Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, by the Abbé Winkelmann, translated by Henry Fusseli

My Lord,

With becoming gratitude for your Lordship’s condescension in granting such a noble Asylum to a Stranger, I humbly presume to shelter this Translation under your Lordship’s Patronage.

If I have been able to do justice to my Author, your Lordship’s accurate Jugment, and fine Taste, will naturally protect his Work: But I must rely wholly on your known Candour and Goodness for the pardon of many imperfections in the language.

I am, with the most profound respect,

My Lord,

Your Lordship’s

Most obliged, most obedient, and most humble Servant,

Henry Fusseli.

London,
10 April, 1765.

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To the Greek climate we owe the production of Taste, and from thence it spread at length over all the politer world. Every invention, communicated by foreigners to that nation, was but the feed of what it became afterwards, changing both its nature and size in a country, chosen, as Plato[1] says, by Minerva, to be inhabited by the Greeks, as productive of every kind of genius.

But this Taste was not only original among the Greeks, but seemed also quite peculiar to their country: it seldom went abroad without loss; and was long ere it imparted its kind influences to more distant climes. It was, doubtless, a stranger to the northern zones, when Painting and Sculpture, those offsprings of Greece, were despised there to such a degree, that the most valuable pieces of Corregio served only for blinds to the windows of the royal stables at Stockholm.

There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the antients. And what we are told of Homer, that whoever understands him well, admires him, we find no less true in matters concerning the antient, especially the Greek arts. But then we must be as familiar with them as with a friend, to find Laocoon as inimitable as Homer. By such intimacy our judgment will be that of Nicomachus: Take these eyes, replied he to some paltry critick, censuring the Helen of Zeuxis, Take my eyes, and she will appear a goddess.

With such eyes Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Poussin, considered the performances of the antients. They imbibed taste at its source; and Raphael particularly in its native country. We know, that he sent young artists to Greece, to copy there, for his use, the remains of antiquity.

An antient Roman statue, compared to a Greek one, will generally appear like Virgil’s Diana amidst her Oreads, in comparison of the Nausicaa of Homer, whom he imitated.

Laocoon was the standard of the Roman artists, as well as ours; and the rules of Polycletus became the rules of art.

I need not put the reader in mind of the negligences to be met with in the most celebrated antient performances: the Dolphin at the feet of the Medicean Venus, with the children, and the Parerga of the Diomedes by Dioscorides, being commonly known. The reverse of the best Egyptian and Syrian coins seldom equals the head, in point of workmanship. Great artists are wisely negligent, and even their errors instruct. Behold their works as Lucian bids you behold the Zeus of Phidias; Zeus himself, not his footstool.

It is not only Nature which the votaries of the Greeks find in their works, but still more, something superior to nature; ideal beauties, brain-born images, as Proclus says[2].

The most beautiful body of ours would perhaps be as much inferior to the most beautiful Greek one, as Iphicles was to his brother Hercules. The forms of the Greeks, prepared to beauty, by the influence of the mildest and purest sky, became perfectly elegant by their early exercises. Take a Spartan youth, sprung from heroes, undistorted by swaddling-cloths; whose bed, from his seventh year, was the earth, familiar with wrestling and swimming from his infancy; and compare him with one of our young Sybarits, and then decide which of the two would be deemed worthy, by an artist, to serve for the model of a Theseus, an Achilles, or even a Bacchus. The latter would produce a Theseus fed on roses, the former a Theseus fed on flesh, to borrow the expression of Euphranor.

The grand games were always a very strong incentive for every Greek youth to exercise himself. Whoever aspired to the honours of these was obliged, by the laws, to submit to a trial of ten months at Elis, the general rendezvous; and there the first rewards were commonly won by youths, as Pindar tells us.[3]To be like the God-like Diagoras, was the fondest wish of every youth.

Behold the swift Indian outstripping in pursuit the hart: how briskly his juices circulate! how flexible, how elastic his nerves and muscles! how easy his whole frame! Thus Homer draws his heroes, and his Achilles he eminently marks for “being swift of foot.”

By these exercises the bodies of the Greeks got the great and manly Contour observed in their statues, without any bloated corpulency. The young Spartans were bound to appear every tenth day naked before the Ephori, who, when they perceived any inclinable to fatness, ordered them a scantier diet; nay, it was one of Pythagoras’s precepts, to beware of growing too corpulent; and, perhaps for the same reason, youths aspiring to wrestling-games were, in the remoter ages of Greece, during their trial, confined to a milk diet.

They were particularly cautious in avoiding every deforming custom; and Alcibiades, when a boy, refusing to learn to play on the flute, for fear of its discomposing his features, was followed by all the youth of Athens.

In their dress they were professed followers of nature. No modern stiffening habit, no squeezing stays hindered Nature from forming easy beauty; the fair knew no anxiety about their attire, and from their loose and short habits the Spartan girls got the epithet of Phænomirides.

We know what pains they took to have handsome children, but want to be acquainted with their methods: for certainly Quillet, in his Callipædy, falls short of their numerous expedients. They even attempted changing blue eyes to black ones, and games of beauty were exhibited at Elis, the rewards consisting of arms consecrated to the temple of Minerva. How could they miss of competent and learned judges, when, as Aristotle tells us, the Grecian youths were taught drawing expressly for that purpose? From their fine complexion, which, though mingled with a vast deal of foreign blood, is still preserved in most of the Greek islands, and from the still enticing beauty of the fair sex, especially at Chios; we may easily form an idea of the beauty of the former inhabitants, who boasted of being Aborigines, nay, more antient than the moon.

And are not there several modern nations, among whom beauty is too common to give any title to pre-eminence? Such are unanimously accounted the Georgians and the Kabardinski in the Crim.

Those diseases which are destructive of beauty, were moreover unknown to the Greeks. There is not the least hint of the small-pox, in the writings of their physicians; and Homer, whose portraits are always so truly drawn, mentions not one pitted face. Venereal plagues, and their daughter the English malady, had not yet names.

And must we not then, considering every advantage which nature bestows, or art teaches, for forming, preserving, and improving beauty, enjoyed and applied by the Grecians; must we not then confess, there is the strongest probability that the beauty of their persons excelled all we can have an idea of?

Art claims liberty: in vain would nature produce her noblest offsprings, in a country where rigid laws would choak her progressive growth, as in Egypt, that pretended parent of sciences and arts: but in Greece, where, from their earliest youth, the happy inhabitants were devoted to mirth and pleasure, where narrow-spirited formality never restrained the liberty of manners, the artist enjoyed nature without a veil.

The Gymnasies, where, sheltered by public modesty, the youths exercised themselves naked, were the schools of art. These the philosopher frequented, as well as the artist. Socrates for the instruction of a Charmides, Autolycus, Lysis; Phidias for the improvement of his art by their beauty. Here he studied the elasticity of the muscles, the ever varying motions of the frame, the outlines of fair forms, or the Contour left by the young wrestler on the sand. Here beautiful nakedness appeared with such a liveliness of expression, such truth and variety of situations, such a noble air of the body, as it would be ridiculous to look for in any hired model of our academies.

Truth springs from the feelings of the heart. What shadow of it therefore can the modern artist hope for, by relying upon a vile model, whose soul is either too base to feel, or too stupid to express the passions, the sentiment his object claims? unhappy he! if experience and fancy fail him.

The beginning of many of Plato’s dialogues, supposed to have been held in the Gymnasies, cannot raise our admiration of the generous souls of the Athenian youth, without giving us, at the same time, a strong presumption of a suitable nobleness in their outward carriage and bodily exercises.

The fairest youths danced undressed on the theatre; and Sophocles, the great Sophocles, when young, was the first who dared to entertain his fellow-citizens in this manner. Phryne went to bathe at the Eleusinian games, exposed to the eyes of all Greece, and rising from the water became the model of Venus Anadyomene. During certain solemnities the young Spartan maidens danced naked before the young men: strange this may seem, but will appear more probable, when we consider that the christians of the primitive church, both men and women, were dipped together in the same font.

Then every solemnity, every festival, afforded the artist opportunity to familiarize himself with all the beauties of Nature.

In the most happy times of their freedom, the humanity of the Greeks abhorred bloody games, which even in the Ionick Asia had ceased long before, if, as some guess, they had once been usual there. Antiochus Epiphanes, by ordering shews of Roman gladiators, first presented them with such unhappy victims; and custom and time, weakening the pangs of sympathizing humanity, changed even these games into schools of art. There Ctesias studied his dying gladiator, in whom you might descry “how much life was still left in him[4].”

These frequent occasions of observing Nature, taught the Greeks to go on still farther. They began to form certain general ideas of beauty, with regard to the proportions of the inferiour parts, as well as of the whole frame: these they raised above the reach of mortality, according to the superiour model of some ideal nature.

Thus Raphael formed his Galatea, as we learn by his letter to Count Baltazar Castiglione[5], where he says, “Beauty being so seldom found among the fair, I avail myself of a certain ideal image.”

According to those ideas, exalted above the pitch of material models, the Greeks formed their gods and heroes: the profile of the brow and nose of gods and goddesses is almost a streight line. The same they gave on their coins to queens, &c. but without indulging their fancy too much. Perhaps this profile was as peculiar to the antient Greeks, as flat noses and little eyes to the Calmucks and Chinese; a supposition which receives some strength from the large eyes of all the heads on Greek coins and gems.

From the same ideas the Romans formed their Empresses on their coins. Livia and Agrippina have the profile of Artemisia and Cleopatra.

We observe, nevertheless, that the Greek artists in general, submitted to the law prescribed by the Thebans: “To do, under a penalty, their best in imitating Nature.” For, where they could not possibly apply their easy profile, without endangering the resemblance, they followed Nature, as we see instanced in the beauteous head of Julia, the daughter of Titus, done by Euodus[6].

But to form a “just resemblance, and, at the same time, a handsomer one,” being always the chief rule they observed, and which Polygnotus constantly went by; they must, of necessity, be supposed to have had in view a more beauteous and more perfect Nature. And when we are told, that some artists imitated Praxiteles, who took his concubine Cratina for the model of his Cnidian Venus; or that others formed the graces from Lais; it is to be understood that they did so, without neglecting these great laws of the art. Sensual beauty furnished the painter with all that nature could give; ideal beauty with the awful and sublime; from that he took the Humane, from this the Divine.

Let any one, sagacious enough to pierce into the depths of art, compare the whole system of the Greek figures with that of the moderns, by which, as they say, nature alone is imitated; good heaven! what a number of neglected beauties will he not discover!

For instance, in most of the modern figures, if the skin happens to be any where pressed, you see there several little smart wrinkles: when, on the contrary, the same parts, pressed in the same manner on Greek statues, by their soft undulations, form at last but one noble pressure. These master-pieces never shew us the skin forcibly stretched, but softly embracing the firm flesh, which fills it up without any tumid expansion, and harmoniously follows its direction. There the skin never, as on modern bodies, appears in plaits distinct from the flesh.

Modern works are likewise distinguished from the antient by parts; a crowd of small touches and dimples too sensibly drawn. In antient works you find these distributed with sparing sagacity, and, as relative to a completer and more perfect Nature, offered but as hints, nay, often perceived only by the learned.

The probability still increases, that the bodies of the Greeks, as well as the works of their artists, were framed with more unity of system, a nobler harmony of parts, and a completeness of the whole, above our lean tensions and hollow wrinkles.

Probability, ’tis true, is all we can pretend to: but it deserves the attention of our artists and connoisseurs the rather, as the veneration professed for the antient monuments is commonly imputed to prejudice, and not to their excellence; as if the numerous ages, during which they have mouldered, were the only motive for bestowing on them exalted praises, and setting them up for the standards of imitation.

Such as would fain deny to the Greeks the advantages both of a more perfect Nature and of ideal Beauties, boast of the famous Bernini, as their great champion. He was of opinion, besides, that Nature was possessed of every requisite beauty: the only skill being to discover that. He boasted of having got rid of a prejudice concerning the Medicean Venus, whose charms he at first thought peculiar ones; but, after many careful researches, discovered them now and then in Nature[7].

He was taught then, by the Venus, to discover beauties in common Nature, which he had formerly thought peculiar to that statue, and but for it, never would have searched for them. Follows it not from thence, that the beauties of the Greek statues being discovered with less difficulty than those of Nature, are of course more affecting; not so diffused, but more harmoniously united? and if this be true, the pointing out of Nature as chiefly imitable, is leading us into a more tedious and bewildered road to the knowledge of perfect beauty, than setting up the ancients for that purpose: consequently Bernini, by adhering too strictly to Nature, acted against his own principles, as well as obstructed the progress of his disciples.

The imitation of beauty is either reduced to a single object, and is individual, or, gathering observations from single ones, composes of these one whole. The former we call copying, drawing a portrait; ’tis the straight way to Dutch forms and figures; whereas the other leads to general beauty, and its ideal images, and is the way the Greeks took. But there is still this difference between them and us: they enjoying daily occasions of seeing beauty, (suppose even not superior to ours,) acquired those ideal riches with less toil than we, confined as we are to a few and often fruitless opportunities, ever can hope for. It would be no easy matter, I fancy, for our nature, to produce a frame equal in beauty to that of Antinous; and surely no idea can soar above the more than human proportions of a deity, in the Apollo of the Vatican, which is a compound of the united force of Nature, Genius, and Art.

Their imitation discovering in the one every beauty diffused through Nature, shewing in the other the pitch to which the most perfect Nature can elevate herself, when soaring above the senses, will quicken the genius of the artist, and shorten his discipleship: he will learn to think and draw with confidence, seeing here the fixed limits of human and divine beauty.

Building on this ground, his hand and senses directed by the Greek rule of beauty, the modern artist goes on the surest way to the imitation of Nature. The ideas of unity and perfection, which he acquired in meditating on antiquity, will help him to combine, and to ennoble the more scattered and weaker beauties of our Nature. Thus he will improve every beauty he discovers in it, and by comparing the beauties of nature with the ideal, form rules for himself.

Then, and not sooner, he, particularly the painter, may be allowed to commit himself to Nature, especially in cases where his art is beyond the instruction of the old marbles, to wit, in drapery; then, like Poussin, he may proceed with more liberty; for “a timid follower will never get the start of his leaders, and he who is at a loss to produce something of his own, will be a bad manager of the productions of another,” as Michael Angelo says; Minds favoured by Nature,

have here a plain way to become originals.

Thus the account de Piles gives, ought to be understood, that Raphael, a short time before he was carried off by death, intended to forsake the marbles, in order to addict himself wholly to Nature. True antient taste would most certainly have guided him through every maze of common Nature; and whatever observations, whatever new ideas he might have reaped from that, they would all, by a kind of chymical transmutation, have been changed to his own essence and soul.

He, perhaps, might have indulged more variety; enlarged his draperies; improved his colours, his light and shadow: but none of these improvements would have raised his pictures to that high esteem they deserve, for that noble Contour, and that sublimity of thoughts, which he acquired from the ancients.

Nothing would more decisively prove the advantages to be got by imitating the ancients, preferably to Nature, than an essay made with two youths of equal talents, by devoting the one to antiquity, the other to Nature: this would draw Nature as he finds her; if Italian, perhaps he might paint like Caravaggio; if Flemish, and lucky, like Jac. Jordans; if French, like Stella: the other would draw her as she directs, and paint like Raphael.

But even supposing that the imitation of Nature could supply all the artist wants, she never could bestow the precision of Contour, that characteristic distinction of the ancients.

The noblest Contour unites or circumscribes every part of the most perfect Nature, and the ideal beauties in the figures of the Greeks; or rather, contains them both. Euphranor, famous after the epoch of Zeuxis, is said to have first ennobled it.

Many of the moderns have attempted to imitate this Contour, but very few with success. The great Rubens is far from having attained either its precision or elegance, especially in the performances which he finished before he went to Italy, and studied the antiques.

The line by which Nature divides completeness from superfluity is but a small one, and, insensible as it often is, has been crossed even by the best moderns; while these, in shunning a meagre Contour, became corpulent, those, in shunning that, grew lean.

Among them all, only Michael Angelo, perhaps, may be said to have attained the antique; but only in strong muscular figures, heroic frames; not in those of tender youth; nor in female bodies, which, under his bold hand, grew Amazons.

The Greek artist, on the contrary, adjusted his Contour, in every figure, to the breadth of a single hair, even in the nicest and most tiresome performances, as gems. Consider the Diomedes and Perseus of Dioscorides[8], Hercules and Iole by Teucer[9], and admire the inimitable Greeks.

Parrhasius, they say, was master of the correctest Contour.

This Contour reigns in Greek figures, even when covered with drapery, as the chief aim of the artist; the beautiful frame pierces the marble like a transparent Coan cloth.

The high-stiled Agrippina, and the three vestals in the royal cabinet at Dresden, deserve to be mentioned as eminent proofs of this. This Agrippina seems not the mother of Nero, but an elder one, the spouse of Germanicus. She much resembles another pretended Agrippina, in the parlour of the library of St. Marc, at Venice[10]. Ours is a sitting figure, above the size of Nature, her head inclined on her right hand; her fine face speaks a soul “pining in thought,” absorbed in pensive sorrow, and senseless to every outward impression. The artist, I suppose, intended to draw his heroine in the mournful moment she received the news of her banishment to Pandataria.

The three vestals deserve our esteem from a double title: as being the first important discoveries of Herculaneum, and models of the sublimest drapery. All three, but particularly one above the natural size, would, with regard to that, be worthy companions of the Farnesian Flora, and all the other boasts of antiquity. The two others seem, by their resemblance to each other, productions of the same hand, only distinguished by their heads, which are not of equal goodness. On the best the curled hairs, running in furrows from the forehead, are tied on the neck: on the other the hair being smooth on the scalp, and curled on the front, is gathered behind, and tied with a ribband: this head seems of a modern hand, but a good one.

There is no veil on these heads; but that makes not against their being vestals: for the priestesses of Vesta (I speak on proof) were not always veiled; or rather, as the drapery seems to betray, the veil, which was of one piece with the garments, being thrown backwards, mingles with the cloaths on the neck.

’Tis to these three inimitable pieces that the world owes the first hints of the ensuing discovery of the subterranean treasures of Herculaneum.

Their discovery happened when the same ruins that overwhelmed the town had nearly extinguished the unhappy remembrance of it: when the tremendous fate that spoke its doom was only known by the account which Pliny gives of his uncle’s death.

These great master-pieces of the Greek art were transplanted, and worshipped in Germany, long before Naples could boast of one single Herculanean monument.

They were discovered in the year 1706 at Portici near Naples, in a ruinous vault, on occasion of digging the foundations of a villa, for the Prince d’Elbeuf, and immediately, with other new discovered marble and metal statues, came into the possession of Prince Eugene, and were transported to Vienna.

Eugene, who well knew their value, provided a Sala Terrena to be built expressly for them, and a few others: and so highly were they esteemed, that even on the first rumour of their sale, the academy and the artists were in an uproar, and every body, when they were transported to Dresden, followed them with heavy eyes.

The famous Matielli, to whom

copied them in clay before their removal, and following them some years after, filled Dresden with everlasting monuments of his art: but even there he studied the drapery of his priestesses, (drapery his chief skill!) till he laid down his chissel, and thus gave the most striking proof of their excellence.

By Drapery is to be understood all that the art teaches of covering the nudities, and folding the garments; and this is the third prerogative of the ancients.

The Drapery of the vestals above, is grand and elegant. The smaller foldings spring gradually from the larger ones, and in them are lost again, with a noble freedom, and gentle harmony of the whole, without hiding the correct Contour. How few of the moderns would stand the test here!

Justice, however, shall not be refused to some great modern artists, who, without impairing nature or truth, have left, in certain cases, the road which the ancients generally pursued. The Greek Drapery, in order to help the Contour, was, for the most part, taken from thin and wet garments, which of course clasped the body, and discovered the shape. The robe of the Greek ladies was extremely thin; thence its epithet of Peplon.

Nevertheless the reliefs, the pictures, and particularly the busts of the ancients, are instances that they did not always keep to this undulating Drapery[11].

In modern times the artists were forced to heap garments, and sometimes heavy ones, on each other, which of course could not fall into the flowing folds of the ancients. Hence the large-folded Drapery, by which the painter and sculptor may display as much skill as by the ancient manner. Carlo Marat and Francis Solimena may be called the chief masters of it: but the garments of the new Venetian school, by passing the bounds of nature and propriety, became stiff as brass.

The last and most eminent characteristic of the Greek works is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in Gesture and Expression. As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures.

’Tis in the face of Laocoon this soul shines with full lustre, not confined however to the face, amidst the most violent sufferings. Pangs piercing every muscle, every labouring nerve; pangs which we almost feel ourselves, while we consider—not the face, nor the most expressive parts—only the belly contracted by excruciating pains: these however, I say, exert not themselves with violence, either in the face or gesture. He pierces not heaven, like the Laocoon of Virgil; his mouth is rather opened to discharge an anxious overloaded groan, as Sadolet says; the struggling body and the supporting mind exert themselves with equal strength, nay balance all the frame.

Laocoon suffers, but suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles: we weeping feel his pains, but wish for the hero’s strength to support his misery.

The Expression of so great a soul is beyond the force of mere nature. It was in his own mind the artist was to search for the strength of spirit with which he marked his marble. Greece enjoyed artists and philosophers in the same persons; and the wisdom of more than one Metrodorus directed art, and inspired its figures with more than common souls.

Had Laocoon been covered with a garb becoming an antient sacrificer, his sufferings would have lost one half of their Expression. Bernini pretended to perceive the first effects of the operating venom in the numbness of one of the thighs.

Every action or gesture in Greek figures, not stamped with this character of sage dignity, but too violent, too passioniate, was called “Parenthyrsos.”

For, the more tranquillity reigns in a body, the fitter it is to draw the true character of the soul; which, in every excessive gesture, seems to rush from her proper centre, and being hurried away by extremes becomes unnatural. Wound up to the highest pitch of passion, she may force herself upon the duller eye; but the true sphere of her action is simplicity and calmness. In Laocoon sufferings alone had been Parenthyrsos; the artist therefore, in order to reconcile the significative and ennobling qualities of his soul, put him into a posture, allowing for the sufferings that were necessary, the next to a state of tranquillity: a tranquillity however that is characteristical: the soul will be herself—this individual—not the soul of mankind; sedate, but active; calm, but not indifferent or drowsy.

What a contrast! how diametrically opposite to this is the taste of our modern artists, especially the young ones! on nothing do they bestow their approbation, but contorsions and strange postures, inspired with boldness; this they pretend is done with spirit, with Franchezza. Contrast is the darling of their ideas; in it they fancy every perfection. They fill their performances with comet-like excentric souls, despising every thing but an Ajax or a Capaneus.

Arts have their infancy as well as men; they begin, as well as the artist, with froth and bombast: in such buskins the muse of Æschilus stalks, and part of the diction in his Agamemnon is more loaded with hyperboles than all Heraclitus’s nonsense. Perhaps the primitive Greek painters drew in the same manner that their first good tragedian thought in.

In all human actions flutter and rashness precede, sedateness and solidity follow: but time only can discover, and the judicious will admire these only: they are the characteristics of great masters; violent passions run away with their disciples.

The sages in the art know the difficulties hid under that air of easiness:

La Fage, though an eminent designer, was not able to attain the purity of ancient taste. Every thing is animated in his works; they demand, and at the same time dissipate, your attention, like a company striving to talk all at once.

This noble simplicity and sedate grandeur is also the true characteristical mark of the best and maturest Greek writings, of the epoch and school of Socrates. Possessed of these qualities Raphael became eminently great, and he owed them to the ancients.

That great soul of his, lodged in a beauteous body, was requisite for the first discovery of the true character of the ancients: he first felt all their beauties, and (what he was peculiarly happy in!) at an age when vulgar, unfeeling, and half-moulded souls overlook every higher beauty.

Ye that approach his works, teach your eyes to be sensible of those beauties, refine your taste by the true antique, and then that solemn tranquillity of the chief figures in his Attila, deemed insipid by the vulgar, will appear to you equally significant and sublime. The Roman bishop, in order to divert the Hun from his design of assailing Rome, appears not with the air of a Rhetor, but as a venerable man, whose very presence softens uproar into peace; like him drawn by Virgil:

full of confidence in God, he faces down the barbarian: the two Apostles descend not with the air of slaughtering angels, but (if sacred may be compared with profane) like Jove, whose very nod shakes Olympus.

Algardi, in his celebrated representation of the same story, done in bas-relief on an altar in St. Peter’s church at Rome, was either too negligent, or too weak, to give this active tranquillity of his great predecessor to the figures of his Apostles. There they appear like messengers of the Lord of Hosts: here like human warriors with mortal arms.

How few of those we call connoisseurs have ever been able to understand, and sincerely to admire, the grandeur of expression in the St. Michael of Guido, in the church of the Capuchins at Rome! they prefer commonly the Archangel of Concha, whose face glows with indignation and revenge[12]; whereas Guido’s Angel, after having overthrown the fiend of God and man, hovers over him unruffled and undismayed.

Thus, to heighten the hero of The Campaign, victorious Marlborough, the British poet paints the avenging Angel hovering over Britannia with the like serenity and awful calmness.

The royal gallery at Dresden contains now, among its treasures, one of Raphael’s best pictures, witness Vasari, &c. a Madonna with the Infant; St. Sixtus and St. Barbara kneeling, one on each side, and two Angels in the fore-part.

It was the chief altar-piece in the cloister of St. Sixtus at Piacenza, which was crouded by connoisseurs, who came to see this Raphael, in the same manner as Thespis was in the days of old, for the sake of the beautiful Cupid of Praxiteles.

Behold the Madonna! her face brightens with innocence; a form above the female size, and the calmness of her mien, make her appear as already beatified: she has that silent awfulness which the ancients spread over their deities. How grand, how noble is her Contour!

The child in her arms is elevated above vulgar children, by a face darting the beams of divinity through every smiling feature of harmless childhood.

St. Barbara kneels, with adoring stillness, at her side: but being far beneath the majesty of the chief figure, the great artist compensated her humbler graces with soft enticing charms.

The Saint opposite to her is venerable with age. His features seem to bear witness of his sacred youth.

The veneration which St. Barbara declares for the Madonna, expressed in the most sensible and pathetic manner, by her fine hands clasped on her breast, helps to support the motion of one of St. Sixtus’s hands, by which he utters his extasy, better becoming (as the artist judiciously thought, and chose for variety’s sake) manly strength, than female modesty.

Time, ’tis true, has withered the primitive splendour of this picture, and partly blown off its lively colours; but still the soul, with which the painter inspired his godlike work, breathes life through all its parts.

Let those that approach this, and the rest of Raphael’s works, in hopes of finding there the trifling Dutch and Flemish beauties, the laboured nicety of Netscher, or Douw, flesh ivorified by Van der Werf, or even the licked manner of some of Raphael’s living countrymen; let those, I say, be told, that Raphael was not a great master for them.

After these remarks on the Nature, the Contour, the Drapery, the simplicity and grandeur of Expression in the performances of the Greek artists, we shall proceed to some inquiries into their method of working.

Their models were generally made of wax; instead of which the moderns used clay, or such like unctuous stuff, as seeming fitter for expressing flesh, than the more gluey and tenacious wax.

A method however not new, though more frequent in our times: for we know even the name of that ancient who first attempted modelling in wet clay; ’twas Dibutades of Sicyon; and Arcesilaus, the friend of Lucullus, grew more famous by his models of clay than his other performances. He made for Lucullus a figure of clay representing Happiness, and received 60,000 sesterces: and Octavius, a Roman Knight, paid him a talent for the model only of a large dish, in plaister, which he designed to have finished in gold.

Of all materials, clay might be allowed to be the fittest for shaping figures, could it preserve its moistness; but losing that by time or fire, its solider parts, contracting by degrees, lessen the bulk of the mass; and that which is formed, being of different diameters, grows sooner dry in some parts than in others, and the dry ones being shrunk to a smaller size, there will be no proportion kept in the whole.

From this inconvenience wax is always free: it loses nothing of its bulk; and there are also means to give it the smoothness of flesh, which is refused to modelling; viz. you make your model of clay, mould it with plaister, and cast the wax over it.

But for transferring their models to the marble, the Greeks seem to have possessed some peculiar advantages, which are now lost: for you discover, every where in their works, the traces of a confident hand; and even in those of inferior rank, it would be no easy matter to prove a wrong cut. Surely hands so steady, so secure, must of necessity have been guided by rules more determinate and less arbitrary than we can boast of.

The usual method of our sculptors is, to quarter the well-prepared model with horizontals and perpendiculars, and, as is common in copying a picture, to draw a relative number of squares on the marble.

Thus, regular gradations of a scale being supposed, every small square of the model has its corresponding one on the marble. But the contents of the relative masses not being determinable by a measured surface, the artist, though he gives to his stone the resemblance of the model, yet, as he only depends on the precarious aid of his eye, he shall never cease wavering, as to his doing right or wrong, cutting too flat or too deep.

Nor can he find lines to determine precisely the outlines, or the Contour of the inward parts, and the centre of his model, in so fixed and unchangeable a manner, as to enable him, exactly, to transfer the same Contours upon his stone.

To all this add, that, if his work happens to be too voluminous for one single hand, he must trust to those of his journeymen and disciples, who, too often, are neither skilful nor cautious enough to follow their master’s design; and if once the smallest trifle be cut wrong, for it is impossible to fix, by this method, the limits of the cuts, all is lost.

It is to be remarked in general, that every sculptor, who carries on his chisselings their whole length, on first fashioning his marble, and does not prepare them by gradual cuts for the last final strokes; it is to be remarked, I say, that he never can keep his work free from faults.

Another chief defect in that method is this: the artist cannot help cutting off, every moment, the lines on his block; and though he restore them, cannot possibly be sure of avoiding mistakes.

On account of this unavoidable uncertainty, the artists found themselves obliged to contrive another method, and that which the French academy at Rome first made use of for copying antiques, was applied by many even to modelled performances.

Over the statue which you want to copy, you fix a well-proportioned square, dividing it into equally distant degrees, by plummets: by these the outlines of the figure are more distinctly marked than they could possibly be by means of the former method: they moreover afford the artist an exact measure of the more prominent or lower parts, by the degrees in which these parts are near them, and in short, allow him to go on with more confidence.

But the undulations of a curve being not determinable by a single perpendicular, the Contours of the figure are but indifferently indicated to the artist; and among their many declinations from a straight surface, his tenour is every moment lost.

The difficulty of discovering the real proportions of the figures, may also be easily imagined: they seek them by horizontals placed across the plummets. But the rays reflected from the figure through the squares, will strike the eye in enlarged angles, and consequently appear bigger, in proportion as they are high or low to the point of view.

Nevertheless, as the ancient monuments must be most cautiously dealt with, plummets are still of use in copying them, as no surer or easier method has been discovered: but for performances to be done from models they are unfit for want of precision.

Michael Angelo went alone a way unknown before him, and (strange to tell!) untrod since the time of that genius of modern sculpture.

This Phidias of latter times, and next to the Greeks, hath, in all probability, hit the very mark of his great masters. We know at least no method so eminently proper for expressing on the block every, even the minutest, beauty of the model.

Vasari[13] seems to give but a defective description of this method, viz. Michael Angelo took a vessel filled with water, in which he placed his model of wax, or some such indissoluble matter: then, by degrees, raised it to the surface of the water. In this manner the prominent parts were unwet, the lower covered, ’till the whole at length appeared. Thus says Vasari, he cut his marble, proceeding from the more prominent parts to the lower ones.

Vasari, it seems, either mistook something in the management of his friend, or by the negligence of his account gives us room to imagine it somewhat different from what he relates.

The form of the vessel is not determined; to raise the figure from below would prove too troublesome, and presupposes much more than this historian had a mind to inform us of.

Michael Angelo, no doubt, thoroughly examined his invention, its conveniencies and inconveniencies, and in all probability observed the following method.

He took a vessel proportioned to his model; for instance, an oblong square: he marked the surface of its sides with certain dimensions, and these he transferred afterwards, with regular gradations, on the marble. The inside of the vessel he marked to the bottom with degrees. Then he laid, or, if of wax, fastened his model in it; he drew, perhaps, a bar over the vessel suitable to its dimensions, according to whose number he drew, first, lines on his marble, and immediately after, the figure; he poured water on the model till it reached its outmost points, and after having fixed upon a prominent part, he drew off as much water as hindered him from seeing it, and then went to work with his chissel, the degrees shewing him how to go on; if, at the same time, some other part of the model appeared, it was copied too, as far as seen.

Water was again carried off, in order to let the lower parts appear; by the degrees he saw to what pitch it was reduced, and by its smoothness he discovered the exact surfaces of the lower parts; nor could he go wrong, having the same number of degrees to guide him, upon his marble.

The water not only pointed him out the heights or depths, but also the Contour of his model; and the space left free on the insides to the surface of the water, whose largeness was determined by the degrees of the two other sides, was the exact measure of what might safely be cut down from the block.

His work had now got the first form, and a correct one: the levelness of the water had drawn a line, of which every prominence of the mass was a point; according to the diminution of the water the line sunk in a horizontal direction, and was followed by the artist ’till he discovered the declinations of the prominences, and their mingling with the lower parts. Proceeding thus with every degree, as it appeared, he finished the Contour, and took his model out of the water.

His figure wanted beauty: he again poured water to a proper height over his model, and then numbering the degrees to the line described by the water, he descried the exact height of the protuberant parts; on these he levelled his rule, and took the measure of the distance, from its verge to the bottom; and then comparing all he had done with his marble, and finding the same number of degrees, he was geometrically sure of success.

Repeating his task, he attempted to express the motion and re-action of nerves and muscles, the soft undulations of the smaller parts, and every imitable beauty of his model. The water insinuating itself, even into the most inaccessible parts, traced their Contour with the correctest sharpness and precision.

This method admits of every possible posture. In profile especially, it discovers every inadvertency; shews the Contour of the prominent and lower parts, and the whole diameter.

All this, and the hope of success, presupposes a model formed by skilful hands, in the true taste of antiquity.

This is the way by which Michael Angelo arrived at immortality. Fame and rewards conspired to procure him what leisure he wanted, for performances which required so much care.

But the artist of our days, however endowed by nature and industry with talents to raise himself, and even though he perceive precision and truth in this method, is forced to exert his abilities for getting bread rather than honour: he of course rests in his usual sphere, and continues to trust in an eye directed by years and practice.

Now this eye, by the observations of which he is chiefly ruled, being at last, though by a great deal of uncertain practice, become almost decisive: how refined, how exact might it not have been, if, from early youth, acquainted with never-changing rules!

And were young artists, at their first beginning to shape the clay or form the wax, so happy as to be instructed in this sure method of Michael Angelo, which was the fruit of long researches, they might with reason hope to come as near the Greeks as he did.

Greek Painting perhaps would share all the praises bestowed on their Sculpture, had time and the barbarity of mankind allowed us to be decisive on that point.

All the Greek painters are allowed is Contour and Expression. Perspective, Composition, and Colouring, are denied them; a judgment founded on some bas-reliefs, and the new-discovered ancient (for we dare not say Greek) pictures, at and near Rome, in the subterranean vaults of the palaces of Mæcenas, Titus, Trajan, and the Antonini; of which but about thirty are preserved entire, some being only in Mosaic.

Turnbull, to his treatise on ancient painting, has subjoined a collection of the most known ancient pictures, drawn by Camillo Paderni, and engraved by Mynde; and these alone give some value to the magnificent and abused paper of his work. Two of them are copied from originals in the cabinet of the late Dr. Mead.

That Poussin much studied the pretended Aldrovandine Nuptials; that drawings are found done by Annibal Carracci, from the presumed Marcius Coriolanus; and that there is a most striking resemblance between the heads of Guido, and those on the Mosaic representing Jupiter carrying off Europa, are remarks long since made.

Indeed, if ancient Painting were to be judged by these, and such like remains of Fresco pictures, Contour and Expression might be wrested from it in the same manner. For the pictures, with figures as big as life, pulled off with the walls of the Herculanean theatre, afford but a very poor idea of the Contour and Expression of the ancient painters. Theseus, the conqueror of the Minotaur, worshipped by the Athenian youths; Flora with Hercules and a Faunus; the pretended judgment of the Decemvir Appius Claudius, are on the testimony of an artist who saw them, of a Contour as mean as faulty; and the heads want not only Expression, but those in the Claudius even Character.

But even this is an evident instance of the meanness of the artists: for the science of beautiful Proportions, of Contour, and Expression, could not be the exclusive privilege of Greek sculptors alone.

However, though I am for doing justice to the ancients, I have no intention to lessen the merit of the moderns.

In Perspective there is no comparison between them and the ancients, whom no earned defence can intitle to any superiority in that science. The laws of Composition and Ordonnance seem to have been but imperfectly known by the ancients: the reliefs of the times when the Greek arts were flourishing at Rome, are instances of this. The accounts of the ancient writers, and the remains of Painting are likewise, in point of Colouring, decisive in favour of the moderns.

There are several other objects of Paintings which, in modern times, have attained greater perfection: such are landscapes and cattle pieces. The ancients seem not to have been acquainted with the handsomer varieties of different animals in different climes, if we may conclude from the horse of M. Aurelius; the two horses in Monte Cavallo; the pretended Lysippean horses above the portal of St. Mark’s church at Venice; the Farnesian bull, and other animals of that groupe.

I observe, by the bye, that the ancients were careless of giving to their horses the diametrical motion of their legs; as we see in the horses at Venice, and the ancient coins: and in that they have been followed, nay even defended, by some ignorant moderns.

’Tis chiefly to oil-painting that our landscapes, and especially those of the Dutch, owe their beauties: by that their colours acquired more strength and liveliness; and even nature herself seems to have given them a thicker, moister atmosphere, as an advantage to this branch of the art.

These, and some other advantages over the ancients, deserve to be set forth with more solid arguments than we have hitherto had.

There is one other important step left towards the atchievement of the art: but the artist, who, boldly forsaking the common path, dares to attempt it, finds himself at once on the brink of a precipice, and starts back dismayed.

The stories of martyrs and saints, fables and metamorphoses, are almost the only objects of modern painters—repeated a thousand times, and varied almost beyond the limits of possibility, every tolerable judge grows sick at them.

The judicious artist falls asleep over a Daphne and Apollo, a Proserpine carried off by Pluto, an Europa, &c. he wishes for occasions to shew himself a poet, to produce significant images, to paint Allegory.

Painting goes beyond the senses: there is its most elevated pitch, to which the Greeks strove to raise themselves, as their writings evince. Parrhasius, like Aristides, a painter of the soul, was able to express the character even of a whole people: he painted the Athenians as mild as cruel, as fickle as steady, as brave as timid. Such a representation owes its possibility only to the allegorical method, whose images convey general ideas.

But here the artist is lost in a desart. Tongues the most savage, which are entirely destitute of abstracted ideas, containing no word whose sense could express memory, space, duration, &c. these tongues, I say, are not more destitute of general signs, than painting in our days. The painter who thinks beyond his palette longs for some learned apparatus, by whose stores he might be enabled to invest abstracted ideas with sensible and meaning images. Nothing has yet been published of this kind, to satisfy a rational being; the essays hitherto made are not considerable, and far beneath this great design. The artist himself knows best in what degree he is satisfied with Ripa’s Iconology, and the emblems of ancient nations, by Van Hooghe.

Hence the greatest artists have chosen but vulgar objects. Annibal Caracci, instead of representing in general symbols and sensible images the history of the Farnesian family, as an allegorical poet, wasted all his skill in fables known to the whole world.

Go, visit the galleries of monarchs, and the publick repositories of art, and see what difference there is between the number of allegorical, poetical, or even historical performances, and that of fables, saints, or madonnas.

Among great artists, Rubens is the most eminent, who first, like a sublime poet, dared to attempt this untrodden path. His most voluminous composition, the gallery of Luxembourg, has been communicated to the world by the hands of the best engravers.

After him the sublimest performance undertaken and finished, in that kind, is, no doubt, the cupola of the imperial library at Vienna, painted by Daniel Gran, and engraved by Sedelmayer. The Apotheosis of Hercules at Versailles, done by Le Moine, and alluding to the Cardinal Hercules de Fleury, though deemed in France the most august of compositions, is, in comparison of the learned and ingenious performance of the German artist, but a very mean and short-sighted Allegory, resembling a panegyric, the most striking beauties of which are relative to the almanack. The artist had it in his power to indulge grandeur, and his flipping the occasion is astonishing: but even allowing, that the Apotheosis of a minister was all that he ought to have decked the chief cieling of a royal palace with, we nevertheless see through his fig-leaf.

The artist would require a work, containing every image with which any abstracted idea might be poetically inverted; a work collected from all mythology, the best poets of all ages, the mysterious philosophy of different nations, the monuments of the ancients on gems, coins, utensils, &c. This magazine should be distributed into several classes, and, with proper applications to peculiar possible cases, adapted to the instruction of the artist. This would, at the same time, open a vast field for imitating the ancients, and participating of their sublimer taste.

The taste in our decorations, which, since the complaints of Vitruvius, hath changed for the worse, partly by the grotesques brought in vogue by Morto da Feltro, partly by our trifling house-painting, might also, from more intimacy with the ancients, reap the advantages of reality and common sense.

The Caricatura-carvings, and favourite shells, those chief supports of our ornaments, are full as unnatural as the candle-sticks of Vitruvius, with their little castles and palaces: how easy would it be, by the help of Allegory, to give some learned convenience to the smallest ornament!

Paintings of ceilings, doors, and chimney-pieces, are commonly but the expletives of these places, because they cannot be gilt all over. Not only they have not the least relation to the rank and circumstances of the proprietor, but often throw some ridicule or reflection upon him.

’Tis an abhorrence of barrenness that fills walls and rooms; and pictures void of thought must supply the vacuum.

Hence the artist, abandoned to the dictates of his own fancy, paints, for want of Allegory, perhaps a satire on him to whom he owes his industry; or, to shun this Charybdis, finds himself reduced to paint figures void of any meaning.

Nay, he may often find it difficult to meet even with those, ’till at last

Thus Painting is degraded from its most eminent prerogative, the representation of invisible, past and future things.

If pictures be sometimes met with, which might be significant in some particular place, they often lose that property by stupid and wrong applications.

Perhaps the master of some new building

may, without the least compunction for offending the rules of perspective, place figures of the smallest size above the vast doors of his apartments and salloons. I speak here of those ornaments which make part of the furniture; not of figures which are often, and for good reasons, set up promiscuously in collections.

The decorations of architecture are often as ill-chosen. Arms and trophies deck a hunting-house as nonsensically, as Ganymede and the eagle, Jupiter and Leda, figure it among the reliefs of the brazen gates of St. Peter’s church at Rome.

Arts have a double aim: to delight and to instruct. Hence the greatest landscape-painters think, they have fulfilled but half their task in drawing their pieces without figures.

Let the artist’s pencil, like the pen of Aristotle, be impregnated with reason; that, after having satiated the eye, he may nourish the mind: and this he may obtain by Allegory; investing, not hiding his ideas. Then, whether he chuse some poetical object himself, or follow the dictates of others, he shall be inspired by his art, shall be fired with the flame brought down from heaven by Prometheus, shall entertain the votary of art, and instruct the mere lover of it.

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SIR,

As you have written on the Greek arts and artists, I wish you had made your treatise as much the object of your caution as the Greek artists made their works; which, before dismissing them, they exhibited to publick view, in order to be examined by everybody, and especially by competent judges of the art. The trial was held during the grand, chiefly the Olympian, games; and all Greece was interested on Ætion’s producing his picture of the nuptials of Alexander and Roxana. You, Sir, wanted a Proxenidas to be judged by, as well as that artist; and had it not been for your mysterious concealment, I might have communicated your treatise, before its publication, to some learned men and connoisseurs of my acquaintance, without mentioning the author’s name.

One of them visited Italy twice, where he devoted all his time to a most anxious examination of painting, and particularly several months to each eminent picture, at the very place where it was painted; the only method, you know, to form a connoisseur. The judgment of a man able to tell you which of Guido’s altar-pieces is painted on taffeta, or linnen, what sort of wood Raphael chose for his transfiguration, &c. the judgment of such a man, I fancy, must be allowed to be decisive.

Another of my acquaintance has studied antiquity: he knows it by the very smell;

He can tell you the number of knots on Hercules’s club; has reduced Nestor’s goblet to the modern measure: nay, is suspected of meditating solutions to all the questions proposed by Tiberius to the grammarians.

A third, for several years past, has neglected every thing but hunting after ancient coins. Many a new discovery we owe to him; especially some concerning the history of the ancient coiners; and, as I am told, he is to rouse the attention of the world by a Prodromus concerning the coiners of Cyzicum.

What a number of reproaches might you have escaped, had you submitted your Essay to the judgment of these gentlemen! they were pleased to acquaint me with their objections, and I should be sorry, for your honour, to see them published.

Among other objections, the first is surprized at your passing by the two Angels, in your description of the Raphael in the royal cabinet at Dresden; having been told, that a Bolognese painter, in mentioning this piece, which he saw at St. Sixtus’s at Piacenza, breaks into these terms of admiration: O! what Angels of Paradise[14]! by which he supposes those Angels to be the most beautiful figures of the picture.

The same person would reproach you for having described that picture in the manner of Raguenet[15].

The second concludes the beard of Laocoon to be as worthy of your attention as his contracted belly: for every admirer of Greek works, says he, must pay the same respect to the beard of Laocoon, which father Labat paid to that of the Moses of Michael Angelo.

This learned Dominican,

has, after so many centuries, drawn from this very statue an evident proof of the true fashion in which Moses wore his own individual beard, and whose imitation must, of course, be the distinguishing mark of every true Jew[16].

There is not the least spark of learning, says he, in your remarks on the Peplon of the three vestals: he might perhaps, on the very inflection of the veil, have discovered to you as many curiosities as Cuper himself found on the edge of the veil of Tragedy in the Apotheosis of Homer[17].

We also want proof of the vestals being really Greek performances: our reason fails us too often in the most obvious things. If unhappily the marble of these figures should be proved to be no Lychnites, they are lost, and your treatise too: had you but slightly told us their marble was large-grained, that would have been a sufficient proof of their authenticity; for it would be somewhat difficult to determine the bigness of the grains with such exactness as to distinguish the Greek marble from the Roman of Luna. But the worst is, they are even denied the title of vestals.

The third mentioned some heads of Livia and Agrippina, without that pretended profile of yours. Here he thinks you had the most lucky occasion to talk of that kind of nose by the ancients called Quadrata, as an ingredient of beauty. But you no doubt know, that the noses of some of the most famous Greek statues, viz. the Medicean Venus, and the Picchinian Meleager, are much too thick for becoming the model of beauty, in that kind, to our artists.

I shall not, however, gall you with all the doubts and objections raised against your treatise, and repeated to nauseousness, upon the arrival of an Academician, the Margites of our days, who, being shewed your treatise, gave it a slight glance, then laid it aside, offended as it were at first sight. But it was easy to perceive that he wanted his opinion to be asked, which we accordingly all did. “The author, said he very peremptorily, seems not to have been at much pains with this treatise: I cannot find above four or five quotations, and those negligently inserted; no chapter, no page, cited; he certainly collected his remarks from books which he is ashamed to produce.”

Yet cannot I help introducing another gentleman, sharp-sighted enough to pick out something that had escaped all my attention; viz. that the Greeks were the first inventors of Painting and Sculpture; an assertion, as he was pleased to express himself, entirely false, having been told it was the Egyptians, or some people still more ancient, and unknown to him.

Even the most whimsical humour may be turned to profit: nevertheless, I think it manifest that you intended to talk only of good Taste in those arts; and the first Elements of an art have the same proportion to good Taste in it, as the seed has to the fruit. That the art was still in its infancy among the Egyptians, when it had attained the highest degree of perfection among the Greeks, may be seen by examining one single gem: you need only consider the head of Ptolomæus Philopator by Aulus, and the two figures adjoining to it done by an Egyptian[18], in order to be convinced of the little merit this nation could pretend to in point of art.

The form and taste of their Painting have been ascertained by Middleton.[19] The pictures of persons as big as life, on two mummies in the royal cabinet of antiquities at Dresden, are evident instances of their incapacity. But these relicks being curious, in several other respects, I shall hereafter subjoin a short account of them.

I cannot, my friend, help allowing some reason for several of these objections. Your negligence in your quotations was, no doubt, somewhat prejudicial to your authenticity: the art of changing blue eyes to black ones, certainly deserved an authority. You imitate Democritus; who being asked, “What is man?” every body knows what was his reply. What reasonable creature will submit to read all Greek scholiasts!

Considering, however, how easily the human mind is biassed, either by friendship or animosity, I took occasion from these objections to examine your treatise with more exactness; and shall now, by the most impartial censure, strive to clear myself from every imputation of prepossession in your favour.

I will pass by the first and second page, though something might be said on your comparison of the Diana with the Nausicaa, and the application: nor would it have been amiss, had you thrown some more light on the remark concerning the misused pictures of Corregio (very likely borrowed from Count Tessin’s letters), by giving an account of the other indignities which the pictures of the best artists, at the same time, met with at Stockholm.

It is well known that, after the surrender of Prague to Count Konigsmark, the 15th of July 1648, the most precious pictures of the Emperor Rodolph II. were carried off to Sweden[20]. Among these were some pictures of Corregio, which the Emperor had been presented with by their first possessor, Duke Frederick of Mantua; two of them being the famous Leda, and a Cupid handling his bow[21]. Christina, endowed at that time rather with scholastic learning than taste, treated these treasures as the Emperor Claudius did an Alexander of Apelles; who ordered the head to be cut off, and that of Augustus to fill its place[22]. In the same manner heads, hands, feet were here cut off from the most beautiful pictures; a carpet was plastered over with them, and the mangled pieces fitted up with new heads, &c. Those that fortunately escaped the common havock, among which were the pieces of Corregio, came afterwards, together with several other pictures, bought by the Queen at Rome, into the possession of the Duke of Orleans, who purchased 250 of them, and among those eleven of Corregio, for 9000 Roman crowns.

But I am not contented with your charging only the northern countries with barbarism, on account of the little esteem they paid to the arts. If good taste is to be judged in this manner, I am afraid for our French neighbours. For having taken Bonn, the residence of the Elector of Cologne, after the death of Max. Henry, they ordered the largest pictures to be cut out of their frames, without distinction, in order to serve for coverings to the waggons, in which the most valuable furniture of the electoral castle was carried off for France. But, Sir, do not presume on my continuing with mere historical remarks: I shall proceed with my objections; after making the two following general observations.

I. You have written in a style too concise for being distinct. Were you afraid of being condemned to the penalty of a Spartan, who could not restrain himself to only three words, perhaps that of reading Picciardin’s Pisan War? Distinctness is required where universal instruction is the end. Meats are to suit the taste of the guests, rather than that of the cooks,

II. There appears, in almost every line of yours, the most passionate attachment to antiquity; which perhaps I shall convince you of, by the following remarks.

The first particular objection I have to make is against your third page. Remember, however, that my passing by two pages is very generous dealing:

but let us now begin a formal trial.

The author talks of certain negligences in the Greek works, which ought to be considered suitably to Lucian’s precepts concerning the Zeus of Phidias: “Zeus himself, not his footstool;”[23] though perhaps he could not be charged with any fault in the foot-stool, but with a very grievous one in the statue.

Is it no fault that Phidias made his Zeus of so enormous a bulk, as almost to reach the cieling of the temple, which must infallibly have been thrown down, had the god taken it in his head to rise?[24] To have left the temple without any cieling at all, like that of the Olympian Jupiter at Athens, had been an instance of more judgment[25].

’Tis but justice to claim an explication of what the author means by “negligences”. He perhaps might be pleased to get a passport, even for the faults of the ancients, by sheltering them under the authority of such titles; nay, to change them into beauties, as Alcæus did the spot on the finger of his beloved boy. We too often view the blemishes of the ancients, as a parent does those of his children:

If these negligences were like those wished for in the Jalysus of Protogenes, where the chief figure was out-shone by a partridge, they might be considered as the agreeable negligée of a fine lady; but this is the question. Besides, had the author consulted his interest, he never would have ventured citing the Diomedes of Dioscorides: but being too well acquainted with that gem, one of the most valued, most finished monuments of Greek art; and being apprehensive of the prejudice that might arise against the meaner productions of the ancients, on discovering many faults in one so eminent as Diomedes; he endeavoured to keep matters from being too nearly examined, and to soften every fault into negligence.

How! if by argument I shall attempt to shew that Dioscorides understood neither perspective, nor the most trivial rules of the motion of a human body; nay, that he offended even against possibility? I’ll venture to do it, though

And perhaps I am not the first discoverer of his faults: yet I do not remember to have seen any thing relative to them.

The Diomedes of Dioscorides is either a sitting, or a rising figure; for the attitude is ambiguous. It is plain he is not sitting; and rising is inconsistent with his action.

Our body endeavouring to raise itself from a seat, moves always mechanically towards its sought-for centre of gravity, drawing back the legs, which were advanced in sitting[26]; instead of which the figure stretches out his right leg. Every erection begins with elevated heels, and in that moment all the weight of the body is supported only by the toes, which was observed by Felix[27], in his Diomedes: but here all rests on the sole.

Nor can Diomedes, (if we suppose him to be a sitting figure, as he touches with his left leg the bottom of his thigh) find, in raising himself, the centre of his gravity, only by a retraction of his legs, and of course cannot rise in that posture. His left hand resting upon the bended leg, holds the palladion, whilst his right touches negligently the pedestal with the point of a short sword; consequently he cannot rise, neither moving his legs in the natural and easy manner required in any erection, nor making use of his arms to deliver himself from that uneasy situation.

There is at the same time a fault committed against the rules of perspective.

The foot of the left bended leg, touching the cornice of the pedestal, shews it over-reaching that part of the floor, on which the pedestal and the right foot are situated, consequently the line described by the hinder-foot is the fore on the gem, and vice versa.

But allowing even a possibility to that situation, it is contrary to the Greek character, which is always distinguished by the natural and easy. Attributes neither to be met with in the contortions of Diomedes, nor in an attitude, the impossibility of which every one must be sensible of, in endeavouring to put himself in it, without the help of former sitting.

Felix, supposed to have lived after Dioscorides, though preserving the same attitude, has endeavoured to make its violence more natural, by opposing to him the figure of Ulysses, who, as we are told, in order to bereave him of the honour of having seized the Palladion, offered to rob him of it, but being discovered, was repulsed by Diomedes; which being his supposed action on the gem, allows violence of attitude[28].

Diomedes cannot be a sitting figure, for the Contour of his buttock and thigh is free, and not in the least compressed: the foot of the bent leg is visible, and the leg itself not bent enough.

The Diomedes represented by Mariette is absurd; the left leg resembling a clasped pocket-knife, and the foot being drawn up so high as to make it impossible in nature that it should reach the pedestal[29].

Faults of this kind cannot be called negligences, and would not be forgiven in any modern artist.

Dioscorides, ’tis true, in this renowned performance did but copy Polycletus, whose Doryphorus (as is commonly agreed) was the best rule of human proportions[30]. But, though a copyist, Dioscorides escaped a fault which his master fell into. For the pedestal, over which the Diomedes of Polycletus leans, is contrary to the most common rules of perspective; its cornices, which should be parallel, forming two different lines.

I wonder at Perrault’s omitting to make objections against the ancient gems.

I mean not to do any thing derogatory to the author, when I trace some of his particular observations to their source.

The food prescribed to the young wrestlers, in the remoter times of Greece, is mentioned by Pausanias[31]. But if the author alluded to the passage which I have in view, why does he talk in general of milk-food, when Pausanias particularly mentions soft cheese? Dromeus of Stymphilos, we learn there, first introduced flesh meat.

My researches, concerning their mysterious art of changing blue eyes to black ones, have not succeeded to my wish. I find it mentioned but once, and that only by the bye by Dioscorides[32]. The author, by clearing up this art, might perhaps have thrown a greater lustre over his treatise, than by producing his new method of statuary. He had it in his power to fix the eyes of the Newtons and Algarotti’s, on a problem worth their attention, and to engage the fair sex, by a discovery so advantageous to their charms, especially in Germany, where, contrary to Greece, large, fine, blue eyes are more frequently met with than black ones.

There was a time when the fashion required to be green eyed:

But I do not know whether art had any share in their colouring. And as to the small-pox, Hippocrates might be quoted, if grammatical disquisitions suited my purpose.

However, I think, no effects of the small-pox on a face can be so much the reverse of beauty, as that defect which the Athenians were reproachfully charged with, viz. a buttock as pitiful as their face was perfect[33]. Indeed Nature, in so scantily supplying those parts, seemed to derogate as much from the Athenian beauty, as, by her lavishness, from that of the Indian Enotocets, whose ears, we are told, were large enough to serve them for pillows.

As for opportunities to study the nudities, our times, I think, afford as advantageous ones as the Gymnasies of the ancients. ’Tis the fault of our artists to make no use of that[34] proposed to the Parisian artists, viz. to walk, during the summer season, along the Seine, in order to have a full view of the naked parts, from the sixth to the fiftieth year.

’Tis perhaps to Michael Angelo’s frequenting such opportunities that we owe his celebrated Carton of the Pisan war[35], where the soldiers bathing in a river, at the sound of a trumpet leap out of the water, and make haste to huddle on their cloaths.

One of the most offensive passages of the treatise is, no doubt, the unjust debasement of the modern sculptors beneath the ancients. These latter times are possessed of several Glycons in muscular heroic figures, and, in tender youthful female bodies, of more than one Praxiteles. Michael Angelo, Algardi, and Sluter, whose genius embellished Berlin, produced muscular bodies,

in a style rivalling that of Glycon himself; and in delicacy the Greeks are perhaps even outdone by Bernini, Fiammingo, Le Gros, Rauchmüller, Donner.

The unskilfulness of the ancients, in shaping children, is agreed upon by our artists, who, I suppose, would for imitation choose a Cupid of Fiammingo rather than of Praxiteles himself. The story of M. Angelo’s placing a Cupid of his own by the side of an antique one, in order to inform our times of the superiority of the ancient art, is of no weight here: for no work of Michael Angelo can bring us so near perfection as Nature herself.

I think it no hyperbole to advance, that Fiammingo, like a new Prometheus, produced creatures which art had never seen before him. For, if from almost all the children on ancient gems[36] and reliefs[37], we may form a conclusion of the art itself, it wanted the true expression of childhood, as looser forms, more milkiness, and unknit bones. Faults which, from the epoch of Raphael, all children laboured under, till the appearance of Francis Quesnoy, called Fiammingo, whose children having the advantages of suitable innocence and nature, became models to the following artists, as in youthful bodies Apollo and Antinous are: an honour which Algardi, his contemporary, may be allowed to share.

Their models in clay are, by our artists, esteemed superior to all the antique marble children; and an artist of genius and talents assured me, that during a stay of seven years at Vienna, he saw not one copy taken from an ancient Cupid in that academy.

Neither do I know on what singular idea of beauty, the ancient artists founded their custom, of hiding the foreheads of their children and youths with hair. Thus a Cupid was represented by Praxiteles[38]; thus a Patroclus, in a picture mentioned by Philostratus[39]: and there is no statue nor bust, no gem nor coin of Antinous, in which we do not find him thus dressed. Hence, perhaps, that gloom, that melancholy, with which all the heads of this favourite of Hadrian are marked.

Is not there in a free open brow more nobleness and sublimity? and does not Bernini seem to have been better acquainted with beauty than the ancients, when he removed the over-shadowing locks from the forehead of young Lewis XIV. whose bust he was then executing? “Your Majesty, said Bernini, is King, and may with confidence shew your brow to all the world.” From that time King and court dressed their hair à la Bernini[40].

His judgment of the bas-reliefs on the monument of Pope Alexander VI[41]. leads us to some remarks on those of antiquity. “The skill in bas-relief, said he, consists in giving the air of relief to the flat: the figures of that monument seem what they are indeed, not what they are not.”

The chief end of bas-relief is to deck those places that want historical or allegorical ornaments, but which have neither cornices sufficiently spacious, nor proportions regular enough to allow groupes of entire statues: and as the cornice itself is chiefly intended to shelter the subordinate parts from being directly or indirectly hurt, no bas-relief must exceed the projection thereof; which would not only make the cornice of no use, but endanger the figures themselves.

The figures of ancient bas-reliefs shoot commonly so much forward as to become almost round. But bas-relief being founded on fiction, can only counterfeit reality; its perfection is well to imitate; and a natural mass is against its nature: if flat, it ought to appear projected, and vice versa. If this be true, it must of course be allowed that figures wholly round are inconsistent with it, and are to be considered as solid marble pillars built upon the theatre, whose aim is mere illusion; for art, as is said of tragedy, wins truth from fiction, and that by truth. To art we often owe charms superior to those of nature: a real garden and vegetating trees, on the stage, do not affect us so agreeably, as when well expressed by the imitating art. A rose of Van Huisum, mallows of Veerendal, bewitch us more than all the darlings of the most skilful gardener: the most enticing landscape, nay, even the charms of the Thessalian Tempe, would not, perhaps, affect us with that irresistible delight which, flowing from Dietrick’s pencil, enchants our senses and imagination.

By such instances we may safely form a judgment of the ancient bas-reliefs: the royal cabinet at Dresden is possessed of two eminent ones: a Bacchanal on a tomb, and a sacrifice to Priapus on a large marble vase.

The bas-relief claims a particular kind of sculpture; a method that few have succeeded in, of which Matielli may be an instance. The Emperor Charles VI. having ordered some models to be prepared by the most renowned artists, in bas-relief, intended for the spiral columns at the church of S. Charles Borromæo; Matielli, already famous, was principally thought of; but however refused the honour of so considerable a work, on account of the enormous bulk of his model, which requiring too great cavities, would have diminished the mass of the stone, and of course weakened the pillars. Mader was the artist, whose models were universally applauded, and who by his admirable execution proved that he deserved that preference. These bas-reliefs represent the story of the patron of this church.

It is in general to be observed, first, that this kind of sculpture admits not indifferently of every attitude and action; as for instance, of too strong projections of the legs. Secondly, That, besides disposing of the several modelled figures in well-ranged groupes, the diameter of every one ought to be applied to the bas-relief itself, by a lessened scale: as for instance, the diameter of a figure in the model being one foot, the profile of the same, according to its size, will be three inches, or less: the rounder a figure of that diameter, the greater the skill. Commonly the relief wants perspective, and thence arise most of its faults.

Though I proposed to make only a few remarks on the ancient bas-relief, I find myself, like a certain ancient Rhetor, almost under a necessity of being new-tuned. I have strayed beyond my limits; though at the same time I remembered that there is a law among commentators, to content themselves with bare remarks on the contents of a treatise: and also sensible that I am writing a letter, not a book, I consider that I may draw some instructions for my own use,

from some peoples impetuosity against the author; who, because they are hired for it, seem to think that writing is confined to them alone.

The Romans, though they worshipped the deity Terminus (the guardian God of limits and borders in general; and, if it please these gentlemen, of the limits in arts and sciences too), allowed nevertheless an universal unrestrained criticism: and the decisions of some Greeks and Romans, in matters of an art, which they did not practise, seem nevertheless authentick to our artists.

Nor can I find, that the keeper of the temple of peace at Rome, though possessed of the register of the pictures there, pretended to monopolize remarks and criticisms upon them; Pliny having described most of them.

’Tis to be wished, that, roused by a Pamphilus and an Apelles, artists would take up the pen themselves, in order to discover the mysteries of the art to those that know how to use them,

Two or three of these are to be commended; the rest contented themselves with giving some historical accounts of the fraternity. But what could appear more auspicious to the improvement of the art, even by the remotest posterity, than the work attempted by the united forces of the celebrated Pietro da Cortona[42] and Padre Ottonelli? Nevertheless this same treatise, except only a few historical remarks, and these too to be met with in an hundred books, seems good for nothing, but

How trivial, how mean are the great Poussin’s reflexions on painting, published by Bellori, and annexed to his life of that artist[43]?

Another digression!—let me now again resume the character of your Aristarchus.

You are bold enough to attack the authority of Bernini, and to challenge a man, the bare mention of whose name would do honour to any treatise. It was Bernini, you ought to recollect, Sir, who at the same age in which Michael Angelo performed his Studiolo[44], viz. in his eighteenth year, produced his Daphne, as a convincing instance of his intimacy with the ancients, at an age in which perhaps the genius of Raphael was yet labouring under darkness and ignorance!

Bernini was one of those favourites of nature, who produce at the same time vernal blossoms and autumnal fruits; and I think it by no means probable, that his studying nature in riper years misled either him or his disciples. The smoothness of his flesh was the result of that study, and imparted to the marble the highest possible degree of life and beauty. Indeed ’tis nature which endows art with life, and “vivifies forms,” as Socrates says[45], and Clito the sculptor allows. The great Lysippus, when asked which of his ancestors he had chosen for his master, replied, “None; but nature alone.” It is not to be denied, that the too close imitation of antiquity is very often apt to lead us to a certain barrenness, unknown to those who imitate nature: various herself, nature teaches variety, and no votary of her’s can be charged with a sameness: whereas Guido, Le Brun, and some other votaries of antiquity, repeated the same face in many of their works. A certain ideal beauty was become so familiar to them, as to slide into their figures even against their will.

But as for such an imitation of nature, as is quite regardless of antiquity, I am entirely of the author’s opinion; though I should have chosen other artists as instances of following nature in painting.

Jordans certainly has not met with the regard due to his merit; let me appeal to an authority universally allowed. “There is, says Mr. d’Argenville, more expression and truth in Jordans, than even in Rubens.

“Truth is the basis and origin of perfection and beauty; nothing, of any kind whatever, can be beautiful or perfect, without being truly what it ought to be, without having all it ought to have.”

The solidity of this judgment presupposed, Jordans, according to Rochefoucault’s maxims, ought rather to be ranked among the greatest originals, than among the mimicks of common nature, where Rembrandt may fill up his place, as Raoux or Vatteau that of Stella; though all these painters do nothing but what Euripides did before them; they draw man ad vivum. There are no trifles, no meannesses in the art, and if we recollect of what use the Caricatura was to Bernini, we should be cautious how we pass judgment even on the Dutch forms. That great genius, they say[46], owed to this monster of the art, a distinction for which he was so eminent, the “Franchezza del Tocco.” When I reflect on this, I am forced to alter my former opinion of the Caricatura, so far as to believe that no artist ever acquired a perfection therein without gaining a farther improvement in the art itself. “It is, says the author, a peculiar distinction of the ancients to have gone beyond nature:” our artists do the same in their Caricaturas: but of what avail to them are the voluminous works they have published on that branch of the art?

The author lays it down, in the peremptory style of a legislator, that “Precision of Contour can only be learned from the Greeks:” but our academies unanimously agree, that the ancients deviate from a strict Contour in the clavicles, arms, knees, &c. over which, in spite of apophyses and bones, they drew their skin as smooth as over mere flesh; whereas our academies teach to draw the bony and cartilaginous parts, more angularly, but the fat and fleshy ones more smooth, and carefully to avoid falling into the ancient style. Pray, Sir, can there be any error in the advices of academies in corpore?

Parrhasius himself, the father of Contour, was not, by Pliny’s account[47], master enough to hit the line by which completeness is distinguished from superfluity: shunning corpulency he fell into leanness: and Zeuxis’s Contour was perhaps like that of Rubens, if it be true that, to augment the majesty of his figures, he drew with more completeness. His female figures he drew like those of Homer[48], of robust limbs: and does not even the tenderest of poets, Theocritus, draw his Helen as fleshy and tall[49] as the Venus of Raphael in the assembly of the gods in the little Farnese? Rubens then, for painting like Homer and Theocritus, needs no apology.

The character of Raphael, in the treatise, is drawn with truth and exactness: but well may we ask the author, as Antalcidas the Spartan asked a sophist, ready to burst forth in a panegyrick on Hercules, “Who blames him?” The beauties however of the Raphael at Dresden, especially the pretended ones of the Jesus, are still warmly disputed.

Why did not he rather display his patriotism against those Italian connoisseurs, whose squeamish stomachs rise against every Flemish production?

And indeed are not colours so essential, that without them no picture can aspire to universal applause? Do not their bewitching charms cover the most grievous faults? They are the harmonious melody of painting; whatever is offensive vanishes by their splendor, and souls animated with their beauties are absorbed in beholding, as the readers of Homer are by his flowing harmony, so as to find no faults. These, joined to that important science of Chiaro-Oscuro, are the characteristicks of Flemish painting.

Agreeably to affect our eye is the first thing in a picture[50], which to obtain, obvious charms are wanted; not such as spring only from reflection. Colouring moreover belongs peculiarly to pictures; whereas design ought to be in every draught, print, &c. and indeed seems easier to be attained than colouring.

The best colourists, according to a celebrated writer[51], have always come after the inventors and contourists; we all know the vain attempts of the famous Poussin. In short, all those

must here acknowledge the superiority of the Flemish art; the painter being really but nature’s mimick, is the more perfect the better he mimicks her.

the delicate Van der Werf, whose performances, worth their weight in gold, are the ornaments of royal cabinets only, has made nature inimitable to every Italian pencil; he allures the connoisseur’s eye as well as that of the clown; and, as an English poet says, “that no pleasing poet ever wrote ill,” surely the Flemish painter obtained that applause which was denied to Poussin.

I should be glad to see many pictures as happily fancied, as well composed, as enticingly painted as some of Gherard Lairesse: let me appeal to every unprepossessed artist at Paris, acquainted with the Stratonice, the most eminent, and no doubt the first ranked picture in the cabinet of Mr. de la Boixieres[52].

The subject is of no trivial choice: King Seleucus I.[53] resigned his wife Stratonice, a daughter of Demetrius Poliorcetes, to his son Antiochus, whom a violent passion for his mother-in-law had thrown into a dangerous sickness: after many unsuccessful inquiries, the physician Erasistratus discovered the true cause, and found that the only means of restoring the prince’s health, was, the condescension of the father to the love of his son: the King resigned his Queen, and at the same time declared Antiochus King of the East.

Stratonice, the chief person, is the noblest figure, a figure worthy Raphael himself. The charming Queen,

with slow and hesitating steps, approaches the bed of her new lover; but still with the countenance of a mother, or rather of a sacred vestal. In the profile of her face you may read shame mingled with gentle resignation to the will of her lord. She has the softness of her sex, the majesty of a queen, an awful submission to the sacred ceremony, and all the sageness required in so extraordinary and delicate a situation. Dressed with a masterly skill, the artist, from the colour of her cloaths, may learn how to paint the purple of the ancients; for it is not generally known that it resembled fadeing, ruddy, vine-leaves[54].

Behind her stands the King, dressed in a darker habit, in order to give the more relief to the Queen, to spare confusion to her, shame to the Prince, and not to interrupt his joy. Expectation and acquiescence are blended in his face, which is taken from the profile of his best coins.

The Prince, a beautiful half-naked youth, sitting in his bed, has some resemblance of his father; his pale face bears witness of the fever, that lately had raged in his veins; but fancy sees returning health, not shame, in that soft-rising ruddiness diffused over his cheeks.

The physician and priest Erasistratus, venerable like the Calchas of Homer, standing before the bed, is the only speaker, authorised by the King, whose will he declares to the Prince; and whilst, with one hand, he leads the Queen to the embraces of her lover, with the other he presents him with the diadem. Joy and astonishment flash from the Prince’s face on the approach of his Queen

though nobly restrained by reverence, he bends his head, and seems to comprise his happiness in a single thought.

The characters indeed are distributed with so much ingenuity, that they seem to give a lustre and energy to each other.

The largest share of light is displayed on Stratonice: she claims our first regard. The priest, though in a weaker light, is raised by his gesture: he is the speaker, and around him reign solemn stillness and attention.

The Prince, the second person, has a larger share of light; and though the artist, led by his skill, chose rather to make a beautiful Queen the chief support of his groupe than a sick Prince, He nevertheless maintains his due rank, and becomes the most eminent person of the whole, by his expression. His face contains the greatest secrets of the art,

Even those motions of the soul, which otherwise seem opposite to each other, mingle here with peaceful harmony; a timid red spreading over his sickly face, announces health, like the faint glimmerings of the morn, which, though veiled by night, announce the day, and even a bright one.

The genius and taste of the artist shines forth in every part of his work: even the vases are copied from the best antique ones; the table before the bed, is, like Homer’s, of ivory.

The distances behind the figures represent a magnificent Greek building, whose decorations seem allegorical. The roof of a portal is supported by Cariatides embracing each other, as images of the tender friendship between father and son, and alluding, at the same time, to the nuptial ceremony.

Though faithful to history, the painter was nevertheless a poet: in order to represent some circumstances, he filled even the furniture with sentiments. The Sphinxes by the Prince’s bed allude to his problematic sickness, the enquiries of Erasistratus, and his sagacity in discovering its true cause.

I have been told that some young Italian artists, when considering this picture, and perceiving the Prince’s arm perhaps a trifle too big, went off without enquiring into the subject itself. Should even Minerva herself, as she once did to Diomedes, attempt to deliver some people from the mist they labour under, by heaven! the attempt were vain!

I have run into this long digression, in order to throw some light on one of the first productions of the art, which is nevertheless but little known.

The idea of noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in Raphael’s figures, might rather, as two eminent authors express it[55], be called “still life.” It is indeed the standard of the Greek art: however, indiscreetly commended to young artists, it might beget as dangerous consequences, as precepts of energetick conciseness in the style; the direct method to make it barren and unpleasing.

“In youths, says Cicero[56], there must be some superfluity, something to be taken off: prematurity spoils the juices, and it is easier to lop the young rank branches of a vine, than to restore its vigour to a worn out trunk.” Not to mention, that figures wanting gesture would, by the bulk of mankind, be received as a speech before the Areopagites, where, by a severe law, the speaker was forbid to raise any passions, though ever so gentle[57]: nay, pictures of this kind would be so many portraits of young Spartans, who, with hands hid under their coats, and down-cast eyes, stalk forth in silent solemnity[58].

Neither am I quite of the author’s opinion with regard to allegory; the applying of which would too frequently do in painting, what was done in geometry by introducing algebra: the one would soon be as difficult as the other, and painting would degenerate into Hieroglyphicks.

The author attempts, in vain, to persuade us, that the majority of the Greeks thought as the Egyptians. There was no more learning in the painting of the platfond of the temple of Juno at Samos, than in that of the Farnese gallery. It represented the love-intrigues of Jupiter and Juno[59]: and, in the front of a temple of Ceres at Eleusis, there was nothing but representations of a ceremony at the rites of that goddess[60].

How to represent abstract ideas I do not yet distinctly conceive. There may be the same difficulties which attend the endeavours of representing to the senses a mathematical point—perhaps nothing less than impossibility; and Theodoretus[61] has some reason in confining painting to the senses. For those Hieroglyphicks which hint at abstract ideas, in such a manner as to express, for instance[62], youth by the number XVI; impossibility by two feet standing on water: those, I say, are monograms, not images: to indulge them in painting is fostering chimæras, is adding to Chinese pictures Chinese explications.

An adversary of allegory believes that Parrhasius, without any help from it, could represent the contradictions in the character of the Athenians; that he did it perhaps in several pictures. Supposing which

The sentence of death pronounced against the leaders of the Athenian navy, after their victory over the Spartans near the Arginuses, afforded the artist a very sensible and rich image, to represent the Athenians, at the same time, merciful and cruel.

The famous Theramenes, one of the leaders, accused his fellow-chieftains of having neglected to gather and bury the bodies of their slain countrymen: a charge sufficient to rouse the rage of the mob against the victors; only six of whom had returned to Athens, the rest having declined the storm.

Theramenes harangued the people in the most pathetick manner; intermixing his speech with frequent pauses, in order to give vent to the loud plaints of those who, in the battle, had lost their parents or relations. He, at the same time, produced a man, who protested he had heard the last words of the drowned, imprecating the publick revenge on their leaders. In vain did Socrates, then a member of the council, with a few others, oppose the accusation: the brave chieftains, instead of the honours they hoped for, were condemned to die. One of them was the only son of Pericles and Aspasia.

Was it not in the power of Parrhasius, who was then alive, to enlarge the meaning of his picture beyond the extent of bare history, only by drawing the true characters of the authors of this scene, without the least help from allegory? It would have been in his power, had he lived in our days.

Your pretensions concerning allegory seem indeed as reasonable an imposition upon the painter, as that of Columella upon his farmer; who wished to find him a philosopher like Democritus, Pythagoras, or Eudoxus[63].

No better success, in my opinion, is to be expected from applying allegory to decorations: the author would, at least, meet with as many difficulties as Virgil, when hammering on the names of a Vibius Caudex, Tanaquil Lucumo, or Decius Mus; to fit them for his Hexameter.

Custom has given its sanction to the use of shells in decorations: and is not there as much nature in them as in the Corinthian capital? You know its origin: a basket set upon the tomb of a young Corinthian girl, filled with some of her play-things, and covered with a large brick, being overgrown with the creeping branches of an acanthus, which had taken root under it, was the first occasion of forming that capital. Callimachus[64] the sculptor, surprized at the elegant simplicity of that composition, took thence a hint for enriching architecture with a new order.

Thus this capital, destined to support all the entablature of the column, is but a basket of flowers; something so apparently inconsistent with the ideas of architecture, that there was no use made of it in the time of Pericles: for Pocock[65] thinks it strange that the temple of Minerva at Athens had Doric, instead of Corinthian pillars. But time soon changed this seeming oddity into nature; the basket lost, by custom, all its former offensiveness, and

We acknowledge no Egyptian law to forbid arbitrary ornaments; and so fond have the artists of all ages been, both of the growth and form of shells, as to change even the chariot of Venus into an enormous one. The ancile, that Palladium of the Romans, was scooped into the form of a shell[66]: we find them on antique lamps[67]. Nay, nature herself seems to have produced their immense variety, and marvellous sinuations, for the benefit of the art.

I have no mind to plead the bad cause of our unskilful decorators: only let me adduce the arguments used by a whole tribe, (if the artists will forgive the term), in order to prove the reasonableness of their art.

The painters and sculptors of Paris, endeavouring to deprive the decorators of the title of artists, by alledging that they employed neither their own intellectual faculties, nor those of the connoisseurs, upon works not produced by nature, but rather the offsprings of capricious art; the others are said to have defended themselves in the following manner: “We are the followers of nature: like the bark of a tree, variously carved, our decorations grow into various forms: then art joins sportive nature, and corrects her: we do what the ancients did: consult their decorations.”

Variety is the great and only rule to which decorators submit. Perceiving that there is no perfect resemblance between two things in nature, they likewise forsake it in their decorations; and careless of anxious twining, leave it to the parts themselves to find their like, as the atoms of Epicurus did. This liberty we owe to the very nation, which, after having nobly exceeded all the narrow bounds of social formalities, bestows so much pains upon communicating her improvements to her neighbours. This style in decorations got the epithet of Barroque taste, derived from a word signifying pearls and teeth of unequal size[68].

Shells have at least as good a claim for being admitted among our decorations, as the heads of sheep and oxen. You know that the ancients placed those heads, stript of the skin, on the frizes, especially of the Doric order, between the Triglyphs, or on the Metopes. We even meet with them on the Corinthian frise of an old temple of Vesta, at Tivoli[69]; on tombs, as on one of the Metellus-family near Rome, and another of Munatius Plancus near Gaeta[70]; on vases, as on a pair in the royal cabinet at Dresden. Some modern artists, finding them perhaps unbecoming, changed them into thunderbolts, like Vignola, or to roses, like Palladio and Scamozzi[71].

We conclude from all this, that learning never had, nor indeed ought to have, any share in an art so nearly related to what we call Lusus Naturæ.

Thus the ancients thought: for, pray, what could be meant by a lizard on Mentor’s cup?[72] The

make, to be sure, a lovely image amidst the flowers of a Rachel Ruysch, but a very poor figure on a cup. Of what mysterious meaning are birds picking grapes from vines, on an urn?[73] Images, perhaps, as void of sense, and as arbitrary, as the fable of Ganymede embroidered on the mantle, which Æneas presented to Cloanthus, as a reward of his victory in the naval games[74].

To conclude: is there any thing contradictory between trophies and the hunting-house of a Prince? Surely the author, though so zealous a champion for the Greek taste, cannot pretend to propose to us that of King Philip and the Macedonians, who, by the account of Pausanias[75], did not erect their own trophies. Diana perhaps, amidst her nymphs and hunting-equipages,

might better suit the place; but we know that the antient Romans hung up the arms of their defeated enemies over the out-sides of their doors, to be everlasting monitors of bravery to every succeeding owner of the house. Can trophies, having the same design, ever be misplaced on any building of the Great?

I wish for a speedy answer to this letter. You cannot be angry at seeing it published. The tribe of authors now imitate the conduct of the stage, where the lover, with his soliloquy, entertains the pit. For the same reason I shall receive, with all my heart, an answer,

for

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Among the Egyptian Mummies of the royal cabinet, there are two preserved perfectly entire, and not in the least damaged, viz. the bodies of a man and woman. The former, among all those that were brought into, and publickly known in Europe, is perhaps the only one of its kind; on account of an inscription thereon, which none of those who have written on Mummies, except Della Valle alone, discovered on those bodies; and Kircher, among all the drawings of Mummies communicated to him, and published in his Oedipus, has but one, (the same which Della Valle had been possessed of,) with an inscription; though his wooden cut[76] is as faulty as all the copies made afterwards[77]. On that Mummy there are these letters ΕΥ✠ΥΧΙ.

This same inscription is on the royal Mummy, of which I propose to give a brief account, and in examining which I have employed all my attention, that I might be certain of its being genuine, and not drawn by a modern hand from the inscription of Della Valle: for ’tis well known, that those bodies frequently pass through the hands of Jews. But the letters are evidently drawn with the same blackish colour with which the face, hands, and feet are stained. The first letter on our Mummy has the form of a large Greek ϵ, expressed by Della Valle with an E angular, the other not being usual in printing-presses.

All the four Mummies of the royal cabinet being bought at Rome, I proposed to examine whether the Mummy with the inscription, was that which Della Valle was possessed of, and found that both the entire royal Mummies were exact resemblances of those described by him.

Both, besides the linnen bandages, of a Barracan-texture, rolled innumerable times around the bodies, are wrapt up in several (and, according to an observation made in England[78], in three) kinds of coarser linnen; which, by particular bandages of the girdle-kind, is fastened in such a manner as to involve even the smallest prominence of the face. The first covering is a nice bit of linnen, slightly tinged with a certain ground, much gilt, decked with various figures, and with a painted one of the deceased.

On the Mummy marked with the inscription, this figure represents a man, who died in the flower of life, with a thin curled beard, not as represented by Kircher, like an old man with a long pointed one. The colour of the face and hands is brown: the head encircled with gilt diadems, marked with the sockets of jewels. From the gold chain, painted around the neck, a sort of medal hangs down, marked with various characters, crescents, &c. and this over-reaches the neck of a bird, that of a hawk perhaps, as on the breasts of other Mummies[79]. In the right hand of the figure is a dish filled with a red stuff, which being like that used by the sacrificers[80], the deceased may be supposed to have been a priest. The first and last finger of the left hand have rings; and in the hand itself there is something round, of a dark-brown colour; which, as Della Valle pretends, is a well-known fruit. The feet and legs are bare, with sandals; the strings of which appearing between the great toes, are, with a slip, fastened on the foot itself.

The inscription, above-mentioned, is beneath the breast.

The second Mummy is the still more refined figure of a young woman. Among a great many medals, seemingly gilt, and other figures, there are certain birds, and quadrupeds something analogous to lions; and towards the extremities of the body there is an ox, perhaps an apis: Down from one of the neck-chains hangs a gilt image of the sun. She has ear-rings, and double bracelets on both her arms: rings on each hand, and on every finger of the left one, but two on the first: whereas the right hand has but two: with this hand she holds, like Isis, a small gilt vessel, of the Greek Spondeion-kind, which was a symbol of the fertility of the Nile, when held by the goddess[81]. In the left hand there is a sort of fruit, like an ear of corn, of a greenish cast. The leaden seals, mentioned by Della Valle, still remain on the first Mummy.

Compare this description with that in his travels[82], and you’ll find the Mummies of the royal cabinet to be the same with those, which were taken out of a deep well or cave, covered with sand, and sold to this celebrated traveller by an Egyptian; and I believe they were purchased from his heirs at Rome, though in the manuscript catalogue, joined to that cabinet of antiquities, there is not the least hint of any such purchase.

I have no design to attempt an explication of the ornaments and figures; some remarks of that kind having already been made by Della Valle. The following observations concern only the inscription.

The Egyptians, we know, employed a double character in expressing themselves[83], the sacred and the vulgar: the first was what is called hieroglyphick; the other contained the characters of their national language, and this is commonly said to be lost. All we know is confined to the twenty-five letters of their alphabet.[84] Della Valle seems inclined to give an instance of the contrary, in that inscription; which Kircher, pushing his conjectures still farther, endeavours to lay down as a foundation for a new scheme of his; and to support it by two other remains of the same kind. For, he attempts to prove[85], that the dialect was the only difference between the old Egyptian and Greek tongue. According to his talent of finding what no body looks for, he makes free with some ancient historical accounts; upon which he obtrudes a fictitious sense, in order to make them tally with his scheme.

Herodotus, according to him, tells us, that King Psammetichus desired some Greeks, who were perfect masters of their language, to go over to Egypt, in order to instruct his people in the purity of the tongue. Hence he concludes, that there was but one language in both countries. But that Greek historian[86] gives an account entirely opposite: he tells us, that Psammetichus, having received some services from the Carians and Ionians, permitted them to settle in Egypt, for the instruction of youth in the Greek language, in order to bring up interpreters.

There is no solidity in the rest of the Kircherian arguments; such as those deduced from the frequent voyages of the Greek sages into Egypt, and the mutual commerce between the two nations; which have not even the strength of conjectures. For the very skill of Democritus, in the sacred tongue of the Babylonians and Egyptians[87], proves only, that the travelling sages learned the languages of the nations they conversed with.

Nor does the testimony of Diodorus, that Attica was originally an Egyptian colony[88], seem to be here of any weight.

The inscription of the Mummy might indeed admit of Kircherian, or such like conjectures, were the Mummy itself of the antiquity pretended by Kircher. Cambyses, the conqueror of Egypt, partly exiled, and partly killed the priests; from which fact Kircher confidently deduces as consequences, the total abolition of the sacred rites, and from that the ceasing to embalm bodies. He again appeals to a passage of Herodotus[89], which, upon his word alone, others have as confidently quoted. Nay, a certain pedant went so far as to pretend, that the Egyptian custom of painting their dead, upon the varnished linnen of the Mummies, ceased with the epoch of Cyrus[90].

But Herodotus says not a word, either of the total abolition of the sacred rites, or of the abolition of the custom of preserving the dead from putrefaction, after the time of Cambyses; nor does Diodorus Siculus give any such hint: we may, on the contrary, from his account of the funeral rites of the Egyptians, rather conclude, that this custom prevailed even in his time; that is to say, when Egypt was changed into a Roman province.

Hence it cannot be demonstrated that our Mummy was embalmed before the Persian conquest.—But supposing it to be of that date, is it a necessary consequence that a body preserved in the Egyptian manner, or even taken care of by their priests, should be marked with Egyptian words?

Perhaps it is the body of some naturalised Ionian or Carian. We know that Pythagoras entered into the Egyptian confession; nay, even consented to be circumcised[91], in order to shorten his way to the mysteries of their priests. The Carians themselves observed the sacred solemnities of Isis, and even went so far in their superstition, as to mangle their faces during the sacrifices offered to that deity[92].

Change the letter ι, in the inscription, into the diphthong ει, and you have a Greek word: such negligences are often to be met with in Greek marbles[93], and still more in Greek manuscripts; and with the same termination it is to be found on a gem, and signifies, “FAREWELL”[94], which was the usual ejaculation addressed by the living to the deceased; the same we meet with on ancient epitaphs[95]; public decrees[96]; and of letters it was the final conclusion[97].

There is on an ancient epitaph the word ΕΥΨΥΧΙ[98]; the form of the Ψ on ancient stones and manuscripts is exactly the same[99] with the third letter of ΕΥ✠ΥΧΙ, which was perhaps confounded with it.

But supposing the Mummy to be of later times, the adoption of a Greek word becomes yet easier. The round form of the ϵ might be something suspicious, with regard to its pretended antiquity; that form being never found on the gems or coins before Augustus[100]. But this suspicion becomes of no weight, by supposing that the Egyptians continued their embalming, even after the time of that Emperor.

However, the word cannot be an Egyptian one, being inconsistent with the remains of that ancient tongue in the modern Coptick, as well as with their manner of writing; which was from the right to the left, as the Etrurians did[101]; whereas the word in question (like some Egyptian characters[102],) is traced from the left to the right. As for the inscription discovered by Maillet[103], no interpreter has yet been found. The Grecians, on the contrary, wrote in the occidental manner, for six hundred years before the christian æra, witness the Sigæan inscription, which is said to be of that date[104].

What has been said relates also to an inscription upon a piece of stone[105], with Egyptian figures, communicated to Kircher by Carolo Vintimiglia, a Palerman patrician. The letters ΙΤΙΨΙΧΙ are two words, and signify, “Let the soul come.” This stone has met with the same fate as the gem engraved with the head of Ptolomæus Philopator: for here an Egyptian has joined two random figures, and there the inscription may be of a Greek hand. The litterati know what little change it wants to be orthographical.

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I could not presume that so small a treatise as mine would be thought of consequence enough to be brought to a publick trial. As it was written only for a few connoisseurs, it seemed superfluous to give it a learned air, by multiplying quotations. Artists want but hints: their task, according to an ancient Rhetor, is “to perform, not to peruse;” consequently every author, who writes for them, ought to be brief. Being besides convinced, that the beauties of the art are founded rather on a quick sense, and refined taste, than on profound meditation, I cannot help thinking that the principle of Neoptolemus[106], “to philosophize only with the few,” ought to be the chief consideration in every treatise of this kind.

Several passages of my Essay are susceptible of explications, and, having been publickly tried by an anonymous author, should be explained and defended at the same time, if my circumstances would permit me to enlarge[107]. As to his other remarks, the author, I hope, will guess at my answer, without my giving one explicitly.—Indeed they do not require any.

I am not in the least moved by the clamours concerning those pieces of Corregio, which, by undoubted accounts, were not only brought to Sweden[108], but even hung up in the stables at Stockholm. Reasoning is of no use here: arguments of this kind admit of no other evidence but that of Æmilius Scaurus against Valerius of Sucro: “He denies; I affirm: Romans! ’tis yours to judge.”

And why should there be any thing more derogatory to the honour of the Swedes, in my repeating Count Tessin’s relation, than in his giving it? Perhaps, because the learned author of the circumstantial life of Queen Christina omits her indiscreet generosity towards Bourdon, and that bad treatment which the pictures of Corregio met with? or was Härleman[109] himself charged with indiscretion or malice, on his relating that, at Lincöping, he found a college, and seven professors, but not one physician or artificer?

It was my design to explain myself more particularly, concerning the negligences of the Greeks, had I been allowed time. The Greeks, as their criticism on the partridge of Protogenes, and his blotting it[110], evidently shews, were not ignorant in learned negligence. But the Zeus of Phidias was the standard of sublimity, the symbol of the omnipresent Deity; like Homer’s Eris, he stood upon the earth, and reached heaven; he was, in the style of sacred poesy, “What encompasses him? &c.” And the world has been candid enough to excuse, nay, even to justify on such reasons, the disproportions in the Carton of Raphael, representing the fishing of Peter[111]. The criticism on the Diomedes, though solid, is not against me: his action, abstractedly considered, with his noble and expressive contour, are standards of the art; and that was all I advanced[112].

The reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks may be reduced to four heads, viz.

Probability was all I pretended to, with regard to the first; which cannot be fully demonstrated, notwithstanding all the assistance of history. For, these advantages of the Greeks were, perhaps, less founded on their nature, and the influences of the climate, than on their education.

The happy situation of their country was, however, the basis of all; and the want of resemblance, which was observed between the Athenians and their neighbours beyond the mountains, was owing to the difference of air and nourishment[113].

The manners and persons of the new-settled inhabitants, as well as the natives of every country, have never failed of being influenced by their different natures. The ancient Gauls, and their successors the German Franks, are but one nation: the blind fury, by which the former were hurried on in their first attacks, proved as unsuccessful to them in the times of Cæsar[114], as it did to the latter in our days. They possessed certain other qualities, which are still in vogue among the modern French; and the Emperor Julian[115] tells us, that in his time there were more dancers than citizens at Paris.

Whereas the Spaniards, managing their affairs cautiously, and with a certain frigidity, kept the Romans longer than any other people from conquering the country[116].

And is not this character of the old Iberians re-assumed by the West-Goths, the Mauritanians, and many other people, who over-ran their country?[117]

It is easy to be imagined what advantages the Greeks, having been subject to the same influences of climate and air, must have reaped from the happy situation of their country. The most temperate seasons reigned through all the year, and the refreshing sea-gales fanned the voluptuous islands of the Ionick sea, and the shores of the continent. Induced by these advantages, the Peloponnesians built all their towns along the coast; see Dicearchus, quoted by Cicero[118].

Under a sky so temperate, nay balanced between heat and cold, the inhabitants cannot fail of being influenced by both. Fruits grow ripe and mellow, even such as are wild improve their natures; animals thrive well, and breed more abundantly. “Such a sky, says Hippocrates[119], produces not only the most beautiful of men, but harmony between their inclinations and shape.” Of which Georgia, that country of beauty, where a pure and serene sky pours fertility, is an instance[120]. Among the elements, beauty owes so much to water alone, that, if we believe the Indians, it cannot thrive, in a country that has it not in its purity[121]. And the Oracle itself attributes to the lymph of Arethusa a power of forming beauty[122].

The Greek tongue affords us also some arguments in behalf of their frame. Nature moulds the organs of speech according to the influences of the climate. There are nations that rather whistle than speak, like the Troglodytes[123]; others that pronounce without opening their lips[124]; and the Phasians, a Greek people, had, as has been said of the English[125], a hoarse voice: an unkind climate forms harsh sounds, and consequently the organs of speech cannot be very delicate.

The superiority of the Greek tongue is incontestible: I do not speak now of its richness, but only of its harmony. For all the northern tongues, being over-loaded with consonants[126], are too often apt to offend with an unpleasing austerity; whereas the Greek tongue is continually changing the consonant for the vowel, and two vowels, meeting with but one consonant, generally grow into a diphthong[127]. The sweetness of the tongue admits of no word ending with these three harsh letters Θ, Φ, Χ, and for the sake of Euphony, readily changes letters for their kindred ones. Some seemingly harsh words cannot be objected here; none of us being acquainted with the true Greek or Roman pronunciation. All these advantages gave to the tongue a flowing softness, brought variety into the sounds of its words, and facilitated their inimitable composition. And from these alone, not to mention the measure which, even in common conversation, every syllable enjoyed, a thing to be despaired of in occidental tongues; from these alone, I say, we may form the highest idea of the organs by which that tongue was pronounced, and may more than conjecture, that, by the language of the Gods, Homer meant the Greek, by that of Men, the Phrygian tongue.

It was chiefly owing to that abundance of vowels, that the Greek tongue was preferable to all others, for expressing by the sound and disposition of its words the forms and substances of things. The discharge, the rapidity, the diminution of strength in piercing, the slowness in gliding, and the stopping of an arrow, are better expressed by the sound of these three verses of Homer, Iliad Δ.

than even by the words themselves. You see it discharged, flying through the air, and piercing the belt of Menelaus.

The description of the Myrmidons in battle-array, Iliad Π. v. 215.

is of the same kind, and has never been hit by any imitation: what beauties in one line!

Plato’s periods were, from their harmony, compared[129] to a noiseless smooth-running stream. But we should be mistaken in confining the tongue to the softer harmonies only: it became a roaring torrent, boisterous as the winds by which Ulysses’ sails were torn, split only in three or four places by the words, but rent by the sound into a thousand tatters[130]. This was the “vivida expressio,” the living sound; supremely beautiful, when properly and sparingly used!

How quick, how refined must the organs have been, which were the depositaries of such a tongue! The Roman itself could not attain its excellence: nay, a Greek father, of the second century of the christian æra[131], complains of the horrid sound of the Roman laws.

Nature keeps proportion; consequently the frame of the Greeks was of a fine clay, of nerves, and muscles most sensibly elastic, and promoting the flexibility of the body: hence that easiness, that pliant facility, accompanied with mirth and vigour, which animated all their actions. Imagine bodies most nicely balanced between leanness and corpulency: both extremes were ridiculed by the Greeks, and their poets sneer at the Philesiases[132], Philetases[133], and Agoracrituses[134].

But though they were beautiful, and by their law early initiated into pleasure, they were not effeminate Sybarites. As an instance of which we shall only repeat what Pericles pleaded in favour of the Athenian manners, against those of Sparta, which were as different from those of the rest of Greece, as their public oeconomy was: “The Spartans, says Pericles, employ their youth to get, by violent exercises, manly strength: but we, though living indolently, encounter every danger as well as they; calmly, not anxiously, mindful of its approaches, we meet it with voluntary magnanimity, and without any compulsion of the law. Not disconcerted by its impending threats, we meet its most furious attacks, with no less boldness than they, whom perpetual practice has prepared for its strokes. We are fond of elegance, without loving finery; of genius, without being emasculate. In short, to be fit for every great enterprize, is the characteristic of the Athenians[135].”

I cannot, nor will I pretend to fix a rule without allowing exceptions. There was a Thersites in the army of the Greeks. But it is worth observing, that the beauty of a nation was always in proportion to their cultivation of the arts. Thebes, wrapt up in a misty sky, produced a sturdy uncouth race[136],[137]according to Hippocrates’s observation on fenny, watry soils[138]; and its sterility in producing men of genius, Pindar only excepted, is an old reproach. Sparta was as defective in this respect as Thebes, having only Alcman to boast of; but the reasons were different: whereas Attica enjoyed a pure and serene sky, which refined the senses[139], and of course shaped their bodies in proportion to that refinement; and Athens was the seat of arts. The same remark may be made with regard to Sicyon, Corinth, Rhodes, Ephesus, &c. all which having been schools of the arts, could not want convenient models. The passage of Aristophanes, insisted on in the letter[140], I take for a joke, as it really is—and thereby hangs a tale: to have the parts, whereon

moderately complete, were Attick beauties. Theseus[141], made prisoner by the Thesprotians, was delivered from his captivity by Hercules, but not without some loss of the parts in question; a loss bequeathed to all his race. This was the true mark of the Thesean pedigree; as a natural mark, representing a spear[142], signified a Spartan extraction; and we find the Greek artists imitating in those places the sparing hand of nature.

But this liberality of nature was confined to Greece, in a narrower sense. Its colonies underwent the same fate, which its eloquence met with when going abroad. “As soon, says Cicero[143], as eloquence set out from the Athenian port, she plumed herself with the manners of all the islands in her way, adopted the Asiatick luxury, and forsaking her sound Attick expression, lost her health.” The Ionians, transplanted by Nileus from Greece into Asia, after the return of the Heraclides, grew still more voluptuous beneath that glowing sky. Heaps of vowels brought wantonness into every word; the neighbouring islands partook of their climate and manners, which a single Lesbian coin may convince us of[144]. No wonder then, if their bodies degenerated as much from those of their ancestors, as their manners.

The remoter the colonies the greater the difference. Those Greeks, who had chosen their abode in Africa, about Pithicussa, fell in with the natives in adoring apes; nay, even gave the names of those animals to their children[145].

The modern Greeks, though composed of various mingled metals, still betray the chief mass. Barbarism has destroyed the very elements of science, and ignorance over-clouds the whole country; education, courage, manners are sunk beneath an iron sway, and even the shadow of liberty is lost. Time, in its course, dissipates the remains of antiquity: pillars of Apollo’s temple at Delos[146], are now the ornaments of English gardens: the nature of the country itself is changed. In days of yore the plants of Crete[147] were famous over all the world; but now the streams and rivers, where you would go in quest of them, are mantled with wild luxuriant weeds, and trivial vegetables[148].

Unhappy country! How could it avoid being changed into a wilderness, when such populous tracts of land as Samos, once mighty enough to balance the Athenian power at sea, are reduced to hideous desarts[149]!

Notwithstanding all these devastations, the forlorn prospect of the soil, the free passage of the winds, stopped by the inextricable windings of entangled shores, and the want of almost all other commodities; yet have the modern Greeks preserved many of the prerogatives of their ancestors. The inhabitants of several islands, (the Greek race being chiefly preserved in the islands), near the Natolian shore, especially the females, are, by the unanimous account of travellers, the most beautiful of the human race[150].

Attica still preserves its air of philanthropy[151]: all the shepherds and clowns welcomed the two travellers, Spon and Wheeler; nay, prevented them with their salutations[152]: neither have they lost the Attick salt, or the enterprising spirit of the former inhabitants[153].

Objections have been made against their early exercises, as rather derogating from, than adding to, the beauteous form of the Greek youths.

Indeed, the continual efforts of the nerves and muscles seem rather to give an angular gladiatorial turn, than the soft Contour of beauty, to youthful bodies. But this may partly be answered by the character of the nation itself: their fancy, their actions, were easy and natural; their affairs, as Pericles says, were managed with a certain carelessness, and some of Plato’s dialogues[154] may give us an idea of that mirth and chearfulness which prevailed in all the Gymnastick exercises of their youth. Hence his desire of having these places, in his commonwealth, frequented by old folks, in order to remind them of the joys of their youth[155].

Their games commonly began at sun rise[156]; and Socrates frequented them at that time. They chose the morning-hours, in order to avoid being incommoded by the heat: as soon as their garments were laid down, the body was anointed with the elegant Attick oil, partly to defend it from the bleak morning-air; as it was usual to practice, even during the severest cold[157]; and partly to prevent a too copious perspiration, where it was intended only to carry off superfluous humours[158]. To this oil they ascribed also a strengthening quality[159]. The exercises being over, they went to bathe, and there submitted to a fresh unction; and a person leaving the bath in this state “appears, says Homer, taller, stronger, and similar to the immortal Gods[160].”

We may form a very distinct idea of the different kinds and degrees of wrestling among the ancients, from a vase once in the possession of Charl. Patin, and, as he guesses, the urn of a gladiator[161].

Had it been a prevailing custom among the Greeks to walk, either barefooted, like the heroes in their performances[162], or with a single sole, as we commonly believe, their feet must have been bruised. But there are many instances of their extreme nicety in this respect; for, they had names for above ten different sorts of shoes[163].

The coverings of the thighs were thrown off at the publick exercises, even before the flourishing of the art[164]; which was a great advantage to the artists. As for the nourishment of the wrestlers in remoter times, I found it more proper to mention milk in general, than soft cheese.

If I remember right, you think it strange, and even undemonstrable, that the primitive church should have dipped their proselytes, promiscuously: consult the note[165].

As I am now entering upon the discussion of my second point, I could wish that these probabilities of a more perfect nature, among the Greeks, might be allowed to have some conclusive weight; and then I should have but a few words to add.

Charmoleos, a Megarian youth, a single kiss of whom was valued at two talents[166], was, no doubt, beautiful enough to serve for a model of Apollo: Him, Alcibiades, Charmides, and Adimanthus[167], the artists could see and study to their wish for several hours every day: and can you imagine those trifling opportunities proposed to the Parisian artists, equivalents for the loss of advantages like these? But granting that, pray, what is there to be seen more in a swimmer than in any other person? The extremities of the body you may see every where. As for that author[168], who pretends to find in France beauties superior to those of Alcibiades, I cannot help doubting his ability to maintain what he asserts.

What has been said hitherto might also answer the objection drawn from the judgment of our academies, concerning those parts of the body which ought to be drawn rather more angular than we find them in the antiques. The Greeks, and their artists, were happy in the enjoyment of figures endowed with youthful harmony; for, we have no reason to doubt their exactness in copying nature, if we only consider the angular smartness with which they drew the wrist-bones. Agasias’s celebrated Gladiator, in the Borghese, has none of the modern angles, nor the bony prominences authorised by our artists: all his angular parts are those we meet with in the other Greek statues. And this statue, which was perhaps one of those that were erected, in the very places where the games were held, to the memory of the several victors, may be supposed an exact copy of nature. The artist was bound to represent any victor in the very attitude, and instantaneous motion, in which he overcame his antagonist, and the Amphictyones were the judges of his performance[169].

Many authors having written on this, and the following point of the treatise, I have contented myself with giving a few remarks of my own. Superficial arguments, in matters of this kind, can neither suit the deeper views of our times, nor lead to general conclusions. Nevertheless we do not want authors whose premature decisions often get the better of their judgment, and that not in matters concerning the art alone. Pray, what decisions of an author may be depended upon, who, when designing to write on the arts in general, shews himself so ignorant of their very elements, as to ascribe to Thucydides, whose concise and energetick style was not without difficulties, even for Tully[170], the character of simplicity?[171] Another of that tribe, seems as little acquainted with Diodorus Siculus, when he describes him as hunting after elegance[172]. Nor want we blockheads enough who admire, in the ancient performances, such trifles as are below any reasonable man’s attention. “The rope, says a travelling scribler, which ties together Dirce and the ox, is to connoisseurs the most beautiful object of the whole groupe of the Toro Farnese[173].”

I am no stranger to those merits of the modern artists which you oppose to the ancients: but at the same time I know, that the imitation of these alone has elevated the others to that pitch of merit; and it would be easy to prove that, whenever they forsook the ancients, they fell into the faults of those, whom alone I intended to blame.

Nature undoubtedly misled Bernini: a Carita of his, on the monument of Pope Urban the VIIIth, is said to be corpulent, and another on that of Alexander the VIIth, even ugly[174]. Certain it is, that no use could be made of the Equestrian statue of Lewis XIV. on which he had bestowed fifteen years, and the King immense sums. He was represented as ascending, on horseback, the mount of honour: but the action both of the rider and of the horse was exaggerated, and too violent; which was the cause of baptizing it a Curtius plunging into the gulph, and its having been placed only in the Thuilleries: from which we may infer, that the most anxious imitation of nature is as little sufficient for attaining beauty, as the study of anatomy alone for attaining the justest proportions: these Lairesse, by his own account, took from the skeletons of Bidloo; but, though a professor in his art, committed many faults, which the good Roman school, especially Raphael, cannot be charged with. However, it is not meant that there is no heaviness in his Venus; nor does it clear him from the faults imputed to him in the Massacre of the Innocents, engraved by Marc. Antonio, as has been attempted in a very rare treatise on painting[175]; for there the female figures labour under an exuberance of breasts; whereas the murderers look ghastly with leanness: a contrast not to be admired: the sun itself has spots.

Let Raphael be imitated in his best manner, and when in his prime; those works want no apology: it was to no purpose to produce Parrhasius and Zeuxis in order to excuse Him, and the Dutch proportions! ’Tis true, the passage of Pliny[176], which you quote concerning Parrhasius, meets commonly with the same interpretation, viz. that, shunning corpulency he fell into leanness[177]. But supposing Pliny to have understood what he wrote, we must clear him of contradicting himself. A little before he allowed to Parrhasius a superiority in the contour, or in his own words, in the outlines; and in the passage before us, Parrhasius, compared with himself, seems, in Point of the middle parts, to fall short of himself. The question is, what he means by middle parts? Perhaps the parts bordering on the outlines: but is not the designer obliged to know every possible attitude of the frame, every change of its contour? If so, it is ridiculous to give this explication to our passage: for the middle parts of a full face are the outlines of its profile, and so on. Consequently, there is no such thing as middle parts to be met with by a designer: the idea of a painter, well-skilled in the contour of the outlines, but ignorant of their contents, is an absurd one. Parrhasius perhaps either wanted skill in the Chiaroscuro, or Keeping in the disposition of his limbs, and this seems the only explication, which the words of Pliny can reasonably admit of. Unless we choose to make him another La Fage, who, though a celebrated designer, never failed spoiling his contours with his colours. Or, perhaps, to indulge another conjecture, Parrhasius smoothed the outlines of his contour, where it bordered on the grounds, in order to avoid being rough; a fault committed, as it seems, by his contemporaries, and by the artists who flourished in the beginning of the sixteenth century, who circumscribed their figures, as it were with a knife; but those smooth contours wanted the support of keeping, and of masses gradually rising or sinking, in order to become round, and to strike the eye: by failing in which, his figures got an air of flatness; and thus Parrhasius fell short of himself, without being either too corpulent or too lean.

We cannot conclude, from the Homeric shape which Zeuxis gave his female figures, that he raised them, like Rubens, into flesh-hills. There is some reason to believe, from the education of the Spartan ladies, that they had something of a masculine vigour, though they were the chief beauties of Greece; and such a one is the Helena of Theocritus.

All this makes me doubt of finding among the ancients any companion for Jacob Jordans, though he is so zealously defended in your letter. Nor am I afraid of maintaining what I have said concerning him. Mr. d’Argenville is indeed a very industrious collector of criticisms upon the artists; but as his design is not very extensive, so his decisions are often too general, to afford us characteristical ideas of his heroes.

A good eye must be allowed to be a better judge, in matters of this kind, than all the ambiguous decisions of authors: and to fix the character of Jordans, I might content myself with appealing to his Diogenes, and the Purification, in the royal cabinet at Dresden. But, for the reader’s sake, let me inquire into the meaning of what you call Truth in painting. For if truth, in the general sense, can by no means be excluded from any branch of the arts, we have, in the decision of Mr. d’Argenville, a riddle to unfold, which, if it has any meaning at all, must have the following:

Rubens, enabled by the inexhaustible fertility of his genius, to pour forth fictions like Homer himself, displays his riches even to prodigality: like him he loved the marvellous, as well in thought and grandeur of conception, as in composition, and chiar’-oscuro. His figures are composed in a manner unknown before him, and his lights, jointly darting upon one great mass, diffuse over all his works a bold harmony, and amazing spirit. Jordans, a genius of a lower class, cannot, in the ideal part of painting, by any means be compared with his great master. He had no wings to soar above nature; for which reason he humbly followed, and painted her as he found her: and if this be truth, he, no doubt, had a larger share of it than Rubens.

If the modern artists, with regard to forms and beauty, are not to be directed by antiquity, there is no authority left to influence them. Some, in painting Venus, would give her a Frenchified air[178]; another would present her with an Aquiline nose, the Medicean Venus, as they would say, having such a one[179]: her hands would be provided with spindles instead of fingers; and she would ogle us with Chinese eyes, like the beauties of a new Italian school. Every artist, in short, would, by his performance, betray his country: but, as Democritus says[180], if the artists ought to pray the gods to let them meet with none but auspicious images, those of the ancients will best suit their wishes.

Let us, however, make some exception in favour of Fiamingo’s children. For, lustiness and full health being the common burden of the praises of children, whose infant forms are not strictly susceptible of that beauty, which belongs to the steadiness of riper years; the imitation of his children has reasonably become a fashion among our artists. But neither this, nor the indulgence of the academy at Vienna, can be, or indeed was meant to be decisive, in favour of the modern children; it only leads us to make a distinction. The ancients went beyond nature, even in their children: the moderns only follow her; and, provided their infant forms, exuberant as they are, do not influence their ideas of youthful and riper bodies, they may be allowed to be in the right, though, at the same time, the ancients were not in the wrong.

Our artists are, likewise, at full liberty to dress the hair of their figures as they please: but, being so fond of nature, they, must needs know, that it is nature which shades, with pendant locks, the forehead and temples of all those, whose life is not spent between the comb and the looking-glass: and finding this manner carefully observed in most statues of the ancients, they may take it as a proof of their attachment to simplicity and truth; a proof of the more weight, as they did not want people, busier in adorning their bodies than their minds, and as nice in adjusting their hair, as the most elegant of our European courtiers. But it was commonly looked upon as a mark of an ingenuous and noble extraction, to dress the hair in the manner of the statues[181].

The imitation of the ancient contour has indeed never been rejected, not even by those whose chief want was that of correctness: but we differ about imitating that “noble simplicity and sedate grandeur” in their works. An expression which hath seldom met with general approbation, and never pronounced without hazard of being misunderstood.

In the Hercules of Bandinelli, the idea of it was deemed a fault[182]: an usurpation in Raphael’s Massacre of the Innocents[183].

The idea of “nature at rest,” I own, might, perhaps, produce figures like the young Spartans of Xenophon; nor would the bulk of mankind be better pleased with performances in the taste of my treatise, (supposing even all its precepts authorised by the judges of the art) than with a speech made before the Areopagites. But it is not on the bulk of mankind that we ought to confer the legislative power in the art. And though works of an extensive composition ought certainly to have the support of a vigour and spirit proportioned to their extent, yet there are limits which must not be overleapt: use not so much spirit as to represent the everlasting Father like the cruel God of war, or an ecstasied saint like a priestess of Bacchus.

Indeed, in the eyes of one unacquainted with this characteristick of the sublime, a Madonna of Trevisani will seem preferable to that of Raphael in the royal cabinet at Dresden. I know that even artists were of opinion, that its being placed so near one of the former, was not a little disadvantageous to it. Hence it seemed not superfluous to enquire into the true grandeur of that inestimable picture, as it is the only production of this Apollo of painters, that Germany is possessed of.

No comparison, indeed, is to be made of its composition with that of the transfiguration; which, however, I think fully compensated by its being genuine: whereas Julio Romano might perhaps claim one half of the other as his own. The difference of the hands is visible: but in the Madonna, the spirit of that epoch, in which Raphael performed his Athenian school, shines with so full a lustre, as to make even the authority of Vasari superfluous.

’Tis no easy matter to convince a critick, conceited enough to blame the Jesus of the Madonna, that he is mistaken. Pythagoras, says an antient philosopher[184], and Anaxagoras look at the sun with different eyes: the former sees a God, the latter a stone. We want but experience to discover truth and beauty in the faces of Raphael, without enquiring into their dignity: beauty pleases, but serious graces charm[185]. Such are the beauties of the ancients, which gave that serious air to Antinous, which we generally ascribe to his shading locks. Sudden raptures, or the enticement of a glance, are often momentary; let an attentive eye dwell upon those confused beauties which the transient look conveys, and the paint will vanish. True charms owe their durability to reflection, and hidden graces allure our enquiries: reluctant and unsatisfied we leave a coy beauty, in continual admiration of some new-fancied charm: and such are the beauties of Raphael and the ancients; not agreeably trifling ones, but regular and full of real graces[186]. By that Cleopatra became the beauty of all ensuing ages: nobody[187] was astonished at her face, but her air engaged every eye, and subdued the melted heart. A French Venus at her toilet is much like Seneca’s wit: which, if put to the test, disappears[188].

The comparison of Raphael and some of the most celebrated Dutch, and new Italian painters, concerns only the management, (Trattamento). The endeavours of the former of these, to hide the laborious industry that appears in all their works, gives an additional sanction to my judgment; for, hiding is labour. The most difficult part in performances of the arts, is to spread an air of easiness, the “ut sibi quivis” over them[189]; of which, among the ancients, the pictures of Nicomachus were entirely destitute[190].

All this, however, is not meant to derogate from Vanderwerf’s superior merit: his works give a lustre even to the cabinets of kings. He diffused over them an inconceivable polish; every trace of his pencil, one would think, is molten; and, in the colliquation of his tints, there reigns but one predominant colour. He might be said to have enamelled rather than painted.

His works indeed please. But does the character of painting consist in pleasing alone? Denner’s bald pates please likewise. But what, do you imagine, would the wise ancients think of them? Plutarch, from the mouth of some Aristides or Zeuxis, would tell him, that beauty never dwells in wrinkles[191].

’Tis said, the Emperor Charles VI. when he first saw one of Denner’s pictures, was loud in its praise, and in admiration of his industry. The painter was immediately desired to make a fellow to the first, and was magnificently rewarded: but the Emperor, comparing each of them with some pieces of Rembrandt and Vandyke, declared, “that having now satisfied his curiosity, he would on no account have any more from this artist.” An English nobleman was of the same opinion: for being shewn a picture of Denner’s, “You are in the wrong, said he, if you believe that our nation esteems performances, which owe their merits to industry rather than to genius.”

I am far from applying these remarks to Vanderwerf; the difference between him and Denner is too great: I only joined them in order to prove, that a picture which only pleases can no more pretend to universal approbation than a poem. No; their charms must be durable; but here we meet with causes of disgust in the very parts, where the painter endeavoured to please us.

Those parts of nature that are beyond observation, were the chief objects of these painters: they were particularly cautious of changing the situation even of the minutest hair, in order to surprize the most sharp-sighted eye with all the microcosm of nature. They may be compared to those disciples of Anaxagoras, who placed all human wisdom in the palm of the hand—but mark, as soon as they attempt to stretch their art beyond these limits, to draw larger proportions, or the nudities, the painter appears

Design is as certainly the painter’s first, second, and third requisite, as action is that of the orator.

I readily allow the solidity of your remarks, concerning the “reliefs” of the ancients. In my treatise I myself charged them with a want of sufficient skill in perspective; and hence the faults in their reliefs.

The fourth point chiefly concerns Allegory.

In painting we commonly call fiction allegory: for, though imitation arises from the very principles of painting as well as of poetry, it constitutes, by itself, neither of them[192]. A picture, without allegory, is but a vulgar image, and resembles Davenant’s Gondibert, an epopée without fiction.

Colouring and design are to painting what metre and truth, or the fable, are to poetry; a body without soul. Poetry, says Aristotle, was first inspired with its soul, with fiction, by Homer; and with that the painter must animate his work. Design and colouring are the fruits of attention and practice: perspective and composition, in the strictest sense, are established on fixed rules; they are of course but mechanical; and, if I may be allowed the expression, only mechanical souls are wanting to understand and to admire them.

Pleasures in general, save only those which rob the bulk of mankind of their invaluable treasure, time, become durable, and are free from tediousness and disgust, in proportion as they engage our intellectual faculties. Mere sensual sentiments soon languish; they do not influence our reason: such is the delight we take in the common landscape, flower, and fruit paintings: the artist, in performing them, thinks but very little; and the connoisseur, in considering them, thinks no more.

A mere history-piece differs from a landscape only in the object: in the former you draw facts and persons, in the latter, sky, land, seas, &c. both, of course, being founded on the same principle, imitation, are essentially but of one kind.

If it be not a contradiction to stretch the limits of painting, as far as those of poetry, and consequently, to allow the painter the same ability of elevating himself to the pitch of the poet as the musician enjoys; it is clear that history, though the sublimest branch of painting, cannot raise itself to the heighths of tragick or epick poetry, by imitation alone.

Homer, as Cicero tells us[193], has transformed man into God: which is to say; he not only exceeded truth, but, to raise his fiction, preferred even the impossible, if probable, to the barely possible[194]. In this Aristotle fixes the very essence of poetry, and tells us that the pictures of Zeuxis had that characteristick. The possibility and truth, which Longinus requires of the painter, as opposites to absurdity in poetry, are not contradictory to this rule.

This heighth the history-painter cannot reach, only by a contour above common nature, or a noble expression of the passions: for these are requisite in a good portrait-painter, who is able to execute them without diminishing the likeness of his model. They are but imitation, only prudently managed. The heads of Vandyke are charged with too exact an observation of nature; an exactness that would be faulty in a history-piece.

Truth, lovely as it is in itself, charms more, penetrates deeper, when invested with fiction: fable, in its strictest sense, is the delight of childhood; allegory that of riper years. And the old opinion, that poetry was of earlier date than prose, as unanimously attested by the annals of different people, makes it evident, that even in the most barbarous times, truth was preferred, when appearing in this dress.

Our understanding, moreover, labours under the fault of bestowing its attention chiefly on things, whose beauties are not to be perceived at first sight, and of inadvertently slighting others, because clear as day: images of this kind, like a ship on the waves, leave but momentary traces in our memory. Hence the ideas of our childhood are the most permanent, because every common occurrence then seems extraordinary. Thus, if nature herself instructs us, that she is not to be moved by common things, let art, as the Orator, ad Herennium, advises us, follow her dictates.

Every idea increases in strength, if accompanied by another or more ideas, as in comparisons; and the more still as they differ in kind: for ideas, too analogous to each other, do not strike: as for instance, a white skin compared to snow. Hence the power of discovering a similarity, in the most different things, is what we commonly call wit; Aristotle, “unexpected ideas”: and these he requires in an orator[195]. The more you are surprized by a picture, the more you are affected; and both those effects are to be obtained by allegory, like to fruit hid beneath leaves and branches, which when found surprizes the more agreeably, the less it was thought of. The smallest composition is susceptible of the sublimest powers of art: all depends upon the idea.

Necessity first taught the artists to use allegory. No doubt, they began with the representation of single objects of one class: but as they improved, they attempted to express what was common to many particulars; i. e. general ideas. All the qualities of single objects afford such ideas: but to become general, and at the same time sensible, they cannot preserve the particular shape of such or such an object, but must be submitted to another shape, essential to that object, but a general one.

The Egyptians were the first, who went in search of images of that kind. Such were their hieroglyphicks. All the deities of antiquity, especially those of Greece, nay, their very names, were originally Egyptian[196]. Their personal theology was quite allegorical; and so is ours. But the symbols of these inventors, partly preserved by the Greeks, were often so mysteriously arbitrary, as to make it altogether impossible to find out their meaning, even by the help of those authors that are still extant; and such a discovery was looked upon as a nefarious profanation[197]. Thus sacredly mysterious was the pomegranate[198] in the hand of the Samian Juno: and to divulge the Eleusinian rites, was thought worse than the robbery of a temple[199].

The relation of the sign to the thing signified, was in some measure founded on the known or pretended qualities of the latter. The Egyptian Horsemarten was of that kind; an image of the sun, because his species was said to have no female, and to live six months under and six above ground[200]. In like manner the cat, being supposed to bring forth a number of kittens equal to that of the days in a month, became the symbol of Isis, or the moon[201].

The Greeks, on the contrary, endowed with more wit, and undoubtedly with more sensibility, made use of no signs but such as had a true relation to the thing signified, or were most agreeable to the senses: all their deities they invested with human forms[202]. Wings, among the Egyptians, were the symbol of eager and effectual services; a symbol conformable to their nature, and continued by the Greeks: and if the Attick Victoria had none, it was meant to signify, that she had chosen Athens for her abode[203]. A goose, among the Egyptians, was the symbol of a cautious leader; in consequence of which the prows of their ships were formed like geese[204]. This the Greeks preserved also, and the ancient Rostrum resembled the neck of a goose[205].

Of all the figures, whose relation to their intended meaning is somewhat obscure, the Sphinx perhaps alone was continued by the Greeks. Placed in the front of a temple, it was, among the Greeks, almost as instructive, as it was significant among the Egyptians[206]. The Greek Sphinx was winged[207], its head bare, without that stole which it wears on some Attick coins[208].

It was in general a characteristic of the Greeks, to mark their productions with a certain chearfulness: the muses love not hideous phantoms: and Homer himself, when by the mouth of some god he cites an Egyptian allegory, always cautiously begins with “We are told.” Nay, the elder Pampho[209], though he exceeds the Egyptian oddities, by his description of Jupiter wrapt up in horse-dung, approaches nevertheless the sublime idea of the English poet:

It will be no easy matter to find, among the old Greek coins, an image like that of a snake encircling an egg[210], on a Syrian coin of the third century. None of their monuments are marked with any thing ghastly: of these they were, if possible, still more cautious than of ill-omen’d words. The image of death is not to be seen, perhaps, but on one gem[211], and that in the shape commonly exhibited at their feasts[212]; viz. dancing to a flute, with intent to make them enjoy the present pleasures of life, by reminding them of its shortness. On another gem[213], with a Roman inscription, there is a skeleton, with two butterflies as images of the soul, one of which is caught by a bird; a pretended symbol of the metempsychosis: but the performance is of latter times.

It has been likewise observed, that[214] among those myriads of altars, sacred even to the most whimsical deities, there never was one set apart to death; save only on the solitary coasts, which were deemed the borders of the world[215].

The Romans, in their best times, thought like the Greeks; and always, in adopting the iconology of a foreign nation, traced the footsteps of these their masters. An elephant, one of the latter mysterious symbols of the Egyptians[216] (for there is on the most ancient monuments neither elephant[217] nor hart, ostrich nor cock, to be found), was the image of different things[218], and perhaps of eternity, as on some Roman[219] coins, because of his longevity. But on a coin of the emperor Antoninus, this animal, with the inscription, MUNIFICENTIA, cannot possibly hint at any other thing but the grand games, the magnificence of which was augmented by those animals.

But it is no more my design to attempt an inquiry into the origin of every allegorical symbol among the Greeks and Romans, than to write a system of allegory. All I propose is, to defend what I have advanced concerning it, and at the same time to direct the artist to the images of those ancients, in preference to the iconologies and ill-judged symbols of some moderns.

We may, from a little specimen, form a judgment of the turn of mind of those ancients, and of the possibility of subjecting abstracted ideas to the senses. The symbols of many a gem, coin, and monument, enjoy their fixed and universally received interpretation; but some of the most memorable, not yet brought to a proper standard, deserve a nearer determination.

Perhaps the allegory of the ancients might be divided, like painting and poetry in general, into two classes, viz. the sublime, and the more vulgar. Symbols of the one might be those by which some mythological or philosophical allusion, or even some unknown or mysterious rite, is expressed.

Such as are more commonly understood, viz. personified virtues, vices, &c. might be referred to the other.

The images of the former give to performances of the art the true epick grandeur: one single figure is sufficient to give it: the more it contains, the sublimer it is: the more it engages our attention, the deeper it penetrates, and we of course feel it the more.

The ancients, in order to represent a child dying in his bloom, painted him carried off by Aurora[220]: a striking image! taken, perhaps, from the custom of burying youths at day-break. The ideas of the bulk of our artists, in this respect, are too trivial to be mentioned here.

The animation of the body, one of the most abstracted ideas, was represented by the loveliest, most poetical images. An artist, who should imagine he could express this idea by the Mosaick creation, would be mistaken; for his image would be merely historical, and nothing but the creation of Adam: a history altogether too sacred for being either admitted as the allegory of a mere philosophical idea, or into every place: neither does it seem poetical enough for the flights of the art. This idea appears on coins and gems[221], as described by the most ancient poets and philosophers: Prometheus forming a man of that clay, of which large petrified heaps were found in Phocis in the time of Pausanias[222]; and Minerva holding a butterfly, as an image of the soul, over his head. The snake encircling a tree behind Minerva, on the above coin of Antoninus Pius, is a supposed symbol of his prudence and sagacity.

It cannot be denied that the meaning of many an ancient allegory is merely conjectural, and therefore not to be applied on every occasion. A child catching a butterfly on an altar was pretended to signify Amicitia ad aras, or, “which is not to exceed the borders of justice[223].” On another gem, Love, endeavouring to pull off the branch of an old tree, where a nightingale is perching, is said to allegorize love of wisdom[224]. Eros, Himeros, and Pathos, the symbols of Love, Appetite, and Desire, are represented, they say[225], on a gem, encompassing the sacred fire on an altar; Love behind the fire, his head only over-reaching the flames; Appetite and Desire on both sides of the altar; Appetite with one hand only in the fire, with the other holding a garland; Desire with both his hands in the flames. A Victoria crowning an anchor, on a coin of king Seleucus, was formerly regarded as an image of peace and security procured by victory, till by the help of history we have been enabled to give it its true interpretation. Seleucus is said to have been born with a mark resembling an anchor[226], which not only he himself, but all his descendants, the Seleucidæ, have preserved on their coins[227].

There is another Victoria with butterfly’s wings[228], fastened on a trophy. This, they say, is the symbol of a hero, who, like Epaminondas, died in the very act of conquering. At Athens such a statue[229], and an altar to an unwinged Victoria, was the symbol of their perpetual success in battle: ours may admit of the same explication as Mars in chains at Sparta[230]. Nor was she, as I presume, provided at random with wings usually given to Psyche, her own being those of an eagle: they perhaps signify the soul of the deceased: however, all these conjectures might be tolerable, if a Victoria fastened on trophies of conquered enemies could reasonably correspond with their being vanquished.

Indeed the sublimer allegory of the ancients has not been transmitted to us, without the loss of its most valuable treasures: it is poor, when compared with the second kind, which is often provided with several symbols for one idea. Two different ones, signifying the happiness of the times, are expressed on coins of the emperor Commodus: the one a lady[231], sitting with an apple or ball in her right, and a dial in her left hand, beneath a leafy tree: three children are before her, two in a vase or flower-pot, the usual symbol of fertility: the other represents four children, who, as is clear by the things they bear, are the seasons. Both have the subscription FELICITAS TEMPORVM.

But these, and all the symbols that want inscriptions, are of a lower rank; and some of them might as well be taken for signs of different ideas. Hope[232] and Fertility[233], for instance, might be Ceres, Nobility[234], Minerva. Patience[235], on a coin of Aurelian, wants her true characteristick, as does Erato; and the Parcæ[236] are only by their garments distinguished from the Graces. On the contrary, ideas which are often confounded in morality, as Justice and Equity, are extremely well distinguished by the ancients. The former is represented, as drawn by Gellius[237], with a stern look, a diadem, and dressed hair[238]; the latter with a mild countenance, and waving ringlets; ears of corn arising from her balance, as symbols of the advantages of equity; and sometimes she holds in her other hand[239] a cornu-copia.

Peace, on a coin of the emperor Titus, is to be ranked among those of a more energetick expression. The goddess of Peace leans on a pillar with her left arm, in the hand of which she holds the branch of an olive-tree, whilst the other waves the caduceus over the thigh of a victim on a little altar, which hints at the bloodless sacrifices of that goddess: the victims were slaughtered out of the temple, and nothing but the thighs were offered at the altar, which was not to be stained with blood.

Peace usually appears with the olive-branch and the caduceus, as on another coin of this emperor[240]; or on a stool placed on a heap of arms, as on a coin of Drusus[241]. On some of Tiberius’s and Vespasian’s coins[242] Peace appears in the act of burning arms.

On a coin of the Emperor Philip there is a noble image; a sleeping Victory: which, with better reason, may be taken for the symbol of confidence in conquest, than for that in the security of the world as the inscription pretends. Of an analogous idea was the picture, by which the Athenian General Timotheus was ridiculed, for the blind luck with which he obtained his victories: he was represented asleep, with Fortune catching Towns in her Net[243].

The Nile, with his sixteen children, is of this same class[244]. The child that reaches the ears of corn, and the fruits, in his Cornu, is the symbol of the highest fertility; but those that over-reach them are signs of miscarrying seasons. Pliny explains the whole[245]. Egypt is at the height of its fertility, when the Nile rises sixteen feet: but if it either falls short of, or exceeds that measure, it equally blasts the land with unfruitfulness. Rossi, in his collection, neglected the children.

Satyrical pictures belong also to this class: the Ass of Gabrias, for instance[246], which imagines itself worshipped by the people, as they bow to the statue of Isis on its back. It is impossible to give a livelier image of the pride of the Vulgar-Great.

The sublimer allegory might be supplied by the lower class, had it not met with the same fate. We are, for instance, not acquainted with the figure of Eloquence, or Peitho; or that of the Goddess of Comfort, Parergon, represented by Praxiteles, as Pausanias tells us[247]. Oblivion had an altar among the Romans[248], and perhaps a figure: as may also be supposed of Chastity, whose altar is to be found on coins[249]; and of Fear, to which Theseus offered sacrifices[250].

However, the remains of ancient allegory are not yet worn out: there are still many secret stores: the poets, and other monuments of antiquity, afford numbers of beautiful images. Those, who in our time, and that of our fathers, were busy in improving allegory, and in facilitating the endeavours of the artists; those, I say, should reasonably have had recourse to so rich and pure a fountain. But there was an epoch to appear, in which a shocking croud of pedants should, with downright madness, conspire in an universal uproar against every the lead glimpse of good taste. Nature, in their eyes, was puerile, and ought to be fashioned: blockheads, both young and old, vied in painting devices and emblems, for the benefit of artists, philosophers, and divines; and woe to him who made a compliment, without dressing it up in an emblem! Symbols void of sense were illustrated with inscriptions, giving an account of what they meant, and meant not: these are the treasures which are dug for, even in our times, and which, being then in high fashion, out-shone all antiquity had left.

The ancients, for instance, represented Munificence by a woman holding a Cornucopia in one hand, and the table of the Roman Congiarium in the other[251]: an image which looked too parsimonious for modern liberality; another therefore was contrived[252], with two horns; one of them inverted, the better to pour out its contents; an eagle, the meaning of which is too hard for me to guess at, was set upon her head; others painted her with a pot in each hand[253]. Eternity was, by the ancients, drawn either sitting on a Globe, or rather Sphere[254], with a Hasta in her hand; or standing[255], with the Sphere in one hand, and the Hasta in the other; or with the Sphere in her hand, and no Hasta; or else covered with a floating Veil[256]. These are the images of Eternity on the coins of the Empress Faustina: but there was not gravity enough in them for the modern artists. Eternity, so frightful to many, required a frightful image[257]; a form female down to the breast, with Globes in each hand; the rest of the Body a circling star-marked Snake turning into itself.

Providence very often has a Globe at her feet, and a Hasta in her left hand[258]. On a coin of the Emperor Pertinax[259], she stretches out both her hands, towards a Globe falling from the clouds. A female figure, with two heads, seemed more expressive to the moderns[260].

Constancy, on some of Claudius’s coins[261], is either fitting or standing, with a Helmet on her head, and a Hasta in her left hand; or without Helmet and Hasta, but always with a finger pointing to her face, as if closely debating some point. For distinction sake the moderns joined a couple of pillars[262].

It is very probable, that Ripa was often at a loss with his own figures. Chastity, in his Iconology, holds in one hand a Whip[263], (a strange incitement to virtue) in the other a Sieve: The first inventor, perhaps, hinted at Tuccia the vestal; which Ripa not remembring, indulges the most absurd whims, not worth repeating.

By thus contrasting ancient and modern allegory, I mean not to divert our times of their right of settling new allegories: but from the different manners of thinking, I shall draw some rules, for those that are to tread these paths.

The character of noble simplicity was the chief aim of the Greeks and Romans: of which Romeyn de Hooghe has given the very contrast. His book, in general, may very fitly be compared to the elm in Virgil’s hell:

The distinctness of the ancient allegory was owing to the individuation of its images. Their rule, (if we except only a few of those above-mentioned), was to avoid every ambiguity; a rule slightly observed by the moderns: the Hart, for instance, symbolizing[264] baptism, revenge, remorse, and flattery; the Cedar, a preacher, worldly vanities, a scholar, and a woman dying in the pangs of child-birth.

That simplicity and distinctness were always accompanied by a certain decency. A hog signifying, among the Egyptians, a scrutator of mysteries[265], together with all the swine of Cæsar Ripa and some of the moderns, would have been thought, by the Greeks, too indecent a symbol of any thing whatever: save only where that animal made part of the arms of a place, as it appears to be on the Eleusinian coins[266].

The last rule of the ancients was to beware of signs too near a-kin to the thing signified. Let the young allegorist observe these rules, and study them, jointly with mythology, and the remotest history.

Indeed some modern allegories, (if those ought to be called modern that are entirely in the taste of antiquity), may perhaps be compared with the sublimer class of the ancient.

Two brothers of the Barbarigo-family, immediately succeeding each other[267], in the dignity of Doge of Venice, are allegorized by Castor and Pollux[268]; one of whom, as the fable tells us, gave the other part of that immortality which Jupiter had conferred on him alone. Pollux, in the allegory, presents his brother, represented by a skull, with a circling snake, as the symbol of eternity; on the reverie of a fictitious coin, beneath the described figures, there drops a broken branch from a tree, with the Virgilian inscription,

Another idea on one of Lewis XIVth’s coins, is as worthy of notice; being struck[269] on occasion of the Duke of Lorrain’s quiting his dominions, after the surrender of Marsal, for having betrayed both the French and Austrian courts. The Duke is Proteus overcome by the arts of Menelaus, and bound, after having, in vain, tried all his different forms. At a distance the conquered citadel is to be seen, and the year of its surrender marked in the inscription. There was no occasion for the superfluous epigraph: Protei Artes delusæ.

Patience, or rather a longing earnest desire[270], represented by a female figure, with folded hands, gazing on a watch, is a very good image of the lower class. It must indeed be owned, that the inventors of the most picturesque allegories have contented themselves with the remains of antiquity; none having been authorised to establish images of their own fancy, for the general imitation of the artists. Neither has any attempt of latter times deferred the honour: for in the whole Iconology of Ripa, of two or three that are tolerable ones,

an Ethiopian washing himself, as an allusion to labour lost[271], is perhaps the best. There are indeed images, and useful hints, dispersed in some books of greater note, (as for instance, The Temple of Stupidity in the Spectator[272],) which ought to be collected, and made more general. Thus, were the treasures of science joined to those of art, the time might come, when a painter would be able to represent an ode, as well as a tragedy.

I shall myself submit to the publick some images: for rules instruct, but examples still more. Friendship, I find every where pitifully represented, and its emblems are not worth mentioning: their flying scribbled labels shew us the depth of their inventors.

This noblest of human virtues I would paint in the figures of those two immortal friends of heroic times, Theseus and Pirithous. The head of the former is said to be on gems[273]: he likewise appears with the club[274] won from Periphetes, a son of Vulcan, on a gem of Philemon. Theseus consequently might be drawn with some resemblance. Friendship, at the brink of danger, might be taken from the idea of an old picture at Delphos, as described by Pausanias[275]. Theseus was painted in the action of defending himself and his friend against the Thesprotians, with his own sword in one hand, and another drawn from the side of his friend, in the other. The beginning of their friendship, as described by Plutarch[276], might also be an image of that idea. I am astonished not to have met, among the emblems of the great men of the Barbarigo-family, with an image of a good man and eternal friend. Such was Nicolas Barbarigo, who contracted with Marco Trivisano a friendship worthy of immortality;

a little rare treatise alone has preserved their memory[277].

A little hint of Plutarch’s might furnish an image of Ambition: he mentions[278] the sacrifices of Honour, as being performed bareheaded, whereas all other sacrifices, save only those of Saturn[279], were offered with covered heads. This custom he believes to have taken its rise from the usual salutation in society; though it may as well be vice versa: perhaps it sprung from the Pelasgian rites[280], which were performed bareheaded. Honour is likewise represented by a female figure, crowned with laurels, a Cornucopia and Hasta in her hands[281]. Accompanied by Virtue, a male figure with a helmet, she is to be found on a coin of Vitellius[282]: and the heads of both on those of Gordian and Galien[283].

Prayers might be personified from an idea of Homer. Phœnix, the tutor of Achilles, endeavouring to reconcile him to the Greeks, makes use of an allegory. “Know Achilles, says he, that prayers are the daughters of Zeus[284]; they are bent with kneeling; their faces sorrowful and wrinkled, with eyes lifted up to heaven. They follow Ate; who, with a bold and haughty mien marches on, and, light of foot as she is, runs over all the world, to seize and torment mankind; for ever endeavouring to escape the Prayers, who incessantly press upon her footsteps, in order to heal those whom she hath hurt. Whoever honours these daughters of Zeus, on their approach, may obtain much good from them; but meeting with repulse, they pray their fire to punish by Ate the hard-hearted wretch.”

The following well-known old fable might also furnish a new image. Salmacis, and the youth beloved by her, were changed to a fountain, unmanning to such a degree, that

The fountain was near Halicarnassus in Caria. Vitruvius[285] thought he had discovered the truth of that fiction: some inhabitants of Argos and Trœzene, says he, going thither with a mind to settle, dispossessed the Carians and Leleges; who, sheltering themselves among the mountains, began to harass the Greeks with their excursions: but one of the inhabitants having discovered some particular qualities in that fountain, erected a building near it, for the convenience of those who had a mind to make use of its water. Greeks and Barbarians mingled there; and these at length, accustomed to the Greek civility, lost their savageness, and were insensibly moulded into another nature. The fable itself is well known to the artists: but the narrative of Vitruvius might instruct them how to draw the allegory of a people taught humanity and civilised, like the Russians by Peter the First. The fable of Orpheus might serve the same purpose. Expression only must decide the choice.

Supposing the above general observations upon allegory insufficient to evince its necessity in painting, the examples will at least demonstrate, that painting reaches beyond the senses.

The two chief performances in allegorical painting, mentioned in my treatise, viz. the Luxemburg gallery, and the cupola of the Imperial Library at Vienna, may shew how poetical, how happy an use their authors made of allegory.

Rubens proposing to paint Henry IV. as a humane victor, with lenity and goodness prevailing, even in the punishment of unnatural rebels, and treacherous banditti, represents him as Jupiter ordering the gods to overthrow and punish the vices: Apollo and Minerva let fly their darts upon them, and the vices, hideous monsters, in a tumultuous uproar tumble over each other: Mars, entering in a fury, threatens total destruction; but Venus, image of celestial love, gently lays hold of his arm:—you fancy you hear her blandishing petition to the mailed god: “rage not with cruel revenge against the vices—they are punished.”

The whole performance of Daniel Gran[286] is an allegory, relative to the Imperial Library, and all its figures are as the branches of one single tree. ’Tis a painted Epopee, not beginning from the eggs of Leda; but, as Homer chiefly rehearses the anger of Achilles, this immortalizes only the Emperor’s care of the sciences. The preparations for the building of the library are represented in the following manner:

Imperial majesty appears as a lady fitting, her head sumptuously dressed, and on her breast a golden heart, as a symbol of the Emperor’s generosity. With her sceptre the gives the summons to the builders; at her feet sits a genius with an angle, palette, and chissel; another hovers over her with the figures of the Graces, as symbols of that good taste which prevailed in the whole. Next to the chief figure sits general Liberality, with a purse in her hand; below her a genius, with the table of the Roman Congiarius, and behind her the Austrian Liberality, her mantle embroidered with larks. Several Genii gather the treasures that flow from her Cornucopia, in order to distribute them among the votaries of the arts and sciences, chiefly those, whose good offices to the library had entitled them to regard. The execution of the Imperial orders personified, directs her face to the commanding figure, and three children present the model of the house. Next her an old man, the image of Experience, measures on a table the plan of the building, a genius standing beneath him with a plummet, as ready to begin. Next the old man sits Invention, with a statue of Isis in her right, and a book in her left hand, signifying, that Nature and Science are the fathers of Invention, the puzzling schemes of which are represented by a Sphinx lying before her.

This performance was compared to the great platfond of Le Moine at Versailles, with an eye to the newest productions of France and Germany alone: for the great gallery of the same palace, painted by Charles le Brun, is, without doubt, the sublimest performance of poetick painting, since the time of Rubens; and being possessed of this, as well as of the gallery of Luxemburg, France may boast of the two most learned allegorical performances.

The gallery of Le Brun contains the history of Louis XIV. from the Pyrenæan peace, to that of Nimeguen, in nine large, and eighteen smaller pieces: that in which the King determines war against Holland, contains, in itself alone, an ingenious and sublime application of almost the whole mythology[287]: its beauties are too exuberant for this treatise; let the artist’s ideas be judged only by two of the smaller compositions. He represents the famous passage over the Rhine: his hero sits in a chariot, a thunderbolt in his hand, and Hercules, the image of heroism, drives him through the midst of tempestuous waves. The figure representing Spain is borne down by the current: the river god, aghast, lets fall his oar: the victories, approaching on rapid wings, present shields, marked with the names of the towns conquered after the passage. Europa astonished beholds the scene.

Another represents the conclusion of the peace. Holland, though with-held by the Imperial Eagle, snatching her robe, runs to meet peace, descending from heaven, surrounded by the Genii of gaiety and pleasure, scattering flowers all around her. Vanity, crowned with peacocks feathers; endeavours to with-hold Spain and Germany from following their associate: but perceiving the cavern where arms are forged for France and Holland, and hearing same threatening in the skies, they likewise follow her example. Is not the former of these two performances comparable, in sublimity, to the Neptune of Homer, and the strides of his immortal horses?

But let examples be never so striking, allegory will still have adversaries: they rose in times of old, against that of Homer himself. There are people of too delicate a conscience, to bear truth and fiction in one piece: they are scandalized at a poor river-god in some sacred story. Poussin met with their reproaches, for personifying the Nile in his Moses[288]. A still stronger party has declared against the obscurity of allegory; for which they censured, and still continue to censure, Le Brun. But who is there so little experienced as not to know, that perspicuity and obscurity depend often upon time and circumstances? When Phidias first added a tortoise[289] to his Venus, ’tis likely that few were acquainted with his design in it, and bold was the artist who first dared to fetter her: time, however, made the meaning as clear as the figures themselves. Allegory, as Plato says[290] of poetry in general, has something enigmatick in itself, and is not calculated for the bulk of mankind. And should the painter, from the fear of being obscure, adapt his performance to the capacity of those, who look upon a picture as upon a tumultuous mob, he might as well check every new and extraordinary idea. The design of the famous Fred. Barocci, in his Martyrdom of St. Vitalis, by drawing a little girl alluring a magpye with a cherry, must have been very mysterious to many; the cherry[291] alluding to the season, in which that saint suffered.

The painting of the greater machines, and of the larger parts of publick buildings, palaces, &c. ought to be allegorical. Grandeur is relative to grandeur; and heroick actions are not to be sung in elegiack strains. But is every fiction allegorical in every place? The Venetian Doge might as well pretend to enjoy his superiority in Terra firma. I am mistaken if the Farnesian gallery is to be ranked among the allegorical performances. Nevertheless Annibal, perhaps not having it in his power to choose his subject, may have been too roughly used in my treatise: it is known that the Duke of Orleans desired Coypel to paint in his gallery the history of Æneas[292].

The Neptune of Rubens[293], in the gallery at Dresden, painted on purpose to adorn the magnificent entry of the Infant Ferdinand of Spain into Antwerp, as governor of the Netherlands, was there, on a triumphal arch, allegorical[294]. The god of the ocean frowning his waves into peace, was a poetick image of the Princes escaping the storm, and arriving safe at Genoa. But now he is nothing more than the Neptune of Virgil.

Vasari, when pretending to find allegory in the Athenian school of Raphael[295], viz. a companion of philosophy and astronomy with theology, seems to have required, and, by the common opinion of his time, to have been authorised to require something grand and above the vulgar, in the decorations of a grand apartment: though indeed there be nothing but what is obvious at first look, and that is, a representation of the Athenian academy[296].

But in ancient times, there was no story in a temple, that was not, at the same time, allegorical; allegory being closely interwoven with mythology: the gods of Homer, says an ancient, are the most lively images of the different powers of the universe; shadows of elevated ideas: and the gallantries of Jupiter and Juno, in the platfond of a temple of that goddess at Samos, were looked on as such; air being represented by Jupiter, and earth by Juno[297].

Here I think it incumbent upon me to clear up what I have said concerning the contradictions in the character of the Athenians, as represented by Parrhasius. This you think an easy matter; the painter having done it either in the historical way, or in several pictures: which latter is absurd. Has not there been even a statue of that people, done by Leochares, as well as a temple[298]? The composition of the picture in question, has still eluded all probable conjectures[299]; and the help of allegory having been called in, has produced nothing but Tesoro’s[300] ghastly phantoms. This fatal picture of Parrhasius, I am afraid, will of itself be a perpetual instance of the superior skill of the ancients in allegory.

What has been said already of allegory, in general, contains likewise what remarks may be made upon its being applied to decorations; nevertheless as you insist upon that point particularly, I shall lightly mention it too.

There are two chief laws in decoration, viz. to adorn suitably to the nature of things and places, and with truth; and not to follow an arbitrary fancy.

The first, as it concerns the artists in general, and dictates to them the adjusting of things in such a manner, as to make them relative to each other, claims especially a strict propriety in decorations:

The sacred shall not be mixed with the profane, nor the terrible with the sublime: this was the reason for rejecting the sheeps-heads[301], in the Doric Metopes, at the chapel of the palace of Luxemburg at Paris.

The second law excludes licentiousness; nay circumscribes the architect and decorator within much narrower limits than the painter; who sometimes must, in spite of reason, subject his own fancy, and Greece, to fashion, even in history-pieces: but publick buildings, and such works as are made for futurity, claim decorations that will outlast the whims of fashion; like those that, by their dignity and superior excellence, bore down the attacks of many a century: otherwise they fade away, grow insipid and out of fashion, perhaps before the finishing of the very work to which they are added.

The former law directs the artist to allegory: the latter to the imitation of antiquity; and this concerns chiefly the smaller decorations.

Such I call those that make not up of themselves a whole, or those that are additional to the larger ones. The ancients never applied shells, when not required by the fable; as in the case of Venus and the Tritons; or by the place, as in the temples of Neptune: and lamps decked with shells[302] are supposed to have made part of the implements of those temples. For the same reason they may give lustre; and be very significant, in proper places; as in the festoons of the Stadthouse at Amsterdam[303].

Sheep and ox-heads stripped of their skin, so far from justifying a promiscuous use of shells, as the author seems inclined to think, are plain arguments to the contrary: for they not only were relative to the ancient sacrifices, but were thought to be endowed with a power of averting lightning[304]; and Numa pretended to have been secretly instructed about them by Jupiter[305]. Nor can the Corinthian capital serve for an instance of a seemingly absurd ornament, authorised and rendered fashionable by time alone: for it seems of an origin more natural and reasonable than Vitruvius makes it; which is, however, an enquiry more adapted to a treatise on architecture. Pocock believed that the Corinthian order had not much reputation in the time of Pericles, who built a temple to Minerva: but he should have been reminded, that the Doric order belonged to the temples of that goddess, as Vitruvius informs us[306].

These decorations ought to be treated like architecture in general, which owes its grandeur to simplicity, to a system of few parts, which being not complex themselves, branch out into grace and splendour. Remember here the channelled pillars of the temple of Jupiter, at Agrigentum, (Girgenti now) which were large enough to contain, in one single gutter, a man at full length[307]. In the same manner these decorations must not only be few, but those must likewise consist of few parts, which are to appear with an air of grandeur and ease.

The first law (to return to allegory) might be lengthened out into many a subaltern rule: but the nature of things and circumstances is, and ever must be, the artist’s first aim; as for examples, refutation promises rather more instruction than authority.

Arion riding on his dolphin, as unmeaningly represented upon a Sopra-porta, in a new treatise on architecture[308], though a significant image in the apartments of a French Dauphin, would be a very poor one in any place where Philanthropy, or the protection of artists like him, could not immediately be hinted at. On the contrary, he would even to this day, though without his lyre, be an ornament to any publick building at Tarentum, because the ancient Tarentines, stamped on their coins the image of Taras, one of the sons of Neptune, riding on a dolphin, on a supposition of his being their first founder.

The allegorical decorations of a building, raised by the contributions of a whole nation, I mean the Duke of Marlborough’s palace at Blenheim, are absurd: enormous lions of massy stone, above two portals, tearing to pieces a little cock[309]. The hint sprung from a poor pun.

Nor can it be denied that antiquity furnishes some ideas seemingly analogous to this: as for instance, the lioness on the tomb of Leæna, the mistress of Aristogiton, raised in honour of her constancy amidst the torments applied by the tyrant, in order to extort from her a confession of the conspirators against him. But from this, I am afraid, nothing can arise in behalf of the above pitiful decoration: that mistress of the martyr of liberty having been a notorious woman, and whose name could not decently stand a publick trial. Of the same nature are the lizards and frogs on a temple[310], alluding to the names of the two architects, Saurus and Batrachus[311]: the above-mentioned lioness having no tongue, made the allegory still more expressive. The lioness on the tomb of the famous Lais[312], holding with her fore-paws a ram, as a symbol of her manners[313], was perhaps an imitation of the former. The lion was, in general, set upon the tombs of the brave.

It is not indeed to be pretended that every ornament and image of the ancient vases, tools, &c. should be allegorical; and to explain many of them, in that way, would be equally difficult and conjectural. I am not bold enough to maintain, that an earthen lamp[314], in the shape of an ox’s-head, means a perpetual remembrance of useful labours, on account of the perpetuity of the fire; nor to decypher here a mysterious sacrifice to Pluto and Proserpine[315]. But the image of a Trojan Prince, carried off by Jupiter, to be his favourite, was of great and honourable signification in the mantle of a Trojan. Birds pecking grapes seem as suitable to an urn, as the young Bacchus brought by Mercury to be nursed by Leucothea, on a large marble vase of the Athenian Salpion[316]. The grapes may be a symbol of the pleasures the deceased enjoy in Elysium: the pleasures of hereafter being commonly supposed to be such; as the deceased chiefly delighted in when alive. A bird, I need not say, was the image of the soul. A Sphinx, on a cup sacred to Bacchus, is supposed to be an allusion to the adventures of Oedipus at Thebes, Bacchus’s birth place[317]; as a Lizard on a cup of Mentor, may hint at the possessor, whose name perhaps was Saurus.

There is some reason to search for allegory, in most of the ancient performances, when we consider, that they even built allegorically. Such an allusive building was a gallery at Olympia[318], sacred to the seven liberal arts, and re-echoing seven times a poem read aloud there. A temple of Mercury, supported, instead of pillars, by Herms, or, as we now spell, Terms, on a coin of Aurelian[319], is of the same kind: there is on its front a dog, a cock, and a tongue; figures that want no explication.

Yet the temple of Virtue and Honour, built by Marcellus, was still more learnedly executed: having consecrated his Sicilian spoils to that purpose, he was disappointed by the priests, whom he first consulted on that design; who told him, that no single temple could admit of two divinities. Marcellus therefore ordered two temples to be built, adjoining to each other, in such a manner that whoever would be admitted to that of Honour must pass through that of Virtue[320]; thus publickly indicating, that virtue alone leads to true honour: this temple was near the Porta Capena[321]. And here I cannot help remembering those hollow statues of ugly satyrs[322], which, when opened, were found replete with little figures of the graces, to teach, that no judgment is to be formed from outward appearances, and that a fair mind makes amends for a homely body.

Perhaps, Sir, some of your objections may have been omitted: if so, it was against my will——and at this instant, I remember one concerning the Greek art of changing blue eyes to black ones. Dioscorides is the only writer that mentions it[323]. Attempts of this kind have been made in our days: a certain Silesian countess was the favourite beauty of the age, and universally acknowledged to be perfect, had it not been for her blue eyes, which some of her admirers wished were black. The lady, informed of the wishes of her adorers, by repeated endeavours overcame nature; her eyes became black,—and she blind.

I am not satisfied with myself, nor perhaps have given you satisfaction: but the art is inexhaustible, and all cannot be written. I only wanted to amuse myself agreeably at my leisure hours; and the conversation of my friend Frederic Oeser, a true imitator of Aristides, the painter of the soul, was not a little favourable to my purpose: the name of which worthy friend and artist[324] shall spread a lustre over the end of my treatise.

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You call yourself a Connoisseur, and the first thing you gaze at, in considering works of art, is the workmanship, the delicacy of the pencilling, or the polish given by the chissel.——It was the idea however, its grandeur or meanness, its dignity, fitness, or unfitness, that ought first to have been examined: for industry and talents are independent of each other. A piece of painting or sculpture cannot, merely on account of its having been laboured, claim more merit than a book of the same sort. To work curiously, and with unnecessary refinements, is as little the mark of a great artist, as to write learnedly is that of a great author. An image anxiously finished, in every minute trifle, may be fitly compared to a treatise crammed with quotations of books, that perhaps were never read. Remember this, and you will not be amazed at the laurel leaves of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, nor at the net held by Adams’s statue of water at Potzdam: you will only be convinced that workmanship is not the standard which distinguishes the antique from the modern.

Be attentive to discover whether an artist had ideas of his own, or only copied those of others; whether he knew the chief aim of all art, Beauty, or blundered through the dirt of vulgar forms; whether he performed like a man, or played only like a child.

Books may be written, and works of art executed, at a very small expence of ideas. A painter may mechanically paint a Madonna, and please; and a professor, in the same manner, may write Metaphysics to the admiration of a thousand students. But would you know whether an artist deserves his name, let him invent, let him do the same thing repeatedly: for as one feature, may modify a mien, so, by changing the attitude of one limb, the artist may give a new hint towards a characteristic distinction of two figures, in other respects exactly the same, and prove himself a man. Plato, in Raphael’s Athenian school, but slightly moves his finger: yet he means enough, and infinitely more than all Zucchari’s meteors. For as it requires more ability to say much in a few words, than to do the contrary; and as good sense delights rather in things than shews, it follows, that one single figure may be the theatre of all an artist’s skill: though, by all that is stale and trivial! the bulk of painters would think it as tyrannical to be sometimes confined to two or three figures, in great only, as the ephemeral writers of this age would grin at the proposal of beginning the world with their own private stock, all public hobby-horses laid aside: for fine cloaths make the beau. ’Tis hence that most young artists,

choose rather to make their entrance with some perplexed composition, than with one figure strongly fancied and masterly executed. But let him, who, content to please the few, wants not to earn either bread or applause from a gaping mob, let him remember that the management of a “little” more or less really distinguishes artist from artist; that the truly sensible produces a multiplicity, as well as quickness and delicacy of feelings, whilst the dashing quack tickles only feeble senses and callous organs; that he may consequently be great in single figures, in, the smallest compositions, and new and various in repeating things the most trite. Here I speak out of the mouth of the ancients: this, their works teach: and both our writers and painters would come nearer them, did not the one busy themselves with their words only, the other with their proportions.

In the face of Apollo pride exerts itself chiefly in the chin and nether lip; anger in the nostrils; and contempt in the opening mouth; the graces inhabit the rest of his divine, head, and unruffled beauty, like the sun, streams athwart the passions. In Laocoon you see bodily pains, and indignation at undeserved sufferings, twist the nose, and paternal sympathy dim the eye-balls. Strokes like these are, as in Homer, a whole idea in one word; he only finds them who is able to understand them. Take it for certain, that the ancients aimed at expressing much in little,

whereas most moderns, like tradesmen in distress, hang out all their wares at once. Homer, by raising all the gods from their seats, on Apollo’s appearing amongst them[325], gives a sublimer idea than all the learning of Callimachus could furnish. If ever a prejudice may be of use, ’tis here; hope largely from the ancient works in approaching them, nor fear disappointments; but examine, peruse, with cool sedateness and silenced passions, lest your disturbed brain find Xenophon flat and Niobe insipid.

To original ideas, we oppose copied, not imitated ones. Copying we call the slavish crawling of the hand and eyes, after a certain model: whereas reasonable imitation just takes the hint, in order to work by itself. Domenichino, the painter of Tenderness, imitated the heads of the pretended Alexander at Florence, and of the Niobe at Rome[326]; but altered them like a master. On gems and coins you may find many a figure of Poussin’s: his Salomon is the Macedonian Jupiter: but whatever his imitation produced, differs from the first idea, as the blossoms of a transplanted tree differ from those that sprung in its native soil.

Another method of copying is, to compile a Madonna from Maratta; a S. Joseph from Barocci; other figures from other masters, and lump them together in order to make a whole. Many such altar-pieces you may find, even at Rome; and such a painter was the late celebrated Masucci of that city.——Copying I call, moreover, the following a certain form, without the least consciousness of one’s being a blockhead. Such was he who, by the command of a certain Prince, painted the nuptials of Psyche, or, if you will, the Queen of Sheba:—’twas a pity there was no other Psyche to be found, but that dangerous one of Raphael. Most of the late great statues of the saints, in St. Peter’s at Rome, are of the same stuff—the block at 500 Roman crowns from the quarry.

The second characteristic of works of art is Beauty. The highest object of meditation for man is man, and for the artist there is none above his own frame. ’Tis by moving your senses that he reaches your soul: and hence the analysis of the bodily system has no less difficulties for him, than that of the human mind for the philosopher. I do not mean the anatomy of the muscles, vessels, bones, and their different forms and situations; nor the relative measure of the whole to its parts, and vice versa: for the knife, exercise, and patience, may teach you all these. I mean the analysis of an attribute, essential to man, but fluctuating with his frame, allowed by all, misconstrued by many, known by few:—the analysis of beauty, which no definition can explain, to him whom heaven hath denied a soul for it. Beauty consists in the harmony of the various parts of an individual. This is the philosopher’s stone, which all artists must search for, though a few only find it: ’tis nonsense to him, who could not have formed the idea out of himself. The line which beauty describes is elliptical, both uniform and various: ’tis not to be described by a circle, and from every point changes its direction. All this is easily said; but to apply it—there is the rub. ’Tis not in the power of Algebra to determine which line, more or less elliptic, forms the divers parts of the system into beauty—but the ancients knew it; I attest their works, from the gods down to their vases. The human form allows of no circle, nor has any antique vase its profile semicircular.

After this, should any one desire me to assist him more sensibly in his inquiries concerning beauty, by setting down some rules (a hard task), I would take them from the antique models, and in want of these, from the most beautiful people I could meet with at the place where I lived. But to instruct, I would do it in the negative way; of which I shall give some instances, confining myself however to the face.

The form of real beauty has no abrupt or broken parts. The ancients made this principle the basis of their youthful profile; which is neither linear nor whimsical, though seldom to be met with in nature: the growth, at least, of climates more indulgent than ours. It consists in the soft coalescence of the brow with the nose. This uniting line so indispensably accompanies beauty, that a person wanting it may appear handsome full-faced; but mean, nay even ugly, when taken in profile. Bernini, that destroyer of art, despised this line, when legislator of taste, as not finding it in common nature, his only model; and therein was followed by all his school. From this same principle it necessarily follows, that neither chin nor cheeks, deep-marked with dimples, can be consistent with true beauty. Hence the face of the Medicean Venus is to be degraded from the first rank. Her face, I dare say, was taken from some celebrated fair one, contemporary with the artist. Two other Venuses, in the garden behind the Farnese, are manifestly portraits.

The form of real beauty has neither the projected parts obtuse, nor the vaulted ones sharp. The eye-bone is magnificently raised, the chin thoroughly vaulted. Thus the best ancients drew: though, when taste declined amongst them, and the arts were trampled on in modern times, these parts changed too: then the eye-bone became roundish and obtusely dull, and the chin mincingly pretty. Hence we may safely affirm, that what they call Antinous, in the Belvedere, whose eye-bone is rather obtuse, cannot be a work of the highest antiquity, any more than the Venus.

As these remarks are general, they likewise concern the features of the face, the form only. There is another charm, that gives expression and life to forms, which we call Grace; and we shall give some loose reflexions on it separately, leaving it to others to give us systems.

The figure of a man is as susceptible of beauty as that of a youth: but as a various one, not the various alone, is the Gordian knot, it follows, that a youthful figure, drawn at large, and in the highest possible degree of beauty, is, of all problems that can be proposed to the designer, the most difficult. Every one may convince himself of this: take the most beautiful face in modern painting, and it will go hard, but you shall know a still more beautiful one in nature.——I speak thus, after having considered the treasures of Rome and Florence.

If ever an artist was endowed with beauty, and deep innate feelings for it; if ever one was versed in the taste and spirit of the ancients, ’twas certainly Raphael: yet are his beauties inferior to the most beautiful nature. I know persons more beautiful than his unequalled Madonna, in the Palazzo Petti at Florence, or the Alcibiades in his academy. The Madonna in the Christmas-night of Corregio, (a piece justly celebrated for its chiar’-oscuro) is no sublime idea; still less so is that of Maratta at Dresden: Titian’s celebrated Venus[327] in the Tribuna at Florence is common nature. The little heads of Albano have an air of beauty; but it is a different thing to express beauty in little, and in great. To have the theory of navigation, and to guide a ship through the ocean, are two things. Poussin, who had studied antiquity more than his predecessors, knew perfectly well what his shoulders could bear, and never ventured into the great.

The Greeks alone seem to have thrown forth beauty, as a potter makes his pot. The heads on all the coins of their Free-states have forms above nature, which they owe to the line that forms their profile. Would it not be easy to hit that line? Yet have all the numismatic compilers deviated from it. Might not Raphael, who complained of the scarcity of beauty, might not he have recurred to the coins of Syracuse, as the best statues, Laocoon alone excepted, were not yet discovered?

Farther than those coins no mortal idea can go. I wish my reader an opportunity of seeing the beautiful head of a genius in the Villa Borghese, and those images of unparalleled beauty, Niobe and her daughters. On the western side of the Alps he must be contented with gems and pastes. Two of the most beautiful youthful heads are a Minerva of Aspasius, now at Vienna, and a young Hercules in the Museum of the late Baron Stosch, at Florence.

But let no man, who has not formed his taste upon antiquity, take it into his head to act the connoisseur of beauty: his ideas must be a parcel of whims. Of modern beauties I know none that could vie with the Greek female dancer of Mr. Mengs, big as life, painted in Crayons on wood, for the Marquis Croimare at Paris, or with his Apollo amidst the muses, in the Villa Albano, to whom that of Guido in the Aurora, compared, is but a mortal.

All the modern copies of ancient gems give us another proof of the decisive authority of beauty in criticisms on works of art. Natter has dared to copy that head of Minerva mentioned above, in the same size and smaller, but fell short. The nose is a hair too big, the chin too flat, and the mouth mean. And this is the case of modern imitators in general. What can we hope then of self-fancied beauties? Conclude not, however, from this, against the possibility of a perfect imitation of antique heads: ’tis enough to say, that it has not yet existed: ’twas probably the fault of the imitators themselves. Natter’s treatise on ancient gems is rather shallow; and what he wrought and wrote, even on that single branch of engraving, for which he was chiefly celebrated, has neither the strength nor the ease of genius.

To this consciousness of inferiority we owe the scarcity of modern supposititious gems and coins. Any man of taste may, upon comparison, distinguish even the best modern coin from the antique original.—I speak of the best antiques: for as to the lower Imperial coins, where the cheat was easier, the artists have been liberal enough. Padoano’s stamps, for copying antique coins, are in the Barberini Collection at Rome, and those of one Michel, a Frenchman, and false coiner in taste, at Florence, in that of the late Baron Stosch.

The third characteristic of works of art is Execution; or, the sketch being made, the method of finishing. And even here we commend good sense above industry. As in judging of styles, we distinguish the good writer by the clearness, fluency, and nervousness of his diction; so in works of art, we discover the master by the manly strength, freedom, and steadiness of his hand. The august contour, and easiness of mien, in the figures of Christ, St. Peter, and the other apostles, on the right side of the Transfiguration, speak the classic hand of Raphael, as strongly as the smooth, anxious nicety of some of Julio Romano’s figures, on the left, the more wavering one of the disciple.

Never admire either the marble’s radiant polish, or the picture’s glossy surface. For that the journeyman sweated; for this the painter vegetated only. Bernini’s Apollo is as polished as HE in the Belvedere; and there is much more labour hid in one of Trevisani’s Madonnas, than in that of Corregio. Whenever trusty arms and laborious industry prevail, we defy all the ancients. We are not their inferiors even in managing porphyry, though a mob of scriblers, with Clarencas in their rear-guard, deny it.

Nor (whatever Maffei thinks[328],) did the ancients know a peculiar method of giving a nicer polish to the figures of their concave gems (Intagli.) Our artists polish as nicely: but statues and gems may be detestable, for all their polish, as a face may be ugly, with the softest skin.

This however is not meant to blame a statue for its polish, as it is conducive to beauty: though Laocoon informs us, that the ancients knew the secret of finishing statues, merely with the chissel. Nor does the cleanness of the pencil, on a picture, want its merit: yet it ought to be distinguished from enamelled tints. A barked statue, and a bristly picture are alike absurd. Sketch with fire, and execute with phlegm. We blame workmanship only as it claims the first rank; as in the marbles à la Bernini, and the linnen of Scybold and Denner.

Friend, these instructions may be of use. For as the bulk of mankind amuse themselves with the shells of things only, your eye may be captivated by polish and glare, as they are the most obvious; to put you on your guard against which, is leading you the first step to true knowledge. For daily observation, during several years, in Italy, has taught me how lamentably most young travellers are duped by a set of blind leaders. To see them skip about in the temple of art and genius, all quite sober and cool, puts me in mind of a swarm of new-fledged grashoppers wantoning in the spring.

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Grace is the harmony of agent and action. It is a general idea: for whatever reasonably pleases in things and actions is gracious. Grace is a gift of heaven; though not like beauty, which must be born with the possessor: whereas nature gives only the dawn, the capability of this. Education and reflection form it by degrees, and custom may give it the sanction of nature. As water,

So Grace is perfect when most simple, when freest from finery, constraint, and affected wit. Yet always to trace nature through the vast realms of pleasure, or through all the windings of characters, and circumstances infinitely various, seems to require too pure and candid a taste for this age, cloyed with pleasure, in its judgments either partial, local, capricious, or incompetent. Then let it suffice to say, that Grace can never live where the passions rave; that beauty and tranquillity of soul are the centre of its powers. By this Cleopatra subdued Cæsar; Anthony slighted Octavia and the world for this; it breathes through every line of Xenophon; Thucydides, it seems, disdained its charms; to Grace Apelles and Corregio owe immortality; but Michael Angelo was blind to it; though all the remains of ancient art, even those of but middling merit, might have satisfied him, that Grace alone places them above the reach of modern skill.

The criticisms on Grace in nature, and on its imitation by art, seem to differ: for many are not shocked at those faults in the latter, that certainly would incur their displeasure in the former. This diversity of feelings lies either in imitation itself, which perhaps affects the more the less it is akin to the thing imitated; or in the senses being little exercised, and in the want of attention, and of clear ideas of the objects in question. But let us not from hence infer that Grace is wholly fictitious: the human mind advances by degrees; nor are youth, the prejudices of education, boiling passions, and their train of phantoms, the standard of its real delight—remove some of these, and it admires what it loathed, and spurns what it doted on. Myriads, you say, the bulk of mankind, have not even the least notion of Grace—but what do they know of beauty, taste, generosity, or all the higher luxuries of the soul? These flowers of the human mind were not intended for universal growth, though their seeds lie in every breast.

Grace, in works of art, concerns the human figure only; it modifies the attitude and countenance, dress and drapery. And here I must observe, that the following remarks do not extend to the comic part of art.

The attitude and gestures of antique figures are such as those have, who, conscious of merit, claim attention as their due, when appearing among men of sense. Their motions always shew the motive; clear, pure blood, and settled spirits; nor does it signify whether they stand, sit, or lie; the attitudes of Bacchanals only are violent, and ought to be so.

In quiet situations, when one leg alone supports the other which is free, this recedes only as far as nature requires for putting the figure out of its perpendicular. Nay, in the Fauni, the foot has been observed to have an inflected direction, as a token of savage, regardless nature. To the modern artists a quiet attitude seemed insipid and spiritless, and therefore they drag the leg at rest forwards, and, to make the attitude ideal, remove part of the body’s weight from the supporting leg, wring the trunk out of its centre, and turn the head, like that of a person suddenly dazzled with lightning. Those to whom this is not clear, may please to recollect some stage-knight, or a conceited young Frenchman. Where room allowed not of such an attitude, they, lest unhappily the leg that has nothing to do might be unemployed, put something elevated under its foot, as if it were like that of a man who could not speak without setting his foot on a stool, or stand without having a stone purposely put under it. The ancients took such care of appearances, that you will hardly find a figure with crossed legs, if not a Bacchus, Paris, or Nireus; and in these they mean to express effeminate indolence.

In the countenances of antique figures, joy bursts not into laughter; ’tis only the representation of inward pleasure. Through the face of a Bacchanal peeps only the dawn of luxury. In sorrow and anguish they resemble the sea, whose bottom is calm, whilst the surface raves. Even in the utmost pangs of nature, Niobe continues still the heroine, who disdained yielding to Latona. The ancients seem to have taken advantage of that situation of the soul, in which, struck dumb by an immensity of pains, she borders upon insensibility; to express, as it were, characters, independent of particular actions; and to avoid scenes too terrifying, too passionate, sometimes to paint the dignity of minds subduing grief.

Those of the moderns, that either were ignorant of antiquity, or neglected to enquire into Grace in nature, have expressed, not only what nature feels, but likewise what she feels not. A Venus at Potzdam, by Pigal[329], is represented in a sentiment which forces the liquor to flow out at both sides of her mouth; seemingly gasping for breath; for she was intended to pant with lust: yet, by all that’s desperate! was this very Pigal several years entertained at Rome to study the antique. A Carita of Bernini, on one of the papal monuments in St. Peter’s, ought, you’ll think, to look upon her children with benevolence and maternal fondness; but her face is all a contradiction to this: for the artist, instead of real graces, applied to her his nostrum, dimples, by which her fondness becomes a perfect sneer. As for the expression of modern sorrow, every one knows it, who has seen cuts, hair torn, garments rent, quite the reverse of the antique, which, like Hamlet’s,

The gestures of the hands of antique figures, and their attitudes in general, are those of people that think themselves alone and unobserved: and though the hands of but very few statues have escaped destruction, yet may you, from the direction of the arm, guess at the easy and natural motion of the hand. Some moderns, indeed, that have supplied statues with hands or fingers, have too often given them their own favourite attitudes—that of a Venus at her toilet, displaying to her levee the graces of a hand,

The action of modern hands is commonly like the gesticulation of a young preacher, piping-hot from the college. Holds a figure her cloths? You would think them cobweb. Nemesis, who, on antique gems, lifts her peplum softly from her bosom, would be thought too griping for any new performance—how can you be so unpolite to think any thing may be held, without the three last fingers genteely stretched forth?

Grace, in the accidental parts of antiques, consists, like that of the essential ones, in what becomes nature. The drapery of the most ancient works is easy and slight: hence it was natural to give the folds beneath the girdle an almost perpendicular direction.—Variety indeed was sought, in proportion to the increase of art; but drapery still remained a thin floating texture, with folds gathered up, not lumped together, or indiscreetly scattered. That these were the chief principles of ancient drapery, you may convince yourself from the beautiful Flora in the Campidoglio, a work of Hadrian’s times. Bacchanals and dancing figures had, indeed, even if statues, more waving garments, such as played upon the air; such a one is in the Palazzo Riccardi at Florence; but even then the artists did not neglect appearances, nor exceed the nature of the materials. Gods and heroes are represented as the inhabitants of sacred places; the dwellings of silent awe, not like a sport for the winds, or as wafting the colours: floating, airy garments are chiefly to be met with on gems—where Atalanta flies

Grace extends to garments, as such were given to the Graces by the ancients. How would you wish to see the Graces dressed? Certainly not in birth-day robes; but rather like a beauty you loved, still warm from the bed, in an easy negligée.

The moderns, since the epoch of Raphael and his school, seem to have forgot that drapery participates of Grace, by their giving the preference to heavy garments, which might not improperly be called the wrappers of ignorance in beauty: for a thick large-folded drapery may spare the artists the pains of tracing the Contour under it, as the ancients did. Some of the modern figures seem to be made only for lasting. Bernini and Peter of Cortona introduced this drapery. For ourselves, we choose light easy dresses; why do we grudge our figures the same advantage?

He that would give a History of Grace, after the revolution of the arts, would perhaps find himself almost reduced to negatives, especially in sculpture.

In sculpture, the imitation of one great man, of Michael Angelo, has debauched the artists from Grace. He, who valued himself upon his being “a pure intelligence” despised all that could please humanity; his exalted learning disdained to stoop to tender feelings and lovely grace.

There are poems of his published, and in manuscript, that abound in meditations on sublime beauty: but you look in vain for it in his works.—Beauty, even the beauty of a God, wants Grace, and Moses, without it, from awful as he was, becomes only terrible. Immoderately fond of all that was extraordinary and difficult, he soon broke through the bounds of antiquity, grace, and nature; and as he panted for occasions of displaying skill only, he grew extravagant. His lying statues, on the ducal tombs of St. Lorenzo at Florence, have attitudes, which life, undistorted, cannot imitate: so careless was he, provided he might dazzle you with his mazy learning, of that decency, which nature and the place required, that to him we might apply, what a poet says of St. Lewis in hell:

He was blindly imitated by his disciples, and in them the want of Grace shocks you still more: for as they were far his inferiors in science, you have no equivalent at all. How little Guilielmo della Porta, the best of them all, understood grace and the antique, you may see in that marble groupe, called the Farnese-bull; where Dirce is his to the girdle. John di Bologna, Algardi, Fiammingo, are great names, but likewise inferior to the ancients, in Grace.

At last Lorenzo Bernini appeared, a man of spirit and superior talents, but whom Grace had never visited even in dreams. He aimed at encyclopædy in art; painter, architect, statuary, he struggled, chiefly as such, to become original. In his eighteenth year he produced his Apollo and Daphne; a work miraculous for those years, and promising that sculpture by him should attain perfection. Soon after he made his David, which fell short of Apollo. Proud of general applause, and sensible of his impotency, either to equal or to offuscate the antiques; he seems, encouraged by the dastardly taste of that age, to have formed the project of becoming a legislator in art, for all ensuing ages, and he carried his point. From that time the Graces entirely forsook him: how could they abide with a man who begun his career from the end opposite to the ancients? His forms he compiled from common nature, and his ideas from the inhabitants of climates unknown to him; for in Italy’s happiest parts nature differs from his figures. He was worshipped as the genius of art, and universally imitated; for, in our days, statues being erected to piety only, none to wisdom, a statue à la Bernini is likelier to make the kitchen prosper than a Laocoon.

From Italy, reader, I leave you to guess at other countries. A celebrated Puget, Girardon, with all his brethren in On, are worse. Judge of the connoisseurs of France by Watelet, and of its designers, by Mariette’s gems.

At Athens the Graces stood eastward, in a sacred place. Our artists should place them over their work-houses; wear them in their rings; seal with them; sacrifice to them; and, court their sovereign charms to their last breath.

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