The life and writings of Henry Fuseli Volume II Part 7

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

Of the epic plan, the loftiest species of human conception, the aim is to astonish whilst it instructs; it is the sublime allegory of a maxim.

Here Invention arranges a plan by general ideas, the selection of the most prominent features of Nature, or favourable modes of society, visibly to substantiate some great maxim. If it admits history for its basis, it hides the limits in its grandeur; if it select characters to conduct its plan, it is only in the genus, their features reflect, their pa.s.sions are kindled by the maxim, and absorbed in its universal blaze: at this elevation heaven and earth mingle their boundaries, men are raised to demiG.o.ds, and G.o.ds descend. This is the sphere of Homer, Phidias, and Michael Agnolo.

Allegory, or the personification of invisible physic and metaphysic ideas, though not banished from the regions of Invention, is equally inadmissible in pure epic, dramatic, and historic plans, because, wherever it enters, it must rule the whole.[81] It rules with propriety the mystic drama of the Vatican, where the characters displayed are only the varied instruments of a mystery by which the church was established, and Julio and Leone are the allegoric image, the representatives of that church; but the epic, dramatic, and historic painter embellish with poetry or delineate with truth what either was or is supposed to be real; they must therefore conduct their plans by personal and substantial agency, if they mean to excite that credibility, without which it is not in their power to create an interest in the spectator or the reader.

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

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

Among the paltry subterfuges contrived by dulness to palliate the want of invention, the laborious pedantry of emblems ranks foremost, by which arbitrary and conventional signs have been subst.i.tuted for character and expression. If the a.s.sertion of S. Johnson, that the plastic arts "can ill.u.s.trate, but cannot inform," be false as a general maxim, it gains an air of truth with regard to this hieroglyphic mode of exchanging substance for signs; and the story which he adds in proof, of a young girl's mistaking the usual figure of Justice with a steel-yard for a cherry-woman, becomes here appropriate. The child had seen many stall and market-women, and always with a steel-yard or a pair of scales, but never a figure of Justice; and it might as well be pretended that one not initiated in the Egyptian mysteries should discover in the Scarabaeus of an obelisk the summer solstice, as that a child, a girl, or a man not acquainted with Caesar Ripa, or some other emblem-coiner, should find in a female holding a balance over her eyes, in another with a bridle in her hand, in a third leaning on a broken pillar, and in a fourth loaded with children, the symbols of Justice, Temperance, Fort.i.tude and Charity. If these signs be at all admissible, they ought, at least, to receive as much light from the form, the character, and expression of the figures they accompany, as they reflect on them, else they become burlesque, instead of being attributes. Though this rage for emblem did not become epidemic before the lapse of the sixteenth century, when the Cavalieri of the art, the Zucchari, Vasari and Porta's undertook to deliver more work than their brains could furnish with thought, yet even the philosophers of the art, in the cla.s.sic days of Julio and Leo, cannot be said to have been entirely free from it. What a.n.a.logy is there between an ostrich at the side of a female with a balance in her hand, and the idea of Justice? Yet thus has Raphael represented her in a stanza of the Vatican. Nor has he been constant to the same emblem, as on the ceiling of another stanza, he has introduced her with a scale, and armed with a sword. The _Night_ of M. Agnolo, on the Medicean tombs, might certainly be taken for what she professes to be, without the a.s.sistance of the mask, the poppies, and the owl at her feet, for the dominion of sleep is personified in her expression and posture: perhaps even her beautiful companion, whose faintly stretching att.i.tude and half-opened eyes express the symptoms of approaching _morn_, might be conceived for its representative;[82] but no stretch of fancy can, in their male a.s.sociates, reach the symbols of _full day_ and _eve_, or in the females of the monument of Julio II. the ideas of _contemplative_ and _active life_.

To means so arbitrary, confused and precarious, the ancients never descended: their general ideas had an uniform and general typus, which invention never presumed to alter or to transgress; but this typus lay less in the attributes than in the character and form. The inverted torch and moon-flower were the accompaniments, and not the subst.i.tutes, of _Death_ and _Sleep_; neither _Psyche_ nor _Victory_ depended on her wings. Mercury was recognized without the caduceus or purse, and Apollo without his bow or lyre; various and similar, the branches of one family, their leading lines descended from that full type of majesty which Phidias, the architect of G.o.ds, had stamped on his Jupiter.

Whether we ought to consider the son of Charmidas as the inventor or the regulator of this supreme and irremovable standard, matters not, from _him_ the ancient writers date the epoch of mythic invention; no revolutions of style changed the character of his forms, talent only polished with more or less success what his laws had established.

Phidias, says Quintilian, was framed to form G.o.ds; Phidias, says Pliny, gave in his Jupiter a new motive to religion.

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

The Biblic expression, as it is translated, "of the Ancient of Days"--which means, "He that existed before time," furnished the primitive artists, instead of an image of supreme majesty, only with the h.o.a.ry image of age: and such a figure borne along by a globe of angels, and crowned with a kind of episcopal mitre, recurs on the bronzes of Lorenzo Ghiberti. The sublime mind of M. Agnolo, soaring beyond the idea of decrepitude and puny formality, strove to form a type in the elemental energy of the Creator of Adam, and darted life from His extended hand, but in the Creator of Eve sunk again to the idea of age.

Raphael strove to compound a form from M. Angelo and his predecessors, to combine energy and rapidity with age: in the Loggia he follows M.

Agnolo, in the Stanza the prior artists; here his G.o.ds are affable and mild, there rapid, and perhaps more violent than energetic. After these two great names, it were profanation to name the attempts of their successors.

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

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

"The character corresponding with that of Christ," says Mengs,[83]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Madonna, called Dell' Impannato, by Raphael, is one of these: it is so called because he introduced in the back-ground the old Italian linen or paper window. Maria is represented standing or raising herself to offer the Infant to St. Elizabeth, who stretches out her arms to receive him. Mary Magdalen behind, and bending over her, points to St.

John, and caresses the child; he with infantine joy escapes from her touch, and looking at her, leaps up to his mother's neck. St. John, as the princ.i.p.al figure, is placed in the fore-ground on a leopard's skin, and with raised hand seems to prophesy of Christ; he appears to be eight or ten years old, Christ scarcely two. At this anachronism, or the much bolder one committed in the admission of M. Magdalen, who was probably younger than Christ, those only will be shocked who have not considered the nature of a votive picture: this was dedicated to St. John, as the tutelary saint of Florence, and before it was transferred to the Pitti Gallery, was the altar-piece in a domestic chapel of the Medicean family.[84]

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

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

Such is the invention of a work, which, whilst it fills the mind, refuses utterance to words; of which it is difficult to say, whether it subdue more by simplicity, command by dignity, persuade by propriety, a.s.suage by repose, or charm by contrast. A great part of these groups consists of portraits in habiliments of the time, deep, vivid, brilliant; but all are completely subject to the tone of gravity that emanates from the centre; a sacred silence enwraps the whole; all gleams and nothing flashes. Steady to his purpose, and penetrated by his motive, though brooding over every part of his work, the artist appears nowhere.[85]

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

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

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

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

Subjects which cannot in their whole compa.s.s be brought before the eye, which appeal for the best part of their meaning to the erudition of the spectator and the refinements of sentimental enthusiasm, seem equally to defy the powers of invention. The labour of disentangling the former, dissolves the momentary magic of the first impression, and leaves us cold: the second evaporates under the grosser touch of sensual art. It may be more than doubted whether the resignation of Alcestis can ever be made intuitive: the pathos of the story consists in the heroic resolution of Alcestis to save her husband's life by resigning her own.

Now the art can show no more than Alcestis dying: the cause of her death, her elevation of mind, the disinterested heroism of her resolution to die, are beyond its power.

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

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

This is not the only instance in which Poussin has mistaken erudition and detail of circ.u.mstances for evidence. The Exposition of Infant Moses on the Nile, is a picture as much celebrated as the former: a woman shoves a child placed in a basket from the sh.o.r.e. A man mournfully pensive walks off followed by a boy who turns towards the woman and connects the groups; a girl in the back-ground points to a distance, where we discover the Egyptian princess, and thus antic.i.p.ate the fate of the child. The statue of a river G.o.d rec.u.mbent on the sphinx, a town with lofty temples, pyramids and obelisks, tell Memphis and the Nile; and smoking brick-kilns still nearer allude to the servitude and toil of Israel in Egypt: not one circ.u.mstance is omitted that could contribute to explain the meaning of the whole; but the repulsive subject completely baffled the painter's endeavour to show the _real_ motive of the action. We cannot penetrate the _cause_ that forces these people to expose the child on the river, and hence our sympathy and partic.i.p.ation languish, we turn from a subject that gives us danger without fear, to admire the expression of the parts, the cla.s.sic elegance, the harmony of colours, the mastery of execution.

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

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

By the choice and scenery of the back-ground we are frequently enabled to judge how far a painter entered into his subject, whether he understood its nature, to what cla.s.s it belonged, what impression it was capable of making, what pa.s.sion it was calculated to rouse: the sedate, the solemn, the severe, the awful, the terrible, the sublime, the placid, the solitary, the pleasing, the gay, are stamped by it.

Sometimes it ought to be negative, entirely subordinate, receding or shrinking into itself; sometimes more positive, it acts, invigorates, a.s.sists the subject, and claims attention; sometimes its forms, sometimes its colour ought to command.--A subject in itself bordering on the usual or common, may become sublime or pathetic by the back-ground alone, and a sublime or pathetic one may become trivial and uninteresting by it: a female leaning her head on her hand on a rock might easily suggest itself to any painter of portrait, but the means of making this figure interesting to those who are not concerned in the likeness, were not to be picked from the mixtures of the palette: Reynolds found the secret in contrasting the tranquillity and repose of the person by a tempestuous sea and a stormy sh.o.r.e in the distance; and in another female contemplating a tremulous sea by a placid moonlight, he connected elegance with sympathy and desire.

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

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

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

The improprieties attendant on the neglect of this principle are, perhaps, in no work of eminence more offensively evident than in the celebrated Resuscitation of Lazarus by Sebastian del Piombo, whose composition, if composition it deserved to be called, seems to have been dictated by the back-ground. It usurps the first glance; it partly buries, everywhere throngs, and in the most important place squeezes the subject into a corner. The horizon is at the top, Jesus, Maria, and Lazarus at the bottom of the scene. Though its plan and groups recede in diminished forms, they advance in glaring opaque colour, nor can it avail in excuse of the artist, to say that the mult.i.tude of figures admitted are characters chosen to show in different modes of expression the effect of the miracle, whilst their number gives celebrity to it and discriminates it from the obscure trick of a juggler: all this, if it had been done, though perhaps it has not, for by far the greater part are not spectators, might have been done with subordination: the most authentic proof of the reality of the miracle ought to have beamed from the countenance of Him who performed it, and of the restored man's sister.--In every work something must be first, something last; that is essential, this optional; that is present by its own right, this by courtesy and convenience.[86]

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

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

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

The bland imagery of Raffaello was exalted to a type of devotion by M.

Angelo, and place and scenery are adjusted with allegoric or prophetic ornament: thus in the picture painted for Angelo Doni, where the enraptured mother receives the Infant from the hands of Joseph, the scene behind exhibits the new sacrament in varied groups of Baptists, immersing themselves or issuing from the fount. In another, representing the annunciation, we discover in the awful twilight of a recess, the figure of Moses breaking the tables he received on Sinai, an allusion to the abolition of the old law--an infringement of Jewish habits, for the figure is not an apparition, but a statue, readily forgiven to its allegoric beauty. Even in those subjects relating to Christ and his family, where the back-ground is dest.i.tute of allusive ornament, it appears the seat of meditation or virgin purity, and consecrates the sentiment or action of the figures, as in the salutation of St. Giovanni in Laterano, and in that where Maria contemplates her son spread in her lap, and seems to bend under the presentiment of the terrible moment which shall spread him at her feet, under the cross; but in that monumental image of Jesus expired on the cross, with the Madonna and John on each side, what is the scenery but the echo of the subject? The surrounding element sympathises with the woe of the sufferers in the two mourning Genii emerging from the air--a sublime conception, which Vasari fancied to have successfully imitated and perhaps improved, when in a repet.i.tion of the same subject, he travestied them to Phbus and Diana extinguishing their orbs, as symbols of sun and moon eclipsed.[87]

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

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