus—He is not to give us the highest images of general grief which impresses the features of a people or a family at the death of a beloved chief or father; for this would be epic imagery: we should have Achilles, Hector, Niobe. He is not to mix up characters which observation and comparison have pointed out to him as the fittest to excite the gradations of sympathy; not Admetus and Alceste, not Meleager and Atalanta; for this would be the drama. He is to give us the idea of a Roman dying amidst Romans, as tradition gave him, with all the real modifications of time and place, which may serve unequivocally to discriminate that moment of grief from all others. Germanicus, Agrippina, Caius, Vitellius, the legates, the centurions at Antioch; the hero, the husband, the father, the friend, the leader, the struggles of nature and sparks of hope must be subjected to the phisiognomic character and the features of Germanicus, the son of Drusus, the Cæsar of Tiberius. Maternal, female, connubial passion must be tinged by Agrippina, the woman absorbed in the Roman, less lover than companion of her husband’s grandeur: even the bursts of friendship, attachment, allegiance, and revenge, must be stamped by the military, ceremonial, and distinctive costume of Rome.

The judicious observation of all this does not reduce the historic painter to the anxiously minute detail of a copyist. Firm he rests on the true basis of art, imitation: the fixed character of things determines all in his choice, and mere floating accident, transient modes and whims of fashion, are still excluded. If defects, if deformities are represented, they must be permanent, they must be inherent in the character. Edward the first and Richard the third must be marked, but marked, to strengthen rather than to diminish the interest we take in the man; thus the deformity of Richard will add to his terrour, and the enormous stride of Edward to his dignity. If my limits permitted, your own recollection would dispense me from expatiating in examples on this more familiar branch of invention. The history of our own times and of our own country has produced a specimen, in the death of a military hero, as excellent as often imitated, which, though respect forbids me to name it, cannot, I trust, be absent from your mind.

Such are the stricter outlines of general and specific invention in the three principal branches of our art; but as their near alliance allows not always a strict discrimination of their limits; as the mind and fancy of men, upon the whole, consist of mixed qualities, we seldom meet with a human performance exclusively made up of epic, dramatic, or pure historic materials.

Novelty and feelings will make the rigid historian sometimes launch out into the marvellous, or warm his bosom and extort a tear; the dramatist, in gazing at some tremendous feature, or the pomp of superiour agency, will drop the chain of sympathy and be absorbed in the sublime; whilst the epic or lyric painter forgets his solitary grandeur, sometimes descends and mixes with his agents. Thus Homer gave the feature of the drama in Hector and Andromache, in Irus and Ulysses; the spirit from the prison house stalks like the shade of Ajax, in Shakspeare; the daughter of Soranus pleading for her father, and Octavia encircled by centurions, melt like Ophelia and Alceste, in Tacitus; thus Raphael personified the genius of the river in Joshua’s passage through the Jordan, and again at the ceremony of Solomon’s inauguration; and thus Poussin raised before the scared eye of Coriolanus, the frowning vision of Rome, all armed, with her attendant, Fortune.

These general excursions from one province of the art into those of its congenial neighbours, granted by judicious invention to the artist, let me apply to the grant of a more specific licence[75]: Horace, the most judicious of critics, when treating on the use of poetic words, tells his pupils, that the adoption of an old word, rendered novel by a skilful construction with others, will entitle the poet to the praise of original diction. The same will be granted to the judicious adoption of figures in art.

Far from impairing the originality of invention, the unpremeditated discovery of an appropriate attitude or figure in the works of antiquity, or of the great old masters after the revival, and its adoption, or the apt transposition of one misplaced in some inferiour work, will add lustre to a performance of commensurate or superiour power, by a kind coalition with the rest, immediately furnished by nature and the subject. In such a case it is easily discovered whether a subject have been chosen merely to borrow an idea, an attitude or figure, or whether their eminent fitness procured them their place. An adopted idea or figure in a work of genius is a foil or a companion of the rest; but an idea of genius borrowed by mediocrity, tears all associate shreds, it is the giant’s thumb by which the pigmy offered the measure of his own littleness. We stamp the plagiary on the borrower, who, without fit materials or adequate conceptions of his own, seeks to shelter impotence under purloined vigour; we leave him with the full praise of invention, who by the harmony of a whole proves that what he adopted might have been his own offspring though anticipated by another. If he take now, he soon may give. Thus Michael Angelo scattered the Torso of Apollonius in every view, in every direction, in groups and single figures, over the composition of the last judgment; and in the Lunetta of Judith and her maid gave an original turn to figures adopted from the gem of Pier Maria da Pescia: if the figure of Adam dismissed from Paradise, by Raphael, still own Masaccio for its inventor, he can scarcely be said to have furnished more than the hint of that enthusiasm and energy which we admire in Paul on the areopagus: in the picture of the covenant with Noah, the sublimity of the vision, and the graces of the mother entangled by her babes, find their originals in the Sistine chapel, but they are equalled by the fervour which conceived the Patriarch who, with the infant pressed to his bosom, with folded hands, and prostrate on his knees, adores. What figure or what gesture in the cartoon of Pisa, has not been imitated? Raphael, Parmegiano, Poussin, are equally indebted to it; in the sacrament of baptism, the last did little more than transcribe that knot of powers, the fierce feature of the veteran who, eager to pull on his cloaths, pushes his foot through the rending garment.—Such are the indulgences which invention grants to fancy, taste, and judgment.

But a limited fragment of observations must not presume to exhaust what in itself is inexhaustible; the features of invention are multiplied before me as my powers decrease: I shall therefore no longer trespass on your patience, than by fixing your attention for a few moments on one of its boldest flights, the transfiguration of Raphael; a performance equally celebrated and censured; in which the most judicious of inventors, the painter of propriety, is said to have not only wrestled for extent of information with the historian, but attempted to leap the boundaries, and, with a less discriminating than daring hand, to remove the established limits of the art, to have arbitrarily combined two actions, and consequently two different moments.

Were this charge founded, I might content myself with observing, that the transfiguration, more than any other of Raphael’s oil-pictures, was a public performance, destined by Julio de Medici, afterward Clement VII. for his archiepiscopal church at Narbonne; that it was painted in contest with Sebastian del Piombo, assisted in his rival-picture of Lazarus by Michael Angelo; and thus, considering it as framed on the simple principles of the monumental style, established in my first discourse, on the pictures of Polygnotus at Delphi, I might frame a plausible excuse for the modern artist; but Raphael is above the assistance of subterfuge, and it is sufficient to examine the picture, in order to prove the futility of the charge. Raphael has connected with the transfiguration not the cure of the maniac, but his presentation for it; if, according to the[76] Gospel record, this happened at the foot of the mountain, whilst the apparition took place at the top, what improbability is there in assigning the same moment to both?

Raphael’s design was to represent Jesus as the Son of God, and at the same time as the reliever of human misery, by an unequivocal fact. The transfiguration on Tabor, and the miraculous cure which followed the descent of Jesus, united, furnished that fact. The difficulty was how to combine two successive actions in one moment: he overcame it by sacrificing the moment of the cure to that of the apparition, by implying the lesser miracle in the greater. In subordinating the cure to the vision he obtained sublimity, in placing the crowd and the patient on the fore-ground, he gained room for the full exertion of his dramatic powers; it was not necessary that the dæmoniac should be represented in the moment of recovery, if its certainty could be expressed by other means: it is implied, it is placed beyond all doubt by the glorious apparition above; it is made nearly intuitive by the uplifted hand and finger of the apostle in the centre, who without hesitation, undismayed by the obstinacy of the dæmon, unmoved by the clamour of the crowd and the pusillanimous scepticism of some of his companions, refers the father of the maniac in an authoritative manner for certain and speedy help to his master[77] on the mountain above, whom, though unseen, his attitude at once connects with all that passes below; here is the point of contact, here is that union of the two parts of the fact in one moment, which Richardson and Falconet could not discover.

FOURTH LECTURE. INVENTION. PART II. — ARGUMENT. — FOURTH LECTURE.

Choice of subjects; divided into positive, negative, repulsive.—Observations on the Parerga, or Accessories of Invention.

The imitation of Nature, as it presents itself in space and figure, being the real sphere of plastic Invention, it follows, that whatever can occupy a place and be circumscribed by lines, characterised by form, substantiated by colour and light and shade, without provoking incredulity, shocking our conception by absurdity, averting our eye by loathsomeness or horrour, is strictly within its province: but though all Nature seem to teem with objects of imitation, the ‘Choice’ of subjects is a point of great importance to the Artist; the conception, the progress, the finish, and the success of his work depend upon it. An apt and advantageous subject rouses and elevates Invention, invigourates, promotes, and adds delight to labour; whilst a dull or repulsive one breeds obstacles at every step, dejects and wearies—the Artist loses his labour, the spectator his expectation.

The first demand on every work of art is that it constitute one whole, that it fully pronounce its own meaning, that it tell itself; it ought to be independent; the essential part of its subject ought to be comprehended and understood without collateral assistance, without borrowing its commentary from the historian or the poet; for as we are soon wearied with a poem whose fable and motives reach us only by the borrowed light of annexed notes, so we turn our eye discontented from a picture or a statue whose meaning depends on the charity of a Cicerone, or must be fetched from a book.

As the condition that each work of art should fully and essentially tell its own tale, undoubtedly narrows the quantity of admissible objects, singly taken, to remedy this, to enlarge the range of subjects, Invention has contrived by a Cyclus or series to tell the most important moments of a long story, its beginning, its middle, and its end: for though some of these may not, in themselves, admit of distinct discrimination, they may receive and impart light by connection.

Of him who undertakes thus to personify a tale, the first demand is, that his Invention dwell on the firm basis of the story, on its most important and significant moments, or its principal actors. Next, as the nature of the art which is confined to the apparition of single moments forces him to leap many intermediate ones, he cannot be said to have invented with propriety, if he neglect imperceptibly to fill the chasm occasioned by their omission; and, finally, that he shall not interrupt or lose the leading thread of his plan in quest of episodes, in the display of subordinate or adventitious beauties. On the observation of these rules depends the perspicuity of his work, the interest we take in it, and, consequently, all that can be gained by the adoption of a historic series.

When form, colour, with conception and execution, are deducted from a work, its subject, the unwrought stuff only, the naked materials remain, and these we divide into three classes.

The first are positive, advantageous, commensurate with and adapted for the art. The whole of the work lies prepared in their germ, and spontaneously meets the rearing hand of the Artist.

The second class, composed of subjects negative and uninteresting in themselves, depends entirely on the manner of treating; such subjects owe what they can be to the genius of the Artist.

The repulsive, the subjects which cannot pronounce their own meaning, constitute the third class. On them genius and talent are equally wasted, because the art has no medium to render them intelligible. Taste and execution may recommend them to our eye, but never can make them generally impressive, or stamp them with perspicuity.

To begin with advantageous subjects, immediately above the scenes of vulgar life, of animals, and common landscape, the simple representation of actions purely human, appears to be as nearly related to the art as to ourselves; their effect is immediate; they want no explanation; from them, therefore, we begin our scale. The next step leads us to pure historic subjects, singly or in a series; beyond these the delineation of character, or, properly speaking, the drama, invites; immediately above this we place the epic with its mythologic, allegoric, and symbolic branches.

On these four branches of Invention, as I have treated diffusely in the lecture published on this subject, and since successively in these prelections, I shall not at present circumstantially dwell, but as succinctly as possible remind you only of their specific difference and elements.

The first class, which, without much boldness of metaphor, may be said to draw its substance immediately from the lap of Nature, to be as elemental as her emotions, and the passions by which she sways us, finds its echo in all hearts, and imparts its charm to every eye; from the mutual caresses of maternal affection and infant simplicity, the whispers of love or eruptions of jealousy and revenge, to the terrours of life, struggling with danger, or grappling with death. The Madonnas of Raphael; the Ugolino, the Paolo and Francesca of Dante; the conflagration of the Borgo; the Niobe protecting her daughter; Hæmon piercing his own breast, with Antigone hanging dead from his arm[78], owe the sympathies they call forth to their assimilating power, and not to the names they bear: without names, without reference to time and place, they would impress with equal energy, because they find their counterpart in every breast, and speak the language of mankind. Such were the Phantasiae of the ancients, which modern art, by indiscriminate laxity of application, in what is called Fancy-Pictures, has more debased than imitated. A mother’s and a lover’s kiss acquire their value from the lips they press, and suffering deformity mingles disgust with pity.

Historic Invention administers to truth. History, as contradistinguished from arbitrary or poetic narration, tells us not what might be, but what is or was; circumscribes the probable, the grand, and the pathetic, with truth of time, place, custom; gives “local habitation and a name:” its agents are the pure organs of a fact. Historic plans, when sufficiently distinct to be told, and founded on the basis of human nature, have that prerogative over mere natural imagery, that whilst they bespeak our sympathy, they interest our intellect. We were pleased with the former as men, we are attracted by this as members of society: bound round with public and private connections and duties, taught curiosity by education, we wish to regulate our conduct by comparisons of analogous situations and similar modes of society: these History furnishes; transplants us into other times; empires and revolutions of empires pass before us with memorable facts and actors in their train, the legislator, the philosopher, the discoverer, the polishers of life, the warriour, the divine, are the principal inhabitants of this soil: it is perhaps unnecessary to add, that nothing trivial, nothing grovelling or mean, should be suffered to approach it. This is the department of Tacitus and Poussin. The exhibition of character in the conflict of passions with the rights, the rules, the prejudices of society, is the legitimate sphere of dramatic invention. It inspires, it agitates us by reflected self-love, with pity, terrour, hope, and fear; whatever makes events, and time and place, the ministers of character and pathos, let fiction or reality compose the tissue, is its legitimate claim: it distinguishes and raises itself above historic representation by laying the chief interest on the actors, and moulding the fact into mere situations contrived for their exhibition: they are the end, this the medium. Such is the invention of Sophocles and Shakspeare, and uniformly that of Raphael. The actors, who in Poussin and the rest of historic painters, shine by the splendour of the fact, reflect it in Raphael with unborrowed rays: they are the luminous object to which the action points.

Of the epic plan, the loftiest species of human conception, the aim is to astonish whilst it instructs; it is the sublime allegory of a maxim. Here Invention arranges a plan by general ideas, the selection of the most prominent features of Nature, or favourable modes of society, visibly to substantiate some great maxim. If it admits history for its basis, it hides the limits in its grandeur; if it select characters to conduct its plan, it is only in the genus, their features reflect, their passions are kindled by the maxim, and absorbed in its universal blaze: at this elevation heaven and earth mingle their boundaries, men are raised to demigods, and gods descend. This is the sphere of Homer, Phidias, and Michael Agnolo.

Allegory, or the personification of invisible physic and metaphysic ideas, though not banished from the regions of Invention, is equally inadmissible in pure epic, dramatic, and historic plans, because, wherever it enters, it must rule the whole.[79] It rules with propriety the mystic drama of the Vatican, where the characters displayed are only the varied instruments of a mystery by which the church was established, and Julio and Leone are the allegoric image, the representatives of that church; but the epic, dramatic, and historic painter embellish with poetry or delineate with truth, what either was or is supposed to be real; they must therefore conduct their plans by personal and substantial agency, if they mean to excite that credibility, without which it is not in their power to create an interest in the spectator or the reader.

That great principle, the necessity of a moral tendency or of some doctrine useful to mankind in the whole of an epic performance, admitted, are we therefore to sacrifice the uniformity of its parts, and thus to lose that credibility which alone can impress us with the importance of the maxim that dictated to the poet narration and to the artist imagery? Are the agents sometimes to be real beings, and sometimes abstract ideas? Is the Zeus of Homer, of whose almighty will the bard, at the very threshold of his poem, proclaims himself only the herald, by the purblind acuteness of a commentator, to be turned into Æther; and Juno, just arriving from her celestial toilet, changed into air, to procure from their mystic embraces the allegoric offspring of vernal impregnation? When Minerva, by her weight, makes the chariot of Diomede groan, and Mars wounded, roars with the voice of ten thousand, are they nothing but the symbol of military discipline, and the sound of the battle’s roar? or Ate, seized by her hair, and by Zeus dashed from the battlements of heaven, is she only a metaphysic idea? Forbid it, Sense! As well might we say, that Milton, when he called the porteress of hell, Satan’s daughter, Sin, and his son and dread antagonist, Death, meant only to impress us with ideas of privation and nonentity, and sacrificed the real agents of his poem to an unskilful choice of names? Yet it is their name that has bewildered his commentator and biographer in criticisms equally cold, repugnant and incongruous, on the admissibility and inadmissibility of allegory in poems of supposed reality. What becomes of the interest the poet and the artist mean to excite in us, if, in the moment of reading or contemplating, we do not believe what the one tells and the other shews? It is that magic which places on the same basis of existence, and amalgamates the mythic or superhuman, and the human parts of the Ilias, of Paradise Lost, and of the Sistine chapel, that enraptures, agitates, and whirls us along as readers or spectators.

When Poussin represented Coriolanus in the Volscian camp, he placed before him in suppliant attitudes his mother, wife, and children, with a train of Roman matrons kneeling, and behind them the erect and frowning form of an armed female, accompanied by another with streaming hair, recumbent on a wheel. On these two, unseen to all else, Coriolanus, perplexed in the extreme, in an attitude of despair, his sword half drawn, as if to slay himself, fixes his scared eyes: who discovers not that he is in a trance, and in the female warriour recognises the tutelary genius of Rome, and her attendant Fortune, to terrify him into compliance? Shall we disgrace with the frigid conceit of an allegory the powerful invention which disclosed to the painter’s eye the agitation in the Roman’s breast and the proper moment for fiction? Who is not struck by the sublimity of a vision which, without diminishing the credibility of the fact, adds to its importance, and raises the hero, by making him submit not to the impulse of private ties, but to the imperious destiny of his country?

Among the paltry subterfuges contrived by dullness to palliate the want of invention, the laborious pedantry of emblems ranks foremost, by which arbitrary and conventional signs have been substituted for character and expression. If the assertion of S. Johnson, that the plastic arts ‘can illustrate, but cannot inform,’ be false as a general maxim, it gains an air of truth with regard to this hieroglyphic mode of exchanging substance for signs; and the story which he adds in proof, of a young girl’s mistaking the usual figure of Justice with a steel-yard for a cherry-woman, becomes here appropriate. The child had seen many stall and market-women, and always with a steel-yard or a pair of scales, but never a figure of Justice; and it might as well be pretended that one not initiated in the Egyptian mysteries, should discover in the Scarabæus of an obelisk the summer solstice, as that a child, a girl, or a man not acquainted with Cæsar Ripa, or some other emblem-coyner, should find in a female holding a balance over her eyes, in another with a bridle in her hand, in a third leaning on a broken pillar, and in a fourth loaded with children, the symbols of Justice, Temperance, Fortitude and Charity. If these signs be at all admissible, they ought, at least, to receive as much light from the form, the character, and expression of the figures they accompany, as they reflect on them, else they become burlesque, instead of being attributes. Though this rage for emblem did not become epidemic before the lapse of the sixteenth century, when the Cavalieri of the art, the Zucchari, Vasari and Porta’s undertook to deliver more work than their brains could furnish with thought, yet even the philosophers of the art, in the classic days of Julio and Leo, cannot be said to have been entirely free from it. What analogy is there between an ostrich at the side of a female with a balance in her hand, and the idea of Justice? Yet thus has Raphael represented her in a stanza of the Vatican. Nor has he been constant to the same emblem, as on the ceiling of another stanza, he has introduced her with a scale, and armed with a sword. The Night of M. Agnolo, on the Medicean tombs, might certainly be taken for what she professes to be, without the assistance of the mask, the poppies, and the owl at her feet, for the dominion of sleep is personified in her expression and posture: perhaps even her beautiful companion, whose faintly stretching attitude and half-opened eyes, express the symptoms of approaching morn, might be conceived for its representative[80]; but no stretch of fancy can, in their male associates, reach the symbols of full day and eve, or in the females of the monument of Julio II. the ideas of contemplative and active life.

To means so arbitrary, confused and precarious, the ancients never descended: their general ideas had an uniform and general typus, which invention never presumed to alter or to transgress; but this typus lay less in the attributes than in the character and form. The inverted torch and moon-flower were the accompaniments, and not the substitutes, of Death and Sleep; neither Psyche nor Victory depended on her wings. Mercury was recognized without the caduceus or purse, and Apollo without his bow or lyre; various and similar, the branches of one family, their leading lines descended from that full type of majesty which Phidias, the architect of gods, had stamped on his Jupiter. Whether we ought to consider the son of Charmidas as the inventor or the regulator of this supreme and irremovable standard, matters not, from him the ancient writers date the epoch of mythic invention; no revolutions of style changed the character of his forms, talent only polished with more or less success what his laws had established. Phidias, says Quintilian, was framed to form gods; Phidias, says Pliny, gave in his Jupiter a new motive to religion.

Whether or not, after the restoration of art, the Supreme Being, the eternal essence of incomprehensible perfection, ought ever to have been approached by the feeble efforts of human conception, it is not my office to discuss, perhaps it ought not—but since it has, as the Roman church has embodied divine substance, and called on our arts for an auxiliary, it was to be expected that, to make assistance effectual, a full type, a supreme standard of form, should have been established for the author and the agents of the sacred circle: but, be it from the tyranny of religious barbarians, or inability, or to avoid the imputation of copying each other, painters and sculptors, widely differing among themselves in the conception of divine or sainted form and character, agree in nothing but attributes and symbols: triangular glories, angelic ministry and minstrelsy, the colours of the drapery; the cross, the spear, the stigmata; the descending dove; in implements of ecclesiastic power or instruments of martyrdom.

The Biblic expression, as it is translated, ‘of the Ancient of Days’—which means ‘He that existed before time,’ furnished the primitive artists, instead of an image of supreme majesty, only with the hoary image of age: and such a figure borne along by a globe of angels, and crowned with a kind of episcopal mitre, recurs on the bronzes of Lorenzo Ghiberti. The sublime mind of M. Agnolo, soaring beyond the idea of decrepitude and puny formality, strove to form a type in the elemental energy of the Creator of Adam, and darted life from His extended hand, but in the Creator of Eve sunk again to the idea of age. Raphael strove to compound a form from M. Angelo and his predecessors, to combine energy and rapidity with age: in the Loggia he follows M. Agnolo, in the Stanza the prior artists; here his gods are affable and mild, there rapid, and perhaps more violent than energetic. After these two great names, it were profanation to name the attempts of their successors.

The same fluctuation perplexes the effigy of the Saviour. Lionardo da Vinci attempted to unite power with calm serenity, but in the Last Supper alone presses on our hearts by humanity of countenance. The Infant Christ of M. Agnolo is a superhuman conception, but as Man and Redeemer with his cross, in the Minerva, he is a figure as mannered in form and attitude, as averting by stern severity; and, as the Judge of Mankind in the Last Judgment, he seems to me as unworthy of the artist’s mind as of his master-hand. The Christs of Raphael, as infants, are seldom more than lovely children; as a man, the painter has poised His form between church tradition and the dignified mildness of his own character.

Two extremes appear to have co-operated to impede the establishment of a type in the formation of the Saviour: by one He is converted into a character of mythology, the other debases Him to the dregs of mankind.

‘The character corresponding with that of Christ,’ says Mengs[81], ‘ought to be a compound of the characters of Jupiter and of Apollo, allowing only for the accidental expression of the moment.’ What magic shall amalgamate the superhuman airs of Rhea’s and Latona’s sons, with patience in suffering and resignation? The critic in his exultation forgot the leading feature of his Master—condescending humility. In the race of Jupiter majesty is often tempered by emanations of beauty and of grace, but never softened to warm humanity. Here lies the knot:

The Saviour of mankind extending his arm to relieve, without visible means, the afflicted, the hopeless, the dying, the dead, is a subject that visits with awe the breast of every one who calls himself after His name; the artist is in the sphere of adoration.

An exalted sage descending to every beneficent office of humanity, instructing ignorance, not only forgiving but excusing outrage, pressing his enemy to his breast, commands the sympathy of every man, though he be no believer; the artist is in the sphere of sentiment.

But a mean man, marked with the features of a mean race, surrounded by a beggarly, ill-shaped rabble and stupid crowds—may be mistaken for a juggler, that claims the attention of no man. Of this let Art beware.

From these observations on positive we now proceed to the class of negative subjects. Negative we call those which in themselves possess little that is significant, historically true or attractive, pathetic or sublime, which leave our heart and fancy listless and in apathy, though by the art with which they are executed they allure and retain the eye: here, if ever, the artist creates his own work, in raising, by ingenious combination, that to a positive subject which in its parts is none, or merely passive.

The first rank among these claims that mystic class of monumental pictures, allusive to mysteries of religion and religious institutions, asylums, charities; or votive pictures of those who dedicate offerings of gratitude for life saved or happiness conferred: in these the male and female patrons of such creeds, societies and persons, prophets, apostles, saints, warriours and doctors, with and without the donor or the suppliant, combine in apposition or groups, and are suffered to flank each other without incurring the indignation due to Anachronism, as they are always placed in the presence of the Divine Being, before whom the distance of epochs, place, and races; the customs, dress, and habits of different nations, are supposed to vanish; and the present, past, and future to exist in the same moment.

These, which the simplicity of primitive art dismissed without more invention than elevating the Madonna with the infant Saviour, and arranging the saints and suppliants in formal parallels beneath, the genius of greater masters often, though not always, transformed to organs of sublimity, or connected in an assemblage of interesting and highly pleasing groups, by inventing a congruous action or scenery, which spread warmth over a subject that, simply considered, threatened to freeze the beholder. Let us give an instance.

The Madonna, called Dell’ Impannato by Raphael, is one of these: it is so called because he introduced, in the back-ground, the old Italian linen or paper window. Maria is represented standing or raising herself to offer the Infant to St. Elizabeth, who stretches out her arms to receive him. Mary Magdalen behind, and bending over her, points to St. John, and caresses the child; he with infantine joy escapes from her touch, and looking at her, leaps up to his mother’s neck. St. John, as the principal figure, is placed in the fore-ground on a leopard’s skin, and with raised hand seems to prophesy of Christ; he appears to have eight or ten years, Christ scarcely two. At this anachronism, or the much bolder one committed in the admission of M. Magdalen, who was probably younger than Christ, those only will be shocked who have not considered the nature of a votive picture: this was dedicated to St. John, as the tutelary saint of Florence, and before it was transferred to the Pitti Gallery, was the altar-piece in a domestic chapel of the Medicean family.[82]

The greater part of this audience are acquainted, some are familiar with the celebrated painting of Correggio, formerly treasured in the Pilotta of Parma; transported to the Louvre and again replaced. In the invention of this work, which exhibits St. Jerome, to whom it was dedicated, presenting his translation of the Scriptures, by the hand of an angel, to the infant seated in the lap of the Madonna, the patron of the piece, is sacrificed in place to the female and angelic group which occupies the middle. The figure that chiefly attracts, has, by its suavity, for centuries, attracted, and still absorbs the general eye, is that charming one of the Magdalen, in a half kneeling, half recumbent posture, pressing the foot of Jesus to her lips. By doing this, the painter has, undoubtedly, offered to the Graces the boldest and most enamoured sacrifice which they ever received from art. He has been rewarded, accordingly, for the impropriety of her usurping the first glance which ought to fix itself on the Divinity, and the Saint vanishes in the amorous gaze on her charms. If the Magdalen has long possessed the right of being present where the Madonna presides, she ought to assist the purpose of the picture in subordinate entreaty; her action should have been that of supplication; as it is, it is the effusion of fondling, unmixed love.

The true medium between dry apposition and exuberant contrast, appears to have been kept by Titian, in an altar-piece of the Franciscans, or Frari, in spite of French selection, still at Venice; and of which the simple grandeur has been balanced by Reynolds against the artificial splendour of Rubens in a similar subject. It probably was what it represents, the thanks-offering of a noble family, for some victory obtained, or conquest made in the Morea. The heads of the family, male and female, presented by St. Francis, occupy the two wings of the composition, kneeling, and with hands joined in prayer, in attitudes nearly parallel. Elevated in the centre, St. Peter stands at the altar, between two columns, his hand in the Gospel-book, the keys before him, addressing the suppliants. Above him, to the right, appears the Madonna, holding the infant, and with benign countenance, seems to sanction the ceremony. Two stripling cherubs on an airy cloud, right over the centre, rear the cross; an armed warriour with the standard of victory, and behind him a turbaned Turk or Moor, approach from the left and round the whole.

Such is the invention of a work, which, whilst it fills the mind, refuses utterance to words; of which it is difficult to say, whether it subdue more by simplicity, command by dignity, persuade by propriety, assuage by repose, or charm by contrast. A great part of these groups consists of portraits in habiliments of the time, deep, vivid, brilliant; but all are completely subject to the tone of gravity that emanates from the centre, a sacred silence enwraps the whole; all gleams and nothing flashes. Steady to his purpose, and penetrated by his motive, though brooding over every part of his work, the artist appears no where.[83]

Next to this higher class of negative subjects, though much lower, may be placed the magnificence of ornamental painting, the pompous machinery of Paolo Veronese, Pietro da Cortona, and Rubens. Splendour, contrast, and profusion, are the springs of its invention. The painter, not the story, is the principal subject here. Dazzled by piles of Palladian architecture, tables set out with regal luxury, terrasses of plate, crowds of Venetian nobles, pages, dwarfs, gold-collared Moors, and choirs of vocal and instrumental music, embrowned and tuned by meridian skies, what eye has time to discover, in the brilliant chaos, the visit of Christ to Simon the Pharisee, or the sober nuptials of Canah? but when the charm dissolves, though avowedly wonders of disposition, colour, and unlimited powers of all-grasping execution, if considered in any other light than as the luxurious trappings of ostentatious wealth, judgment must pronounce them ominous pledges of irreclaimable depravity of taste, glittering masses of portentous incongruities and colossal baubles.

The next place to representation of pomp among negative subjects, but far below, we assign to Portrait. Not that characteristic portrait by which Silanion, in the face of Apollodorus, personified habitual indignation; Apelles in Alexander superhuman ambition; Raphael in Julio the IId. pontifical fierceness; Titian in Paul IIId. testy age with priestly subtlety; and in Machiavelli and Cæsar Borgia the wily features of conspiracy and treason.—Not that portrait by which Rubens contrasted the physiognomy of philosophic and classic acuteness with that of genius in the conversation-piece of Grotius, Meursius, Lipsius, and himself; not the nice and delicate discriminations of Vandyk, nor that power which, in our days, substantiated humour in Sterne, comedy in Garrick, and mental and corporeal strife, to use his own words, in Samuel Johnson. On that broad basis, portrait takes its exalted place between history and the drama. The portrait I mean is that common one as widely spread as confined in its principle; the remembrancer of insignificance, mere human resemblance, in attitude without action, features without meaning, dress without drapery, and situation without propriety. The aim of the artist and the sitter’s wish are confined to external likeness; that deeper, nobler aim, the personification of character, is neither required, nor, if obtained, recognised. The better artist, condemned to this task, can here only distinguish himself from his duller brother by execution, by invoking the assistance of back-ground, chiaroscuro and picturesque effects, and thus, sometimes produces a work which delights the eye and leaves us, whilst we lament the misapplication, with a strong impression of his power; him we see, not the insignificant individual that usurps the centre, one we never saw, care not if we never see, and if we do, remember not, for his head can personify nothing but his opulence or his pretence; it is furniture.

If any branch of art be once debased to a mere article of fashionable furniture, it will seldom elevate itself above the taste and the caprice of the owner, or the dictates of fashion; for its success depends on both; and though there be not a bauble thrown by the sportive hand of fashion which taste may not catch to advantage, it will seldom be allowed to do it, if fashion dictate the mode. Since liberty and commerce have more levelled the ranks of society, and more equally diffused opulence, private importance has been increased, family connections and attachments have been more numerously formed, and hence portrait painting, which formerly was the exclusive property of princes, or a tribute to beauty, prowess, genius, talent, and distinguished character, is now become a kind of family calendar, engrossed by the mutual charities of parents, children, brothers, nephews, cousins, and relatives of all colours.

To portrait painting, thus circumstanced, we subjoin, as the last branch of uninteresting subjects, that kind of landscape which is entirely occupied with the tame delineation of a given spot; an enumeration of hill and dale, clumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses, what is commonly called Views. These, if not assisted by nature, dictated by taste, or chosen for character, may delight the owner of the acres they enclose, the inhabitants of the spot, perhaps the antiquary or the traveller, but to every other eye they are little more than topography. The landscape of Titian, of Mola, of Salvator, of the Poussins, Claude, Rubens, Elzheimer, Rembrandt and Wilson, spurns all relation with this kind of mapwork. To them nature disclosed her bosom in the varied light of rising, meridian, setting suns; in twilight, night and dawn. Height, depth, solitude, strike, terrify, absorb, bewilder in their scenery. We tread on classic or romantic ground, or wander through the characteristic groups of rich congenial objects. The usual choice of the Dutch school, which frequently exhibits no more than the transcript of a spot, borders, indeed, nearer on the negative kind of landscape; but imitation will not be entitled to the pleasure we receive, or the admiration we bestow, on their genial works, till it has learnt to give an air of choice to necessity, to imitate their hues, spread their masses, and to rival the touch of their pencil.

Subjects which cannot, in their whole compass, be brought before the eye, which appeal for the best part of their meaning, to the erudition of the spectator, and the refinements of sentimental enthusiasm, seem equally to defy the powers of invention. The labour of disentangling the former, dissolves the momentary magic of the first impression, and leaves us cold: the second evaporates under the grosser touch of sensual art. It may be more than doubted whether the resignation of Alcestis can ever be made intuitive; the pathos of the story consists in the heroic resolution of Alcestis to save her husband’s life by resigning her own. Now the art can shew no more than Alcestis dying: the cause of her death, her elevation of mind, the disinterested heroism of her resolution to die, are beyond its power.

Raffaelle’s celebrated donation of the keys to St. Peter in the cartoon before us, as ineffectually struggles with more than the irremovable obscurity, with the ambiguity of the subject: a numerous group of grave and devout characters, in attitudes of anxious debate and eager curiosity, press forward to witness the behests of a person who, with one hand, seems to have consigned two massy keys to their foremost companion on his knees, and with the other hand points to a flock of sheep, grazing behind. What associating power can find the connexion between those keys and the pasturing herd? or discover in an obtrusive allegory the only real motive of the emotions that inspire the apostolic group? the artist’s most determined admirer, if not the slave of pontifical authority, ready to transubstantiate whatever comes before him, must confine his homage to the power that interests us in a composition without a subject.

Poussin’s extolled picture of the testament of Eudamidas is another proof of the inefficacy to represent the enthusiasm of sentiment by the efforts of art. The figures have simplicity, the expression energy, it is well composed, in short, it possesses every requisite but that which alone could make it what it pretends to be:—you see an elderly man on his death-bed; a physician, pensive, with his hand on the man’s breast, his wife and daughter desolate at the foot of the bed; one, who resembles a notary, eagerly writing; a buckler and a lance on the wall; and the simple implements of the scene, tell us the former occupation and the circumstances of Eudamidas—but his legacy—the secure reliance on the friend to whom he bequeaths his daughter—the noble acceptance and magnanimity of that friend, these we ought to see, and seek in vain for them; what is represented in the picture may be as well applied to any other man who died, made a will, and left a daughter and a wife, as to the Corinthian Eudamidas.

This is not the only instance in which Poussin has mistaken erudition and detail of circumstances for evidence. The exposition of Infant Moses on the Nile, is a picture as much celebrated as the former: a woman shoves a child placed in a basket from the shore. A man mournfully pensive walks off followed by a boy who turns towards the woman and connects the groups; a girl in the back-ground, points to a distance, where we discover the Egyptian princess, and thus anticipate the fate of the child. The statue of a river god recumbent on the sphinx, a town with lofty temples, pyramids and obelisks tell Memphis and the Nile; and smoaking brick-kilns still nearer allude to the servitude and toil of Israel in Egypt: not one circumstance is omitted that could contribute to explain the meaning of the whole; but the repulsive subject completely baffled the painter’s endeavour to shew the real motive of the action. We cannot penetrate the cause that forces these people to expose the child on the river, and hence our sympathy and participation languish, we turn from a subject that gives us danger without fear, to admire the expression of the parts, the classic elegance, the harmony of colours, the mastery of execution.

The importance of some secondary points of invention, of scenery, back-ground, drapery, ornament, is frequently such, that, independent of the want of more essential parts, if possessed in a very eminent degree, they have singly raised from insignificance to esteem, names that had few other rights to consideration; and neglected, in spite of superiour comprehension, in the choice or conception of a subject, in defiance of style and perhaps of colour, of expression, and sometimes composition, often have left little but apathy to the contemplation of works produced by men of superiour grasp and essential excellence. Fewer would admire Poussin were he deprived of his scenery, though I shall not assert with Mengs, that in his works the subject is more frequently the appendix than the principle of the back-ground; what right could the greater part of Andrea del Sarto’s historic compositions claim to our attention, if deprived of the parallelism, the repose and space in which his figures are arranged, or the ample draperies that invest them, and hide with solemn simplicity their vulgarity of character and limbs: it often requires no inconsiderable degree of mental power and technic discrimination to separate the sublimity of Michael Agnolo, and the pathos of Raffaelle from the total neglect or the incongruities of scenery and back-ground, which frequently involve or clog their conceptions, to add by fancy the place on which their figures ought to stand, the horizon that ought to elevate or surround them, and the masses of light and shade indolently neglected or sacrificed to higher principles. How deeply the importance of scenery and situation, with their proper degree of finish, were felt by Tiziano, before and after his emancipation from the shackles of Giov. Bellino, every work of his during the course of nearly a centenary practice proves: to select two from all, the Martyrdom of the Dominican Peter, that summary of his accumulated powers, and the presentation of the Virgin, one of his first historic essays, owe, if not all, their greatest effect, to scenery: loftiness and solitude of site, assist the sublimity of the descending vision to consecrate the actors beyond what their characters and style of limbs could claim, and render the first an object of submissive admiration, whilst its simple grandeur renders the second one of cheerful and indulgent acquiescence; and reconciles us to a detail of portrait-painting, and the impropriety of associating domestic and vulgar imagery with a consecrated subject.

It is for these reasons that the importance of scenery and back-ground has been so much insisted on by Reynolds; who frequently declared, that whatever preparatory assistance he might admit in the draperies or other parts of his figures, he always made it a point to keep the arrangement of the scenery, the disposition and ultimate finish of the back-ground to himself.

By the choice and scenery of the back-ground we are frequently enabled to judge how far a painter entered into his subject, whether he understood its nature, to what class it belonged, what impression it was capable of making, what passion it was calculated to rouse: the sedate, the solemn, the severe, the awful, the terrible, the sublime, the placid, the solitary, the pleasing, the gay, are stamped by it. Sometimes it ought to be negative, entirely subordinate, receding or shrinking into itself, sometimes more positive, it acts, invigourates, assists the subject, and claims attention; sometimes its forms, sometimes its colour ought to command.—A subject in itself bordering on the usual or common, may become sublime or pathetic by the back-ground alone, and a sublime or pathetic one may become trivial and uninteresting by it: a female leaning her head on her hand on a rock might easily suggest itself to any painter of portrait, but the means of making this figure interesting to those who are not concerned in the likeness, were not to be picked from the mixtures of the palette, Reynolds found the secret in contrasting the tranquillity and repose of the person by a tempestuous sea and a stormy shore in the distance; and in another female contemplating a tremulous sea by a placid moonlight, he connected elegance with sympathy and desire.

Whatever connects the individual with the elements, whether by abrupt or imperceptible means, is an instrument of sublimity, as, whatever connects it in the same manner with, or tears it from the species, may become an organ of pathos: in this discrimination lies the rule by which our art, to astonish or move, ought to choose the scenery of its subjects. It is not by the accumulation of infernal or magic machinery, distinctly seen, by the introduction of Hecate and a chorus of female dæmons and witches, by surrounding him with successive apparitions at once, and a range of shadows moving above or before him, that Macbeth can be made an object of terrour,—to render him so you must place him on a ridge, his down-dashed eye absorbed by the murky abyss; surround the horrid vision with darkness, exclude its limits, and shear its light to glimpses.

This art of giving to the principal figure the command of the horizon, is perhaps the only principle by which modern art might have gained an advantage over that of the antients, and improved the dignity of composition, had it been steadily pursued by its great restorers, the painters of Julio II. and Leone X. though we find it more attended to in the monumental imagery of the Capella Sistina, than in the Stanze and the cartoons of Raffaello, which being oftener pathetic or intellectual than sublime, suffered less by neglecting it.

The same principle which has developed in the cone, the form generally most proper for composing a single figure or a group, contains the reason why the principal figure or group should be the most elevated object of a composition, and locally command the accidents of scenery and place. The Apollo of Belvedere, singly or in a group, was surely not composed to move at the bottom of a valley, nor the Zeus of Phidias to be covered with a roof.

The improprieties attendant on the neglect of this principle are, perhaps, in no work of eminence more offensively evident than in the celebrated resuscitation of Lazarus by Sebastian del Piombo, whose composition, if composition it deserve to be called, seems to have been dictated by the back-ground. It usurps the first glance; it partly buries, every where throngs, and in the most important place squeezes the subject into a corner. The horizon is at the top, Jesus, Maria, and Lazarus at the bottom of the scene. Though its plan and groups recede in diminished forms, they advance in glaring opaque colour, nor can it avail in excuse of the artist, to say that the multitude of figures admitted are characters chosen to shew in different modes of expression the effect of the miracle, whilst their number gives celebrity to it and discriminates it from the obscure trick of a juggler: all this, if it had been done, though perhaps it has not, for by far the greater part are not spectators, might have been done with subordination: the most authentic proof of the reality of the miracle ought to have beamed from the countenance of Him who performed it, and of the restored man’s sister.—In every work something must be first, something last; that is essential, this optional; that is present by its own right, this by courtesy and convenience.[84]

The rival picture of the resuscitation of Lazarus, the Transfiguration of Christ by Raffaello, avoids the inconvenience of indiscriminate crowding, and the impertinent luxuriance of scenery which we have censured, by the artifice of escaping from what is strictly called back-ground, and excluding it altogether: the action on the fore-ground is the basis and Christ the apex of the cone, and what they might have suffered from diminution of size is compensated by elevation and splendour. In sacrificing to this principle the rules of a perspective which he was so well acquainted with, Raffaello succeeded to unite the beginning, the middle, and the end of the event which he represented in one moment; he escaped every atom of common-place or unnecessary embellishment, with a simplicity and so artless an air, that few but the dull, the petulant, and the pedant, can refuse him their assent, admiration and sympathy; if he has not, strictly speaking, embodied possibility, he has perhaps done more, he has done what Homer did, by hiding the unmanageable but less essential part of his materials, he has transformed it to probability.

I have said that by the choice of scenery alone, we may often, if not always, judge how far an artist has penetrated his subject, what emotion in treating it he meant to excite. No subjects can elucidate this with so much perspicuity, as those generally distinguished by the name of Madonnas: subjects stamped with a mystery of religion, and originally contrived under the bland images of maternal fondness to subdue the heart. In examining the considerable number of those by Raffaello, we find generally some reciprocal feature of filial and parental love, ‘the charities of father, son, and mother,’ sometimes varied by infant play and female caresses, sometimes dignified by celestial ministry and homage; the endearments of the nursery selected and embodied by forms more charming than exalted, less beautiful than genial—accordingly the choice of scenery consists seldom in more than a pleasing accompaniment: the flower and the shrub, the rivulet and grove, enamel the seat or embower the repose of the sacred pilgrims under the serenity of a placid sky, expanded or breaking through trees, or sheltering rains; whilst in those surrounded by domestic scenery, a warm recess veils the mother, now hiding her darling from profane aspect, now pressing him to her bosom, or contemplating in silent rapture his charms displayed on her lap—accompaniments and actions, though appropriate, without allusion to the mysterious personages they profess to exhibit—to discriminate them the chair, the window, the saddle on which Joseph sits in one, the flowers which he kneeling presents in another, the cradle, the bath, are called on. Raffaello was less penetrated by a devout than by an amorous principle; his design was less to stamp maternal affection with the seal of religion than to consecrate the face he adored; his Holy Families, with one exception, are the apotheosis of his Fornarina.

This exception, as it proves what had been advanced of the rest, so it proves, likewise, that the omission of its beauties in them was more a matter of choice than want of comprehension. Than the face and attitude of the Madonna of Versailles, known from a print by Edelinck, copied by Giac. Frey, nature and art combined never offered to the sense and heart a more exalted sentiment, or more correspondent forms. The face still, indeed, offers his favourite lines, lines not of supreme beauty, but they have assumed a sanctity which is in vain looked for in all its sister faces; serious without severity, pure without insipidity, humble though majestic, charming and modest at once, and without affectation graceful; face and figure unite what we can conceive of maternal beauty, equally poised between effusion of affection and the mysterious sentiment of superiority in the awful Infant, whom she bends to receive from his slumbers.

The bland imagery of Raffaello was exalted to a type of devotion by M. Angelo, and place and scenery are adjusted with allegoric or prophetic ornament: thus in the picture painted for Angelo Doni, where the enraptured mother receives the Infant from the hands of Joseph, the scene behind exhibits the new sacrament in varied groups of Baptists, immersing themselves or issuing from the fount. In another, representing the annunciation, we discover in the awful twilight of a recess, the figure of Moses breaking the tables he received on Sinai, an allusion to the abolition of the old law—an infringement of Jewish habits, for the figure is not an apparition, but a statue, readily forgiven to its allegoric beauty. Even in those subjects relating to Christ and his family, where the back-ground is destitute of allusive ornament, it appears the seat of meditation or virgin purity, and consecrates the sentiment or action of the figures, as in the salutation of St. Giovanni in Laterano, and in that where Maria contemplates her son spread in her lap, and seems to bend under the presentiment of the terrible moment which shall spread him at her feet, under the cross; but in that monumental image of Jesus expired on the cross, with the Madonna and John on each side, what is the scenery but the echo of the subject? The surrounding element sympathises with the woe of the sufferers in the two mourning Genii emerging from the air—a sublime conception, which Vasari fancied to have successfully imitated and perhaps improved, when in a repetition of the same subject, he travestied them to Phœbus and Diana extinguishing their orbs, as symbols of sun and moon eclipsed.[85]

What has been said of the luxuriance of Poussin’s scenery, leads to that intemperate abuse which allots it a greater space, a more conspicuous situation, a higher finish and effect than the importance of the subject itself permits—by which, unity is destroyed, and it becomes doubtful to what class a work belongs, whether it be a mixture of two or more, or all, where portrait with architecture, landscape with history, for ‘mastery striving, each rules a moment.’ It cannot be denied that some of the noblest works of art are liable to this imputation, and that the fond admiration of the detailed beauties in the scenery of the Pietro Martire of Titian, if it does not detract from the main purpose for which the picture was or ought to have been painted, certainly adds nothing to its real interest—nature finishes all, but an attempt to mimic nature’s universality palsies the hand of art; the celebrated ‘Cene,’ or Supper-Scenes of Paolo Cagliari can escape this imputation only by being classed as models of ornamental painting; and were it not known, that notwithstanding their grandeur propriety, and pathos of composition, the Cartoons of Raffaello had been originally destined, still more for popular amusement, than the poised admiration of select judges, it would be difficult to excuse or to account for the exuberance, not seldom the impropriety of accompaniment and of scenery, with which some of them are loaded: in the Cartoon of the miraculous draught of fishes, perhaps Giovanni d’ Udine would not have been allowed to treat us with fac-similes of the herons of the lake on its fore-ground; in that of Paul on the Areopagus, there would probably have been less agglomeration of finished, unfinished, or half-demolished buildings; in the miracle of Peter and John, the principal agents would scarcely have been hemmed in by a barbaric colonnade, loaded with profane ornament; or in the Massacre of the Infants, the humble cottages of Bethlehem been transformed to piles of Ionian architecture, girt with gods in inter-columnar niches, and the metropolitan pomp of Rome.

FIFTH LECTURE. COMPOSITION, EXPRESSION. — ARGUMENT. — FIFTH LECTURE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sacrifice at Lystra, though as a whole it has more of collateral arrangement than depth of Composition, as it traces in the moment of its choice the motive that produced and shews the disappointment that checks it, has collected actors and faces the most suitable to express both: actors and features of godlike dignity, superstitious devotion and eager curiosity: the scene is the vestibule of the temple of Hermes, and Paul the supposed representative of that deity, though not placed in the centre or a central light, by his elevation, gesture, and the whole of the composition streaming toward him, commands the first glance. At the very onset of the ceremony the sacrificer is arrested in the act of smiting the victim, by the outstretched arm of a young man bursting through the hymning throng of priests and victimarii, observing Paul indignant rending his garment in horrour of the idolatrous perversion of his miracle.[86] The miracle itself is personified in that characteristic figure of the healed man, who with eyes flashing joy and gratitude on the Apostle, and hands joined in adoration, rushes in, accompanied by an aged man of gravity and rank, who, lifting up part of the garment that covered his thigh, attests him to have been the identic owner of those crutches that formerly supported him, though now as useless thrown on the pavement.

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

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

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

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

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

Far, too far, from having answered all the demands of composition, my limits force me, and my subject requires, to give a faint sketch of the most prominent features of Expression, its assistant and interpreter. They interweave themselves so closely with each other, and both with Invention, that we can scarcely conceive one without supposing the presence of the rest, and applying the principles of each to all; still they are separate powers, and may be possessed singly. The figure of Christ by M. Agnolo in the Minerva, embracing his cross and the instruments of suffering, is sublimely conceived, powerfully arranged; but neither his features or expression are those of Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This moment of horrour the gigantic but barbarous genius of Rembrandt chose, and, without a metaphor, executed a subject, which humanity, judgment and taste taught his rivals, only to treat; he displays a scene which no eye but that of Domitian or Nero could wish or bear to see. Samson stretched on the ground is held by one Philistine under him, whilst another chains his right arm, and a third clenching his beard with one, drives a dagger into his eye with the other hand. The pain that blasts him, darts expression from the contortions of the mouth and his gnashing teeth to the crampy convulsions of the leg dashed high into the air. Some fiend-like features glare through the gloomy light which discovers Delilah, her work now done, sliding off, the shears in her left, the locks of Samson in her right hand. If her figure, elegant, attractive, such as Rembrandt never conceived before or after, deserve our wonder rather than our praise; no words can do justice to the expression that animates her face, and shews her less shrinking from the horrid scene than exulting in being its cause. Such is the work whose magic of colour, tone and chiaroscuro irresistibly entrap the eye, whilst we detest the brutal choice of the moment.[87]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIXTH LECTURE. CHIAROSCURO. — ARGUMENT. — SIXTH LECTURE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That the discovery of a principle big with advantages as obvious as important to art should have been reserved for the penetration of Lionardo, however singular, is less strange than that, when discovered and its powers demonstrated, it should, with the exception of one name, have not only met with no imitators, but with an ambiguous and even discouraging reception from the pupils of his own school, and some next allied to it. Vasari, his panegyrist rather than biographer, talks of it more as a singular phænomenon than as an evident principle, and avowing that he introduced a certain depth of shade into oil-painting, which enabled succeeding artists to relieve their figures more forcibly[88], persevered to discolour walls and pannels with washy flat insipidity. Bartolomeo della Porta alone appears to have had sufficient compass of mind to grasp its energy and connect it with colour: from him, through Andrea del Sarto down to Pietro Berettini, who owed his effects rather to opposition of tints than to legitimate Chiaroscuro, the Tuscan school gradually suffered it to dwindle into evanescence. Unless we were to consider its astonishing effects in some of Michael Angelo’s works in the light of imitations rather than as emanations of his own genius; which perhaps we are the less warranted to presume as he seems to have paid no attention to Lionardo’s discovery in its brightest period; for the groups of his celebrated cartoon exhibit little more than individual light and shade.

What the Tuscan school treated with neglect the Roman appears not to have been eager to adopt: if Raffaello did not remain a stranger to the theories of Lionardo and Frà. Bartolomeo, he suffered the principle to lie dormant; for no production of his during his intercourse with them is marked by concentration of light or purity of shade or subordinate masses: nor is the interval between his last departure from Florence and his entrance of the Vatican discriminated by any visible progress in massing and illuminating a whole: the upper and lower parts of the dispute on the Sacrament, cut sheer asunder, as a whole, are little relieved in either; and if the Parnassus and the school of Athens have the beginning, middle, and end of legitimate Composition, they owe it to expression and feeling; nor can the more vigorous display of Chiaroscuro in the works of the second stanza, the Deliverance of Peter, the Fall of Heliodorus, the Attila, the Mass of Bolsena be referred to a principle of imitation, when we see it neglected in a subject where it might have ruled with absolute sway, in the Incendio del Borgo, and on the whole in every Composition of the third and fourth stanza; a series of evidence that Raffaello considered Chiaroscuro as a subordinate vehicle, and never suffered its blandishments or energies to absorb meaning or to supplant expression and form[89]: but the harmony which immediately after him Giulio Pipi, and Polydoro only excepted, the rest of his pupils had sacrificed or consecrated to higher beauties, their successors, the subsequent Roman school from the Zuccari through Giuseppo Cesari down to C. Maratta, if they did not entirely lose in a heavy display of academic pedantry, or destroy by the remorseless ‘bravura’ of mannered practice, they uniformly polluted by bastard theories and adulterated methods of shade.

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

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 aërial 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 hand 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, Tiziàn; 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.[90]

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 St. 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.[91]

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[92]; 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 superiour powers to raise a subject, by the admission of subordinate, sometimes diverging, sometimes opposite streams of light, to assist and invigourate the effect of the primary one, without impairing that unity which, alone can ensure a breadth of 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 back-ground, 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 day-light, 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 splendor and angelic hues: whilst in the Infant-massacre at Bethlehem alternate sheets of stormy light, and agitated gloom, dash horrour 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 superiour 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 day-light 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 frescos.

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 canvas, and invigourate 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 inchanted 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 lap’d 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 Sybils 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 ecstacies, 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 Lodovico 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 Lodovico 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 frescos 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 terrours 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

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