THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART."
BY LORD LINDSAY.
16. There is, perhaps, no phenomenon
connected with the history of the first half of the
nineteenth century, which will become a subject of
more curious investigation in after ages, than the
coincident development of the Critical faculty, and
extinction of the Arts of Design. Our mechanical
energies, vast though they be, are not singular nor
characteristic; such, and so great, have before been
manifested and it may perhaps be recorded
of us with wonder rather than respect, that we pierced
mountains and excavated valleys, only to emulate the
activity of the gnat and the swiftness of the swallow.
Our discoveries in science, however accelerated or
comprehensive, are but the necessary development of
the more wonderful reachings into vacancy of past
centuries; and they who struck the piles of the bridge
of Chaos will arrest the eyes of Futurity rather than
we builders of its towers and gates theirs
the authority of Light, ours but the ordering of courses
to the Sun and Moon.
17. But the Negative character
of the age is distinctive. There has not before
appeared a race like that of civilized Europe at this
day, thoughtfully unproductive of all art ambitious industrious investigative reflective,
and incapable. Disdained by the savage, or scattered
by the soldier, dishonored by the voluptuary, or forbidden
by the fanatic, the arts have not, till now, been
extinguished by analysis and paralyzed by protection.
Our lecturers, learned in history, exhibit the descents
of excellence from school to school, and clear from
doubt the pedigrees of powers which they cannot
re-establish, and of virtues no more to be revived:
the scholar is early acquainted with every department
of the Impossible, and expresses in proper terms his
sense of the deficiencies of Titian and the errors
of Michael Angelo: the metaphysician weaves from
field to field his analogies of gossamer, which shake
and glitter fairly in the sun, but must be torn asunder
by the first plow that passes: geometry measures
out, by line and rule, the light which is to illustrate
heroism, and the shadow which should veil distress;
and anatomy counts muscles, and systematizes motion,
in the wrestling of Genius with its angel. Nor
is ingenuity wanting nor patience; apprehension
was never more ready, nor execution more exact yet
nothing is of us, or in us, accomplished; the
treasures of our wealth and will are spent in vain our
cares are as clouds without water our creations
fruitless and perishable; the succeeding Age will
trample “sopra lor vanita che
par persona,” and point wonderingly back
to the strange colorless tessera in the mosaic of
human mind.
18. No previous example can be
shown, in the career of nations not altogether nomad
or barbarous, of so total an absence of invention, of
any material representation of the mind’s inward
yearning and desire, seen, as soon as shaped, to be,
though imperfect, in its essence good, and worthy
to be rested in with contentment, and consisting self-approval the
Sabbath of contemplation which confesses and confirms
the majesty of a style. All but ourselves have
had this in measure; the Imagination has stirred herself
in proportion to the requirements, capacity, and energy
of each race: reckless or pensive, soaring or
frivolous, still she has had life and influence; sometimes
aiming at Heaven with brick for stone and slime for
mortar anon bound down to painting of porcelain,
and carving of ivory, but always with an inward consciousness
of power which might indeed be palsied or imprisoned,
but not in operation vain. Altars have been rent,
many ashes poured out, hands
withered but we alone have worshiped, and
received no answer the pieces left in order
upon the wood, and our names writ in the water that
runs roundabout the trench.
19. It is easier to conceive
than to enumerate the many circumstances which are
herein against us, necessarily, and exclusive of all
that wisdom might avoid, or resolution vanquish.
First, the weight of mere numbers, among whom ease
of communication rather renders opposition of judgment
fatal, than agreement probable; looking from England
to Attica, or from Germany to Tuscany, we may remember
to what good purpose it was said that the magnetism
of iron was found not in bars, but in needles.
Together with this adversity of number comes the likelihood
of many among the more available intellects being
held back and belated in the crowd, or else prematurely
outwearied; for it now needs both curious fortune
and vigorous effort to give to any, even the greatest,
such early positions of eminence and audience as may
feed their force with advantage; so that men spend
their strength in opening circles, and crying for
place, and only come to speech of us with broken voices
and shortened time. Then follows the diminution
of importance in peculiar places and public edifices,
as they engage national affection or vanity; no single
city can now take such queenly lead as that the pride
of the whole body of the people shall be involved
in adorning her; the buildings of London or Munich
are not charged with the fullness of the national
heart as were the domes of Pisa and Florence: their
credit or shame is metropolitan, not acropolitan;
central at the best, not dominant; and this is one
of the chief modes in which the cessation of superstition,
so far as it has taken place, has been of evil consequence
to art, that the observance of local sanctities being
abolished, meanness and mistake are anywhere allowed
of, and the thoughts and wealth which were devoted
and expended to good purpose in one place, are now
distracted and scattered to utter unavailableness.
20. In proportion to the increasing
spirituality of religion, the conception of worthiness
in material offering ceases, and with it the sense
of beauty in the evidence of votive labor; machine-work
is substituted for handwork, as if the value of ornament
consisted in the mere multiplication of agreeable
forms, instead of in the evidence of human care and
thought and love about the separate stones; and machine-work
once tolerated the eye itself soon loses
its sense of this very evidence, and no more perceives
the difference between the blind accuracy of the engine,
and the bright, strange play of the living stroke a
difference as great as between the form of a stone
pillar and a springing fountain. And on this
blindness follow all errors and abuses hollowness
and slightness of framework, speciousness of surface
ornament, concealed structure, imitated materials,
and types of form borrowed from things noble for things
base; and all these abuses must be resisted with the
more caution, and less success, because in many ways
they are signs or consequences of improvement, and
are associated both with purer forms of religious
feeling and with more general diffusion of refinements
and comforts; and especially because we are critically
aware of all our deficiencies, too cognizant of all
that is greatest to pass willingly and humbly through
the stages that rise to it, and oppressed in every
honest effort by the bitter sense of inferiority.
In every previous development the power has been in
advance of the consciousness, the resources more abundant
than the knowledge the energy irresistible,
the discipline imperfect. The light that led was
narrow and dim streakings of dawn but
it fell with kindly gentleness on eyes newly awakened
out of sleep. But we are now aroused suddenly
in the light of an intolerable day our
limbs fail under the sunstroke we are walled
in by the great buildings of elder times, and their
fierce reverberation falls upon us without pause,
in our feverish and oppressive consciousness of captivity;
we are laid bedridden at the Beautiful Gate, and all
our hope must rest in acceptance of the “such
as I have,” of the passers by.
21. The frequent and firm, yet
modest expression of this hope, gives peculiar value
to Lord Lindsay’s book on Christian Art; for
it is seldom that a grasp of antiquity so comprehensive,
and a regard for it so affectionate, have consisted
with aught but gloomy foreboding with respect to our
own times. As a contribution to the History of
Art, his work is unquestionably the most valuable
which has yet appeared in England. His research
has been unwearied; he has availed himself of the
best results of German investigation his
own acuteness of discernment in cases of approximating
or derivative style is considerable and
he has set before the English reader an outline of
the relations of the primitive schools of Sacred art
which we think so thoroughly verified in all its more
important ramifications, that, with whatever richness
of detail the labor of succeeding writers may illustrate
them, the leading lines of Lord Lindsay’s chart
will always henceforth be followed. The feeling
which pervades the whole book is chastened, serious,
and full of reverence for the strength ordained out
of the lips of infant Art accepting on
its own terms its simplest teaching, sympathizing with
all kindness in its unreasoning faith; the writer evidently
looking back with most joy and thankfulness to hours
passed in gazing upon the faded and faint touches
of feeble hands, and listening through the stillness
of uninvaded cloisters for fall of voices now almost
spent; yet he is never contracted into the bigot,
nor inflamed into the enthusiast; he never loses his
memory of the outside world, never quits nor compromises
his severe and reflective Protestantism, never gives
ground of offense by despite or forgetfulness of any
order of merit or period of effort. And the tone
of his address to our present schools is therefore
neither scornful nor peremptory; his hope, consisting
with full apprehension of all that we have lost, is
based on a strict and stern estimate of our power,
position, and resource, compelling the assent even
of the least sanguine to his expectancy of the revelation
of a new world of Spiritual Beauty, of which whosoever
“will dedicate his talents,
as the bondsman of love, to his Redeemer’s glory
and the good of mankind, may become the priest and
interpreter, by adopting in the first instance, and
re-issuing with that outward investiture which the
assiduous study of all that is beautiful, either in
Grecian sculpture, or the later but less spiritual
schools of painting, has enabled him to supply, such
of its bright ideas as he finds imprisoned in the
early and imperfect efforts of art and
secondly, by exploring further on his own account in
the untrodden realms of feeling that lie before him,
and calling into palpable existence visions as bright,
as pure, and as immortal as those that have already,
in the golden days of Raphael and Perugino, obeyed
their creative mandate, Live!”
22. But while we thus defer to
the discrimination, respect the feeling, and join
in the hope of the author, we earnestly deprecate the
frequent assertion, as we entirely deny the accuracy
or propriety, of the metaphysical analogies, in accordance
with which his work has unhappily been arranged.
Though these had been as carefully, as they are crudely,
considered, it had still been no light error of judgment
to thrust them with dogmatism so abrupt into the forefront
of a work whose purpose is assuredly as much to win
to the truth as to demonstrate it. The writer
has apparently forgotten that of the men to whom he
must primarily look for the working out of his anticipations,
the most part are of limited knowledge and inveterate
habit, men dexterous in practice, idle in thought;
many of them compelled by ill-ordered patronage into
directions of exertion at variance with their own
best impulses, and regarding their art only as a means
of life; all of them conscious of practical difficulties
which the critic is too apt to under-estimate, and
probably remembering disappointments of early effort
rude enough to chill the most earnest heart.
The shallow amateurship of the circle of their patrons
early disgusts them with theories; they shrink back
to the hard teaching of their own industry, and would
rather read the book which facilitated their methods
than the one that rationalized their aims. Noble
exceptions there are, and more than might be deemed;
but the labor spent in contest with executive difficulties
renders even these better men unapt receivers of a
system which looks with little respect on such achievement,
and shrewd discerners of the parts of such system which
have been feebly rooted, or fancifully reared.
Their attention should have been attracted both by
clearness and kindness of promise; their impatience
prevented by close reasoning and severe proof of every
statement which might seem transcendental. Altogether
void of such consideration or care, Lord Lindsay never
even so much as states the meaning or purpose of his
appeal, but, clasping his hands desperately over his
head, disappears on the instant in an abyss of curious
and unsupported assertions of the philosophy of human
nature: reappearing only, like a breathless diver,
in the third page, to deprecate the surprise of the
reader whom he has never addressed, at a conviction
which he has never stated; and again vanishing ere
we can well look him in the face, among the frankincensed
clouds of Christian mythology: filling the greater
part of his first volume with a resume of its
symbols and traditions, yet never vouchsafing the slightest
hint of the objects for which they are assembled,
or the amount of credence with which he would have
them regarded; and so proceeds to the historical portion
of the book, leaving the whole theory which is its
key to be painfully gathered from scattered passages,
and in great part from the mere form of enumeration
adopted in the preliminary chart of the schools; and
giving as yet account only of that period to which
the mere artist looks with least interest while
the work, even when completed, will be nothing more
than a single pinnacle of the historical edifice whose
ground-plan is laid in the preceding essay, “Progression
by Antagonism": a plan, by the author’s
confession, “too extensive for his own, or any
single hand to execute,” yet without the understanding
of whose main relations it is impossible to receive
the intended teaching of the completed portion.
23. It is generally easier to
plan what is beyond the reach of others than to execute
what is within our own; and it had been well if the
range of this introductory essay had been something
less extensive, and its reasoning more careful.
Its search after truth is honest and impetuous, and
its results would have appeared as interesting as they
are indeed valuable, had they but been arranged with
ordinary perspicuity, and represented in simple terms.
But the writer’s evil genius pursues him; the
demand for exertion of thought is remorseless, and
continuous throughout, and the statements of theoretical
principle as short, scattered, and obscure, as they
are bold. We question whether many readers may
not be utterly appalled by the aspect of an “Analysis
of Human Nature” the first task proposed
to them by our intellectual Eurystheus to
be accomplished in the space of six semi-pages, followed
in the seventh by the “Development of the Individual
Man,” and applied in the eighth to a “General
Classification of Individuals”: and we
infinitely marvel that our author should have thought
it unnecessary to support or explain a division of
the mental attributes on which the treatment of his
entire subject afterwards depends, and whose terms
are repeated in every following page to the very dazzling
of eye and deadening of ear (a division, we regret
to say, as illogical as it is purposeless), otherwise
than by a laconic reference to the assumptions of
Phrenology.
“The Individual Man, or Man
considered by himself as an unit in creation, is compounded
of three distinct primary elements.
1. Sense, or the
animal frame, with its passions or affections;
2. Mind or Intellect; of
which the distinguishing faculties rarely,
if ever, equally balanced, and by their respective
predominance determinative of his whole character,
conduct, and views of life are,
i. Imagination,
the discerner of Beauty,
ii. Reason, the
discerner of Truth,
the former animating and informing
the world of Sense or Matter, the latter finding
her proper home in the world of abstract or immaterial
existences the former receiving the impress
of things Objectively, or ab externo,
the latter impressing its own ideas on them Subjectively,
or ab interno the former a feminine
or passive, the latter a masculine or active
principle; and
iii. Spirit the
Moral or Immortal principle, ruling through the
Will, and breathed into
Man by the Breath of God.” “Progression
by Antagonism,”.
24. On what authority does the
writer assume that the moral is alone the Immortal
principle or the only part of the human
nature bestowed by the breath of God? Are imagination,
then, and reason perishable? Is the Body itself?
Are not all alike immortal; and when distinction is
to be made among them, is not the first great division
between their active and passive immortality, between
the supported body and supporting spirit; that spirit
itself afterwards rather conveniently to be considered
as either exercising intellectual function, or receiving
moral influence, and, both in power and passiveness,
deriving its energy and sensibility alike from the
sustaining breath of God than actually
divided into intellectual and moral parts? For
if the distinction between us and the brute be the
test of the nature of the living soul by that breath
conferred, it is assuredly to be found as much in the
imagination as in the moral principle. There is
but one of the moral sentiments enumerated by Lord
Lindsay, the sign of which is absent in the animal
creation: the enumeration is a bald one,
but let it serve the turn “Self-esteem
and love of Approbation,” eminent in horse and
dog; “Firmness,” not wanting either to
ant or elephant; “Veneration,” distinct
as far as the superiority of man can by brutal intellect
be comprehended; “Hope,” developed as
far as its objects can be made visible; and “Benevolence,”
or Love, the highest of all, the most assured of all together
with all the modifications of opposite feeling, rage,
jealousy, habitual malice, even love of mischief and
comprehension of jest: the one only moral
sentiment wanting being that of responsibility to
an Invisible being, or conscientiousness. But
where, among brutes, shall we find the slightest trace
of the Imaginative faculty, or of that discernment
of beauty which our author most inaccurately confounds
with it, or of the discipline of memory, grasping
this or that circumstance at will, or of the still
nobler foresight of, and respect towards, things future,
except only instinctive and compelled?
25. The fact is, that it is not
in intellect added to the bodily sense, nor in moral
sentiment superadded to the intellect, that the essential
difference between brute and man consists: but
in the elevation of all three to that point at which
each becomes capable of communion with the Deity,
and worthy therefore of eternal life; the
body more universal as an instrument more
exquisite in its sense this last character
carried out in the eye and ear to the perception of
Beauty, in form, sound, and color and herein
distinctively raised above the brutal sense; intellect,
as we have said, peculiarly separating and vast; the
moral sentiments like in essence, but boundlessly
expanded, as attached to an infinite object, and laboring
in an infinite field: each part mortal in its
shortcoming, immortal in the accomplishment of its
perfection and purpose; the opposition which we at
first broadly expressed as between body and spirit,
being more strictly between the natural and spiritual
condition of the entire creature body natural,
sown in death, body spiritual, raised in incorruption:
Intellect natural, leading to skepticism; intellect
spiritual, expanding into faith: Passion natural,
suffered from things spiritual; passion spiritual,
centered on things unseen: and the strife or
antagonism which is throughout the subject of Lord
Lindsay’s proof, is not, as he has stated it,
between the moral, intellectual, and sensual elements,
but between the upward and downward tendencies of
all three between the spirit of Man which
goeth upward, and the spirit of the Beast which goeth
downward.
26. We should not have been thus
strict in our examination of these preliminary statements,
if the question had been one of terms merely, or if
the inaccuracy of thought had been confined to the
Essay on Antagonism. If upon receiving a writer’s
terms of argument in the sense however
unusual or mistaken which he chooses they
should bear, we may without further error follow his
course of thought, it is as unkind as unprofitable
to lose the use of his result in quarrel with its
algebraic expression; and if the reader will understand
by Lord Lindsay’s general term “Spirit”
the susceptibility of right moral emotion, and the
entire subjection of the Will to Reason; and receive
his term “Sense” as not including the perception
of Beauty either in sight or sound, but expressive
of animal sensation only, he may follow without embarrassment
to its close, his magnificently comprehensive statement
of the forms of probation which the heart and faculties
of man have undergone from the beginning of time.
But it is far otherwise when the theory is to be applied,
in all its pseudo-organization, to the separate departments
of a particular art, and analogies the most subtle
and speculative traced between the mental character
and artistical choice or attainment of different races
of men. Such analogies are always treacherous,
for the amount of expression of individual mind which
Art can convey is dependent on so many collateral circumstances,
that it even militates against the truth of any particular
system of interpretation that it should seem at first
generally applicable, or its results consistent.
The passages in which such interpretation has been
attempted in the work before us, are too graceful to
be regretted, nor is their brilliant suggestiveness
otherwise than pleasing and profitable too, so long
as it is received on its own grounds merely, and affects
not with its uncertainty the very matter of its foundation.
But all oscillation is communicable, and Lord Lindsay
is much to be blamed for leaving it entirely to the
reader to distinguish between the determination of
his research and the activity of his fancy between
the authority of his interpretation and the aptness
of his metaphor. He who would assert the true
meaning of a symbolical art, in an age of strict inquiry
and tardy imagination, ought rather to surrender something
of the fullness which his own faith perceives, than
expose the fabric of his vision, too finely woven,
to the hard handling of the materialist; and we sincerely
regret that discredit is likely to accrue to portions
of our author’s well-grounded statement of real
significances, once of all men understood, because
these are rashly blended with his own accidental perceptions
of disputable analogy. He perpetually associates
the present imaginative influence of Art with its ancient
hieroglyphical teaching, and mingles fancies fit only
for the framework of a sonnet, with the deciphered
evidence which is to establish a serious point of
history; and this the more frequently and grossly,
in the endeavor to force every branch of his subject
into illustration of the false division of the mental
attributes which we have pointed out.
27. His theory is first clearly
stated in the following passage:
“Man is, in the strictest sense
of the word, a progressive being, and with many periods
of inaction and retrogression, has still held, upon
the whole, a steady course towards the great end of
his existence, the re-union and re-harmonizing of
the three elements of his being, dislocated by the
Fall, in the service of his God. Each of these
three elements, Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, has
had its distinct development at three distant intervals,
and in the personality of the three great branches
of the human family. The race of Ham, giants in
prowess if not in stature, cleared the earth of primeval
forests and monsters, built cities, established vast
empires, invented the mechanical arts, and gave the
fullest expansion to the animal energies. After
them, the Greeks, the elder line of Japhet, developed
the intellectual faculties, Imagination and Reason,
more especially the former, always the earlier to
bud and blossom; poetry and fiction, history, philosophy,
and science, alike look back to Greece as their birthplace;
on the one hand they put a soul into Sense, peopling
the world with their gay mythology on the
other they bequeathed to us, in Plato and Aristotle,
the mighty patriarchs of human wisdom, the Darius and
the Alexander of the two grand armies of thinking
men whose antagonism has ever since divided the battlefield
of the human intellect: While, lastly, the
race of Shem, the Jews, and the nations of Christendom,
their locum tenentes as the Spiritual Israel, have, by Gods blessing,
been elevated in Spirit to as near and intimate communion with Deity as is
possible in this stage of being. Now the peculiar interest and dignity of Art
consists in her exact correspondence in her three departments with these three
periods of development, and in the illustration she thus affords more closely
and markedly even than literature to the all-important truth that men stand or
fall according as they look up to the Ideal or not. For example, the
Architecture of Egypt, her pyramids and temples, cumbrous and inelegant, but
imposing from their vastness and their gloom, express the ideal of Sense or
Matter elevated and purified indeed, and nearly approaching the Intellectual,
but Material still; we think of them as of natural scenery, in association with
caves or mountains, or vast periods of time; their voice is as the voice of the
sea, or as that of many peoples, shouting in unison: But the Sculpture of
Greece is the voice of Intellect and Thought, communing with itself in solitude,
feeding on beauty and yearning after truth: While the Painting of Christendom
(and we must remember that the glories of Christianity, in the full extent of
the term, are yet to come) is that of an immortal Spirit, conversing with its
God. And as if to mark more forcibly the fact of continuous progress towards
perfection, it is observable that although each of the three arts peculiarly
reflects and characterizes one of the three epochs, each art of later growth has
been preceded in its rise, progress, and decline, by an antecedent correspondent
development of its elder sister or sisters Sculpture, in Greece, by that of
Architecture Painting, in Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If
Sculpture and Painting stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting
by that of Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters,
girlish and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in
equal stature and perfection.
28. The reader must, we think,
at once perceive the bold fallacy of this forced analogy the
comparison of the architecture of one nation with
the sculpture of another, and the painting of a third,
and the assumption as a proof of difference in moral
character, of changes necessarily wrought, always
in the same order, by the advance of mere mechanical
experience. Architecture must precede sculpture,
not because sense precedes intellect, but because
men must build houses before they adorn chambers,
and raise shrines before they inaugurate idols; and
sculpture must precede painting, because men must learn
forms in the solid before they can project them on
a flat surface, and must learn to conceive designs
in light and shade before they can conceive them in
color, and must learn to treat subjects under positive
color and in narrow groups, before they can treat
them under atmospheric effect and in receding masses,
and all these are mere necessities of practice, and
have no more connection with any divisions of the human
mind than the equally paramount necessities that men
must gather stones before they build walls, or grind
corn before they bake bread. And that each following
nation should take up either the same art at an advanced
stage, or an art altogether more difficult, is nothing
but the necessary consequence of its subsequent elevation
and civilization. Whatever nation had succeeded
Egypt in power and knowledge, after having had communication
with her, must necessarily have taken up art at the
point where Egypt left it in its turn delivering
the gathered globe of heavenly snow to the youthful
energy of the nation next at hand, with an exhausted
“a vous le de!” In order
to arrive at any useful or true estimate of the respective
rank of each people in the scale of mind, the architecture
of each must be compared with the architecture of the
other sculpture with sculpture line
with line; and to have done this broadly and with
a surface glance, would have set our author’s
theory on firmer foundation, to outward aspect, than
it now rests upon. Had he compared the accumulation
of the pyramid with the proportion of the peristyle,
and then with the aspiration of the spire; had he set
the colossal horror of the Sphinx beside the Phidian
Minerva, and this beside the Pieta of M. Angelo; had
he led us from beneath the iridescent capitals of
Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the
hues and the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might
have been tempted to assoilzie from all staying of
question or stroke of partisan the invulnerable aspect
of his ghostly theory; but, if, with even partial
regard to some of the circumstances which physically
limited the attainments of each race, we follow their
individual career, we shall find the points of superiority
less salient and the connection between heart and
hand more embarrassed.
29. Yet let us not be misunderstood: the
great gulf between Christian and Pagan art we cannot
bridge nor do we wish to weaken one single
sentence wherein its breadth or depth is asserted by
our author. The separation is not gradual, but
instant and final the difference not of
degree, but of condition; it is the difference between
the dead vapors rising from a stagnant pool, and the
same vapors touched by a torch. But we would
brace the weakness which Lord Lindsay has admitted
in his own assertion of this great inflaming instant
by confusing its fire with the mere phosphorescence
of the marsh, and explaining as a successive development
of the several human faculties, what was indeed the
bearing of them all at once, over a threshold strewed
with the fragments of their idols, into the temple
of the One God.
We shall therefore, as fully as our
space admits, examine the application of our author’s
theory to Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, successively,
setting before the reader some of the more interesting
passages which respect each art, while we at the same
time mark with what degree of caution their conclusions
are, in our judgment, to be received.
30. Accepting Lord Lindsay’s
first reference to Egypt, let us glance at a few of
the physical accidents which influenced its types of
architecture. The first of these is evidently
the capability of carriage of large blocks of stone
over perfectly level land. It was possible to
roll to their destination along that uninterrupted
plain, blocks which could neither by the Greek have
been shipped in seaworthy vessels, nor carried over
mountain-passes, nor raised except by extraordinary
effort to the height of the rock-built fortress or
seaward promontory. A small undulation of surface,
or embarrassment of road, makes large difference in
the portability of masses, and of consequence, in the
breadth of the possible intercolumniation, the solidity
of the column, and the whole scale of the building.
Again, in a hill-country, architecture can be important
only by position, in a level country only by bulk.
Under the overwhelming mass of mountain-form it is
vain to attempt the expression of majesty by size
of edifice the humblest architecture may
become important by availing itself of the power of
nature, but the mightiest must be crushed in emulating
it: the watch-towers of Amalfi are more
majestic than the Superga of Piedmont; St. Peter’s
would look like a toy if built beneath the Alpine
cliffs, which yet vouchsafe some communication of
their own solemnity to the smallest chalet that glitters
among their glades of pine. On the other hand,
a small building is in a level country lost, and the
impressiveness of bulk proportionably increased; hence
the instinct of nations has always led them to the
loftiest efforts where the masses of their labor might
be seen looming at incalculable distance above the
open line of the horizon hence rose her
four square mountains above the flat of Memphis, while
the Greek pierced the recesses of Phigaleia with ranges
of columns, or crowned the sea-cliffs of Sunium with
a single pediment, bright, but not colossal.
31. The derivation of the Greek
types of form from the forest-hut is too direct to
escape observation; but sufficient attention has not
been paid to the similar petrifaction, by other nations,
of the rude forms and materials adopted in the haste
of early settlement, or consecrated by the purity
of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German
Gothic has thus been most characteristically affected
by the structure of the intersecting timbers at the
angles of the chalet. This was in some cases
directly and without variation imitated in stone, as
in the piers of the old bridge at Aarburg; and the
practice obtained partially in the German
after-Gothic universally, or nearly so,
in Switzerland of causing moldings which
met at an angle to appear to interpenetrate each other,
both being truncated immediately beyond the point of
intersection. The painfulness of this ill-judged
adaptation was conquered by association the
eye became familiarized to uncouth forms of tracery and
a stiffness and meagerness, as of cast-iron, resulted
in the moldings of much of the ecclesiastical, and
all the domestic Gothic of central Europe; the moldings
of casements intersecting so as to form a small hollow
square at the angles, and the practice being further
carried out into all modes of decoration pinnacles
interpenetrating crockets, as in a peculiarly bold
design of archway at Besancon. The influence
at Venice has been less immediate and more fortunate;
it is with peculiar grace that the majestic form of
the ducal palace reminds us of the years of fear and
endurance when the exiles of the Prima Venetia settled
like home-less birds on the sea-sand, and that its
quadrangular range of marble wall and painted chamber,
raised upon multiplied columns of confused arcade,
presents but the exalted image of the first pile-supported
hut that rose above the rippling of the lagoons.
32. In the chapter on the “Influence
of Habit and Religion,” of Mr. Hope’s
Historical Essay, the reader will find further instances
of the same feeling, and, bearing immediately on our
present purpose, a clear account of the derivation
of the Egyptian temple from the excavated cavern;
but the point to which in all these cases we would
direct especial attention, is, that the first perception
of the great laws of architectural proportion
is dependent for its acuteness less on the aesthetic
instinct of each nation than on the mechanical conditions
of stability and natural limitations of size in the
primary type, whether hut, chalet, or tent.
As by the constant reminiscence of
the natural proportions of his first forest-dwelling,
the Greek would be restrained from all inordinate
exaggeration of size the Egyptian was from
the first left without hint of any system of proportion,
whether constructive, or of visible parts. The
cavern its level roof supported by amorphous
piers might be extended indefinitely into
the interior of the hills, and its outer façade continued
almost without term along their flanks the
solid mass of cliff above forming one gigantic entablature,
poised upon props instead of columns. Hence the
predisposition to attempt in the built temple the
expression of infinite extent, and to heap the ponderous
architrave above the proportionless pier.
33. The less direct influences
of external nature in the two countries were still
more opposed. The sense of beauty, which among
the Greek peninsulas was fostered by beating of sea
and rush of river, by waving of forest and passing
of cloud, by undulation of hill and poise of precipice,
lay dormant beneath the shadowless sky and on the objectless
plain of the Egyptians; no singing winds nor shaking
leaves nor gliding shadows gave life to the line of
their barren mountains no Goddess of Beauty
rose from the pacing of their silent and foamless Nile.
One continual perception of stability, or changeless
revolution, weighed upon their hearts their
life depended on no casual alternation of cold and
heat of drought and shower; their gift-Gods
were the risen River and the eternal Sun, and the
types of these were forever consecrated in the lotus
decoration of the temple and the wedge of the enduring
Pyramid. Add to these influences, purely physical,
those dependent on the superstitions and political
constitution; of the overflowing multitude of “populous
No”; on their condition of prolonged peace their
simple habits of life their respect for
the dead their separation by incommunicable
privilege and inherited occupation and it
will be evident to the reader that Lord Lindsay’s
broad assertion of the expression of “the Ideal
of Sense or Matter” by their universal style,
must be received with severe modification, and is indeed
thus far only true, that the mass of Life supported
upon that fruitful plain could, when swayed by a despotic
ruler in any given direction, accomplish by mere weight
and number what to other nations had been impossible,
and bestow a pre-eminence, owed to mere bulk and evidence
of labor, upon public works which among the Greek
republics could be rendered admirable only by the
intelligence of their design.
34. Let us, for the present omitting
consideration of the debasement of the Greek types
which took place when their cycle of achievement had
been fulfilled, pass to the germination of Christian
architecture, out of one of the least important elements
of those fallen forms one which, less than
the least of all seeds, has risen into the fair branching
stature under whose shadow we still dwell.
The principal characteristics of the
new architecture, as exhibited in the Lombard cathedral,
are well sketched by Lord Lindsay:
“The three most prominent features,
the eastern aspect of the sanctuary, the cruciform
plan, and the soaring octagonal cupola, are borrowed
from Byzantium the latter in an improved
form the cross with a difference the
nave, or arm opposite the sanctuary, being lengthened
so as to resemble the supposed shape of the actual
instrument of suffering, and form what is now distinctively
called the Latin Cross. The crypt and absis,
or tribune, are retained from the Romish basilica,
but the absis is generally pierced with windows,
and the crypt is much loftier and more spacious, assuming
almost the appearance of a subterranean church.
The columns of the nave, no longer isolated, are clustered
so as to form compound piers, massive and heavy their
capitals either a rude imitation of the Corinthian,
or, especially in the earlier structures, sculptured
with grotesque imagery. Triforia, or galleries
for women, frequently line the nave and transepts.
The roof is of stone, and vaulted. The narthex,
or portico, for excluded penitents, common alike to
the Greek and Roman churches, and in them continued
along the whole façade of entrance, is dispensed with
altogether in the oldest Lombard ones, and when afterwards
resumed, in the eleventh century, was restricted to
what we should now call Porches, over each door, consisting
generally of little more than a canopy open at the
sides, and supported by slender pillars, resting on
sculptured monsters. Three doors admit from the
western front; these are generally covered with sculpture,
which frequently extends in belts across the façade,
and even along the sides of the building. Above
the central door is usually seen, in the later Lombard
churches, a S. Catherine’s-wheel window.
The roof slants at the sides, and ends in front sometimes
in a single pediment, sometimes in three gables answering
to three doors; while, in Lombardy at least, hundreds
of slender pillars, of every form and device those
immediately adjacent to each other frequently interlaced
in the true lover’s knot, and all supporting
round or trefoliate arches run along, in
continuous galleries, under the eaves, as if for the
purpose of supporting the roof run up the
pediment in front, are continued along the side-walls
and round the eastern absis, and finally engirdle
the cupola. Sometimes the western front is absolutely
covered with these galleries, rising tier above tier.
Though introduced merely for ornament, and therefore
on a vicious principle, these fairy-like colonnades
win very much on one’s affections. I may
add to these general features the occasional and rare
one, seen to peculiar advantage in the cathedral of
Cremona, of numerous slender towers, rising, like minarets,
in every direction, in front and behind, and giving
the east end, specially, a marked resemblance to the
mosques of the Mahometans.
“The Baptistery and the Campanile,
or bell-tower, are in theory invariable adjuncts to
the Lombard cathedral, although detached from it.
The Lombards seem to have built them with peculiar
zest, and to have had a keen eye for the picturesque
in grouping them with the churches they belong to.
“I need scarcely add that the
round arch is exclusively employed in pure Lombard
architecture.
“To translate this new style
into its symbolical language is a pleasurable task.
The three doors and three gable ends signify the Trinity,
the Catherine-wheel window (if I mistake not) the Unity,
as concentrated in Christ, the Light of the Church,
from whose Greek monogram its shape was probably adopted.
The monsters that support the pillars of the porch
stand there as talismans to frighten away evil
spirits. The crypt (as in older buildings) signifies
the moral death of man, the cross, the atonement,
the cupola heaven; and these three, taken in conjunction
with the lengthened nave, express, reconcile, and
give their due and balanced prominence to the leading
ideas of the Militant and Triumphant Church, respectively
embodied in the architecture of Rome and Byzantium.
Add to this, the symbolism of the Baptistery, and
the Christian pilgrimage, from the Font to the Door
of Heaven, is complete,”
35. We have by-and-bye an equally
comprehensive sketch of the essential characters of
the Gothic cathedral; but this we need not quote, as
it probably contains little that would be new to the
reader. It is succeeded by the following interpretation
of the spirit of the two styles:
“Comparing, apart from enthusiasm,
the two styles of Lombard and Pointed Architecture,
they will strike you, I think, as the expression,
respectively, of that alternate repose and activity
which characterize the Christian life, exhibited in
perfect harmony in Christ alone, who, on earth, spent
His night in prayer to God, His day in doing good to
man in heaven, as we know by His own testimony,
‘worketh hitherto, conjointly with the Father forever, at the same time,
reposing on the infinity of His wisdom and of His power. Each, then, of these
styles has its peculiar significance, each is perfect in its way. The Lombard
Architecture, with its horizontal lines, its circular arches and expanding
cupola, soothes and calms one; the Gothic, with its pointed arches, aspiring
vaults and intricate tracery, rouses and excites and why? Because the one
symbolizes an infinity of Rest, the other of Action, in the adoration and
service of God. And this consideration will enable us to advance a step farther:
The aim of the one style is definite, of the other indefinite; we look up to the
dome of heaven and calmly acquiesce in the abstract idea of infinity; but we
only realize the impossibility of conceiving it by the flight of imagination
from star to star, from firmament to firmament. Even so Lombard Architecture
attained perfection, expressed its idea, accomplished its purpose but Gothic
never; the Ideal is unapproachable.
36. This idea occurs not only
in this passage: it is carried out through
the following chapters; the
pointed arch associated with the cupola is spoken
of as a “fop interrupting the meditations of
a philosopher”; the “earlier
contemplative style of the Lombards” is spoken
of; Giottesque art is “the expression
of that Activity of the Imagination which produced
Gothic Architecture”; and, throughout, the analogy
is prettily expressed, and ably supported; yet it
is one of those against which we must warn the reader:
it is altogether superficial, and extends not to the
minds of those whose works it accidentally, and we
think disputably, characterizes. The transition
from Romanesque (we prefer using the generic term)
to Gothic is natural and straightforward, in many
points traceable to mechanical and local necessities
(of which one, the dangerous weight of snow on flat
roofs, has been candidly acknowledged by our author),
and directed by the tendency, common to humanity in
all ages, to push every newly-discovered means of
delight to its most fantastic extreme, to exhibit
every newly-felt power in its most admirable achievement,
and to load with intrinsic decoration forms whose
essential varieties have been exhausted. The
arch, carelessly struck out by the Etruscan, forced
by mechanical expediencies on the unwilling, uninventive
Roman, remained unfelt by either. The noble form
of the apparent Vault of Heaven the line
which every star follows in its journeying, extricated
by the Christian architect from the fosse, the aqueduct,
and the sudarium grew into long succession
of proportioned colonnade, and swelled into the white
domes that glitter above the plain of Pisa, and fretted
channels of Venice, like foam globes at rest.
37. But the spirit that was in
these Aphrodites of the earth was not then, nor
in them, to be restrained. Colonnade rose over
colonnade; the pediment of the western front was lifted
into a detached and scenic wall; story above story
sprang the multiplied arches of the Campanile, and
the eastern pyramidal fire-type, lifted from its foundation,
was placed upon the summit. With the superimposed
arcades of the principal front arose the necessity,
instantly felt by their subtle architects, of a new
proportion in the column; the lower wall inclosure,
necessarily for the purposes of Christian worship
continuous, and needing no peristyle, rendered the
lower columns a mere facial decoration, whose proportions
were evidently no more to be regulated by the laws
hitherto observed in detached colonnades. The
column expanded into the shaft, or into the huge pilaster
rising unbanded from tier to tier; shaft and pilaster
were associated in ordered groups, and the ideas of
singleness and limited elevation once attached to
them, swept away for ever; the stilted and variously
centered arch existed already: the pure ogive
followed where first exhibited we stay not
to inquire; finally, and chief of all,
the great mechanical discovery of the resistance of
lateral pressure by the weight of the superimposed
flanking pinnacle. Daring concentrations of pressure
upon narrow piers were the immediate consequence,
and the recognition of the buttress as a feature in
itself agreeable and susceptible of decoration.
The glorious art of painting on glass added its temptations;
the darkness of northern climes both rendering the
typical character of Light more deeply felt than in
Italy, and necessitating its admission in larger masses;
the Italian, even at the period of his most exquisite
art in glass, retaining the small Lombard window,
whose expediency will hardly be doubted by anyone who
has experienced the transition from the scorching reverberation
of the white-hot marble front, to the cool depth of
shade within, and whose beauty will not be soon forgotten
by those who have seen the narrow lights of the Pisan
duomo announce by their redder burning, not like transparent
casements, but like characters of fire searing the
western wall, the decline of day upon Capraja.
38. Here, then, arose one great
distinction between Northern and Transalpine Gothic,
based, be it still observed, on mere necessities of
climate. While the architect of Santa Maria Novella
admitted to the frescoes of Ghirlandajo scarcely more
of purple lancet light than had been shed by the morning
sun through the veined alabasters of San Miniato;
and looked to the rich blue of the quinquipartite vault
above, as to the mosaic of the older concha, for conspicuous
aid in the color decoration of the whole; the northern
builder burst through the walls of his apse, poured
over the eastern altar one unbroken blaze, and lifting
his shafts like pines, and his walls like precipices,
ministered to their miraculous stability by an infinite
phalanx of sloped buttress and glittering pinnacle.
The spire was the natural consummation. Internally,
the sublimity of space in the cupola had been superseded
by another kind of infinity in the prolongation of
the nave; externally, the spherical surface had been
proved, by the futility of Arabian efforts, incapable
of decoration; its majesty depended on its simplicity,
and its simplicity and leading forms were alike discordant
with the rich rigidity of the body of the building.
The campanile became, therefore, principal and central;
its pyramidal termination was surrounded at the base
by a group of pinnacles, and the spire itself, banded,
or pierced into aerial tracery, crowned with its last
enthusiastic effort the flamelike ascent of the perfect
pile.
39. The process of change was
thus consistent throughout, though at intervals accelerated
by the sudden discovery of resource, or invention
of design; nor, had the steps been less traceable,
do we think the suggestiveness of Repose, in the earlier
style, or of Imaginative Activity in the latter, definite
or trustworthy. We much question whether the
Duomo of Verona, with its advanced guard of haughty
gryphons the mailed peers of Charlemagne
frowning from its vaulted gate, that vault
itself ribbed with variegated marbles, and peopled
by a crowd of monsters the Evangelical
types not the least stern or strange; its stringcourses
replaced by flat cut friezes, combats between gryphons
and chain-clad paladins, stooping behind their
triangular shields and fetching sweeping blows with
two-handled swords; or that of Lucca its
fantastic columns clasped by writhing snakes and winged
dragons, their marble scales spotted with inlaid serpentine,
every available space alive with troops of dwarfish
riders, with spur on heel and hawk in hood, sounding
huge trumpets of chase, like those of the Swiss Urus-horn,
and cheering herds of gaping dogs upon harts and
hares, boars and wolves, every stone signed with its
grisly beast be one whit more soothing
to the contemplative, or less exciting to the imaginative
faculties, than the successive arch? and visionary
shaft, and dreamy vault, and crisped foliage, and
colorless stone, of our own fair abbeys, checkered
with sunshine through the depth of ancient branches,
or seen far off, like clouds in the valley, risen
out of the pause of its river.
40. And with respect to the more
fitful and fantastic expression of the “Italian
Gothic,” our author is again to be blamed for
his loose assumption, from the least reflecting of
preceding writers, of this general term, as if the
pointed buildings of Italy could in any wise be arranged
in one class, or criticised in general terms.
It is true that so far as the church interiors are
concerned, the system is nearly universal, and always
bad; its characteristic features being arches of enormous
span, and banded foliage capitals divided into three
fillets, rude in design, unsuggestive of any structural
connection with the column, and looking consequently
as if they might be slipped up or down, and had been
only fastened in their places for the temporary purposes
of a festa. But the exteriors of Italian
pointed buildings display variations of principle
and transitions of type quite as bold as either the
advance from the Romanesque to the earliest of their
forms, or the recoil from their latest to the cinque-cento.
41. The first and grandest style
resulted merely from the application of the pointed
arch to the frequent Romanesque window, the large
semicircular arch divided by three small ones.
Pointing both the superior and inferior arches, and
adding to the grace of the larger one by striking
another arch above it with a more removed center, and
placing the voussoirs at an acute angle to the
curve, we have the truly noble form of domestic Gothic,
which more or less enriched by moldings
and adorned by penetration, more or less open of the
space between the including and inferior arches was
immediately adopted in almost all the proudest palaces
of North Italy in the Brolettos of Como,
Bergamo, Modena, and Siena in the
palace of the Scaligers at Verona of the
Gambacorti at Pisa of Paolo Guinigi
at Lucca besides inferior buildings innumerable: nor
is there any form of civil Gothic except the Venetian,
which can be for a moment compared with it in simplicity
or power. The latest is that most vicious and
barbarous style of which the richest types are the
lateral porches and upper pinnacles of the Cathedral
of Como, and the whole of the Certosa of Pavia: characterized
by the imitative sculpture of large buildings on a
small scale by way of pinnacles and niches; the substitution
of candelabra for columns; and the covering of the
surfaces with sculpture, often of classical subject,
in high relief and daring perspective, and finished
with delicacy which rather would demand preservation
in a cabinet, and exhibition under a lens, than admit
of exposure to the weather and removal from the eye,
and which, therefore, architecturally considered, is
worse than valueless, telling merely as unseemly roughness
and rustication. But between these two extremes
are varieties nearly countless some of them
both strange and bold, owing to the brilliant color
and firm texture of the accessible materials, and
the desire of the builders to crowd the greatest expression
of value into the smallest space.
42. Thus it is in the promontories
of serpentine which meet with their polished and gloomy
green the sweep of the Gulf of Genoa, that we find
the first cause of the peculiar spirit of the Tuscan
and Ligurian Gothic carried out in the
Florentine duomo to the highest pitch of colored finish adorned
in the upper story of the Campanile by a transformation,
peculiarly rich and exquisite, of the narrowly-pierced
heading of window already described, into a veil of
tracery and aided throughout by an accomplished
precision of design in its moldings which we believe
to be unique. In St. Petronio of Bologna, another
and a barbarous type occurs; the hollow niche of Northern
Gothic wrought out with diamond-shaped penetrations
inclosed in squares; at Bergamo another, remarkable
for the same square penetrations of its rich and daring
foliation; while at Monza and Carrara the
square is adopted as the leading form of decoration
on the west fronts, and a grotesque expression results barbarous
still; which, however, in the latter duomo
is associated with the arcade of slender niches the
translation of the Romanesque arcade into pointed
work, which forms the second perfect order of Italian
Gothic, entirely ecclesiastical, and well developed
in the churches of Santa Caterina and Santa Maria della
Spina at Pisa. The Veronese Gothic, distinguished
by the extreme purity and severity of its ruling lines,
owing to the distance of the centers of circles from
which its cusps are struck, forms another, and yet
a more noble school and passes through
the richer decoration of Padua and Vicenza to the
full magnificence of the Venetian distinguished
by the introduction of the ogee curve without pruriency
or effeminacy, and by the breadth and decision of
moldings as severely determined in all examples of
the style as those of any one of the Greek orders.
43. All these groups are separated
by distinctions clear and bold and many
of them by that broadest of all distinctions which
lies between disorganization and consistency accumulation
and adaptation, experiment and design; yet
to all one or two principles are common, which again
divide the whole series from that of the Transalpine
Gothic and whose importance Lord Lindsay
too lightly passes over in the general description,
couched in somewhat ungraceful terms, “the vertical
principle snubbed, as it were, by the horizontal.”
We have already alluded to the great school of color
which arose in the immediate neighborhood of the Genoa
serpentine. The accessibility of marble throughout
North Italy similarly modified the aim of all design,
by the admission of undecorated surfaces. A blank
space of freestone wall is always uninteresting, and
sometimes offensive; there is no suggestion of preciousness
in its dull color, and the stains and rents of time
upon it are dark, coarse, and gloomy. But a marble
surface receives in its age hues of continually increasing
glow and grandeur; its stains are never foul nor dim;
its undecomposing surface preserves a soft, fruit-like
polish forever, slowly flushed by the maturing suns
of centuries. Hence, while in the Northern Gothic
the effort of the architect was always so to diffuse
his ornament as to prevent the eye from permanently
resting on the blank material, the Italian fearlessly
left fallow large fields of uncarved surface, and
concentrated the labor of the chisel on detached portions,
in which the eye, being rather directed to them by
their isolation than attracted by their salience, required
perfect finish and pure design rather than force of
shade or breadth of parts; and further, the intensity
of Italian sunshine articulated by perfect gradations,
and defined by sharp shadows at the edge, such inner
anatomy and minuteness of outline as would have been
utterly vain and valueless under the gloom of a northern
sky; while again the fineness of material both admitted
of, and allured to, the precision of execution which
the climate was calculated to exhibit.
44. All these influences working
together, and with them that of classical example
and tradition, induced a delicacy of expression, a
slightness of salience, a carefulness of touch, and
refinement of invention, in all, even the rudest,
Italian decorations, utterly unrecognized in those
of Northern Gothic: which, however picturesquely
adapted to their place and purpose, depend for most
of their effect upon bold undercutting, accomplish
little beyond graceful embarrassment of the eye, and
cannot for an instant be separately regarded as works
of accomplished art. Even the later and more
imitative examples profess little more than picturesque
vigor or ingenious intricacy. The oak leaves
and acorns of the Beauvais moldings are superbly wreathed,
but rigidly repeated in a constant pattern; the stems
are without character, and the acorns huge, straight,
blunt, and unsightly. Round the southern door
of the Florentine duomo runs a border of fig-leaves,
each leaf modulated as if dew had just dried from
off it yet each alike, so as to secure
the ordered symmetry of classical enrichment.
But the Gothic fullness of thought is not therefore
left without expression; at the edge of each leaf
is an animal, first a cicala, then a lizard, then a
bird, moth, serpent, snail all different,
and each wrought to the very life panting plumy writhing glittering full
of breath and power. This harmony of classical
restraint with exhaustless fancy, and of architectural
propriety with imitative finish, is found throughout
all the fine periods of the Italian Gothic, opposed
to the wildness without invention, and exuberance
without completion, of the North.
45. One other distinction we
must notice, in the treatment of the Niche and its
accessories. In Northern Gothic the niche frequently
consists only of a bracket and canopy the
latter attached to the wall, independent of columnar
support, pierced into openwork profusely rich, and
often prolonged upwards into a crocketed pinnacle of
indefinite height. But in the niche of pure Italian
Gothic the classic principle of columnar support is
never lost sight of. Even when its canopy is
actually supported by the wall behind, it is apparently
supported by two columns in front, perfectly formed
with bases and capitals: (the support of
the Northern niche if it have any commonly
takes the form of a buttress): when it
appears as a detached pinnacle, it is supported on
four columns, the canopy trefoliated with very obtuse
cusps, richly charged with foliage in the foliating
space, but undecorated at the cusp points, and terminating
above in a smooth pyramid, void of all ornament, and
never very acute. This form, modified only by
various grouping, is that of the noble sepulchral
monuments of Verona, Lucca, Pisa, and Bologna; on
a small scale it is at Venice associated with the cupola,
in St. Mark’s, as well as in Santa Fosca,
and other minor churches. At Pisa, in the Spina
chapel it occurs in its most exquisite form, the columns
there being chased with checker patterns of great elegance.
The windows of the Florence cathedral are all placed
under a flat canopy of the same form, the columns
being elongated, twisted, and enriched with mosaic
patterns. The reader must at once perceive how
vast is the importance of the difference in system
with respect to this member; the whole of the rich,
cavernous chiaroscuro of Northern Gothic being dependent
on the accumulation of its niches.
46. In passing to the examination
of our Author’s theory as tested by the progress
of Sculpture, we are still struck by his utter want
of attention to physical advantages or difficulties.
He seems to have forgotten from the first, that the
mountains of Syene are not the rocks of Paros.
Neither the social habits nor intellectual powers of
the Greek had so much share in inducing his advance
in Sculpture beyond the Egyptian, as the difference
between marble and syenite, porphyry or alabaster.
Marble not only gave the power, it actually introduced
the thought of representation or realization
of form, as opposed to the mere suggestive abstraction:
its translucency, tenderness of surface, and equality
of tint tempting by utmost reward to the finish which
of all substances it alone admits: even
ivory receiving not so delicately, as alabaster endures
not so firmly, the lightest, latest touches of the
completing chisel. The finer feeling of the hand
cannot be put upon a hard rock like syenite the
blow must be firm and fearless the traceless,
tremulous difference between common and immortal sculpture
cannot be set upon it it cannot receive
the enchanted strokes which, like Aaron’s incense,
separate the Living and the Dead. Were it otherwise,
were finish possible, the variegated and lustrous surface
would not exhibit it to the eye. The imagination
itself is blunted by the resistance of the material,
and by the necessity of absolute predetermination
of all it would achieve. Retraction of all thought
into determined and simple forms, such as might be
fearlessly wrought, necessarily remained the characteristic
of the school. The size of the edifice induced
by other causes above stated, further limited the
efforts of the sculptor. No colossal figure can
be minutely finished; nor can it easily be conceived
except under an imperfect form. It is a representation
of Impossibility, and every effort at completion adds
to the monstrous sense of Impossibility. Space
would altogether fail us were we even to name one-half
of the circumstances which influence the treatment
of light and shade to be seen at vast distances upon
surfaces of variegated or dusky color; or of the necessities
by which, in masses of huge proportion, the mere laws
of gravity, and the difficulty of clearing the substance
out of vast hollows neither to be reached nor entered,
bind the realization of absolute form. Yet all
these Lord Lindsay ought rigidly to have examined,
before venturing to determine anything respecting
the mental relations of the Greek and Egyptian.
But the fact of his overlooking these inevitablenesses
of material is intimately connected with the worst
flaw of his theory his idea of a Perfection
resultant from a balance of elements; a perfection
which all experience has shown to be neither desirable
nor possible.
47. His account of Niccola Pisano,
the founder of the first great school of middle age
sculpture, is thus introduced:
“Niccola’s peculiar praise
is this, that, in practice at least, if
not in theory, he first established the principle
that the study of nature, corrected by the ideal of
the antique, and animated by the spirit of Christianity,
personal and social, can alone lead to excellence in
art: each of the three elements of human
nature Matter, Mind, and Spirit being
thus brought into union and co-operation in the service
of God, in due relative harmony and subordination.
I cannot over-estimate the importance of this principle;
it was on this that, consciously or unconsciously,
Niccola himself worked it has been by following
it that Donatello and Ghiberti, Leonardo, Raphael,
and Michael Angelo have risen to glory. The Sienese
school and the Florentine, minds contemplative and
dramatic, are alike beholden to it for whatever success
has attended their efforts. Like a treble-stranded
rope, it drags after it the triumphal car of Christian
Art. But if either of the strands be broken,
if either of the three elements be pursued disjointedly
from the other two, the result is, in each respective
case, grossness, pedantry, or weakness: the
exclusive imitation of Nature produces a Caravaggio,
a Rubens, a Rembrandt that of the Antique,
a Pellegrino di Tibaldo and a David; and
though there be a native chastity and taste in religion,
which restrains those who worship it too abstractedly
from Intellect and Sense, from running into such extremes,
it cannot at least supply that mechanical apparatus
which will enable them to soar: such devotees
must be content to gaze up into heaven, like angels
cropt of their wings.
48. This is mere Bolognese eclecticism
in other terms, and those terms incorrect. We
are amazed to find a writer usually thoughtful, if
not accurate, thus indolently adopting the worn-out
falsities of our weakest writers on Taste. Does
he can he for an instant suppose that the
ruffian Caravaggio, distinguished only by his preference
of candlelight and black shadows for the illustration
and re-enforcement of villainy, painted nature mere
nature exclusive nature, more painfully
or heartily than John Bellini or Raphael? Does
he not see that whatever men imitate must be nature
of some kind, material nature or spiritual, lovely
or foul, brutal or human, but nature still? Does
he himself see in mere, external, copyable nature,
no more than Caravaggio saw, or in the Antique no
more than has been comprehended by David? The
fact is, that all artists are primarily divided into
the two great groups of Imitators and Suggesters their
falling into one or other being dependent partly on
disposition, and partly on the matter they have to
subdue (thus Perugino imitates line by line
with penciled gold, the hair which Nino Pisano can
only suggest by a gilded marble mass, both having
the will of representation alike). And each of
these classes is again divided into the faithful and
unfaithful imitators and suggesters; and that is a
broad question of blind eye and hard heart, or seeing
eye and serious heart, always co-existent; and then
the faithful imitators and suggesters artists
proper, are appointed, each with his peculiar gift
and affection, over the several orders and classes
of things natural, to be by them illumined and set
forth.
49. And that is God’s doing
and distributing; and none is rashly to be thought
inferior to another, as if by his own fault; nor any
of them stimulated to emulation, and changing places
with others, although their allotted tasks be of different
dignities, and their granted instruments of different
keenness; for in none of them can there be a perfection
or balance of all human attributes; the
great colorist becomes gradually insensible to the
refinements of form which he at first intentionally
omitted; the master of line is inevitably dead to many
of the delights of color; the study of the true or
ideal human form is inconsistent with the love of
its most spiritual expressions. To one it is intrusted
to record the historical realities of his age; in
him the perception of character is subtle, and that
of abstract beauty in measure diminished; to another,
removed to the desert, or inclosed in the cloister,
is given, not the noting of things transient, but
the revealing of things eternal. Ghirlandajo
and Titian painted men, but could not angels; Duccio
and Angelico painted Saints, but could not senators.
One is ordered to copy material form lovingly and
slowly his the fine finger and patient
will: to another are sent visions and dreams upon
the bed his the hand fearful and swift,
and impulse of passion irregular and wild. We
may have occasion further to insist upon this great
principle of the incommunicableness and singleness
of all the highest powers; but we assert it here especially,
in opposition to the idea, already so fatal to art,
that either the aim of the antique may take place
together with the purposes, or its traditions become
elevatory of the power, of Christian art; or that
the glories of Giotto and the Sienese are in any wise
traceable through Niccola Pisano to the venerable
relics of the Campo Santo.
50. Lord Lindsay’s statement,
as far as it regards Niccola himself, is true.
“His improvement in Sculpture
is attributable, in the first instance, to the study
of an ancient sarcophagus, brought from Greece by the
ships of Pisa in the eleventh century, and which,
after having stood beside the door of the Duomo for
many centuries as the tomb of the Countess Beatrice,
mother of the celebrated Matilda, has been recently
removed to the Campo Santo. The front is sculptured
in bas-relief, in two compartments, the one representing
Hippolytus rejecting the suit of Phaedra, the other
his departure for the chase: such at least
is the most plausible interpretation. The sculpture,
if not super-excellent, is substantially good, and
the benefit derived from it by Niccola is perceptible
on the slightest examination of his works. Other
remains of antiquity are preserved at Pisa, which
he may have also studied, but this was the classic
well from which he drew those waters which became
wine when poured into the hallowing chalice of Christianity.
I need scarcely add that the mere presence of such
models would have availed little, had not nature endowed
him with the quick eye and the intuitive apprehension
of genius, together with a purity of taste which taught
him how to select, how to modify and how to reinspire the germs of excellence
thus presented to him.
51. But whatever characters peculiarly
classical were impressed upon Niccola by this study,
died out gradually among his scholars; and in Orcagna
the Byzantine manner finally triumphed, leading the
way to the purely Christian sculpture of the school
of Fiesole, in its turn swept away by the returning
wave of classicalism. The sculpture of Orcagna,
Giotto, and Mino da Fiesole, would have been
what it was, if Niccola had been buried in his sarcophagus;
and this is sufficiently proved by Giotto’s
remaining entirely uninfluenced by the educated excellence
of Andrea Pisano, while he gradually bent the Pisan
down to his own uncompromising simplicity. If,
as Lord Lindsay asserts, “Giotto had learned
from the works of Niccola the grand principle of Christian
art,” the sculptures of the Campanile of Florence
would not now have stood forth in contrasted awfulness
of simplicity, beside those of the south door of the
Baptistery.
52. “Andrea’s merit
was indeed very great; his works, compared with those
of Giovanni and Niccola Pisano, exhibit a progress
in design, grace, composition and mechanical execution,
at first sight unaccountable a chasm yawns
between them, deep and broad, over which the younger
artist seems to have leapt at a bound, the
stream that sank into the earth at Pisa emerges a
river at Florence. The solution of the mystery
lies in the peculiar plasticity of Andrea’s genius,
and the ascendency acquired over it by Giotto, although
a younger man, from the first moment they came into
contact. Giotto had learnt from the works of
Niccola the grand principle of Christian art, imperfectly
apprehended by Giovanni and his other pupils, and
by following up which he had in the natural course
of things improved upon his prototype. He now
repaid to Sculpture, in the person of Andrea, the
sum of improvement in which he stood her debtor in
that of Niccola: so far, that is to say,
as the treasury of Andrea’s mind was capable
of taking it in, for it would be an error to suppose
that Andrea profited by Giotto in the same independent
manner or degree that Giotto profited by Niccola.
Andrea’s was not a mind of strong individuality;
he became completely Giottesque in thought and style,
and as Giotto and he continued intimate friends through
life, the impression never wore off: most
fortunate, indeed, that it was so, for the welfare
of Sculpture in general, and for that of the buildings
in decorating which the friends worked in concert.
“Happily, Andrea’s most
important work, the bronze door of the Baptistery,
still exists, and with every prospect of preservation.
It is adorned with bas-reliefs from the history of
S. John, with allegorical figures of virtues and heads
of prophets, all most beautiful, the historical
compositions distinguished by simplicity and purity
of feeling and design, the allegorical virtues perhaps
still more expressive, and full of poetry in their
symbols and attitudes; the whole series is executed
with a delicacy of workmanship till then unknown in
bronze, a precision yet softness of touch resembling
that of a skillful performer on the pianoforte.
Andrea was occupied upon it for nine years, from 1330
to 1339, and when finished, fixed in its place, and
exposed to view, the public enthusiasm exceeded all
bounds; the Signoria, with unexampled condescension,
visited it in state, accompanied by the ambassadors
of Naples and Sicily, and bestowed on the fortunate
artist the honor and privilege of citizenship, seldom
accorded to foreigners unless of lofty rank or exalted
merit. The door remained in its original position facing
the Cathedral till superseded in that post
of honor by the ‘Gate of Paradise,’ cast
by Ghiberti. It was then transferred to the Southern
entrance of the Baptistery, facing the Misericordia.
53. A few pages farther on, the
question of Giotto’s claim to the authorship
of the designs for this door is discussed at length,
and, to the annihilation of the honor here attributed
to Andrea, determined affirmatively, partly
on the testimony of Vasari, partly on internal evidence these
designs being asserted by our author to be “thoroughly
Giottesque.” But, not to dwell on Lord Lindsay’s
inconsistency, in the ultimate decision his discrimination
seems to us utterly at fault. Giotto has, we
conceive, suffered quite enough in the abduction of
the work in the Campo Santo, which was worthy of him,
without being made answerable for these designs of
Andrea. That he gave a rough draft of many of
them, is conceivable; but if even he did this, Andrea
has added cadenzas of drapery, and other scholarly
commonplace, as a bad singer puts ornament into an
air. It was not of such teaching that came the
“Jabal” of Giotto. Sitting at his
tent door, he withdraws its rude drapery with one
hand: three sheep only are feeding before him,
the watchdog sitting beside them; but he looks forth
like a Destiny, beholding the ruined cities of the
earth become places, like the valley of Achor, for
herds to lie down in.
54. We have not space to follow
our author through his very interesting investigation
of the comparatively unknown schools of Teutonic sculpture.
With one beautiful anecdote, breathing the whole spirit
of the time the mingling of deep piety
with the modest, manly pride of art our
readers must be indulged:
“The Florentine Ghiberti gives
a most interesting account of a sculptor of Cologne
in the employment of Charles of Anjou, King of Naples,
whose skill he parallels with that of the statuaries
of ancient Greece; his heads, he says, and his design
of the naked, were ’maravigliosamente bene,’
his style full of grace, his sole defect the somewhat
curtailed stature of his figures. He was no less
excellent in minuter works as a goldsmith, and in
that capacity had worked for his patron a ’tavola
d’oro,’ a tablet or screen (apparently)
of gold, with his utmost care and skill; it was a
work of exceeding beauty but in some political
exigency his patron wanted money, and it was broken
up before his eyes. Seeing his labor vain and
the pride of his heart rebuked, he threw himself on
the ground, and uplifting his eyes and hands to heaven,
prayed in contrition, ’Lord God Almighty, Governor
and disposer of heaven and earth! Thou hast opened
mine eyes that I follow from henceforth none other
than Thee Have mercy upon me!’ He
forthwith gave all he had to the poor for the love
of God, and went up into a mountain where there was
a great hermitage, and dwelt there the rest of his
days in penitence and sanctity, surviving down to
the days of Pope Martin, who reigned from 1281 to
1284. ‘Certain youths,’ adds Ghiberti,
’who sought to be skilled in statuary, told
me how he was versed both in painting and sculpture,
and how he had painted in the Romitorio where he lived; he was an excellent
draughtsman and very courteous. When the youths who wished to improve visited
him, he received them with much humility, giving them learned instructions,
showing them various proportions, and drawing for them many examples, for he was
most accomplished in his art. And thus, he concludes, with great humility, he
ended his days in that hermitage.
55. We could have wished that
Lord Lindsay had further insisted on what will be
found to be a characteristic of all the truly Christian
or spiritual, as opposed to classical, schools of
sculpture the scenic or painter-like management
of effect. The marble is not cut into the actual
form of the thing imaged, but oftener into a perspective
suggestion of it the bas-reliefs sometimes
almost entirely under cut, and sharpedged, so as to
come clear off a dark ground of shadow; even heads
the size of life being in this way rather shadowed
out than carved out, as the Madonna of Benedetto de
Majano in Santa Maria Novella, one of the cheeks being
advanced half an inch out of its proper place and
often the most audacious violations of proportion
admitted, as in the limbs of Michael Angelo’s
sitting Madonna in the Uffizii; all artifices, also,
of deep and sharp cutting being allowed, to gain the
shadowy and spectral expressions about the brow and
lip which the mere actualities of form could not have
conveyed; the sculptor never following a
material model, but feeling after the most momentary
and subtle aspects of the countenance striking
these out sometimes suddenly, by rude chiseling, and
stopping the instant they are attained never
risking the loss of thought by the finishing of flesh
surface. The heads of the Medici sacristy we
believe to have been thus left unfinished, as having
already the utmost expression which the marble could
receive, and incapable of anything but loss from further
touches. So with Mino da Fiesole and
Jacopo della Quercia, the workmanship
is often hard, sketchy, and angular, having its full
effect only at a little distance; but at that distance
the statue becomes ineffably alive, even to startling,
bearing an aspect of change and uncertainty, as if
it were about to vanish, and withal having a light,
and sweetness, and incense of passion upon it that
silences the looker-on, half in delight, half in expectation.
This daring stroke this transfiguring tenderness may
be shown to characterize all truly Christian sculpture,
as compared with the antique, or the pseudo-classical
of subsequent periods. We agree with Lord Lindsay
in thinking the Psyche of Naples the nearest approach
to the Christian ideal of all ancient efforts; but
even in this the approximation is more accidental
than real a fair type of feature, further
exalted by the mode in which the imagination supplies
the lost upper folds of the hair. The fountain
of life and emotion remains sealed; nor was the opening
of that fountain due to any study of the far less
pure examples accessible by the Pisan sculptors.
The sound of its waters had been heard long before
in the aisles of the Lombard; nor was it by Ghiberti,
still less by Donatello, that the bed of that Jordan
was dug deepest, but by Michael Angelo (the last heir
of the Byzantine traditions descending through Orcagna),
opening thenceforward through thickets darker and
more dark, and with waves ever more soundless and
slow, into the Dead Sea wherein its waters have been
stayed.
56. It is time for us to pass
to the subject which occupies the largest portion
of the work the History
“of Painting, as developed contemporaneously
with her sister, Sculpture, and (like her) under the
shadow of the Gothic Architecture, by Giotto and his
successors throughout Italy, by Mino, Duccio, and their
scholars at Siena, by Orcagna and Fra Angelico
da Fiesole at Florence, and by the obscure but
interesting primitive school of Bologna, during the
fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth century.
The period is one, comparatively speaking, of repose
and tranquillity, the storm sleeps and
the winds are still, the currents set in one direction,
and we may sail from isle to isle over a sunny sea,
dallying with the time, secure of a cloudless sky
and of the greetings of innocence and love wheresoever
the breeze may waft us. There is in truth a holy
purity, an innocent naïvete, a childlike grace and
simplicity, a freshness, a fearlessness, an utter
freedom from affectation, a yearning after all things
truthful, lovely and of good report, in the productions
of this early time, which invest them with a charm
peculiar in its kind, and which few even of the most
perfect works of the maturer era can boast of, and hence the risk and danger of
becoming too passionately attached to them, of losing the power of
discrimination, of admiring and imitating their defects as well as their
beauties, of running into affectation in seeking after simplicity and into
exaggeration in our efforts to be in earnest, in a word, of forgetting that in
art as in human nature, it is the balance, harmony, and co-equal development of
Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, which constitute perfection.
57. To the thousand islands,
or how many soever they may be, we shall allow ourselves
to be wafted with all willingness, but not in Lord
Lindsay’s three-masted vessel, with its balancing
topmasts of Sense, Intellect, and Spirit. We
are utterly tired of the triplicity; and we are mistaken
if its application here be not as inconsistent as it
is arbitrary. Turning back to the introduction,
which we have quoted, the reader will find that while
Architecture is there taken for the exponent of Sense,
Painting is chosen as the peculiar expression of Spirit.
“The painting of Christendom is that of an immortal
spirit conversing with its God.” But in
a note to the first chapter of the second volume, he
will be surprised to find painting become a “twin
of intellect,” and architecture suddenly advanced
from a type of sense to a type of spirit:
“Sculpture and Painting, twins
of Intellect, rejoice and breathe freest in the pure
ether of Architecture, or Spirit, like Castor or Pollux
under the breezy heaven of their father Jupiter.”
58. Prepared by this passage
to consider painting either as spiritual or intellectual,
his patience may pardonably give way on finding in
the sixth letter (what he might, however,
have conjectured from the heading of the third period
in the chart of the schools) that the peculiar
prerogative of painting color, is to be
considered as a sensual element, and the exponent
of sense, in accordance with a new analogy, here for
the first time proposed, between spirit, intellect,
and sense, and expression, form, and color. Lord
Lindsay is peculiarly unfortunate in his adoptions
from previous writers. He has taken this division
of art from Fuseli and Reynolds, without perceiving
that in those writers it is one of convenience merely,
and, even so considered, is as injudicious as illogical.
In what does expression consist but in form and color?
It is one of the ends which these accomplish, and may
be itself an attribute of both. Color may be
expressive or inexpressive, like music; form expressive
or inexpressive, like words; but expression by itself
cannot exist; so that to divide painting into color,
form, and expression, is precisely as rational as
to divide music into notes, words, and expression.
Color may be pensive, severe, exciting, appalling,
gay, glowing, or sensual; in all these modes it is
expressive: form may be tender or abrupt, mean
or majestic, attractive or overwhelming, discomfortable
or delightsome; in all these modes, and many more,
it is expressive; and if Lord Lindsay’s analogy
be in anywise applicable to either form or color,
we should have color sensual (Correggio), color intellectual
(Tintoret), color spiritual (Angelico) form
sensual (French sculpture), form intellectual (Phidias),
form spiritual (Michael Angelo). Above all, our
author should have been careful how he attached the
epithet “sensual” to the element of color not
only on account of the glaring inconsistency with his
own previous assertion of the spirituality of painting (since
it is certainly not merely by being flat instead of
solid, representative instead of actual, that painting
is if it be more spiritual than
sculpture); but also, because this idea of sensuality
in color has had much share in rendering abortive
the efforts of the modern German religious painters,
inducing their abandonment of its consecrating, kindling,
purifying power.
59. Lord Lindsay says, in a passage
which we shall presently quote, that the most sensual
as well as the most religious painters have always
loved the brightest colors. Not so; no painters
ever were more sensual than the modern French, who
are alike insensible to, and incapable of color depending
altogether on morbid gradation, waxy smoothness of
surface, and lusciousness of line, the real elements
of sensuality wherever it eminently exists. So
far from good color being sensual, it saves, glorifies,
and guards from all evil: it is with Titian, as
with all great masters of flesh-painting, the redeeming
and protecting element; and with the religious painters,
it is a baptism with fire, an under-song of holy Litanies.
Is it in sensuality that the fair flush opens upon
the cheek of Francia’s chanting angel, until
we think it comes, and fades, and returns, as his
voice and his harping are louder or lower or
that the silver light rises upon wave after wave of
his lifted hair; or that the burning of the blood
is seen on the unclouded brows of the three angels
of the Campo Santo, and of folded fire within their
wings; or that the hollow blue of the highest heaven
mantles the Madonna with its depth, and falls around
her like raiment, as she sits beneath the throne of
the Sistine Judgment? Is it in sensuality that
the visible world about us is girded with an eternal
iris? is there pollution in the rose and
the gentian more than in the rocks that are trusted
to their robing? is the sea-blue a stain
upon its water, or the scarlet spring of day upon
the mountains less holy than their snow? As well
call the sun itself, or the firmament, sensual, as
the color which flows from the one, and fills the
other.
60. We deprecate this rash assumption,
however, with more regard to the forthcoming portion
of the history, in which we fear it may seriously
diminish the value of the author’s account of
the school of Venice, than to the part at present
executed. This is written in a spirit rather
sympathetic than critical, and rightly illustrates
the feeling of early art, even where it mistakes,
or leaves unanalyzed, the technical modes of its expression.
It will be better, perhaps, that we confine our attention
to the accounts of the three men who may be considered
as sufficient representatives not only of the art
of their time, but of all subsequent; Giotto, the
first of the great line of dramatists, terminating
in Raffaelle; Orcagna, the head of that branch of the
contemplative school which leans towards sadness or
terror, terminating in Michael Angelo; and Angelico,
the head of the contemplatives concerned with the
heavenly ideal, around whom may be grouped first Duccio,
and the Sienese, who preceded him, and afterwards Pinturiccio,
Perugino, and Leonardo da Vinci.
61. The fourth letter opens in
the fields of Vespignano. The circumstances of
the finding of Giotto by Cimabue are well known.
Vasari’s anecdote of the fly painted upon the
nose of one of Cimabue’s figures might, we think,
have been spared, or at least not instanced as proof
of study from nature “nobly rewarded.”
Giotto certainly never either attempted or accomplished
any small imitation of this kind; the story has all
the look of one of the common inventions of the ignorant
for the ignorant; nor, if true, would Cimabue’s
careless mistake of a black spot in the shape of a
fly for one of the living annoyances of which there
might probably be some dozen or more upon his panel
at any moment, have been a matter of much credit to
his young pupil. The first point of any real
interest is Lord Lindsay’s confirmation of Foerster’s
attribution of the Campo Santo Life of Job, till lately
esteemed Giotto’s, to Francesco da
Volterra. Foerster’s evidence appears
incontrovertible; yet there is curious internal evidence,
we think, in favor of the designs being Giotto’s,
if not the execution. The landscape is especially
Giottesque, the trees being all boldly massed first
with dark brown, within which the leaves are painted
separately in light: this very archaic treatment
had been much softened and modified by the Giotteschi
before the date assigned to these frescoes by Foerster.
But, what is more singular, the figure of Eliphaz,
or the foremost of the three friends, occurs in a
tempera picture of Giotto’s in the Academy of
Florence, the Ascension, among the apostles on the
left; while the face of another of the three friends
is again repeated in the “Christ disputing with
the Doctors” of the small tempera series, also
in the Academy; the figure of Satan shows much analogy
to that of the Envy of the Arena chapel; and many
other portions of the design are evidently either
sketches of this very subject by Giotto himself, or
dexterous compilations from his works by a loving
pupil. Lord Lindsay has not done justice to the
upper division the Satan before God:
it is one of the very finest thoughts ever realized
by the Giotteschi. The serenity of power in the
principal figure is very noble; no expression of wrath,
or even of scorn, in the look which commands the evil
spirit. The position of the latter, and countenance,
are less grotesque and more demoniacal than is usual
in paintings of the time; the triple wings expanded the
arms crossed over the breast, and holding each other
above the elbow, the claws fixing in the flesh; a
serpent buries its head in a cleft in the bosom, and
the right hoof is lifted, as if to stamp.
62. We should have been glad
if Lord Lindsay had given us some clearer idea of
the internal evidence on which he founds his determination
of the order or date of the works of Giotto.
When no trustworthy records exist, we conceive this
task to be of singular difficulty, owing to the differences
of execution universally existing between the large
and small works of the painter. The portrait
of Dante in the chapel of the Podesta is proved by
Dante’s exile, in 1302, to have been painted
before Giotto was six and twenty; yet we remember
no head in any of his works which can be compared
with it for carefulness of finish and truth of drawing;
the crudeness of the material vanquished by dexterous
hatching; the color not only pure, but deep a
rare virtue with Giotto; the eye soft and thoughtful,
the brow nobly modeled. In the fresco of the Death
of the Baptist, in Santa Croce, which we agree with
Lord Lindsay in attributing to the same early period,
the face of the musician is drawn with great refinement,
and considerable power of rounding surfaces (though
in the drapery may be remarked a very singular piece
of archaic treatment: it is warm white, with yellow
stripes; the dress itself falls in deep folds, but
the striped pattern does not follow the foldings it
is drawn across, as if with a straight ruler).
63. But passing from these frescoes,
which are nearly the size of life, to those of the
Arena chapel at Padua, erected in 1303, decorated in
1306, which are much smaller, we find the execution
proportionably less dexterous. Of this famous
chapel Lord Lindsay says
“nowhere (save in the Duomo
of Orvieto) is the legendary history of the Virgin
told with such minuteness.
“The heart must indeed be cold
to the charms of youthful art that can enter this
little sanctuary without a glow of delight. From
the roof, with its sky of ultramarine, powdered with
stars and interspersed with medallions containing
the heads of our Saviour, the Virgin and the Apostles,
to the mock paneling of the nave, below the windows,
the whole is completely covered with frescoes, in
excellent preservation, and all more or less painted
by Giotto’s own hand, except six in the tribune,
which however have apparently been executed from his
cartoons....
“These frescoes form a most
important document in the history of Giotto’s
mind, exhibiting all his peculiar merits, although
in a state as yet of immature development. They
are full of fancy and invention; the composition is
almost always admirable, although sometimes too studiously
symmetrical; the figures are few and characteristic,
each speaking for itself, the impersonation of a distinct
idea, and most dramatically grouped and contrasted;
the attitudes are appropriate, easy, and natural;
the action and gesticulation singularly vivid; the
expression is excellent, except when impassioned grief
induces caricature: devoted to the study
of Nature as he is, Giotto had not yet learnt that
it is suppressed feeling which affects one most.
The head of our Saviour is beautiful throughout that
of the Virgin not so good she is modest,
but not very graceful or celestial: it was
long before he succeeded in his Virgins they
are much too matronly: among the accessory figures,
graceful female forms occasionally appear, foreshadowing
those of his later works at Florence and Naples, yet
they are always clumsy about the waist and bust, and
most of them are under-jawed, which certainly detracts
from the sweetness of the female countenance.
His delineation of the naked is excellent, as compared
with the works of his predecessors, but far unequal
to what he attained in his later years, the
drapery, on the contrary, is noble, majestic, and
statuesque; the coloring is still pale and weak, it
was long ere he improved in this point; the landscape
displays little or no amendment upon the Byzantine;
the architecture, that of the fourteenth century, is
to the figures that people it in the proportion of
dolls’ houses to the children that play with
them, an absurdity long unthinkingly acquiesced
in, from its occurrence in the classic bas-reliefs
from which it had been traditionally derived; and,
finally, the lineal perspective is very fair, and
in three of the compositions an excellent effect is
produced by the introduction of the same background
with varied dramatis personae, reminding one
of Retszch’s illustrations of Faust. The animals too are always excellent,
full of spirit and character.
64. This last characteristic
is especially to be noticed. It is a touching
proof of the influence of early years. Giotto
was only ten years old when he was taken from following
the sheep. For the rest, as we have above stated,
the manipulation of these frescoes is just as far
inferior to that of the Podesta chapel as their dimensions
are less; and we think it will be found generally
that the smaller the work the more rude is Giotto’s
hand. In this respect he seems to differ from
all other masters.
“It is not difficult, gazing
on these silent but eloquent walls, to repeople them
with the group once, as we know-five hundred years
ago assembled within them, Giotto
intent upon his work, his wife Ciuta admiring his
progress, and Dante, with abstracted eye, alternately
conversing with his friend and watching the gambols
of the children playing on the grass before the door.
It is generally affirmed that Dante, during this visit,
inspired Giotto with his taste for allegory, and that
the Virtues and Vices of the Arena were the first fruits
of their intercourse; it is possible, certainly, but
I doubt it, allegory was the universal
language of the time, as we have seen in the history
of the Pisan school.
It ought to have been further mentioned,
that the representation of the Virtues and Vices under
these Giottesque figures continued long afterwards.
We find them copied, for instance, on the capitals
of the Ducal Palace at Venice, with an amusing variation
on the “Stultitia,” who has neither
Indian dress nor club, as with Giotto, but is to the
Venetians sufficiently distinguished by riding a horse.
65. The notice of the frescoes
at Assisi consists of little more than an enumeration
of the subjects, accompanied by agreeable translations
of the traditions respecting St. Francis, embodied
by St. Buonaventura. Nor have we space to follow
the author through his examination of Giotto’s
works at Naples and Avignon. The following account
of the erection of the Campanile of Florence is too
interesting to be omitted:
“Giotto was chosen to erect
it, on the ground avowedly of the universality of
his talents, with the appointment of Capomaestro, or
chief architect of the Cathedral and its dependencies,
a yearly salary of one hundred gold florins,
and the privilege of citizenship, and under the special
understanding that he was not to quit Florence.
His designs being approved of, the republic passed
a decree in the spring of 1334, that ’the Campanile
should be built so as to exceed in magnificence, height
and excellence of workmanship whatever in that kind
had been achieved of old by the Greeks and Romans
in the time of their utmost power and greatness “della
loro piú florida potenza."’
The first stone was laid accordingly, with great pomp,
on the 18th of July following, and the work prosecuted
with such vigor and with such costliness and utter
disregard of expense, that a citizen of Verona, looking
on, exclaimed that the republic was taxing her strength
too far, that the united resources of two
great monarchs would be insufficient to complete it;
a criticism which the Signoria resented by confining
him for two months in prison, and afterwards conducting
him through the public treasury, to teach him that
the Florentines could build their whole city of marble,
and not one poor steeple only, were they so inclined.
“Giotto made a model of his
proposed structure, on which every stone was marked,
and the successive courses painted red and white, according
to his design, so as to match with the Cathedral and
Baptistery; this model was of course adhered to strictly
during the short remnant of his life, and the work
was completed in strict conformity to it after his
death, with the exception of the spire, which, the
taste having changed, was never added. He had
intended it to be one hundred braccia, or one hundred and fifty feet
high.
The deficiency of the spire Lord Lindsay
does not regret:
“Let the reader stand before
the Campanile, and ask himself whether, with Michael
Scott at his elbow, or Aladdin’s lamp in his
hand, he would supply the deficiency? I think
not.”
We have more faith in Giotto than
our author and we will reply to his question
by two others whether, looking down upon
Florence from the hill of San Miniato, his
eye rested oftener and more affectionately on the
Campanile of Giotto, or on the simple tower and spire
of Santa Maria Novella? and whether, in
the backgrounds of Perugino, he would willingly substitute
for the church spires invariably introduced, flat-topped
campaniles like the unfinished tower of Florence?
66. Giotto sculptured with his
own hand two of the bas-reliefs of this campanile,
and probably might have executed them all. But
the purposes of his life had been accomplished; he
died at Florence on the 8th of January, 1337.
The concluding notice of his character and achievement
is highly valuable.
67. “Painting indeed stands
indebted to Giotto beyond any of her children.
His history is a most instructive one. Endowed
with the liveliest fancy, and with that facility which
so often betrays genius, and achieving in youth a
reputation which the age of Methuselah could not have
added to, he had yet the discernment to perceive how
much still remained to be done, and the resolution
to bind himself (as it were) to Nature’s chariot
wheel, confident that she would erelong emancipate
and own him as her son. Calm and unimpassioned,
he seems to have commenced his career with a deliberate
survey of the difficulties he had to encounter and
of his resources for the conflict, and then to have
worked upon a system steadily and perseveringly, prophetically
sure of victory. His life was indeed one continued
triumph, and no conqueror ever mounted
to the Capitol with a step more equal and sedate.
We find him, at first, slowly and cautiously endeavoring
to infuse new life into the traditional compositions,
by substituting the heads, attitudes, and drapery
of the actual world for the spectral forms and conventional
types of the mosaics and the Byzantine painters, idealizing
them when the personages represented were of higher
mark and dignity, but in none ever outstepping truth.
Advancing in his career, we find year by year the
fruits of continuous unwearied study in a consistent
and equable contemporary improvement in all the various
minuter though most important departments of his art,
in his design, his drapery, his coloring, in the dignity
and expression of his men and in the grace of his
women asperities softened down, little graces
unexpectedly born and playing about his path, as if
to make amends for the deformity of his actual offspring touches,
daily more numerous, of that nature which makes the
world akin and ever and always a keen yet
cheerful sympathy with life, a playful humor mingling
with his graver lessons, which affects us the more
as coming from one who, knowing himself an object
personally of disgust and ridicule, could yet satirize
with a smile.
“Finally, throughout his works,
we are conscious of an earnest, a lofty, a religious
aim and purpose, as of one who felt himself a pioneer
of civilization in a newly-discovered world, the Adam
of a new Eden freshly planted in the earth’s
wilderness, a mouthpiece of God and a preacher of
righteousness to mankind. And here we must
establish a distinction very necessary to be recognized
before we can duly appreciate the relative merits
of the elder painters in this, the most important point
in which we can view their character. Giotto’s
genius, however universal, was still (as I have repeatedly
observed) Dramatic rather than Contemplative, a
tendency in which his scholars and successors almost
to a man resembled him. Now, just as in actual
life where, with a few rare exceptions,
all men rank under two great categories according as
Imagination or Reason predominates in their intellectual
character two individuals may be equally
impressed with the truths of Christianity and yet
differ essentially in its outward manifestation, the
one dwelling in action, the other in contemplation,
the one in strife, the other in peace, the one (so
to speak) in hate, the other in love, the one struggling
with devils, the other communing with angels, yet each
serving as a channel of God’s mercies to man,
each (we may believe) offering Him service equally
acceptable in His sight even so shall we
find it in art and with artists; few in whom the Dramatic
power predominates will be found to excel in the expression
of religious emotions of the more abstract and enthusiastic
cast, even although men of indisputably pure and holy
character themselves; and vice versa, few of
the more Contemplative but will feel bewildered and
at fault, if they descend from their starry region
of light into the grosser atmosphere that girdles
in this world of action. The works of artists
are their minds’ mirror; they cannot express
what they do not feel; each class dwells apart and
seeks its ideal in a distinct sphere of emotion, their
object is different, and their success proportioned
to the exclusiveness with which they pursue that object.
A few indeed there have been in all ages, monarchs
of the mind and types of our Saviour, who have lived
a twofold existence of action and contemplation in
art, in song, in politics, and in daily life; of these
have been Abraham, Moses, David, and Cyrus in the
elder world Alfred, Charlemagne, Dante,
and perhaps Shakespeare, in the new, and
in art, Niccola Pisano, Leonardo da
Vinci and Michael Angelo. But Giotto, however
great as the patriarch of his peculiar tribe, was
not of these few, and we ought not therefore to misapprehend
him, or be disappointed at finding his Madonnas (for
instance) less exquisitely spiritual than the Sienese,
or those of Fra Angelico and some later
painters, who seem to have dipped their pencils in
the rainbow that circles the throne of God, they
are pure and modest, but that is all; on the other
hand, where his Contemplative rivals lack utterance,
he speaks most feelingly to the heart in his own peculiar
language of Dramatic composition he glances
over creation with the eye of love, all the charities
of life follow in his steps, and his thoughts are
as the breath of the morning. A man of the world,
living in it and loving it, yet with a heart that it
could not spoil nor wean from its allegiance to God ’non
meno buon Cristiano che eccellente
pittore, as Vasari emphatically describes him his religion breathes of
the free air of heaven rather than the cloister, neither enthusiastic nor
superstitious, but practical, manly and healthy and this, although the
picturesque biographer of S. Francis!
68. This is all as admirably
felt as expressed, and to those acquainted with and
accustomed to love the works of the painter, it leaves
nothing to be asked for; but we must again remind
Lord Lindsay, that he has throughout left the artistical
orbit of Giotto undefined, and the offense of his
manner unremoved, as far as regards the uninitiated
spectator. We question whether from all that he
has written, the untraveled reader could form any
distinct idea of the painter’s peculiar merits
or methods, or that the estimate, if formed, might
not afterwards expose him to severe disappointment.
It ought especially to have been stated, that the
Giottesque system of chiaroscuro is one of pure, quiet,
pervading daylight. No cast shadows ever
occur, and this remains a marked characteristic of
all the works of the Giotteschi. Of course, all
subtleties of reflected light or raised color are unthought
of. Shade is only given as far as it is necessary
to the articulation of simple forms, nor even then
is it rightly adapted to the color of the light; the
folds of the draperies are well drawn, but the entire
rounding of them always missed the general
forms appearing flat, and terminated by equal and
severe outlines, while the masses of ungradated color
often seem to divide the figure into fragments.
Thus, the Madonna in the small tempera series of the
Academy of Florence, is usually divided exactly in
half by the dark mass of her blue robe, falling in
a vertical line. In consequence of this defect,
the grace of Giotto’s composition can hardly
be felt until it is put into outline. The colors
themselves are of good quality, never glaring, always
gladdening, the reds inclining to orange more than
purple, yellow frequent, the prevalent tone of the
color groups warm; the sky always blue, the whole
effect somewhat resembling that of the Northern painted
glass of the same century and chastened
in the same manner by noble neutral tints or greens;
yet all somewhat unconsidered and unsystematic, painful
discords not unfrequent. The material and ornaments
of dress are never particularized, no imitations of
texture or jewelry, yet shot stuffs of two colors frequent.
The drawing often powerful, though of course uninformed;
the mastery of mental expression by bodily motion,
and of bodily motion, past and future, by a single
gesture, altogether unrivaled even by Raffaelle; it
is obtained chiefly by throwing the emphasis always
on the right line, admitting straight lines of great
severity, and never dividing the main drift of the
drapery by inferior folds; neither are accidents allowed
to interfere the garments fall heavily
and in marked angles nor are they affected
by the wind, except under circumstances of very rapid
motion. The ideal of the face is often solemn seldom
beautiful; occasionally ludicrous failures occur:
in the smallest designs the face is very often a dead
letter, or worse: and in all, Giotto’s handling
is generally to be distinguished from that of any
of his followers by its bluntness. In the school
work we find sweeter types of feature, greater finish,
stricter care, more delicate outline, fewer errors,
but on the whole less life.
69. Finally, and on this we would
especially insist, Giotto’s genius is not to
be considered as struggling with difficulty and repressed
by ignorance, but as appointed, for the good of men,
to come into the world exactly at the time when its
rapidity of invention was not likely to be hampered
by demands for imitative dexterity or neatness of finish;
and when, owing to the very ignorance which has been
unwisely regretted, the simplicity of his thoughts
might be uttered with a childlike and innocent sweetness,
never to be recovered in times of prouder knowledge.
The dramatic power of his works, rightly understood,
could receive no addition from artificial arrangement
of shade, or scientific exhibition of anatomy, and
we have reason to be deeply grateful when afterwards
“inland far” with Buonaroti and Titian,
that we can look back to the Giotteschi to
see those children
“Sport
upon the shore
And hear the mighty waters rolling
evermore.”
We believe Giotto himself felt this unquestionably
he could have carried many of his works much farther
in finish, had he so willed it; but he chose rather
to multiply motives than to complete details.
Thus we recur to our great principle of Separate gift.
The man who spends his life in toning colors must
leave the treasures of his invention untold let
each have his perfect work; and while we thank Bellini
and Leonardo for their deeply wrought dyes, and life-labored
utterance of passionate thought; let us remember also
what cause, but for the remorseless destruction of
myriads of his works, we should have had to thank
Giotto, in that, abandoning all proud effort, he chose
rather to make the stones of Italy cry out with one
voice of pauseless praise, and to fill with perpetual
remembrance of the Saints he loved, and perpetual
honor of the God he worshiped, palace chamber and convent
cloister, lifted tower and lengthened wall, from the
utmost blue of the plain of Padua to the Southern
wildernesses of the hermit-haunted Apennine.
70. From the head of the Dramatic
branch of Art, we turn to the first of the great Contemplative
Triad, associated, as it most singularly happens in
name as well as in heart; Orcagna Arcagnuolo;
Fra Giovanni detto Angelico;
and Michael Angelo: the first two names
being bestowed by contemporary admiration.
“Orcagna was born apparently
about the middle of the (14th) century, and was christened
Andrea, by which name, with the addition of that of
his father, Cione, he always designated himself; that,
however, of Orcagna, a corruption of Arcagnuolo, or
‘The Archangel,’ was given him by his
contemporaries, and by this he has become known to
posterity.
“The earliest works of Orcagna
will be found in that sanctuary of Semi-Byzantine
art, the Campo Santo of Pisa. He there painted
three of the four ‘Novissima,’ Death,
Judgment, Hell, and Paradise the two former
entirely himself, the third with the assistance of
his brother Bernardo, who is said to have colored
it after his designs. The first of the series,
a most singular performance, had for centuries been
popularly known as the ‘Trionfo della
Morte.’ It is divided by an immense
rock into two irregular portions. In that to the
right, Death, personified as a female phantom, batwinged,
claw-footed, her robe of linked mail and her long
hair streaming on the wind, swings back her scythe
in order to cut down a company of the rich ones of
the earth, Castruccio Castracani and his gay companions,
seated under an orange-grove, and listening to the
music of a troubadour and a female minstrel; little
genii or Cupids, with reversed torches, float in the
air above them; one young gallant caresses his hawk,
a lady her lapdog, Castruccio alone looks
abstractedly away, as if his thoughts were elsewhere.
But all are alike heedless and unconscious, though
the sand is run out, the scythe falling and their
doom sealed. Meanwhile the lame and the halt,
the withered and the blind, to whom the heavens are
brass and life a burthen, cry on Death with impassioned
gestures, to release them from their misery, but
in vain; she sweeps past, and will not hear them.
Between these two groups lie a heap of corpses, mown
down already in her flight kings, queens,
bishops, cardinals, young men and maidens, secular
and ecclesiastical ensigned by their crowns,
coronets, necklaces, miters and helmets huddled
together in hideous confusion; some are dead, others
dying, angels and devils draw the souls
out of their mouths; that of a nun (in whose hand
a purse, firmly clenched, betokens her besetting sin)
shrinks back aghast at the unlooked-for sight of the
demon who receives it an idea either inherited
or adopted from Andrea Tafi. The whole upper half of the fresco, on this side,
is filled with angels and devils carrying souls to heaven or to hell; sometimes
a struggle takes place, and a soul is rescued from a demon who has unwarrantably
appropriated it; the angels are very graceful, and their intercourse with their
spiritual charge is full of tenderness and endearment; on the other hand, the
wicked are hurried off by the devils and thrown headlong into the mouths of
hell, represented as the crater of a volcano, belching out flames nearly in the
center of the composition. These devils exhibit every variety of horror in form
and feature.
71. We wish our author had been
more specific in his account of this wonderful fresco.
The portrait of Castruccio ought to have been signalized
as a severe disappointment to the admirers of the heroic
Lucchese: the face is flat, lifeless, and sensual,
though fine in feature. The group of mendicants
occupying the center are especially interesting, as
being among the first existing examples of hard study
from the model: all are evidently portraits and
the effect of deformity on the lines of the countenance
rendered with appalling truth; the retractile muscles
of the mouth wrinkled and fixed the jaws
projecting the eyes hungry and glaring the
eyebrows grisly and stiff, the painter having drawn
each hair separately: the two stroppiati with
stumps instead of arms are especially characteristic,
as the observer may at once determine by comparing
them with the descendants of the originals, of whom
he will at any time find two, or more, waiting to
accompany his return across the meadow in front of
the Duomo: the old woman also, nearest of the
group, with gray disheveled hair and gray coat, with
a brown girdle and gourd flask, is magnificent, and
the archetype of all modern conceptions of witch.
But the crowning stroke of feeling is dependent on
a circumstance seldom observed. As Castruccio
and his companions are seated under the shade of an
orange grove, so the mendicants are surrounded by
a thicket of teasels, and a branch of ragged
thorn is twisted like a crown about their sickly temples
and weedy hair.
72. We do not altogether agree
with our author in thinking that the devils exhibit
every variety of horror; we rather fear that the spectator
might at first be reminded by them of what is commonly
known as the Dragon pattern of Wedgwood ware.
There is invention in them however and
energy; the eyes are always terrible, though simply
drawn a black ball set forward, and two-thirds
surrounded by a narrow crescent of white, under a
shaggy brow; the mouths are frequently magnificent;
that of a demon accompanying a thrust of a spear with
a growl, on the right of the picture, is interesting
as an example of the development of the canine teeth
noticed by Sir Charles Bell its capacity of laceration is unlimited:
another, snarling like a tiger at an angel who has
pulled a soul out of his claws, is equally well conceived;
we know nothing like its ferocity except Rembrandt’s
sketches of wounded wild beasts. The angels we
think generally disappointing; they are for the most
part diminutive in size, and the crossing of the extremities
of the two wings that cover the feet, gives them a coleopterous, cockchafer look, which is not a little
undignified; the colors of their plumes are somewhat
coarse and dark one is covered with silky
hair, instead of feathers. The souls they contend
for are indeed of sweet expression; but exceedingly
earthly in contour, the painter being unable to deal
with the nude form. On the whole, he seems to
have reserved his highest powers for the fresco which
follows next in order, the scene of Resurrection and
Judgment.
“It is, in the main, the traditional
Byzantine composition, even more rigidly symmetrical
than usual, singularly contrasting in this respect
with the rush and movement of the preceding compartment.
Our Saviour and the Virgin, seated side by side, each
on a rainbow and within a vesica piscis,
appear in the sky Our Saviour uttering the words of malediction with uplifted
arm, showing the wound in his side, and nearly in the attitude of Michael
Angelo, but in wrath, not in fury the Virgin timidly drawing back and gazing
down in pity and sorrow. I never saw this co-equal juxtaposition in any other
representation of the Last Judgment.
73. The positions of our Saviour
and of the Virgin are not strictly co-equal; the glory
in which the Madonna is seated is both lower and less;
but the equality is more complete in the painting of
the same subject in Santa M. Novella. We believe
Lord Lindsay is correct in thinking Orcagna the only
artist who has dared it. We question whether
even wrath be intended in the countenance of the principal
figure; on the contrary, we think it likely to disappoint
at first, and appear lifeless in its exceeding tranquillity;
the brow is indeed slightly knit, but the eyes have
no local direction. They comprehend all things are
set upon all spirits alike, as in that word-fresco
of our own, not unworthy to be set side by side with
this, the Vision of the Trembling Man in the House
of the Interpreter. The action is as majestic
as the countenance the right hand seems
raised rather to show its wound (as the left points
at the same instant to the wound in the side), than
in condemnation, though its gesture has been adopted
as one of threatening first (and very nobly)
by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the figure of the Angel departing,
looking towards Sodom and afterwards, with
unfortunate exaggeration, by Michael Angelo. Orcagna’s
Madonna we think a failure, but his strength has been
more happily displayed in the Apostolic circle.
The head of St. John is peculiarly beautiful.
The other Apostles look forward or down as in judgment some
in indignation, some in pity, some serene but
the eyes of St. John are fixed upon the Judge Himself
with the stability of love intercession
and sorrow struggling for utterance with awe and
through both is seen a tremor of submissive astonishment,
that the lips which had once forbidden his to call
down fire from heaven should now themselves burn with
irrevocable condemnation.
74. “One feeling for the
most part pervades this side of the composition, there
is far more variety in the other; agony is depicted
with fearful intensity and in every degree and character;
some clasp their hands, some hide their faces, some
look up in despair, but none towards Christ; others
seem to have grown idiots with horror: a
few gaze, as if fascinated, into the gulf of fire
towards which the whole mass of misery are being urged
by the ministers of doom the flames bite
them, the devils fish for and catch them with long
grappling-hooks: in sad contrast to the
group on the opposite side, a queen, condemned herself
but self-forgetful, vainly struggles to rescue her
daughter from a demon who has caught her by the gown
and is dragging her backwards into the abyss her
sister, wringing her hands, looks on in agony it
is a fearful scene.
“A vast rib or arch in the walls
of pandemonium admits one into the contiguous gulf
of Hell, forming the third fresco, or rather a continuation
of the second in which Satan sits in the
midst, in gigantic terror, cased in armor and crunching
sinners of whom Judas, especially, is eaten
and ejected, re-eaten and re-ejected again and again
forever. The punishments of the wicked are portrayed
in circles numberless around him. But in everything
save horror this compartment is inferior to the preceding,
and it has been much injured and repainted.”
75. We might have been spared
all notice of this last compartment. Throughout
Italy, owing, it may be supposed, to the interested
desire of the clergy to impress upon the populace
as forcibly as possible the verity of purgatorial
horrors, nearly every representation of the Inferno
has been repainted, and vulgar butchery substituted
for the expressions of punishment which were too chaste
for monkish purposes. The infernos of Giotto
at Padua, and of Orcagna at Florence, have thus been
destroyed; but in neither case have they been replaced
by anything so merely disgusting as these restorations
by Solazzino in the Campo Santo. Not a line of
Orcagna’s remains, except in one row of figures
halfway up the wall, where his firm black drawing is
still distinguishable: throughout the rest of
the fresco, hillocks of pink flesh have been substituted
for his severe forms and for his agonized
features, puppets’ heads with roaring mouths
and staring eyes, the whole as coarse and sickening,
and quite as weak, as any scrabble on the lowest booths
of a London Fair.
76. Lord Lindsay’s comparison
of these frescoes of Orcagna with the great work in
the Sistine, is, as a specimen of his writing, too
good not to be quoted.
“While Michael Angelo’s
leading idea seems to be the self-concentration and
utter absorption of all feeling into the one predominant
thought, Am I, individually, safe? resolving
itself into two emotions only, doubt and despair all
diversities of character, all kindred sympathies annihilated
under their pressure those emotions uttering
themselves, not through the face but the form, by
bodily contortion, rendering the whole composition,
with all its overwhelming merits, a mighty hubbub Orcagna’s
on the contrary embraces the whole world of passions
that make up the economy of man, and these not confused
or crushed into each other, but expanded and enhanced
in quality and intensity commensurably with the ‘change’
attendant upon the resurrection variously
expressed indeed, and in reference to the diversities
of individual character, which will be nowise compromised
by that change, yet from their very intensity suppressed
and subdued, stilling the body and informing only
the soul’s index, the countenance. All
therefore is calm; the saved have acquiesced in all
things, they can mourn no more the damned
are to them as if they had never been; among
the lost, grief is too deep, too settled for caricature,
and while every feeling of the spectator, every key
of the soul’s organ, is played upon by turns,
tenderness and pity form the under-song throughout
and ultimately prevail; the curse is uttered in sorrow
rather than wrath, and from the pitying Virgin and
the weeping archangel above, to the mother endeavoring
to rescue her daughter below, and the young secular
led to paradise under the approving smile of S. Michael,
all resolves itself into sympathy and love. Michael
Angelo’s conception may be more efficacious
for teaching by terror it was his object,
I believe, as the heir of Savonarola and the representative
of the Protestant spirit within the bosom of Catholicism;
but Orcagna’s is in better taste, truer to human
nature, sublimer in philosophy, and (if I mistake not) more scriptural.
77. We think it somewhat strange
that the object of teaching by terror should be attributed
to M. Angelo more than to Orcagna, seeing that the
former, with his usual dignity, has refused all representation
of infernal punishment except in the figure
dragged down with the hand over the face, the serpent
biting the thigh, and in the fiends of the extreme
angle; while Orcagna, whose intention may be conjectured
even from Solazzino’s restoration, exhausted
himself in detailing Dante’s distribution of
torture, and brings into successive prominence every
expedient of pain; the prong, the spit, the rack, the
chain, venomous fang and rending beak, harrowing point
and dividing edge, biting fiend and calcining fire.
The objects of the two great painters were indeed
opposed, but not in this respect. Orcagna’s,
like that of every great painter of his day, was to
write upon the wall, as in a book, the greatest possible
number of those religious facts or doctrines which
the Church desired should be known to the people.
This he did in the simplest and most straightforward
way, regardless of artistical reputation, and desiring
only to be read and understood. But Michael Angelo’s
object was from the beginning that of an artist.
He addresses not the sympathies of his day, but the
understanding of all time, and he treats the subject
in the mode best adapted to bring every one of his
own powers into full play. As might have been
expected, while the self-forgetfulness of Orcagna
has given, on the one hand, an awfulness to his work,
and verity, which are wanting in the studied composition
of the Sistine, on the other it has admitted a puerility
commensurate with the narrowness of the religion he
had to teach.
78. Greater differences still
result from the opposed powers and idiosyncrasies
of the two men. Orcagna was unable to draw the
nude on this inability followed a coldness
to the value of flowing lines, and to the power of
unity in composition neither could he indicate
motion or buoyancy in flying or floating figures,
nor express violence of action in the limbs he
cannot even show the difference between pulling and
pushing in the muscles of the arm. In M. Angelo
these conditions were directly reversed. Intense
sensibility to the majesty of writhing, flowing, and
connected lines, was in him associated with a power,
unequaled except by Angelico, of suggesting aerial
motion motion deliberate or disturbed,
inherent or impressed, impotent or inspired gathering
into glory, or gravitating to death. Orcagna was
therefore compelled to range his figures symmetrically
in ordered lines, while Michael Angelo bound them
into chains, or hurled them into heaps, or scattered
them before him as the wind does leaves. Orcagna
trusted for all his expression to the countenance,
or to rudely explained gesture aided by grand fall
of draperies, though in all these points he was still
immeasurably inferior to his colossal rival. As
for his “embracing the whole world of passions
which make up the economy of man,” he had no
such power of delineation nor, we believe,
of conception. The expressions on the inferno
side are all of them varieties of grief and fear,
differing merely in degree, not in character or operation:
there is something dramatic in the raised hand of
a man wearing a green bonnet with a white plume but
the only really far-carried effort in the group is
the head of a Dominican monk (just above the queen
in green), who, in the midst of the close crowd, struggling,
shuddering, and howling on every side, is fixed in
quiet, total despair, insensible to all things, and
seemingly poised in existence and sensation upon that
one point in his past life when his steps first took
hold on hell; this head, which is opposed to a face
distorted by horror beside it, is, we repeat, the only
highly wrought piece of expression in the group.
79. What Michael Angelo could
do by expression of countenance alone, let the Pieta
of Genoa tell, or the Lorenzo, or the parallel to this
very head of Orcagna’s, the face of the man
borne down in the Last Judgment with the hand clenched
over one of the eyes. Neither in that fresco is
he wanting in dramatic episode; the adaptation of the
Niobe on the spectator’s left hand is far finer
than Orcagna’s condemned queen and princess;
the groups rising below, side by side, supporting each
other, are full of tenderness, and reciprocal devotion;
the contest in the center for the body which a demon
drags down by the hair is another kind of quarrel
from that of Orcagna between a feathered angel and
bristly fiend for a diminutive soul reminding
us, as it forcibly did at first, of a vociferous difference
in opinion between a cat and a cockatoo. But
Buonaroti knew that it was useless to concentrate interest
in the countenances, in a picture of enormous size,
ill lighted; and he preferred giving full play to
the powers of line-grouping, for which he could have
found no nobler field. Let us not by unwise comparison
mingle with our admiration of these two sublime works
any sense of weakness in the naïvete of the one, or
of coldness in the science of the other. Each
painter has his own sufficient dominion, and he who
complains of the want of knowledge in Orcagna, or
of the display of it in Michael Angelo, has probably
brought little to his judgment of either.
80. One passage more we must
quote, well worthy of remark in these days of hollowness
and haste, though we question the truth of the particular
fact stated in the second volume respecting the shrine
of Or San Michele. Cement is now visible enough
in all the joints, but whether from recent repairs
we cannot say:
“There is indeed another, a
technical merit, due to Orcagna, which I would have
mentioned earlier, did it not partake so strongly of
a moral virtue. Whatever he undertook to do,
he did well by which I mean, better than
anybody else. His Loggia, in its general structure
and its provisions against injury from wet and decay,
is a model of strength no less than symmetry and elegance;
the junction of the marbles in the tabernacle of Or
San Michele, and the exquisite manual workmanship of
the bas-reliefs, have been the theme of praise for
five centuries; his colors in the Campo Santo have
maintained a freshness unrivaled by those of any of
his successors there; nay, even had his
mosaics been preserved at Orvieto, I am confident
the commettitura would be found more compact
and polished than any previous to the sixteenth century.
The secret of all this was that he made himself thoroughly
an adept in the mechanism of the respective arts,
and therefore his works have stood. Genius is
too apt to think herself independent of form and matter never
was there such a mistake; she cannot slight either
without hamstringing herself. But the rule is
of universal application; without this thorough mastery
of their respective tools, this determination honestly
to make the best use of them, the divine, the soldier,
the statesman, the philosopher, the poet however
genuine their enthusiasm, however lofty their genius are
mere empirics, pretenders to crowns they will not
run for, children not men sporters with Imagination, triflers with Reason, with
the prospects of humanity, with Time, and with God.
A noble passage this, and most true,
provided we distinguish always between mastery of
tool together with thorough strength of workmanship,
and mere neatness of outside polish or fitting of measurement,
of which ancient masters are daringly scornful.
81. None of Orcagna’s pupils,
except Francisco Traini, attained celebrity
“nothing in fact is known of
them except their names. Had their works, however
inferior, been preserved, we might have had less difficulty
in establishing the links between himself and his
successor in the supremacy of the Semi-Byzantine school
at Florence, the Beato Fra Angelico
da Fiesole.... He was born at Vicchio, near
Florence, it is said in 1387, and was baptized by
the name of Guido. Of a gentle nature, averse
to the turmoil of the world, and pious to enthusiasm,
though as free from fanaticism as his youth was innocent
of vice, he determined, at the age of twenty, though
well provided for in a worldly point of view, to retire
to the cloister; he professed himself accordingly a
brother of the monastery of S. Domenico at Fiesole
in 1407, assuming his monastic name from the Apostle
of love, S. John. He acquired from his residence
there the distinguishing surname ‘da Fiesole; and a calmer retreat
for one weary of earth and desirous of commerce with heaven would in vain be
sought for; the purity of the atmosphere, the freshness of the morning breeze,
the starry clearness and delicious fragrance of the nights, the loveliness of
the valley at ones feet, lengthening out, like a life of happiness, between the
Apennine and the sea with the intermingling sounds that ascend perpetually from
below, softened by distance into music, and by an agreeable compromise at once
giving a zest to solitude and cheating it of its loneliness rendering Fiesole a
spot which angels might alight upon by mistake in quest of paradise, a spot
where it would be at once sweet to live and sweet to die.
82. Our readers must recollect
that the convent where Fra Giovanni first
resided is not that whose belfry tower and cypress
grove crown the “top of Fesole.”
The Dominican convent is situated at the bottom of
the slope of olives, distinguished only by its narrow
and low spire; a cypress avenue recedes from it towards
Florence a stony path, leading to the ancient
Badia of Fiesole, descends in front of the three-arched
loggia which protects the entrance to the church.
No extended prospect is open to it; though over the
low wall, and through the sharp, thickset olive leaves,
may be seen one silver gleam of the Arno, and, at evening,
the peaks of the Carrara mountains, purple against
the twilight, dark and calm, while the fire-flies
glance beneath, silent and intermittent, like stars
upon the rippling of mute, soft sea.
“It is by no means an easy task
to adjust the chronology of Fra Angelico’s
works; he has affixed no dates to them, and consequently,
when external evidence is wanting, we are thrown upon
internal, which in his case is unusually fallacious.
It is satisfactory therefore to possess a fixed date
in 1433, the year in which he painted the great tabernacle
for the Company of Flax-merchants, now removed to the
gallery of the Uffizii. It represents the Virgin and child, with attendant
Saints, on a gold ground very dignified and noble, although the Madonna has not
attained the exquisite spirituality of his later efforts. Round this tabernacle
as a nucleus, may be classed a number of paintings, all of similar excellence
admirable that is to say, but not of his very best, and in which, if I mistake
not, the type of the Virgin bears throughout a strong family resemblance.
83. If the painter ever increased
in power after this period (he was then forty-three),
we have been unable to systematize the improvement.
We much doubt whether, in his modes of execution, advance
were possible. Men whose merit lies in record
of natural facts, increase in knowledge; and men whose
merit is in dexterity of hand increase in facility;
but we much doubt whether the faculty of design, or
force of feeling, increase after the age of twenty-five.
By Fra Angelico, who drew always in fear
and trembling, dexterous execution had been from the
first repudiated; he neither needed nor sought technical
knowledge of the form, and the inspiration, to which
his power was owing, was not less glowing in youth
than in age. The inferiority traceable (we grant)
in this Madonna results not from its early date, but
from Fra Angelico’s incapability, always
visible, of drawing the head of life size. He
is, in this respect, the exact reverse of Giotto;
he was essentially a miniature painter, and never
attained the mastery of muscular play in the features
necessary in a full-sized drawing. His habit,
almost constant, of surrounding the iris of the eye
by a sharp black line, is, in small figures, perfectly
successful, giving a transparency and tenderness not
otherwise expressible. But on a larger scale it
gives a stony stare to the eyeball, which not all
the tenderness of the brow and mouth can conquer or
redeem.
84. Further, in this particular
instance, the ear has by accident been set too far
back (Fra Angelico, drawing
only from feeling, was liable to gross errors of this
kind, often, however, more beautiful than
other men’s truths) and the hair
removed in consequence too far off the brow; in other
respects the face is very noble still more
so that of the Christ. The child stands
upon the Virgin’s knees, one hand raised
in the usual attitude of benediction, the other holding
a globe. The face looks straightforward, quiet,
Jupiter-like, and very sublime, owing to the smallness
of the features in proportion to the head, the eyes
being placed at about three-sevenths of the whole height,
leaving four-sevenths for the brow, and themselves
only in length about one-sixth of the breadth of the
face, half closed, giving a peculiar appearance of
repose. The hair is short, golden, symmetrically
curled, statuesque in its contour; the mouth tender
and full of life: the red cross of the glory
about the head of an intense ruby enamel, almost fire
color; the dress brown, with golden girdle. In
all the treatment Fra Angelico maintains his
assertion of the authority of abstract imagination,
which, depriving his subject of all material or actual
being, contemplates it as retaining qualities eternal
only adorned by incorporeal splendor.
The eyes of the beholder are supernaturally unsealed:
and to this miraculous vision whatever is of the earth
vanishes, and all things are seen endowed with an harmonious
glory the garments falling with strange,
visionary grace, glowing with indefinite gold the
walls of the chamber dazzling as of a heavenly city the
mortal forms themselves impressed with divine changelessness no
domesticity no jest no anxiety no
expectation no variety of action or of
thought. Love, all fulfilling, and various modes
of power, are alone expressed; the Virgin never shows
the complacency or petty watchfulness of maternity;
she sits serene, supporting the child whom she ever
looks upon, as a stranger among strangers; “Behold
the handmaid of the Lord” forever written upon
her brow.
85. An approach to an exception
in treatment is found in the Annunciation of the upper
corridor of St. Mark’s, most unkindly treated
by our author:
“Probably the earliest of the
series full of faults, but imbued with
the sweetest feeling; there is a look of naïve curiosity,
mingling with the modest and meek humility of the
Virgin, which almost provokes a smile.”
Many a Sabbath evening of bright summer
have we passed in that lonely corridor but
not to the finding of faults, nor the provoking of
smiles. The angel is perhaps something less majestic
than is usual with the painter; but the Virgin is
only the more to be worshiped, because here, for once,
set before us in the verity of life. No gorgeous
robe is upon her; no lifted throne set for her; the
golden border gleams faintly on the dark blue dress;
the seat is drawn into the shadow of a lowly loggia.
The face is of no strange, far-sought loveliness; the
features might even be thought hard, and they are
worn with watching, and severe, though innocent.
She stoops forward with her arms folded on her bosom:
no casting down of eye nor shrinking of the frame in
fear; she is too earnest, too self-forgetful for either:
wonder and inquiry are there, but chastened and free
from doubt; meekness, yet mingled with a patient majesty;
peace, yet sorrowfully sealed, as if the promise of
the Angel were already underwritten by the prophecy
of Simeon. They who pass and repass in the twilight
of that solemn corridor, need not the adjuration inscribed
beneath:
“Virginis intactae cum
veneris ante figuram
Praetereundo cave ne sileatur
Ave."
We in general allow the inferiority
of Angelico’s fresco to his tempera works; yet
even that which of all these latter we think the most
radiant, the Annunciation on the reliquary of Santa
Maria Novella, would, we believe, if repeatedly compared
with this of St. Mark’s, in the end have the
disadvantage. The eminent value of the tempera
paintings results partly from their delicacy of line,
and partly from the purity of color and force of decoration
of which the material is capable.
86. The passage, to which we
have before alluded, respecting Fra Angelico’s
color in general, is one of the most curious and fanciful
in the work:
“His coloring, on the other
hand, is far more beautiful, although of questionable
brilliancy. This will be found invariably the
case in minds constituted like his. Spirit and
Sense act on each other with livelier reciprocity
the closer their approximation, the less intervention
there is of Intellect. Hence the most religious
and the most sensual painters have always loved the
brightest colors Spiritual Expression and
a clearly defined (however inaccurate) outline forming
the distinction of the former class; Animal Expression
and a confused and uncertain outline (reflecting that
lax morality which confounds the limits of light and
darkness, right and wrong) of the latter. On the
other hand, the more that Intellect, or the spirit
of Form, intervenes in its severe precision, the less
pure, the paler grow the colors, the nearer they tend
to the hue of marble, of the bas-relief. We thus
find the purest and brightest colors only in Fra
Angelico’s pictures, with a general predominance
of blue, which we have observed to prevail more or
less in so many of the Semi-Byzantine painters, and
which, fanciful as it may appear, I cannot but attribute,
independently of mere tradition, to an inherent, instinctive
sympathy between their mental constitution and the
color in question; as that of red, or of blood, may
be observed to prevail among painters in whom Sense
or Nature predominates over Spirit for
in this, as in all things else, the moral and the material
world respond to each other as closely as shadow and
substance. But, in Painting as in Morals, perfection
implies the due intervention of Intellect between
Spirit and Sense of Form between Expression
and Coloring as a power at once controlling
and controlled and therefore, although
acknowledging its fascination, I cannot unreservedly
praise the Coloring of Fra Angelico.
87. There is much ingenuity,
and some truth, here, but the reader, as in other
of Lord Lindsay’s speculations, must receive
his conclusions with qualification. It is the
natural character of strong effects of color, as of
high light, to confuse outlines; and it is a necessity
in all fine harmonies of color that many tints should
merge imperceptibly into their following or succeeding
ones: we believe Lord Lindsay himself would
hardly wish to mark the hues of the rainbow into divided
zones, or to show its edge, as of an iron arch, against
the sky, in order that it might no longer reflect
(a reflection of which we profess ourselves up to
this moment altogether unconscious) “that lax
morality which confounds the limits of right and wrong.”
Again, there is a character of energy in all warm
colors, as of repose in cold, which necessarily causes
the former to be preferred by painters of savage subject that
is to say, commonly by the coarsest and most degraded; but
when sensuality is free from ferocity, it leans to
blue more than to red (as especially in the flesh
tints of Guido), and when intellect prevails over
this sensuality, its first step is invariably to put
more red into every color, and so “rubor
est virtutis color.” We hardly
think Lord Lindsay would willingly include Luca Giordano
among his spiritual painters, though that artist’s
servant was materially enriched by washing the ultramarine
from the brushes with which he painted the Ricardi
palace; nor would he, we believe, degrade Ghirlandajo
to fellowship with the herd of the sensual, though
in the fresco of the vision of Zacharias there are
seventeen different reds in large masses, and not
a shade of blue. The fact is, there is no color
of the spectrum, as there is no note of music, whose
key and prevalence may not be made pure in expression,
and elevating in influence, by a great and good painter,
or degraded to unhallowed purpose by a base one.
88. We are sorry that our author
“cannot unreservedly praise the coloring of
Angelico;” but he is again curbed by his unhappy
system of balanced perfectibility, and must quarrel
with the gentle monk because he finds not in him the
flames of Giorgione, nor the tempering of Titian,
nor the melody of Cagliari. This curb of perfection
we took between our teeth from the first, and we will
give up our hearts to Angelico without drawback or
reservation. His color is, in its sphere and
to its purpose, as perfect as human work may be:
wrought to radiance beyond that of the ruby and opal,
its inartificialness prevents it from arresting the
attention it is intended only to direct; were it composed
with more science it would become vulgar from the loss
of its unconsciousness; if richer, it must have parted
with its purity, if deeper, with its joyfulness, if
more subdued, with its sincerity. Passages are,
indeed, sometimes unsuccessful; but it is to be judged
in its rapture, and forgiven in its fall: he
who works by law and system may be blamed when he
sinks below the line above which he proposes no elevation,
but to him whose eyes are on a mark far off, and whose
efforts are impulsive, and to the utmost of his strength,
we may not unkindly count the slips of his sometime
descent into the valley of humiliation.
89. The concluding notice of
Angelico is true and interesting, though rendered
obscure by useless recurrence to the favorite theory.
“Such are the surviving works
of a painter, who has recently been as unduly extolled
as he had for three centuries past been unduly depreciated, depreciated,
through the amalgamation during those centuries of
the principle of which he was the representative with
baser, or at least less precious matter extolled,
through the recurrence to that principle, in its pure,
unsophisticated essence, in the present in
a word, to the simple Imaginative Christianity of the
middle ages, as opposed to the complex Reasoning Christianity
of recent times. Creeds therefore are at issue,
and no exclusive partisan, neither Catholic nor Protestant
in the absolute sense of the terms, can fairly appreciate
Fra Angelico. Nevertheless, to those who regard society as
progressive through the gradual development of the component elements of human
nature, and who believe that Providence has accommodated the mind of man,
individually, to the perception of half-truths only, in order to create that
antagonism from which Truth is generated in the abstract, and by which the
progression is effected, his rank and position in art are clear and definite.
All that Spirit could achieve by herself, anterior to that struggle with
Intellect and Sense which she must in all cases pass through in order to work
out her destiny, was accomplished by him. Last and most gifted of a long and
imaginative race the heir of their experience, with collateral advantages which
they possessed not and flourishing at the moment when the transition was
actually taking place from the youth to the early manhood of Europe; he gave
full, unreserved, and enthusiastic expression to that Love and Hope which had
winged the Faith of Christendom in her flight towards heaven for fourteen
centuries, to those yearnings of the Heart and the Imagination which ever
precede, in Universal as well as Individual development, the severer and more
chastened intelligence of Reason.
90. We must again repeat that
if our author wishes to be truly serviceable to the
schools of England, he must express himself in terms
requiring less laborious translation. Clearing
the above statement of its mysticism and metaphor,
it amounts only to this, that Fra Angelico
was a man of (humanly speaking) perfect piety humility,
charity, and faith that he never employed
his art but as a means of expressing his love to God
and man, and with the view, single, simple, and straightforward,
of glory to the Creator, and good to the Creature.
Every quality or subject of art by which these ends
were not to be attained, or to be attained secondarily
only, he rejected; from all study of art, as such,
he withdrew; whatever might merely please the eye,
or interest the intellect, he despised, and refused;
he used his colors and lines, as David his harp, after
a kingly fashion, for purposes of praise and not of
science. To this grace and gift of holiness were
added, those of a fervent imagination, vivid invention,
keen sense of loveliness in lines and colors, unwearied
energy, and to all these gifts the crowning one of
quietness of life and mind, while yet his convent-cell
was at first within view, and afterwards in the center,
of a city which had lead of all the world in Intellect,
and in whose streets he might see daily and hourly
the noblest setting of manly features. It would
perhaps be well to wait until we find another man
thus actuated, thus endowed, and thus circumstanced,
before we speak of “unduly extolling”
the works of Fra Angelico.
91. His artistical attainments,
as might be conjectured, are nothing more than the
development, through practice, of his natural powers
in accordance with his sacred instincts. His
power of expression by bodily gesture is greater even
than Giotto’s, wherever he could feel or comprehend
the passion to be expressed; but so inherent in him
was his holy tranquillity of mind, that he could not
by any exertion, even for a moment, conceive either
agitation, doubt, or fear and all the actions
proceeding from such passions, or, a fortiori,
from any yet more criminal, are absurdly and powerlessly
portrayed by him; while contrariwise, every gesture,
consistent with emotion pure and saintly, is rendered
with an intensity of truth to which there is no existing
parallel; the expression being carried out into every
bend of the hand, every undulation of the arm, shoulder,
and neck, every fold of the dress and every wave of
the hair. His drawing of movement is subject to
the same influence; vulgar or vicious motion he cannot
represent; his running, falling, or struggling figures
are drawn with childish incapability; but give him
for his scene the pavement of heaven, or pastures
of Paradise, and for his subject the “inoffensive
pace” of glorified souls, or the spiritual speed
of Angels, and Michael Angelo alone can contend with
him in majesty, in grace and musical continuousness
of motion, no one. The inspiration was in some
degree caught by his pupil Benozzo, but thenceforward
forever lost. The angels of Perugino appear to
be let down by cords and moved by wires; that of Titian,
in the sacrifice of Isaac, kicks like an awkward swimmer;
Raphael’s Moses and Elias of the Transfiguration
are cramped at the knees; and the flight of Domenichino’s
angels is a sprawl paralyzed. The authority of
Tintoret over movement is, on the other hand, too
unlimited; the descent of his angels is the swoop of
a whirlwind or the fall of a thunderbolt; his mortal
impulses are oftener impetuous than pathetic, and
majestic more than melodious.
92. But it is difficult by words
to convey to the reader unacquainted with Angelico’s
works, any idea of the thoughtful variety of his rendering
of movement Earnest haste of girded faith
in the Flight into Egypt, the haste of obedience,
not of fear; and unweariedness, but through spiritual
support, and not in human strength Swift
obedience of passive earth to the call of its Creator,
in the Resurrection of Lazarus March of
meditative gladness in the following of the Apostles
down the Mount of Olives Rush of adoration
breaking through the chains and shadows of death,
in the Spirits in Prison. Pacing of mighty angels
above the Firmament, poised on their upright wings,
half opened, broad, bright, quiet, like eastern clouds
before the sun is up; or going forth, with
timbrels and with dances, of souls more than conquerors,
beside the shore of the last great Red Sea, the sea
of glass mingled with fire, hand knit with hand, and
voice with voice, the joyful winds of heaven following
the measure of their motion, and the flowers of the
new earth looking on, like stars pausing in their courses.
93. And yet all this is but the
lowest part and narrowest reach of Angelico’s
conceptions. Joy and gentleness, patience and
power, he could indicate by gesture but
Devotion could be told by the countenance only.
There seems to have been always a stern limit by which
the thoughts of other men were stayed; the religion
that was painted even by Perugino, Francia, and Bellini,
was finite in its spirit the religion of
earthly beings, checked, not indeed by the corruption,
but by the veil and the sorrow of clay. But with
Fra Angelico the glory of the countenance
reaches to actual transfiguration; eyes that see no
more darkly, incapable of all tears, foreheads flaming,
like Belshazzar’s marble wall, with the writing
of the Father’s name upon them, lips tremulous
with love, and crimson with the light of the coals
of the altar and all this loveliness, thus
enthusiastic and ineffable, yet sealed with the stability
which the coming and going of ages as countless as
sea-sand cannot dim nor weary, and bathed by an ever
flowing river of holy thought, with God for its source,
God for its shore, and God for its ocean.
94. We speak in no inconsiderate
enthusiasm. We feel assured that to any person
of just feeling who devotes sufficient time to the
examination of these works, all terms of description
must seem derogatory. Where such ends as these
have been reached, it ill becomes us to speak of minor
deficiencies as either to be blamed or regretted:
it cannot be determined how far even what we deprecate
may be accessory to our delight, nor by what intricate
involution what we deplore may be connected with what
we love. Every good that nature herself bestows,
or accomplishes, is given with a counterpoise, or
gained at a sacrifice; nor is it to be expected of
Man that he should win the hardest battles and tread
the narrowest paths, without the betrayal of a weakness,
or the acknowledgment of an error.
95. With this final warning against
our author’s hesitating approbation of what
is greatest and best, we must close our specific examination
of the mode in which his design has been worked out.
We have done enough to set the reader upon his guard
against whatever appears slight or inconsiderate in
his theory or statements, and with the more severity,
because this was alone wanting to render the book one
of the most valuable gifts which Art has ever received.
Of the translations from the lives of the saints we
have hardly spoken; they are gracefully rendered,
and all of them highly interesting but we
could wish to see these, and the enumerations of fresco
subjects with which the other volumes are in great
part occupied, published separately for the convenience
of travelers in Italy. They are something out
of place in a work like that before us. For the
rest, we might have more interested the reader, and
gratified ourselves, by setting before him some of
the many passages of tender feeling and earnest eloquence
with which the volumes are replete but
we felt it necessary rather to anticipate the hesitation
with which they were liable to be received, and set
limits to the halo of fancy by which their light is
obscured though enlarged. One or two
paragraphs, however, of the closing chapter must be
given before we part:
96. “What a scene of beauty,
what a flower-garden of art how bright and
how varied must Italy have presented at
the commencement of the sixteenth century, at the
death of Raphael! The sacrileges we lament
took place for the most part after that period; hundreds
of frescoes, not merely of Giotto and those other
elders of Christian Art, but of Gentile da
Fabriano, Pietro della Francesca, Perugino
and their compeers, were still existing, charming
the eye, elevating the mind, and warming the heart.
Now alas! few comparatively and fading are the relics
of those great and good men. While Dante’s
voice rings as clear as ever, communing with us as
friend with friend, theirs is dying gradually away,
fainter and fainter, like the farewell of a spirit.
Flaking off the walls, uncared for and neglected save
in a few rare instances, scarce one of their frescoes
will survive the century, and the labors of the next
may not improbably be directed to the recovery and
restoration of such as may still slumber beneath the
whitewash and the daubs with which the Bronzinos and
Zuccheros ‘et id genus omne’
have unconsciously sealed them up for posterity their
best title to our gratitude. But why not
begin at once? at all events in the instances numberless,
where merely whitewash interposes between us and them.
“It is easy to reply what
need of this? They the artists have
Moses and the prophets, the frescoes of Raphael and
Michael Angelo let them study them.
Doubtless, but we still reply, and with
no impiety they will not repent, they will
not forsake their idols and their evil ways they
will not abandon Sense for Spirit, oils for fresco unless
these great ones of the past, these Sleepers of Ephesus,
arise from the dead.... It is not by studying
art in its perfection by worshiping Raphael
and Michael Angelo exclusively of all other excellence that
we can expect to rival them, but by re-ascending to
the fountain-head by planting ourselves
as acorns in the ground those oaks are rooted in, and
growing up to their level in a word, by
studying Duccio and Giotto that we may paint like
Taddeo di Bartolo and Masaccio, Taddeo di
Bartolo and Masaccio that we may paint like Perugino
and Luca Signorelli, Perugino and Luca Signorelli
that we may paint like Raphael and Michael Angelo.
And why despair of this, or even of shaming the Vatican?
For with genius and God’s blessing nothing is
impossible.
I would not be a blind partisan, but, with all their faults,
the old masters I plead for knew how to touch the heart. It may be difficult at
first to believe this; like children, they are shy with us like strangers, they
bear an uncouth mien and aspect like ghosts from the other world, they have an
awkward habit of shocking our conventionalities with home truths. But with the
dead as with the living all depends on the frankness with which we greet them,
the sincerity with which we credit their kindly qualities; sympathy is the key
to truth we must love, in order to appreciate.
97. These are beautiful sentences;
yet this let the young painter of these days remember
always, that whomsoever he may love, or from whomsoever
learn, he can now no more go back to those hours of
infancy and be born again. About the faith, the
questioning and the teaching of childhood there is
a joy and grace, which we may often envy, but can
no more assume: the voice and the gesture
must not be imitated when the innocence is lost.
Incapability and ignorance in the act of being struggled
against and cast away are often endowed with a peculiar
charm but both are only contemptible when
they are pretended. Whatever we have now to do,
we may be sure, first, that its strength and life
must be drawn from the real nature with us and about
us always, and secondly, that, if worth doing, it
will be something altogether different from what has
ever been done before. The visions of the cloister
must depart with its superstitious peace the
quick, apprehensive symbolism of early Faith must
yield to the abstract teaching of disciplined Reason.
Whatever else we may deem of the Progress of Nations,
one character of that progress is determined and discernible.
As in the encroaching of the land upon the sea, the
strength of the sandy bastions is raised out of the
sifted ruin of ancient inland hills for
every tongue of level land that stretches into the
deep, the fall of Alps has been heard among the clouds,
and as the fields of industry enlarge, the intercourse
with Heaven is shortened. Let it not be doubted
that as this change is inevitable, so it is expedient,
though the form of teaching adopted and of duty prescribed
be less mythic and contemplative, more active and
unassisted: for the light of Transfiguration
on the Mountain is substituted the Fire of Coals upon
the Shore, and on the charge to hear the Shepherd,
follows that to feed the Sheep. Doubtful we may
be for a time, and apparently deserted; but if, as
we wait, we still look forward with steadfast will
and humble heart, so that our Hope for the Future
may be fed, not dulled or diverted by our Love for
the Past, we shall not long be left without a Guide: the
way will be opened, the Precursor appointed the
Hour will come, and the Man.
EASTLAKES HISTORY OF OIL-PAINTING.
98. The stranger in Florence
who for the first time passes through the iron gate
which opens from the Green Cloister of Santa Maria
Novella into the Spezieria, can hardly fail of being
surprised, and that perhaps painfully, by the suddenness
of the transition from the silence and gloom of the
monastic inclosure, its pavement rough with epitaphs,
and its walls retaining, still legible, though crumbling
and mildewed, their imaged records of Scripture History,
to the activity of a traffic not less frivolous than
flourishing, concerned almost exclusively with the
appliances of bodily adornment or luxury. Yet
perhaps, on a moment’s reflection, the rose-leaves
scattered on the floor, and the air filled with odor
of myrtle and myrrh, aloes and cassia, may arouse
associations of a different and more elevated character;
the preparation of these precious perfumes may seem
not altogether unfitting the hands of a religious
brotherhood or if this should not be conceded,
at all events it must be matter of rejoicing to observe
the evidence of intelligence and energy interrupting
the apathy and languor of the cloister; nor will the
institution be regarded with other than respect, as
well as gratitude, when it is remembered that, as
to the convent library we owe the preservation of
ancient literature, to the convent laboratory we owe
the duration of mediaeval art.
99. It is at first with surprise
not altogether dissimilar, that we find a painter
of refined feeling and deep thoughtfulness, after manifesting
in his works the most sincere affection for what is
highest in the reach of his art, devoting himself
for years (there is proof of this in the work before
us) to the study of the mechanical preparation of its
appliances, and whatever documentary evidence exists
respecting their ancient use. But it is with
a revulsion of feeling more entire, that we perceive
the value of the results obtained the accuracy
of the varied knowledge by which their sequence has
been established and above all, their immediate
bearing upon the practice and promise of the schools
of our own day.
Opposite errors, we know not which
the least pardonable, but both certainly productive
of great harm, have from time to time possessed the
masters of modern art. It has been held by some
that the great early painters owed the larger measure
of their power to secrets of material and method,
and that the discovery of a lost vehicle or forgotten
process might at any time accomplish the regeneration
of a fallen school. By others it has been asserted
that all questions respecting materials or manipulation
are idle and impertinent; that the methods of the
older masters were either of no peculiar value, or
are still in our power; that a great painter is independent
of all but the simplest mechanical aids, and demonstrates
his greatness by scorn of system and carelessness
of means.
100. It is evident that so long
as incapability could shield itself under the first
of these creeds, or presumption vindicate itself by
the second; so long as the feeble painter could lay
his faults on his palette and his panel; and the self-conceited
painter, from the assumed identity of materials proceed
to infer equality of power (for we believe
that in most instances those who deny the evil of our
present methods will deny also the weakness of our
present works) little good could be expected
from the teaching of the abstract principles of the
art; and less, if possible, from the example of any
mechanical qualities, however admirable, whose means
might be supposed irrecoverable on the one hand, or
indeterminate on the other, or of any excellence conceived
to have been either summoned by an incantation, or
struck out by an accident. And of late, among
our leading masters, the loss has not been merely
of the system of the ancients, but of all system whatsoever:
the greater number paint as if the virtue of oil pigment
were its opacity, or as if its power depended on its
polish; of the rest, no two agree in use or choice
of materials; not many are consistent even in their
own practice; and the most zealous and earnest, therefore
the most discontented, reaching impatiently and desperately
after better things, purchase the momentary satisfaction
of their feelings by the sacrifice of security of
surface and durability of hue. The walls of our
galleries are for the most part divided between pictures
whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with
a heavy hand and a cold heart, secures for them the
stability of dullness and the safety of mediocrity;
and pictures whose reckless and experimental brilliancy,
unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as
evanescent as the dust of an insect’s wing, and
presents in its chief perfections so many subjects
of future regret.
101. But if these evils now continue,
it can only be through rashness which no example can
warn, or through apathy which no hope can stimulate,
for Mr. Eastlake has alike withdrawn license from
experimentalism and apology from indolence. He
has done away with all legends of forgotten secrets;
he has shown that the masters of the great Flemish
and early Venetian schools possessed no means, followed
no methods, but such as we may still obtain and pursue;
but he has shown also, among all these masters, the
most admirable care in the preparation of materials
and the most simple consistency in their use; he has
shown that their excellence was reached, and could
only have been reached, by stern and exact science,
condescending to the observance, care, and conquest
of the most minute physical particulars and hindrances;
that the greatest of them never despised an aid nor
avoided a difficulty. The loss of imaginative
liberty sometimes involved in a too scrupulous attention
to methods of execution is trivial compared to the
evils resulting from a careless or inefficient practice.
The modes in which, with every great painter, realization
falls short of conception are necessarily so many
and so grievous, that he can ill afford to undergo
the additional discouragement caused by uncertain
methods and bad materials. Not only so, but even
the choice of subjects, the amount of completion attempted,
nay, even the modes of conception and measure of truth
are in no small degree involved in the great question
of materials. On the habitual use of a light or
dark ground may depend the painter’s preference
of a broad and faithful, or partial and scenic chiaroscuro;
correspondent with the facility or fatality of alterations,
may be the exercise of indolent fancy, or disciplined
invention; and to the complexities of a system requiring
time, patience, and succession of process, may be
owing the conversion of the ready draughtsman into
the resolute painter. Farther than this, who shall
say how unconquerable a barrier to all self-denying
effort may exist in the consciousness that the best
that is accomplished can last but a few years, and
that the painter’s travail must perish with his
life?
102. It cannot have been without
strong sense of this, the true dignity and relation
of his subject, that Mr. Eastlake has gone through
a toil far more irksome, far less selfish than any
he could have undergone in the practice of his art.
The value which we attach to the volume depends, however,
rather on its preceptive than its antiquarian character.
As objects of historical inquiry merely, we cannot
conceive any questions less interesting than those
relating to mechanical operations generally, nor any
honors less worthy of prolonged dispute than those
which are grounded merely on the invention or amelioration
of processes and pigments. The subject can only
become historically interesting when the means ascertained
to have been employed at any period are considered
in their operation upon or procession from the artistical
aim of such period, the character of its chosen subjects,
and the effects proposed in their treatment upon the
national mind. Mr. Eastlake has as yet refused
himself the indulgence of such speculation; his book
is no more than its modest title expresses. For
ourselves, however, without venturing in the slightest
degree to anticipate the expression of his ulterior
views though we believe that we can trace
their extent and direction in a few suggestive sentences,
as pregnant as they are unobtrusive we
must yet, in giving a rapid sketch of the facts established,
assume the privilege of directing the reader to one
or two of their most obvious consequences, and, like
honest ’prentices, not suffer the abstracted
retirement of our master in the back parlor to diminish
the just recommendation of his wares to the passers-by.
103. Eminently deficient in works
representative of the earliest and purest tendencies
of art, our National Gallery nevertheless affords a
characteristic and sufficient series of examples of
the practice of the various schools of painting, after
oil had been finally substituted for the less manageable
glutinous vehicles which, under the general name of
tempera, were principally employed in the production
of easel pictures up to the middle of the fifteenth
century. If the reader were to make the circuit
of this collection for the purpose of determining which
picture represented with least disputable fidelity
the first intention of its painter, and united in
its modes of execution the highest reach of achievement
with the strongest assurance of durability, we believe
that after hesitating long over hypothetical
degrees of blackened shadow and yellowed light, of
lost outline and buried detail, of chilled luster,
dimmed transparency, altered color, and weakened force he
would finally pause before a small picture on panel,
representing two quaintly dressed figures in a dimly
lighted room dependent for its interest
little on expression, and less on treatment but
eminently remarkable for reality of substance, vacuity
of space, and vigor of quiet color; nor less for an
elaborate finish, united with energetic freshness,
which seem to show that time has been much concerned
in its production, and has had no power over its fate.
104. We do not say that the total
force of the material is exhibited in this picture,
or even that it in any degree possesses the lusciousness
and fullness which are among the chief charms of oil-painting;
but that upon the whole it would be selected as uniting
imperishable firmness with exquisite delicacy; as
approaching more unaffectedly and more closely than
any other work to the simple truths of natural color
and space; and as exhibiting, even in its quaint and
minute treatment, conquest over many of the difficulties
which the boldest practice of art involves.
This picture, bearing the inscription
“Johannes Van Eyck (fuit?) hic, 1434,”
is probably the portrait, certainly the work, of one
of those brothers to whose ingenuity the first invention
of the art of oil-painting has been long ascribed.
The volume before us is occupied chiefly in determining
the real extent of the improvements they introduced,
in examining the processes they employed, and in tracing
the modifications of those processes adopted by later
Flemings, especially Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyck.
Incidental notices of the Italian system occur, so
far as, in its earlier stages, it corresponded with
that of the north; but the consideration of its separate
character is reserved for a following volume, and
though we shall expect with interest this concluding
portion of the treatise, we believe that, in the present
condition of the English school, the choice of the
methods of Van Eyck, Bellini, or Rubens, is as much
as we could modestly ask or prudently desire.
105. It would have been strange
indeed if a technical perfection like that of the
picture above described (equally characteristic of
all the works of those brothers), had been at once
reached by the first inventors of the art. So
far was this from being the case, and so distinct
is the evidence of the practice of oil-painting in
antecedent periods, that of late years the discoveries
of the Van Eycks have not unfrequently been treated
as entirely fabulous; and Raspe, in particular, rests
their claims to gratitude on the contingent introduction
of amber-varnish and poppy-oil: “Such
perhaps,” he says, “might have
been the misrepresented discovery of the Van Eycks.”
That tradition, however, for which the great painters
of Italy, and their sufficiently vain historian, had
so much respect as never to put forward any claim
in opposition to it, is not to be clouded by incautious
suspicion. Mr. Eastlake has approached it with
more reverence, stripped it of its exaggeration, and
shown the foundations for it in the fact that the
Van Eycks, though they did not create the art, yet
were the first to enable it for its function; that
having found it in servile office and with dormant
power laid like the dead Adonis on his
lettuce-bed they gave it vitality and dominion.
And fortunate it is for those who look for another
such reanimation, that the method of the Van
Eycks was not altogether their own discovery.
Had it been so, that method might still have remained
a subject of conjecture; but after being put in possession
of the principles commonly acknowledged before their
time, it is comparatively easy to trace the direction
of their inquiry and the nature of their improvements.
106. With respect to remote periods
of antiquity, we believe that the use of a hydrofuge
oil-varnish for the protection of works in tempera,
the only fact insisted upon by Mr. Eastlake, is also
the only one which the labor of innumerable ingenious
writers has established: nor up to the beginning
of the twelfth century is there proof of any practice
of painting except in tempera, encaustic (wax applied
by the aid of heat), and fresco. Subsequent to
that period, notices of works executed in solid color
mixed with oil are frequent, but all that can be proved
respecting earlier times is a gradually increasing
acquaintance with the different kinds of oil and the
modes of their adaptation to artistical uses.
Several drying oils are mentioned
by the writers of the first three centuries of the
Christian era walnut by Pliny and Galen,
walnut, poppy, and castor-oil (afterwards used by
the painters of the twelfth century as a varnish)
by Dioscorides yet these notices occur only
with reference to medicinal or culinary purposes.
But at length a drying oil is mentioned in connection
with works of art by Aetius, a medical writer of the
fifth century. His words are:
“Walnut oil is prepared like
that of almonds, either by pounding or pressing the
nuts, or by throwing them, after they have been bruised,
into boiling water. The (medicinal) uses are the
same: but it has a use besides these, being employed
by gilders or encaustic painters; for it dries, and
preserves gildings and encaustic paintings for a long
time.”
“It is therefore clear,”
says Mr. Eastlake, “that an oil varnish, composed
either of inspissated nut oil, or of nut oil combined
with a dissolved resin, was employed on gilt surfaces
and pictures, with a view to preserve them, at least
as early as the fifth century. It may be added
that a writer who could then state, as if from his
own experience, that such varnishes had the effect
of preserving works ’for a long time,’
can hardly be understood to speak of a new invention.”
Linseed-oil is also mentioned by Aetius,
though still for medicinal uses only; but a varnish,
composed of linseed-oil mixed with a variety of resins,
is described in a manuscript at Lucca, belonging probably
to the eighth century:
“The age of Charlemagne was
an era in the arts; and the addition of linseed-oil
to the materials of the varnisher and decorator may
on the above evidence be assigned to it. From
this time, and during many ages, the linseed-oil varnish,
though composed of simpler materials (such as sandarac
and mastic resin boiled in the oil), alone appears
in the recipes hitherto brought to light.”
107. The modes of bleaching and
thickening oil in the sun, as well as the siccative
power of metallic oxides, were known to the classical
writers, and evidence exists of the careful study of
Galen, Dioscorides, and others by the painters of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the loss
(recorded by Vasari) of Antonio Veneziano to the arts,
“per che studio in Dioscoride le
cose dell’erbe,” is a remarkable instance
of its less fortunate results. Still, the immixture
of solid color with the oil, which had been commonly
used as a varnish for tempera paintings and gilt surfaces,
was hitherto unsuggested; and no distinct notice seems
to occur of the first occasion of this important step,
though in the twelfth century, as above stated, the
process is described as frequent both in Italy and
England. Mr. Eastlake’s instances have been
selected, for the most part, from four treatises,
two of which, though in an imperfect form, have long
been known to the public; the third, translated by
Mrs. Merrifield, is in course of publication; the fourth,
“Tractatus de Coloribus illuminatorum,”
is of less importance.
Respecting the dates of the first
two, those of Eraclius and Theophilus, some difference
of opinion exists between Mr. Eastlake and their respective
editors. The former MS. was published by Raspe,
who inclines to the opinion of its having been written
soon after the time of St. Isidore of Seville, probably
therefore in the eighth century, but insists only
on its being prior to the thirteenth. That of
Theophilus, published first by M. Charles de l’Escalopier,
and lately from a more perfect MS. by Mr. Hendrie,
is ascribed by its English editor (who places Eraclius
in the tenth) to the early half of the eleventh century.
Mr. Hendrie maintains his opinion with much analytical
ingenuity, and we are disposed to think that Mr. Eastlake
attaches too much importance to the absence of reference
to oil-painting in the Mappae Clavicula (a
MS. of the twelfth century), in placing Theophilus
a century and a half later on that ground alone.
The question is one of some importance in an antiquarian
point of view, but the general reader will perhaps
be satisfied with the conclusion that in MSS.
which cannot possibly be later than the close of the
twelfth century, references to oil-painting are clear
and frequent.
108. Nothing is known of the
personality of either Eraclius or Theophilus, but
what may be collected from their works; amounting,
in the first case, to the facts of the author’s
“language being barbarous, his credulity exceptionable,
and his knowledge superficial,” together with
his written description as “vir sapientissimus;”
while all that is positively known of Theophilus is
that he was a monk, and that Theophilus was not his
real name. The character, however, of which the
assumed name is truly expressive, deserves from us
no unrespectful attention; we shall best possess our
readers of it by laying before them one or two passages
from the preface. We shall make some use of Mr.
Hendrie’s translation; it is evidently the work
of a tasteful man, and in most cases renders the feeling
of the original faithfully; but the Latin, monkish
though it be, deserved a more accurate following, and
many of Mr. Hendrie’s deviations bear traces
of unsound scholarship. An awkward instance occurs
in the first paragraph:
“Theophilus, humilis presbyter,
servus servorum Dei, indignus nomine
et professione monachi, omnibus
mentis desidiam animique vagationem utili manuum
occupatione, et delectabili novitatum meditatione declinare
et calcare volentibus, retributionem coelestis
praemii!”
“I, Theophilus, an humble priest,
servant of the servants of God, unworthy of the name
and profession of a monk, to all wishing to overcome
and avoid sloth of the mind or wandering of the soul,
by useful manual occupation and the delightful contemplation
of novelties, send a recompense of heavenly price.” Theophilus.
Proemium is not “price,”
nor is the verb understood before retributionem
“send.” Mr. Hendrie seems even less
familiar with Scriptural than with monkish language,
or in this and several other cases he would have recognized
the adoption of apostolic formulae. The whole
paragraph is such a greeting and prayer as stands at
the head of the sacred epistles: “Theophilus,
to all who desire to overcome wandering of the soul,
etc., etc. (wishes) recompense of heavenly
reward.” Thus also the dedication of the
Byzantine manuscript, lately translated by M. Didron,
commences “A tous les peintres,
et a tous ceux qui, aimant l’instruction,
etudieront ce livre, salut dans
le Seigneur.” So, presently afterwards,
in the sentence, “divina dignatio quae
dat omnibus affluenter et non improperat”
(translated, “divine authority which
affluently and not precipitately gives to all"), though
Mr. Hendrie might have perhaps been excused for not
perceiving the transitive sense of dignatio
after indignus in the previous text, which
indeed, even when felt, is sufficiently difficult to
render in English; and might not have been aware that
the word impropero frequently bears the sense
of opprobo; he ought still to have recognized
the Scriptural “who giveth to all men liberally
and upbraideth not.” “Qui,”
in the first page, translated “wherefore,”
mystifies a whole sentence; “ut mereretur,”
rendered with a schoolboy’s carelessness “as
he merited,” reverses the meaning of another;
“jactantia,” in the following page,
is less harmfully but not less singularly translated
“jealousy.” We have been obliged to
alter several expressions in the following passages,
in order to bring them near enough to the original
for our immediate purpose:
“Which knowledge, when he has
obtained, let no one magnify himself in his own eyes,
as if it had been received from himself, and not from
elsewhere; but let him rejoice humbly in the Lord,
from whom and by whom are all things, and without
whom is nothing; nor let him wrap his gifts in the
folds of envy, nor hide them in the closet of an avaricious
heart; but all pride of heart being repelled, let him
with a cheerful mind give with simplicity to all who
ask of him, and let him fear the judgment of the Gospel
upon that merchant, who, failing to return to his
lord a talent with accumulated interest, deprived of
all reward, merited the censure from the mouth of
his judge of ‘wicked servant.’
“Fearing to incur which sentence,
I, a man unworthy and almost without name, offer gratuitously
to all desirous with humility to learn, that which
the divine condescension, which giveth to all men liberally
and upbraideth not, gratuitously conceded to me:
and I admonish them that in me they acknowledge the
goodness, and admire the generosity of God; and I
would persuade them to believe that if they also add
their labor, the same gifts are within their reach.
“Wherefore, gentle son, whom
God has rendered perfectly happy in this respect,
that those things are offered to thee gratis, which
many, plowing the sea waves with the greatest danger
to life, consumed by the hardship of hunger and cold,
or subjected to the weary servitude of teachers, and
altogether worn out by the desire of learning, yet
acquire with intolerable labor, covet with greedy
looks this ’BOOK OF VARIOUS ARTS,’ read
it through with a tenacious memory, embrace it with
an ardent love.
“Should you carefully peruse
this, you will there find out whatever Greece possesses
in kinds and mixtures of various colors; whatever
Tuscany knows of in mosaic-work, or in variety of enamel;
whatever Arabia shows forth in work of fusion, ductility,
or chasing; whatever Italy ornaments with gold, in
diversity of vases and sculpture of gems or ivory;
whatever France loves in a costly variety of windows;
whatever industrious Germany approves in work of gold,
silver, copper, and iron, of woods and of stones.
“When you shall have re-read
this often, and have committed it to your tenacious
memory, you shall thus recompense me for this care
of instruction, that as often as you shall have successfully
made use of my work, you pray for me for the pity
of Omnipotent God, who knows that I have written these
things, which are here arranged, neither through love
of human approbation, nor through desire of temporal
reward, nor have I stolen anything precious or rare
through envious jealousy, nor have I kept back anything
reserved served for myself alone; but in augmentation
of the honor and glory of His name, I have consulted
the progress and hastened to aid the necessities of
many men.”
109. There is perhaps something
in the naïve seriousness with which these matters
of empiricism, to us of so small importance, are regarded
by the good monk, which may at first tempt the reader
to a smile. It is, however, to be kept in mind
that some such mode of introduction was customary
in all works of this order and period. The Byzantine
MS., already alluded to, is prefaced still more singularly:
“Que celui qui veut apprendre
la science de la peinture
commence a s’y preparer d’avance
quelque temps en dessinant sans
relache ... puis qu’il adresse
a Jesus Christ la priere et
oraison suivante,” etc.: the
prayer being followed by a homily respecting envy,
much resembling that of Theophilus. And we may
rest assured that until we have again begun to teach
and to learn in this spirit, art will no more recover
its true power or place than springs which flow from
no heavenward hills can rise to useful level in the
wells of the plain. The tenderness, tranquillity,
and resoluteness which we feel in such men’s
words and thoughts found a correspondent expression
even in the movements of the hand; precious qualities
resulted from them even in the most mechanical of their
works, such as no reward can evoke, no academy teach,
nor any other merits replace. What force can
be summoned by authority, or fostered by patronage,
which could for an instant equal in intensity the labor
of this humble love, exerting itself for its own pleasure,
looking upon its own works by the light of thankfulness,
and finishing all, offering all, with the irrespective
profusion of flowers opened by the wayside, where
the dust may cover them, and the foot crush them?
110. Not a few passages conceived
in the highest spirit of self-denying piety would,
of themselves, have warranted our sincere thanks to
Mr. Hendrie for his publication of the manuscript.
The practical value of its contents is however very
variable; most of the processes described have been
either improved or superseded, and many of the recipes
are quite as illustrative of the writer’s credulity
in reception, as generosity in communication.
The references to the “land of Havilah”
for gold, and to “Mount Calybe” for iron,
are characteristic of monkish geographical science;
the recipe for the making of Spanish gold is interesting,
as affording us a clew to the meaning of the mediaeval
traditions respecting the basilisk. Pliny says
nothing about the hatching of this chimera from cocks’
eggs, and ascribes the power of killing at sight to
a different animal, the catoblepas, whose head,
fortunately, was so heavy that it could not be held
up. Probably the word “basiliscus”
in Theophilus would have been better translated “cockatrice.”
“There is also a gold called
Spanish gold, which is composed from red copper, powder
of basilisk, and human blood, and acid. The Gentiles,
whose skillfulness in this art is commendable, make
basilisks in this manner. They have, underground,
a house walled with stones everywhere, above and below,
with two very small windows, so narrow that scarcely
any light can appear through them; in this house they
place two old cocks of twelve or fifteen years, and
they give them plenty of food. When these have
become fat, through the heat of their good condition,
they agree together and lay eggs. Which being
laid, the cocks are taken out and toads are placed
in, which may hatch the eggs, and to which bread is
given for food. The eggs being hatched, chickens
issue out, like hens’ chickens, to which after
seven days grow the tails of serpents, and immediately,
if there were not a stone pavement to the house, they
would enter the earth. Guarding against which,
their masters have round brass vessels of large size,
perforated all over, the mouths of which are narrow,
in which they place these chickens, and close the
mouths with copper coverings and inter them underground,
and they are nourished with the fine earth entering
through the holes for six months. After this
they uncover them and apply a copious fire, until the
animals’ insides are completely burnt. Which
done, when they have become cold, they are taken out
and carefully ground, adding to them a third part
of the blood of a red man, which blood has been dried
and ground. These two compositions are tempered
with sharp acid in a clean vessel; they then take
very thin sheets of the purest red copper, and anoint
this composition over them on both sides, and place
them in the fire. And when they have become glowing,
they take them out and quench and wash them in the
same confection; and they do this for a long time,
until this composition eats through the copper, and
it takes the color of gold. This gold is proper
for all work.”
Our readers will find in Mr. Hendrie’s
interesting note the explanation of the symbolical
language of this recipe; though we cannot agree with
him in supposing Theophilus to have so understood it.
We have no doubt the monk wrote what he had heard
in good faith, and with no equivocal meaning; and
we are even ourselves much disposed to regret and resist
the transformation of toads into nitrates of potash,
and of basilisks into sulphates of copper.
111. But whatever may be the
value of the recipes of Theophilus, couched in the
symbolical language of the alchemist, his evidence
is as clear as it is conclusive, as far as regards
the general processes adopted in his own time.
The treatise of Peter de St. Audemar, contained in
a volume transcribed by Jehan le Begue in
1431, bears internal evidence of being nearly coeval
with that of Theophilus. And in addition to these
MSS., Mr. Eastlake has examined the records of
Ely and Westminster, which are full of references
to decorative operations. From these sources it
is not only demonstrated that oil-painting, at least
in the broadest sense (striking colors mixed with
oil on surfaces of wood or stone), was perfectly common
both in Italy and England in the 12th, 13th, and 14th
centuries, but every step of the process is determinable.
Stone surfaces were primed with white lead mixed with
linseed oil, applied in successive coats, and carefully
smoothed when dry. Wood was planed smooth (or,
for delicate work, covered with leather of horse-skin
or parchment), then coated with a mixture of white
lead, wax, and pulverized tile, on which the oil and
lead priming was laid. In the successive application
of the coats of this priming, the painter is warned
by Eraclius of the danger of letting the superimposed
coat be more oily than that beneath, the shriveling
of the surface being a necessary consequence.
“The observation respecting
the cause, or one of the causes, of a wrinkled and
shriveled surface, is not unimportant. Oil, or
an oil varnish, used in abundance with the colors
over a perfectly dry preparation, will produce this
appearance: the employment of an oil varnish
is even supposed to be detected by it.... As regards
the effect itself, the best painters have not been
careful to avoid it. Parts of Titian’s
St. Sebastian (now in the Gallery of the Vatican) are
shriveled; the Giorgione in the Louvre is so; the drapery
of the figure of Christ in the Duke of Wellington’s
Correggio exhibits the same appearance; a Madonna
and Child by Reynolds, at Petworth, is in a similar
state, as are also parts of some pictures by Greuze.
It is the reverse of a cracked surface, and is unquestionably
the less evil of the two.” “Eastlake,”
112. On the white surface thus
prepared, the colors, ground finely with linseed oil,
were applied, according to the advice of Theophilus,
in not less than three successive coats, and finally
protected with amber or sandarac varnish: each
coat of color being carefully dried by the aid of
heat or in the sun before a second was applied, and
the entire work before varnishing. The practice
of carefully drying each coat was continued in the
best periods of art, but the necessity of exposure
to the sun intimated by Theophilus appears to have
arisen only from his careless preparation of the linseed
oil, and ignorance of a proper drying medium.
Consequent on this necessity is the restriction in
Theophilus, St. Audemar, and in the British Museum
MS., of oil-painting to wooden surfaces, because movable
panels could be dried in the sun; while, for walls,
the colors are to be mixed with water, wine, gum, or
the usual tempera vehicles, egg and fig-tree juice;
white lead and verdigris, themselves dryers, being
the only pigments which could be mixed with oil for
walls. But the MS. of Eraclius and the records
of our English cathedrals imply no such absolute restriction.
They mention the employment of oil for the painting
or varnishing of columns and interior walls, and in
quantity very remarkable. Among the entries relating
to St. Stephen’s chapel, occur “For
19 flagons of painter’s oil, at 3s 4d.
the flagon, 43s 4d.” (It might be as well,
in the next edition, to correct the copyist’s
reverse of the position of the X and L, lest it should
be thought that the principles of the science of arithmetic
have been progressive, as well as those of art.) And
presently afterwards, in May of the same year, “to
John de Hennay, for seventy flagons and a half
of painter’s oil for the painting of the same
chapel, at 20d. the flagon, 117s 6d.”
The expression “painter’s oil” seems
to imply more careful preparation than that directed
by Theophilus, probably purification from its mucilage
in the sun; but artificial heat was certainly employed
to assist the drying, and after reading of flagons
supplied by the score, we can hardly be surprised
at finding charcoal furnished by the cartload see
an entry relating to the Painted Chamber. In
one MS. of Eraclius, however, a distinct description
of a drying oil in the modern sense, occurs, white
lead and lime being added, and the oil thickened by
exposure to the sun, as was the universal practice
in Italy.
113. Such was the system of oil-painting
known before the time of Van Eyck; but it remains
a question in what kind of works and with what degree
of refinement this system had been applied. The
passages in Eraclius refer only to ornamental work,
imitations of marble, etc.; and although, in
the records of Ely cathedral, the words “pro
ymaginibus super columnas depingendis”
may perhaps be understood as referring to paintings
of figures, the applications of oil, which are distinctly
determinable from these and other English documents,
are merely decorative; and “the large supplies
of it which appear in the Westminster and Ely records
indicate the coarseness of the operations for which
it was required.” Theophilus, indeed, mentions
tints for faces mixturas vultuum;
but it is to be remarked that Theophilus painted with
a liquid oil, the drying of which in the sun he expressly
says “in ymaginibus et aliis picturis
diuturnum et taediosum nimis est.”
The oil generally employed was thickened to the consistence
of a varnish. Cennini recommends that it be kept
in the sun until reduced one half; and in the Paris
copy of Eraclius we are told that “the longer
the oil remains in the sun the better it will be.”
Such a vehicle entirely precluded delicacy of execution.
“Paintings entirely executed
with the thickened vehicle, at a time when art was
in the very lowest state, and when its votaries were
ill qualified to contend with unnecessary difficulties,
must have been of the commonest description.
Armorial bearings, patterns, and similar works of
mechanical decoration, were perhaps as much as could
be attempted.
“Notwithstanding the general
reference to flesh-painting, ’e cosi fa
dello incarnare,’ in Cennini’s
directions, there are no certain examples of pictures
of the fourteenth century, in which the flesh is executed
in oil colors. This leads us to inquire what
were the ordinary applications of oil-painting in
Italy at that time. It appears that the method,
when adopted at all, was considered to belong to the
complemental and merely decorative parts of a picture.
It was employed in portions of the work only, on draperies,
and over gilding and foils. Cennini describes
such operations as follows. ’Gild the surface
to be occupied by the drapery; draw on it what ornaments
or patterns you please; glaze the unornamented intervals
with verdigris ground in oil, shading some folds twice.
Then, when this is dry, glaze the same color over
the whole drapery, both ornaments and plain portions.’
“These operations, together
with the gilt field round the figures, the stucco
decorations, and the carved framework, tabernacle,
or ornamento itself of the picture, were completed
first; the faces and hands, which in Italian pictures
of the fourteenth century were always in tempera,
were added afterwards, or at all events after the draperies
and background were finished. Cennini teaches
the practice of all but the carving. In later
times the work was divided, and the decorator or gilder
was sometimes a more important person than the painter.
Thus some works of an inferior Florentine artist were
ornamented with stuccoes, carving, and gilding, by
the celebrated Donatello, who, in his youth, practiced
this art in connection with sculpture. Vasari
observed the following inscription under a picture: ’Simone
Cini, a Florentine, wrought the carved work; Gabriello
Saracini executed the gilding; and Spinello di
Luca, of Arezzo, painted the picture, in the year
1385.’”
114. We may pause to consider
for a moment what effect upon the mental habits of
these earlier schools might result from this separate
and previous completion of minor details. It
is to be remembered that the painter’s object
in the backgrounds of works of this period (universally,
or nearly so, of religious subject) was not the deceptive
representation of a natural scene, but the adornment
and setting forth of the central figures with precious
work the conversion of the picture, as
far as might be, into a gem, flushed with color and
alive with light. The processes necessary for
this purpose were altogether mechanical; and those
of stamping and burnishing the gold, and of enameling,
were necessarily performed before any delicate tempera-work
could be executed. Absolute decision of design
was therefore necessary throughout; hard linear separations
were unavoidable between the oil-color and the tempera,
or between each and the gold or enamel. General
harmony of effect, aerial perspective, or deceptive
chiaroscuro, became totally impossible; and the dignity
of the picture depended exclusively on the lines of
its design, the purity of its ornaments, and the beauty
of expression which could be attained in those portions
(the faces and hands) which, set off and framed by
this splendor of decoration, became the cynosure of
eyes. The painter’s entire energy was given
to these portions; and we can hardly imagine any discipline
more calculated to insure a grand and thoughtful school
of art than the necessity of discriminated character
and varied expression imposed by this peculiarly separate
and prominent treatment of the features. The
exquisite drawing of the hand also, at least in outline,
remained for this reason even to late periods one
of the crowning excellences of the religious schools.
It might be worthy the consideration of our present
painters whether some disadvantage may not result from
the exactly opposite treatment now frequently adopted,
the finishing of the head before the addition of its
accessories. A flimsy and indolent background
is almost a necessary consequence, and probably also
a false flesh-color, irrecoverable by any after-opposition.
115. The reader is in possession
of most of the conclusions relating to the practice
of oil-painting up to about the year 1406.
“Its inconveniences were such
that tempera was not unreasonably preferred to it
for works that required careful design, precision,
and completeness. Hence the Van Eycks seem to
have made it their first object to overcome the stigma
that attached to oil-painting, as a process fit only
for ordinary purposes and mechanical decorations.
With an ambition partly explained by the previous
coarse applications of the method, they sought to
raise wonder by surpassing the finish of tempera with
the very material that had long been considered intractable.
Mere finish was, however, the least of the excellences
of these reformers. The step was short which
sufficed to remove the self-imposed difficulties of
the art; but that effort would probably not have been
so successful as it was, in overcoming long-established
prejudices, had it not been accompanied by some of
the best qualities which oil-painting, as a means
of imitating nature, can command.”
116. It has been a question to
which of the two brothers, Hubert or John, the honor
of the invention is to be attributed. Van Mander
gives the date of the birth of Hubert 1366; and his
interesting epitaph in the cathedral of St. Bavon,
at Ghent, determines that of his death:
“Take warning from me, ye who
walk over me. I was as you are, but am now buried
dead beneath you. Thus it appears that neither
art nor medicine availed me. Art, honor, wisdom,
power, affluence, are spared not when death comes.
I was called Hubert Van Eyck; I am now food for worms.
Formerly known and highly honored in painting; this
all was shortly after turned to nothing. It was
in the year of the Lord one thousand four hundred
and twenty-six, on the eighteenth day of September,
that I rendered up my soul to God, in sufferings.
Pray God for me, ye who love art, that I may attain
to His sight. Flee sin; turn to the best [objects]:
for you must follow me at last.”
John Van Eyck appears by sufficient
evidence to have been born between 1390 and 1395;
and, as the improved oil-painting was certainly introduced
about 1410, the probability is greater that the system
had been discovered by the elder brother than by the
youth of 15. What the improvement actually was
is a far more important question. Vasari’s
account, in the Life of Antonello da Messina,
is the first piece of evidence here examined;
and it is examined at once with more respect and more
advantage than the half-negligent, half-embarrassed
wording of the passage might appear either to deserve
or to promise. Vasari states that “Giovanni
of Bruges,” having finished a tempera-picture
on panel, and varnished it as usual, placed it in the
sun to dry that the heat opened the joinings and
that the artist, provoked at the destruction of his
work
“began to devise means for preparing
a kind of varnish which should dry in the shade, so
as to avoid placing his pictures in the sun. Having
made experiments with many things, both pure and mixed
together, he at last found that linseed-oil and nut-oil,
among the many which he had tested, were more drying
than all the rest. These, therefore, boiled with
other mixtures of his, made him the varnish
which he, nay, which all the painters of the world,
had long desired. Continuing his experiments
with many other things, he saw that the immixture of
the colors with these kinds of oils gave them a very
firm consistence, which, when dry, was proof against
wet; and, moreover, that the vehicle lit up the colors
so powerfully, that it gave a gloss of itself without
varnish; and that which appeared to him still more
admirable was, that it allowed of blending [the colors]
infinitely better than tempera. Giovanni, rejoicing
in this invention, and being a person of discernment,
began many works.”
117. The reader must observe
that this account is based upon and clumsily accommodated
to the idea, prevalent in Vasari’s time throughout
Italy, that Van Eyck not merely improved, but first
introduced, the art of oil-painting, and that no mixture
of color with linseed or nut oil had taken place before
his time. We are only informed of the new and
important part of the invention, under the pointedly
specific and peculiarly Vasarian expression “altre
sue misture.” But the real value of the
passage is dependent on the one fact of which it puts
us in possession, and with respect to which there
is every reason to believe it trustworthy, that it
was in search of a Varnish which would dry in
the shade that Van Eyck discovered the new vehicle.
The next point to be determined is the nature of the
Varnish ordinarily employed, and spoken of by Cennini
and many other writers under the familiar title of
Vernice liquida. The derivation of
the word Vernix bears materially on the question,
and will not be devoid of interest for the general
reader, who may perhaps be surprised at finding himself
carried by Mr. Eastlake’s daring philology into
regions poetical and planetary:
“Eustathius, a writer of the
twelfth century, in his commentary on Homer, states
that the Greeks of his day called amber ([Greek:
elektron]) Veronice ([Greek: beronike]).
Salmasius, quoting from a Greek medical MS. of the
same period, writes it Verenice ([Greek: berenike]).
In the Lucca MS. (8th century) the word Veronica more
than once occurs among the ingredients of varnishes,
and it is remarkable that in the copies of the same
recipes in the Mappae Clavicula (12th century)
the word is spelt, in the genitive, Verenicis and Vernicis.
This is probably the earliest instance of the use of
the Latinized word nearly in its modern form; the
original nominative Vernice being afterwards changed
to Vernix.
“Veronice or Verenice, as a
designation for amber, must have been common at an
earlier period than the date of the Lucca MS., since
it there occurs as a term in ordinary use. It
is scarcely necessary to remark that the letter [Greek:
beta] was sounded v by the mediaeval Greeks, as it
is by their present descendants. Even during the
classic ages of Greece [Greek: beta] represented
[Greek: phi] in certain dialects. The name
Berenice or Beronice, borne by more than one daughter
of the Ptolemies, would be more correctly written
Pherenice or Pheronice. The literal coincidence
of this name and its modifications with the Vernice
of the middle ages, might almost warrant the supposition
that amber, which by the best ancient authorities
was considered a mineral, may, at an early period,
have been distinguished by the name of a constellation,
the constellation of Berenice’s (golden) hair.” Eastlake.
118. We are grieved to interrupt
our reader’s voyage among the constellations;
but the next page crystallizes us again like ants in
amber, or worse, in gum-sandarach. It appears,
from conclusive and abundant evidence, that the greater
cheapness of sandarach, and its easier solubility
in oil rendered it the usual substitute for amber,
and that the word Vernice, when it occurs alone, is
the common synonym for dry sandarach resin. This,
dissolved by heat in linseed oil, three parts oil
to one of resin, was the Vernice liquida
of the Italians, sold in Cennini’s time ready
prepared, and the customary varnish of tempera pictures.
Concrete turpentine ("oyle of fir-tree,” “Pece
Greca,” “Pegola"), previously prepared
over a slow fire until it ceased to swell, was added
to assist the liquefaction of the sandarach, first
in Venice, where the material could easily be procured,
and afterwards in Florence. The varnish so prepared,
especially when it was long boiled to render it more
drying, was of a dark color, materially affecting the
tints over which it was passed.
“It is not impossible that the
lighter style of coloring introduced by Giotto may
have been intended by him to counteract the effects
of this varnish, the appearance of which in the Greek
pictures he could not fail to observe. Another
peculiarity in the works of the painters of the time
referred to, particularly those of the Florentine and
Sienese schools, is the greenish tone of their coloring
in the flesh; produced by the mode in which they often
prepared their works, viz. by a green under-painting.
The appearance was neutralized by the red sandarac
varnish, and pictures executed in the manner described
must have looked better before it was removed.”
Farther on, this remark is thus followed out:
“The paleness or freshness of
the tempera may have been sometimes calculated for
this brown glazing (for such it was in effect), and
when this was the case, the picture was, strictly
speaking, unfinished without its varnish. It
is, therefore, quite conceivable that a painter, averse
to mere mechanical operations, would, in his final
process, still have an eye to the harmony of his work,
and, seeing that the tint of his varnish was more
or less adapted to display the hues over which it was
spread, would vary that tint, so as to heighten the
effect of the picture. The practice of tingeing
varnishes was not even new, as the example given by
Cardanus proves. The next step to this would be
to treat the tempera picture still more as a preparation,
and to calculate still further on the varnish, by
modifying and adapting its color to a greater extent.
A work so completed must have nearly approached the
appearance of an oil picture. This was perhaps
the moment when the new method opened itself to the
mind of Hubert Van Eyck.... The next change necessarily
consisted in using opaque as well as transparent colors;
the former being applied over the light, the latter
over the darker, portions of the picture; while the
work in tempera was now reduced to a light chiaroscuro
preparation.... It was now that the hue of the
original varnish became an objection; for, as a medium,
it required to be itself colorless.”
119. Our author has perhaps somewhat
embarrassed this part of the argument, by giving too
much importance to the conjectural adaptation of the
tints of the tempera picture to the brown varnish,
and too little to the bold transition from transparent
to opaque color on the lights. Up to this time,
we must remember, the entire drawing of the flesh had
been in tempera; the varnish, however richly tinted,
however delicately adjusted to the tints beneath,
was still broadly applied over the whole surface,
the design being seen through the transparent glaze.
But the mixture of opaque color at once implies that
portions of the design itself were executed with the
varnish for a vehicle, and therefore that the varnish
had been entirely changed both in color and consistence.
If, as above stated, the improvement in the varnish
had been made only after it had been mixed with opaque
color, it does not appear why the idea of so mixing
it should have presented itself to Van Eyck more than
to any other painter of the day, and Vasari’s
story of the split panel becomes nugatory. But
we apprehend, from a previous passage, that
Mr. Eastlake would not have us so interpret him.
We rather suppose that we are expressing his real
opinion in stating our own, that Van Eyck, seeking
for a varnish which would dry in the shade, first
perfected the methods of dissolving amber or copal
in oil, then sought for and added a good dryer, and
thus obtained a varnish which, having been subjected
to no long process of boiling, was nearly colorless;
that in using this new varnish over tempera works
he might cautiously and gradually mix it with the
opaque color, whose purity he now found unaffected,
by the transparent vehicle; and, finally, as the thickness
of the varnish in its less perfect state was an obstacle
to precision of execution, increase the proportion
of its oil to the amber, or add a diluent, as occasion
required.
120. Such, at all events, in
the sum, whatever might be the order or occasion of
discovery, were Van Eyck’s improvements in the
vehicle of color, and to these, applied by singular
ingenuity and affection to the imitation of nature,
with a fidelity hitherto unattempted, Mr. Eastlake
attributes the influence which his works obtained over
his contemporaries:
“If we ask in what the chief
novelty of his practice consisted, we shall at once
recognize it in an amount of general excellence before
unknown. At all times, from Van Eyck’s
day to the present, whenever nature has been surprisingly
well imitated in pictures, the first and last question
with the ignorant has been What materials
did the artist use? The superior mechanical secret
is always supposed to be in the hands of the greatest
genius; and an early example of sudden perfection in
art, like the fame of the heroes of antiquity, was
likely to monopolize and represent the claims of many.”
This is all true; that Van Eyck saw
nature more truly than his predecessors is certain;
but it is disputable whether this rendering of nature
recommended his works to the imitation of the Italians.
On the contrary, Mr. Eastlake himself observes in
another place, that the character of delicate
imitation common to the Flemish pictures militated
against the acceptance of their method:
“The specimens of Van Eyck,
Hugo van der Goes, Memling, and others,
which the Florentines had seen, may have appeared,
in the eyes of some severe judges (for example, those
who daily studied the frescoes of Masaccio), to indicate
a certain connection between oil painting and minuteness,
if not always of size, yet of style. The method,
by its very finish and the possible completeness of
its gradations, must have seemed well calculated to
exhibit numerous objects on a small scale. That
this was really the impression produced, at a later
period, on one who represented the highest style of
design, has been lately proved by means of an interesting
document, in which the opinions of Michael Angelo on
the character of Flemish pictures are recorded by a
contemporary artist."
121. It was not, we apprehend,
the resemblance to nature, but the abstract power
of color, which inflamed with admiration and jealousy
the artists of Italy; it was not the delicate touch
nor the precise verity of Van Eyck, but the “vivacita
de’ colori” (says Vasari) which
at the first glance induced Antonello da Messina
to “put aside every other avocation and thought,
and at once set out for Flanders,” assiduously
to cultivate the friendship of Giovanni, presenting
to him many drawings and other things, until Giovanni,
finding himself already old, was content that Antonello
should see the method of his coloring in oil, nor
then to quit Flanders until he had “thoroughly
learned that process.” It was this
process, separate, mysterious, and admirable,
whose communication the Venetian, Domenico, thought
the most acceptable kindness which could repay his
hospitality; and whose solitary possession Castagno
thought cheaply purchased by the guilt of the betrayer
and murderer; it was in this process, the deduction
of watchful intelligence, not by fortuitous discovery,
that the first impulse was given to European art.
Many a plank had yawned in the sun before Van Eyck’s;
but he alone saw through the rent, as through an opening
portal, the lofty perspective of triumph widening
its rapid wedge; many a spot of opaque
color had clouded the transparent amber of earlier
times; but the little cloud that rose over Van Eyck’s
horizon was “like unto a man’s hand.”
What this process was, and how far
it differed from preceding practice, has hardly, perhaps,
been pronounced by Mr. Eastlake with sufficient distinctness.
One or two conclusions which he has not marked are,
we think, deducible from his evidence, In one point,
and that not an unimportant one, we believe that many
careful students of coloring will be disposed to differ
with him: our own intermediate opinion we will
therefore venture to state, though with all diffidence.
122. We must not, however, pass
entirely without notice the two chapters on the preparation
of oils, and on the oleo-resinous vehicles, though
to the general reader the recipes contained in them
are of little interest; and in the absence of all
expression of opinion on the part of Mr. Eastlake
as to their comparative excellence, even to the artist,
their immediate utility appears somewhat doubtful.
One circumstance, however, is remarkable in all, the
care taken by the great painters, without exception,
to avoid the yellowing of their oil. Perfect and
stable clearness is the ultimate aim of all the processes
described (many of them troublesome and tedious in
the extreme): and the effect of the altered oil
is of course most dreaded on pale and cold colors.
Thus Philippe Nunez tells us how to purify linseed
oil “for white and blues;” and Pacheco,
“el de linaza no me quele mal:
aunque aï quien diga que no
a de ver el Azul ni el
Blanco este Azeite." De Mayerne recommends
poppy oil “for painting white, blue, and similar
colors, so that they shall not yellow;” and
in another place, “for air-tints and blue;” while
the inclination to green is noticed as an imperfection
in hempseed oil: so Vasari speaking
of linseed-oil in contemporary practice “benche
il noce e meglio, perche ingialla
meno.” The Italians generally mixed an
essential oil with their delicate tints, including
flesh tints. Extraordinary methods were
used by the Flemish painters to protect their blues;
they were sometimes painted with size, and varnished;
sometimes strewed in powder on fresh white-lead. Leonardo gives a careful recipe for preventing
the change of color in nut oil, supposing it to be
owing to neglect in removing the skin of the nut.
His words, are incorrectly translated:
“una certa bucciolina,” is not
a husk or rind but “a thin skin,”
meaning the white membranous covering of the nut itself,
of which it is almost impossible to detach all the
inner laminae. This, “che tiene
della natura del mallo,”
Leonardo supposes to give the expressed oil its property
of forming a skin at the surface.
123. We think these passages
interesting, because they are entirely opposed to
the modern ideas of the desirableness of yellow lights
and green blues, which have been introduced chiefly
by the study of altered pictures. The anxiety
of Rubens, expressed in various letters, quoted lest any of his whites should have become yellow,
and his request that his pictures might be exposed
to the sun to remedy the defect, if it occurred, are
conclusive on this subject, as far as regards the
feeling of the Flemish painters: we shall presently
see that the coolness of their light was an
essential part of their scheme of color.
The testing of the various processes
given in these two chapters must be a matter of time:
many of them have been superseded by recent discoveries.
Copal varnish is in modern practice no inefficient
substitute for amber, and we believe that most artists
will agree with us in thinking that the vehicles now
in use are sufficient for all purposes, if used rightly.
We shall, therefore, proceed in the first place to
give a rapid sketch of the entire process of the Flemish
school as it is stated by Mr. Eastlake in the 11th
chapter, and then examine the several steps of it
one by one, with the view at once of marking what
seems disputable, and of deducing from what is certain
some considerations respecting the consequences of
its adoption in subsequent art.
124. The ground was with all
the early masters pure white, plaster of Paris,
or washed chalk with size; a preparation which has
been employed without change from remote antiquity witness
the Egyptian mummy-cases. Such a ground, becoming
brittle with age, is evidently unsafe on canvas, unless
exceedingly thin; and even on panel is liable to crack
and detach itself, unless it be carefully guarded
against damp. The precautions of Van Eyck against
this danger, as well as against the warping of his
panel, are remarkable instances of his regard to points
apparently trivial:
“In large altar-pieces, necessarily
composed of many pieces, it may be often remarked
that each separate plank has become slightly convex
in front: this is particularly observable in
the picture of the Transfiguration by Raphael.
The heat of candles on altars is supposed to have
been the cause of this not uncommon defect; but heat,
if considerable, would rather produce the contrary
appearance. It would seem that the layer of paint,
with its substratum, slightly operates to prevent
the wood from contracting or becoming concave on that
side; it might therefore be concluded that a similar
protection at the back, by equalizing the conditions,
would tend to keep the wood flat. The oak panel
on which the picture by Van Eyck in the National Gallery
is painted is protected at the back by a composition
of gesso, size, and tow, over which a coat of black
oil-paint was passed. This, whether added when
the picture was executed or subsequently, has tended
to preserve the wood (which is not at all worm-eaten),
and perhaps to prevent its warping.”
On the white ground, scraped, when
it was perfectly dry, till it was “as white
as milk and as smooth as ivory” (Cennini), the
outline of the picture was drawn, and its light and
shade expressed, usually with the pen, with all possible
care; and over this outline a coating of size was
applied in order to render the gesso ground non-absorbent.
The establishment of this fact is of the greatest
importance, for the whole question of the true function
and use of the gesso ground hangs upon it. That
use has been supposed by all previous writers on the
technical processes of painting to be, by absorbing
the oil, to remove in some degree the cause of yellowness
in the colors. Had this been so, the ground itself
would have lost its brilliancy, and it would have followed
that a dark ground, equally absorbent, would have answered
the purpose as well. But the evidence adduced
by Mr. Eastlake on this subject is conclusive:
“Pictures are sometimes transferred
from panel to cloth. The front being secured
by smooth paper or linen, the picture is laid on its
face, and the wood is gradually planed and scraped
away. At last the ground appears; first, the
‘gesso grosso,’ then, next the
painted surface, the ‘gesso sottile.’
On scraping this it is found that it is whitest immediately
next the colors; for on the inner side it may sometimes
have received slight stains from the wood, if the latter
was not first sized. When a picture which happens
to be much cracked has been oiled or varnished, the
fluid will sometimes penetrate through the cracks into
the ground, which in such parts had become accessible.
In that case the white ground is stained in lines
only, corresponding in their direction with the cracks
of the picture. This last circumstance also proves
that the ground was not sufficiently hard in itself
to prevent the absorption of oil. Accordingly,
it required to be rendered non-absorbent by a coating
of size; and this was passed over the outline,
before the oil-priming was applied.”
The perfect whiteness of the ground
being thus secured, a transparent warm oil-priming,
in early practice flesh-colored, was usually passed
over the entire picture. This custom, says Mr.
Eastlake, appears to have been “a remnant of
the old habit of covering tempera pictures with a
warm varnish, and was sometimes omitted.”
When used it was permitted to dry thoroughly, and
over it the shadows were painted in with a rich transparent
brown, mixed with a somewhat thick oleo-resinous
vehicle; the lighter colors were then added with a
thinner vehicle, taking care not to disturb the transparency
of the shadows by the unnecessary mixture of opaque
pigments, and leaving the ground bearing bright through
the thin lights. As the art advanced, the lights
were more and more loaded, and afterwards glazed,
the shadows being still left in untouched transparency.
This is the method of Rubens. The later Italian
colorists appear to have laid opaque local color without
fear even into the shadows, and to have recovered
transparency by ultimate glazing.
125. Such are the principal heads
of the method of the early Flemish masters, as stated
by Mr. Eastlake. We have marked as questionable
the influence of the ground in supporting the lights:
our reasons for doing so we will give, after we have
stated what we suppose to be the advantages or disadvantages
of the process in its earlier stages, guiding ourselves
as far as possible by the passages in which any expression
occurs of Mr. Eastlake’s opinion.
The reader cannot but see that the
eminent character of the whole system is its
predeterminateness. From first to last its success
depended on the decision and clearness of each successive
step. The drawing and light and shade were secured
without any interference of color; but when over these
the oil-priming was once laid, the design could neither
be altered nor, if lost, recovered; a color laid too
opaquely in the shadow destroyed the inner organization
of the picture, and remained an irremediable blemish;
and it was necessary, in laying color even on the
lights, to follow the guidance of the drawing beneath
with a caution and precision which rendered anything
like freedom of handling, in the modern sense, totally
impossible. Every quality which depends on rapidity,
accident, or audacity was interdicted; no affectation
of ease was suffered to disturb the humility of patient
exertion. Let our readers consider in what temper
such a work must be undertaken and carried through a
work in which error was irremediable, change impossible which
demanded the drudgery of a student, while it involved
the deliberation of a master in which the
patience of a mechanic was to be united with the foresight
of a magician in which no license could
be indulged either to fitfulness of temper or felicity
of invention in which haste was forbidden,
yet languor fatal, and consistency of conception no
less incumbent than continuity of toil. Let them
reflect what kind of men must have been called up and
trained by work such as this, and then compare the
tones of mind which are likely to be produced by our
present practice, a practice in which alteration
is admitted to any extent in any stage in
which neither foundation is laid nor end foreseen in
which all is dared and nothing resolved, everything
periled, nothing provided for in which men
play the sycophant in the courts of their humors,
and hunt wisps in the marshes of their wits a
practice which invokes accident, evades law, discredits
application, despises system, and sets forth with chief
exultation, contingent beauty, and extempore invention.
126. But it is not only the fixed
nature of the successive steps which influenced the
character of these early painters. A peculiar
direction was given to their efforts by the
close attention to drawing which, as Mr. Eastlake
has especially noticed, was involved in the preparation
of the design on the white ground. That design
was secured with a care and finish which in many instances
might seem altogether supererogatory. The preparation
by John Bellini in the Florentine gallery is completed
with exhaustless diligence into even the portions farthest
removed from the light, where the thick brown of the
shadows must necessarily have afterwards concealed
the greater part of the work. It was the discipline
undergone in producing this preparation which fixed
the character of the school. The most important
part of the picture was executed not with the brush,
but with the point, and the refinements attainable
by this instrument dictated the treatment of their
subject. Hence the transition to etching and
engraving, and the intense love of minute detail,
accompanied by an imaginative communication of dignity
and power to the smallest forms, in Albert Duerer
and others. But this attention to minutiae was
not the only result; the disposition of light and shade
was also affected by the method. Shade was not
to be had at small cost; its masses could not be dashed
on in impetuous generalization, fields for the future
recovery of light. They were measured out and
wrought to their depths only by expenditure of toil
and time; and, as future grounds for color, they were
necessarily restricted to the natural shadow
of every object, white being left for high lights of
whatever hue. In consequence, the character of
pervading daylight, almost inevitably produced in
the preparation, was afterwards assumed as a standard
in the painting. Effectism, accidental shadows,
all obvious and vulgar artistical treatment, were
excluded, or introduced only as the lights became
more loaded, and were consequently imposed with more
facility on the dark ground. Where shade was required
in large mass, it was obtained by introducing an object
of locally dark color. The Italian masters who
followed Van Eyck’s system were in the constant
habit of relieving their principal figures by the
darkness of some object, foliage, throne, or drapery,
introduced behind the head, the open sky being left
visible on each side. A green drapery is thus
used with great quaintness by John Bellini in the
noble picture of the Brera Gallery; a black screen,
with marbled veins, behind the portraits of himself
and his brother in the Louvre; a crimson velvet curtain
behind the Madonna, in Francia’s best picture
at Bologna. Where the subject was sacred, and
the painter great, this system of pervading light produced
pictures of a peculiar and tranquil majesty; where
the mind of the painter was irregularly or frivolously
imaginative, its temptations to accumulative detail
were too great to be resisted the spectator
was by the German masters overwhelmed with the copious
inconsistency of a dream, or compelled to traverse
the picture from corner to corner like a museum of
curiosities.
127. The chalk or pen preparation
being completed, and the oil-priming laid, we have
seen that the shadows were laid in with a transparent
brown in considerable body. The question
next arises What influence is this part
of the process likely to have had upon the coloring
of the school? It is to be remembered that the
practice was continued to the latest times, and that
when the thin light had been long abandoned, and a
loaded body of color had taken its place, the brown
transparent shadow was still retained, and is retained
often to this day, when asphaltum is used as its base,
at the risk of the destruction of the picture.
The utter loss of many of Reynolds’ noblest works
has been caused by the lavish use of this pigment.
What the pigment actually was in older times is left
by Mr. Eastlake undecided:
“A rich brown, which, whether
an earth or mineral alone, or a substance of the kind
enriched by the addition of a transparent yellow or
orange, is not an unimportant element of the glowing
coloring which is remarkable in examples of the school.
Such a color, by artificial combinations at least,
is easily supplied; and it is repeated, that, in general,
the materials now in use are quite as good as those
which the Flemish masters had at their command.”
It is also asserted that
the peculiar glow of the brown of Rubens is hardly
to be accounted for by any accidental variety in the
Cassel earths, but was obtained by the mixture of a
transparent yellow. Evidence, however, exists
of asphaltum having been used in Flemish pictures,
and with safety, even though prepared in the modern
manner:
“It is not ground” (says
De Mayerne), “but a drying oil is prepared with
litharge, and the pulverized asphaltum mixed with this
oil is placed in a glass vessel, suspended by a thread
[in a water bath]. Thus exposed to the fire it
melts like butter; when it begins to boil it is instantly
removed. It is an excellent color for shadows,
and may be glazed like lake; it lasts well.”
128. The great advantage of this
primary laying in of the darks in brown was the obtaining
an unity of shadow throughout the picture, which rendered
variety of hue, where it occurred, an instantly accepted
evidence of light. It mattered not how vigorous
or how deep in tone the masses of local color might
be, the eye could not confound them with true shadow;
it everywhere distinguished the transparent browns
as indicative of gloom, and became acutely sensible
of the presence and preciousness of light wherever
local tints rose out of their depths. But however
superior this method may be to the arbitrary use of
polychrome shadows, utterly unrelated to the lights,
which has been admitted in modern works; and however
beautiful or brilliant its results might be in the
hands of colorists as faithful as Van Eyck, or as inventive
as Rubens; the principle on which it is based becomes
dangerous whenever, in assuming that the ultimate
hue of every shadow is brown, it presupposes a peculiar
and conventional light. It is true, that so long
as the early practice of finishing the under-drawing
with the pen was continued, the gray of that preparation
might perhaps diminish the force of the upper color,
which became in that case little more than a glowing
varnish even thus sometimes verging on too
monotonous warmth, as the reader may observe in the
head of Dandolo, by John Bellini, in the National
Gallery. But when, by later and more impetuous
hands, the point tracing was dispensed with, and the
picture boldly thrown in with the brown pigment, it
became matter of great improbability that the force
of such a prevalent tint could afterwards be softened
or melted into a pure harmony; the painter’s
feeling for truth was blunted; brilliancy and richness
became his object rather than sincerity or solemnity;
with the palled sense of color departed the love of
light, and the diffused sunshine of the early schools
died away in the narrowed rays of Rembrandt.
We think it a deficiency in the work before us that
the extreme peril of such a principle, incautiously
applied, has not been pointed out, and that the method
of Rubens has been so highly extolled for its technical
perfection, without the slightest notice of the gross
mannerism into which its facile brilliancy too frequently
betrayed the mighty master.
129. Yet it remains a question
how far, under certain limitations and for certain
effects, this system of pure brown shadow may be successfully
followed. It is not a little singular that it
has already been revived in water-colors by a painter
who, in his realization of light and splendor of hue,
stands without a rival among living schools Mr.
Hunt; his neutral shadows being, we believe, first
thrown in frankly with sepia, the color introduced
upon the lights, and the central lights afterwards
further raised by body color, and glazed. But
in this process the sepia shadows are admitted only
on objects whose local colors are warm or neutral;
wherever the tint of the illumined portion is delicate
or peculiar, a relative hue of shade is at once laid
on the white paper; and the correspondence with the
Flemish school is in the use of brown as the ultimate
representative of deep gloom, and in the careful preservation
of its transparency, not in the application of brown
universally as the shade of all colors. We apprehend
that this practice represents, in another medium,
the very best mode of applying the Flemish system;
and that when the result proposed is an effect of
vivid color under bright cool sunshine, it would be
impossible to adopt any more perfect means. But
a system which in any stage prescribes the use of
a certain pigment, implies the adoption of a constant
aim, and becomes, in that degree, conventional.
Suppose that the effect desired be neither of sunlight
nor of bright color, but of grave color subdued by
atmosphere, and we believe that the use of brown for
an ultimate shadow would be highly inexpedient.
With Van Eyck and with Rubens the aim was always consistent:
clear daylight, diffused in the one case, concentrated
in the other, was yet the hope, the necessity of both;
and any process which admitted the slightest dimness,
coldness, or opacity, would have been considered an
error in their system by either. Alike, to Rubens,
came subjects of tumult or tranquillity, of gayety
or terror; the nether, earthly, and upper world were
to him animated with the same feeling, lighted by
the same sun; he dyed in the same lake of fire the
warp of the wedding-garment or of the winding-sheet;
swept into the same delirium the recklessness of the
sensualist, and rapture of the anchorite; saw in tears
only their glittering, and in torture only its flush.
To such a painter, regarding every subject in the same
temper, and all as mere motives for the display of
the power of his art, the Flemish system, improved
as it became in his hands, was alike sufficient and
habitual. But among the greater colorists of Italy
the aim was not always so simple nor the method so
determinable. We find Tintoret passing like a
fire-fly from light to darkness in one oscillation,
ranging from the fullest prism of solar color to the
coldest grays of twilight, and from the silver tingeing
of a morning cloud to the lava fire of a volcano:
one moment shutting himself into obscure chambers of
imagery, the next plunged into the revolutionless day
of heaven, and piercing space, deeper than the mind
can follow or the eye fathom; we find him by turns
appalling, pensive, splendid, profound, profuse; and
throughout sacrificing every minor quality to the power
of his prevalent mood. By such an artist it might,
perhaps, be presumed that a different system of color
would be adopted in almost every picture, and that
if a chiaroscuro ground were independently laid, it
would be in a neutral gray, susceptible afterwards
of harmony with any tone he might determine upon,
and not in the vivid brown which necessitated brilliancy
of subsequent effect. We believe, accordingly,
that while some of the pieces of this master’s
richer color, such as the Adam and Eve in the Gallery
of Venice, and we suspect also the miracle of St. Mark,
may be executed on the pure Flemish system, the greater
number of his large compositions will be found based
on a gray shadow; and that this gray shadow was independently
laid we have more direct proof in the assertion of
Boschini, who received his information from the younger
Palma: “Quando haveva stabilita
questa importante distribuzione, abboggiava
il quadro tutto di chiaroscuro;” and we
have, therefore, no doubt that Tintoret’s well-known
reply to the question, “What were the most beautiful
colors?” “Il nero, e il bianco,”
is to be received in a perfectly literal sense, beyond
and above its evident reference to abstract principle.
Its main and most valuable meaning was, of course,
that the design and light and shade of a picture were
of greater importance than its color; (and this Tintoret
felt so thoroughly that there is not one of his works
which would seriously lose in power if it were translated
into chiaroscuro); but it implied also that Tintoret’s
idea of a shadowed preparation was in gray, and not
in brown.
130. But there is a farther and
more essential ground of difference in system of shadow
between the Flemish and Italian colorists. It
is a well-known optical fact that the color of shadow
is complemental to that of light: and that therefore,
in general terms, warm light has cool shadow, and
cool light hot shadow. The noblest masters of
the northern and southern schools respectively adopted
these contrary keys; and while the Flemings raised
their lights in frosty white and pearly grays out of
a glowing shadow, the Italians opposed the deep and
burning rays of their golden heaven to masses of solemn
gray and majestic blue. Either, therefore, their
preparation must have been different, or they were
able, when they chose, to conquer the warmth of the
ground by superimposed color. We believe, accordingly,
that Correggio will be found as stated
in the notes of Reynolds quoted to
have habitually grounded with black, white, and ultramarine,
then glazing with golden transparent colors; while
Titian used the most vigorous browns, and conquered
them with cool color in mass above. The remarkable
sketch of Leonardo in the Uffizii of Florence is commenced
in brown over the brown is laid an olive
green, on which the highest lights are struck with
white.
Now it is well known to even the merely
decorative painter that no color can be brilliant
which is laid over one of a corresponding key, and
that the best ground for any given opaque color will
be a comparatively subdued tint of the complemental
one; of green under red, of violet under yellow, and
of orange or brown therefore under blue.
We apprehend accordingly that the real value of the
brown ground with Titian was far greater than even
with Rubens; it was to support and give preciousness
to cool color above, while it remained itself untouched
as the representative of warm reflexes and extreme
depth of transparent gloom. We believe this employment
of the brown ground to be the only means of uniting
majesty of hue with profundity of shade. But its
value to the Fleming is connected with the management
of the lights, which we have next to consider.
As we here venture for the first time to disagree
in some measure with Mr. Eastlake, let us be sure that
we state his opinion fairly. He says:
“The light warm tint which Van
Mander assumes to have been generally used in the
oil-priming was sometimes omitted, as unfinished pictures
prove. Under such circumstances, the picture may
have been executed at once on the sized outline.
In the works of Lucas van Leyden, and sometimes in
those of Albert Duerer, the thin yet brilliant lights
exhibit a still brighter ground underneath....
It thus appears that the method proposed by the inventors
of oil-painting, of preserving light within the colors,
involved a certain order of processes. The principal
conditions were: first, that the outline should
be completed on the panel before the painting, properly
so called, was begun. The object, in thus defining
the forms, was to avoid alterations and repaintings,
which might ultimately render the ground useless without
supplying its place. Another condition was to
avoid loading the opaque colors. This limitation
was not essential with regard to the transparent colors,
as such could hardly exclude the bright ground.... The system of coloring adopted by
the Van Eycks may have been influenced by the practice
of glass-painting. They appear, in their first
efforts at least, to have considered the white panel
as representing light behind a colored and transparent
medium, and aimed at giving brilliancy to their tints
by allowing the white ground to shine through them.
If those painters and their followers erred, it was
in sometimes too literally carrying out this principle.
Their lights are always transparent (mere white
excepted) and their shadows sometimes want depth.
This is in accordance with the effect of glass-staining,
in which transparency may cease with darkness, but
never with light. The superior method of Rubens
consisted in preserving transparency chiefly in his
darks, and in contrasting their lucid depth with solid
lights. Among the technical improvements
on the older process may be especially mentioned the
preservation of transparency in the darker masses,
the lights being loaded as required. The system
of exhibiting the bright ground through the shadows
still involved an adherence to the original method
of defining the composition at first; and the solid
painting of the lights opened the door to that freedom
of execution which the works of the early masters
wanted.”
131. We think we cannot have
erred in concluding from these scattered passages
that Mr. Eastlake supposes the brilliancy of the high
lights of the earlier schools to be attributable to
the under-power of the white ground. This we
admit, so far as that ground gave value to the transparent
flesh-colored or brown preparation above it; but we
doubt the transparency of the highest lights, and
the power of any white ground to add brilliancy to
opaque colors. We have ourselves never seen an
instance of a painted brilliant light that was
not loaded to the exclusion of the ground. Secondary
lights indeed are often perfectly transparent, a warm
hatching over the under-white; the highest light itself
may be so but then it is the white ground
itself subdued by transparent darker color,
not supporting a light color. In the Van Eyck
in the National Gallery all the brilliant lights are
loaded; mere white, Mr. Eastlake himself admits, was
always so; and we believe that the flesh-color and
carnations are painted with color as opaque
as the white head-dress, but fail of brilliancy from
not being loaded enough; the white ground beneath
being utterly unable to add to the power of such tints,
while its effect on more subdued tones depended in
great measure on its receiving a transparent coat
of warm color first. This may have been
sometimes omitted, as stated; when it was
so, we believe that an utter loss of brilliancy must
have resulted; but when it was used, the highest lights
must have been raised from it by opaque color as distinctly
by Van Eyck as by Rubens. Rubens’ Judgment
of Paris is quoted as an example of the
best use of the bright gesso ground: and
how in that picture, how in all Rubens’ best
pictures, is it used? Over the ground is thrown
a transparent glowing brown tint, varied and deepened
in the shadow; boldly over that brown glaze, and into
it, are struck and painted the opaque gray middle tints,
already concealing the ground totally; and above these
are loaded the high lights like gems note
the sparkling strokes on the peacock’s plumes.
We believe that Van Eyck’s high lights were either,
in proportion to the scale of picture and breadth
of handling, as loaded as these, or, in the degree
of their thinness, less brilliant. Was then his
system the same as Rubens’? Not so; but
it differed more in the management of middle tints
than in the lights: the main difference was,
we believe, between the careful preparation of the
gradations of drawing in the one, and the daring assumption
of massy light in the other. There are theorists
who would assert that their system was the same but
they forget the primal work, with the point underneath,
and all that it implied of transparency above.
Van Eyck secured his drawing in dark, then threw a
pale transparent middle tint over the whole, and recovered
his highest lights; all was transparent
except these. Rubens threw a dark middle tint
over the whole at first, and then gave the drawing
with opaque gray. All was opaque except
the shadows. No slight difference this, when
we reflect on the contrarieties of practice ultimately
connected with the opposing principles; above all on
the eminent one that, as all Van Eyck’s color,
except the high lights, must have been equivalent
to a glaze, while the great body of color in
Rubens was solid (ultimately glazed occasionally, but
not necessarily), it was possible for Van Eyck to
mix his tints to the local hues required, with far
less danger of heaviness in effect than would have
been incurred in the solid painting of Rubens.
This is especially noticed by Mr. Eastlake, with whom
we are delighted again to concur:
“The practice of using compound
tints has not been approved by colorists; the method,
as introduced by the early masters, was adapted to
certain conditions, but, like many of their processes,
was afterwards misapplied. Vasari informs us
that Lorenzo di Credi, whose exaggerated
nicety in technical details almost equaled that of
Gerard Dow, was in the habit of mixing about thirty
tints before he began to work. The opposite extreme
is perhaps no less objectionable. Much may depend
on the skillful use of the ground. The purest
color in an opaque state and superficially light only,
is less brilliant than the foulest mixture through
which light shines. Hence, as long as the white
ground was visible within the tints, the habit of
matching colors from nature (no matter by what complication
of hues, provided the ingredients were not chemically
injurious to each other) was likely to combine the
truth of negative hues with clearness.”
132. These passages open to us
a series of questions far too intricate to be even
cursorily treated within our limits. It is to
be held in mind that one and the same quality of color
or kind of brilliancy is not always the best; the
phases and phenomena of color are innumerable in reality,
and even the modes of imitating them become expedient
or otherwise, according to the aim and scale of the
picture. It is no question of mere authority
whether the mixture of tints to a compound one, or
their juxtaposition in a state of purity, be the better
practice. There is not the slightest doubt that,
the ground being the same, a stippled tint is more
brilliant and rich than a mixed one; nor is there
doubt on the other hand that in some subjects such
a tint is impossible, and in others vulgar. We
have above alluded to the power of Mr. Hunt in water-color.
The fruit-pieces of that artist are dependent for
their splendor chiefly on the juxtaposition of pure
color for compound tints, and we may safely affirm
that the method is for such purpose as exemplary as
its results are admirable. Yet would you desire
to see the same means adopted in the execution of the
fruit in Rubens’ Peace and War? Or again,
would the lusciousness of tint obtained by Rubens
himself, adopting the same means on a grander scale
in his painting of flesh, have been conducive to the
ends or grateful to the feelings of the Bellinis or
Albert Duerer? Each method is admirable as applied
by its master; and Hemling and Van Eyck are as much
to be followed in the mingling of color, as Rubens
and Rembrandt in its decomposition. If an award
is absolutely to be made of superiority to either
system, we apprehend that the palm of mechanical skill
must be rendered to the latter, and higher dignity
of moral purpose confessed in the former; in proportion
to the nobleness of the subject and the thoughtfulness
of its treatment, simplicity of color will be found
more desirable. Nor is the far higher perfection
of drawing attained by the earlier method to be forgotten.
Gradations which are expressed by delicate execution
of the darks, and then aided by a few strokes
of recovered light, must always be more subtle and
true than those which are struck violently forth with
opaque color; and it is to be remembered that the
handling of the brush, with the early Italian masters,
approached in its refinement to drawing with the point the
more definitely, because the work was executed, as
we have just seen, with little change or play of local
color. And whatever discredit the looser
and bolder practice of later masters may have thrown
on the hatched and penciled execution of earlier periods we
maintain that this method, necessary in fresco, and
followed habitually in the first oil pictures, has
produced the noblest renderings of human expression
in the whole range of the examples of art: the
best works of Raphael, all the glorious portraiture
of Ghirlandajo and Masaccio, all the mightiest achievements
of religious zeal in Francia, Perugino, Bellini, and
such others. Take as an example in fresco Masaccio’s
hasty sketch of himself now in the Uffizii; and in
oil, the two heads of monks by Perugino in the Academy
of Florence; and we shall search in vain for any work
in portraiture, executed in opaque colors, which could
contend with them in depth of expression or in fullness
of recorded life not mere imitative
vitality, but chronicled action. And we have no
hesitation in asserting that where the object of the
painter is expression, and the picture is of a size
admitting careful execution, the transparent system,
developed as it is found in Bellini or Perugino, will
attain the most profound and serene color, while it
will never betray into looseness or audacity.
But if in the mind of the painter invention prevail
over veneration, if his eye be creative
rather than penetrative, and his hand more powerful
than patient let him not be confined to
a system where light, once lost, is as irrecoverable
as time, and where all success depends on husbandry
of resource. Do not measure out to him his sunshine
in inches of gesso; let him have the power of striking
it even out of darkness and the deep.
133. If human life were endless,
or human spirit could fit its compass to its will,
it is possible a perfection might be reached which
should unite the majesty of invention with the meekness
of love. We might conceive that the thought,
arrested by the readiest means, and at first represented
by the boldest symbols, might afterwards be set forth
with solemn and studied expression, and that the power
might know no weariness in clothing which had known
no restraint in creating. But dilation and contraction
are for molluscs, not for men; we are not ringed into
flexibility like worms, nor gifted with opposite sight
and mutable color like chameleons. The mind which
molds and summons cannot at will transmute itself
into that which clings and contemplates; nor is it
given to us at once to have the potter’s power
over the lump, the fire’s upon the clay, and
the gilder’s upon the porcelain. Even the
temper in which we behold these various displays of
mind must be different; and it admits of more than
doubt whether, if the bold work of rapid thought were
afterwards in all its forms completed with microscopic
care, the result would be other than painful.
In the shadow at the foot of Tintoret’s picture
of the Temptation, lies a broken rock-bowlder.
The dark ground has been first laid in, of color nearly
uniform; and over it a few, not more than fifteen or
twenty, strokes of the brush, loaded with a light
gray, have quarried the solid block of stone out of
the vacancy. Probably ten minutes are the utmost
time which those strokes have occupied, though the
rock is some four feet square. It may safely
be affirmed that no other method, however laborious,
could have reached the truth of form which results
from the very freedom with which the conception has
been expressed; but it is a truth of the simplest
kind the definition of a stone, rather than
the painting of one and the lights are
in some degree dead and cold the natural
consequence of striking a mixed opaque pigment over
a dark ground. It would now be possible to treat
this skeleton of a stone, which could only have been
knit together by Tintoret’s rough temper, with
the care of a Fleming; to leave its fiercely-stricken
lights emanating from a golden ground, to gradate
with the pen its ponderous shadows, and in its completion,
to dwell with endless and intricate precision upon
fibers of moss, bells of heath, blades of grass, and
films of lichen. Love like Van Eyck’s would
separate the fibers as if they were stems of forest,
twine the ribbed grass into fanciful articulation,
shadow forth capes and islands in the variegated film,
and hang the purple bells in counted chiming.
A year might pass away, and the work yet be incomplete;
yet would the purpose of the great picture have been
better answered when all had been achieved? or if so,
is it to be wished that a year of the life of Tintoret
(could such a thing be conceived possible) had been
so devoted?
134. We have put in as broad
and extravagant a view as possible the difference
of object in the two systems of loaded and transparent
light; but it is to be remembered that both are in
a certain degree compatible, and that whatever exclusive
arguments may be adduced in favor of the loaded system
apply only to the ultimate stages of the work.
The question is not whether the white ground be expedient
in the commencement but how far it must
of necessity be preserved to the close? There
cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever the object,
whatever the power of the painter, the white ground,
as intensely bright and perfect as it can be obtained,
should be the base of his operations; that it should
be preserved as long as possible, shown wherever it
is possible, and sacrificed only upon good cause.
There are indeed many objects which do not admit of
imitation unless the hand have power of superimposing
and modeling the light; but there are others which
are equally unsusceptible of every rendering except
that of transparent color over the pure ground.
It appears from the evidence now produced
that there are at least three distinct systems traceable
in the works of good colorists, each having its own
merit and its peculiar application. First, the
white ground, with careful chiaroscuro preparation,
transparent color in the middle tints, and opaque
high lights only (Van Eyck). Secondly, white ground,
transparent brown preparation, and solid painting of
lights above (Rubens). Thirdly, white ground,
brown preparation, and solid painting both of lights
and shadows above (Titian); on which last method,
indisputably the noblest, we have not insisted, as
it has not yet been examined by Mr. Eastlake.
But in all these methods the white ground was indispensable.
It mattered not what transparent color were put over
it: red, frequently, we believe, by Titian, before
the brown shadows yellow sometimes by Rubens: whatever
warm tone might be chosen for the key of the composition,
and for the support of its grays, depended for its
own value upon the white gesso beneath; nor can any
system of color be ultimately successful which excludes
it. Noble arrangement, choice, and relation of
color, will indeed redeem and recommend the falsest
system: our own Reynolds, and recently Turner,
furnish magnificent examples of the power attainable
by colorists of high caliber, after the light ground
is lost (we cannot agree with Mr. Eastlake
in thinking the practice of painting first in white
and black, with cool reds only, “equivalent
to its preservation"): but in the works
of both, diminished splendor and sacrificed durability
attest and punish the neglect of the best resources
of their art.
135. We have stated, though briefly,
the major part of the data which recent research has
furnished respecting the early colorists; enough,
certainly, to remove all theoretical obstacles to the
attainment of a perfection equal to theirs. A
few carefully conducted experiments, with the efficient
aids of modern chemistry, would probably put us in
possession of an amber varnish, if indeed this be necessary,
at least not inferior to that which they employed;
the rest of their materials are already in our hands,
soliciting only such care in their preparation as
it ought, we think, to be no irksome duty to bestow.
Yet we are not sanguine of the immediate result.
Mr. Eastlake has done his duty excellently; but it
is hardly to be expected that, after being long in
possession of means which we could apply to no profit,
the knowledge that the greatest men possessed no better,
should at once urge to emulation and gift with strength.
We believe that some consciousness of their true position
already existed in the minds of many living artists;
example had at least been given by two of our Academicians,
Mr. Mulready and Mr. Etty, of a splendor based on
the Flemish system, and consistent, certainly, in
the first case, with a high degree of permanence; while
the main direction of artistic and public sympathy
to works of a character altogether opposed to theirs,
showed fatally how far more perceptible and appreciable
to our present instincts is the mechanism of handling
than the melody of hue. Indeed we firmly believe,
that of all powers of enjoyment or of judgment, that
which is concerned with nobility of color is least
communicable: it is also perhaps the most rare.
The achievements of the draughtsman are met by the
curiosity of all mankind; the appeals of the dramatist
answered by their sympathy; the creatures of imagination
acknowledged by their fear; but the voice of the colorist
has but the adder’s listening, charm he never
so wisely. Men vie with each other, untaught,
in pursuit of smoothness and smallness of
Carlo Dolci and Van Huysum; their domestic hearts may
range them in faithful armies round the throne of Raphael;
meditation and labor may raise them to the level of
the great mountain pedestal of Buonarotti “vestito
gia de’ raggi del pianeta,
che mena dritto altrui per
ogni calle;” but neither time nor teaching
will bestow the sense, when it is not innate, of that
wherein consists the power of Titian and the great
Venetians. There is proof of this in the various
degrees of cost and care devoted to the preservation
of their works. The glass, the curtain, and the
cabinet guard the preciousness of what is petty, guide
curiosity to what is popular, invoke worship to what
is mighty; Raphael has his palace Michael
his dome respect protects and crowds traverse
the sacristy and the saloon; but the frescoes of Titian
fade in the solitudes of Padua, and the gesso falls
crumbled from the flapping canvas, as the sea-winds
shake the Scuola di San Rocco.
136. But if, on the one hand,
mere abstract excellence of color be thus coldly regarded,
it is equally certain that no work ever attains enduring
celebrity which is eminently deficient in this great
respect. Color cannot be indifferent; it is either
beautiful and auxiliary to the purposes of the picture,
or false, froward, and opposite to them. Even
in the painting of Nature herself, this law is palpable;
chiefly glorious when color is a predominant element
in her working, she is in the next degree most impressive
when it is withdrawn altogether: and forms and
scenes become sublime in the neutral twilight, which
were indifferent in the colors of noon. Much
more is this the case in the feebleness of imitation;
all color is bad which is less than beautiful; all
is gross and intrusive which is not attractive; it
repels where it cannot inthrall, and destroys what
it cannot assist. It is besides the painter’s
peculiar craft; he who cannot color is no painter.
It is not painting to grind earths with oil and lay
them smoothly on a surface. He only is a painter
who can melodize and harmonize hue if
he fail in this, he is no member of the brotherhood.
Let him etch, or draw, or carve: better the unerring
graver than the unfaithful pencil better
the true sling and stone than the brightness of the
unproved armor. And let not even those who deal
in the deeper magic, and feel in themselves the loftier
power, presume upon that power nor believe
in the reality of any success unless that which has
been deserved by deliberate, resolute, successive
operation. We would neither deny nor disguise
the influences of sensibility or of imagination, upon
this, as upon every other admirable quality of art; we
know that there is that in the very stroke and fall
of the pencil in a master’s hand, which creates
color with an unconscious enchantment we
know that there is a brilliancy which springs from
the joy of the painter’s heart a gloom
which sympathizes with its seriousness a
power correlative with its will; but these are all
vain unless they be ruled by a seemly caution a
manly moderation an indivertible foresight.
This we think the one great conclusion to be received
from the work we have been examining, that all power
is vain all invention vain all
enthusiasm vain all devotion even, and
fidelity vain, unless these are guided by such severe
and exact law as we see take place in the development
of every great natural glory; and, even in the full
glow of their bright and burning operation, sealed
by the cold, majestic, deep-graven impress of the signet
on the right hand of Time.
SAMUEL PROUT.
137. The first pages in the histories
of artists, worthy the name, are generally alike;
records of boyish resistance to every scheme, parental
or tutorial, at variance with the ruling desire and
bent of the opening mind. It is so rare an accident
that the love of drawing should be noticed and fostered
in the child, that we are hardly entitled to form
any conclusions respecting the probable result of an
indulgent foresight; it is enough to admire the strength
of will which usually accompanies every noble intellectual
gift, and to believe that, in early life, direct resistance
is better than inefficient guidance. Samuel Prout with
how many rich and picturesque imaginations is the name
now associated! was born at Plymouth, September
17th, 1783, and intended by his father for his own
profession; but although the delicate health of the
child might have appeared likely to induce a languid
acquiescence in his parent’s wish, the love
of drawing occupied every leisure hour, and at last
trespassed upon every other occupation. Reproofs
were affectionately repeated, and every effort made
to dissuade the boy from what was considered an “idle
amusement,” but it was soon discovered that
opposition was unavailing, and the attachment too strong
to be checked. It might perhaps have been otherwise,
but for some rays of encouragement received from the
observant kindness of his first schoolmaster.
To watch the direction of the little hand when it
wandered from its task, to draw the culprit to him
with a smile instead of a reproof, to set him on the
high stool beside his desk, and stimulate him, by the
loan of his own pen, to a more patient and elaborate
study of the child’s usual subject, his favorite
cat, was a modification of preceptorial care as easy
as it was wise; but it perhaps had more influence
on the mind and after-life of the boy than all the
rest of his education together.
138. Such happy though rare interludes
in school-hours, and occasional attempts at home,
usually from the carts and horses which stopped at
a public-house opposite, began the studentship of
the young artist before he had quitted his pinafore.
An unhappy accident which happened about the same
time, and which farther enfeebled his health, rendered
it still less advisable to interfere with his beloved
occupation. We have heard the painter express,
with a melancholy smile, the distinct recollection
remaining with him to this day, of a burning autumn
morning, on which he had sallied forth alone, himself
some four autumns old, armed with a hooked stick,
to gather nuts. Unrestrainable alike with pencil
or crook, he was found by a farmer, towards the close
of the day, lying moaning under a hedge, prostrated
by a sunstroke, and was brought home insensible.
From that day forward he was subject to attacks of
violent pain in the head, recurring at short intervals;
and until thirty years after marriage not a week passed
without one or two days of absolute confinement to
his room or to his bed. “Up to this hour,”
we may perhaps be permitted to use his own touching
words, “I have to endure a great fight of afflictions;
can I therefore be sufficiently thankful for the merciful
gift of a buoyant spirit?”
139. That buoyancy of spirit one
of the brightest and most marked elements of his character never
failed to sustain him between the recurrences even
of his most acute suffering; and the pursuit of his
most beloved Art became every year more determined
and independent. The first beginnings in landscape
study were made in happy truant excursions, now fondly
remembered, with the painter Haydon, then also a youth.
This companionship was probably rather cemented by
the energy than the delicacy of Haydon’s sympathies.
The two boys were directly opposed in their habits
of application and modes of study. Prout unremitting
in diligence, patient in observation, devoted in copying
what he loved in nature, never working except with
his model before him; Haydon restless, ambitious,
and fiery; exceedingly imaginative, never captivated
with simple truth, nor using his pencil on the spot,
but trusting always to his powers of memory. The
fates of the two youths were inevitably fixed by their
opposite characters. The humble student became
the originator of a new School of Art, and one of the
most popular painters of his age. The self-trust
of the wanderer in the wilderness of his fancy betrayed
him into the extravagances, and deserted him
in the suffering, with which his name must remain sadly,
but not unjustly, associated.
140. There was, however, little
in the sketches made by Prout at this period to indicate
the presence of dormant power. Common prints,
at a period when engraving was in the lowest state
of decline, were the only guides which the youth could
obtain; and his style, in endeavoring to copy these,
became cramped and mannered; but the unremitting sketching
from nature saved him. Whole days, from dawn till
night, were devoted to the study of the peculiar objects
of his early interest, the ivy-mantled bridges, mossy
water-mills, and rock-built cottages, which characterize
the valley scenery of Devon. In spite of every
disadvantage, the strong love of truth, and the instinctive
perception of the chief points of shade and characters
of form on which his favorite effects mainly depended,
enabled him not only to obtain an accumulated store
of memoranda, afterwards valuable, but to publish
several elementary works which obtained extensive
and deserved circulation, and to which many artists,
now high in reputation, have kindly and frankly confessed
their early obligations.
141. At that period the art of
water-color drawing was little understood at Plymouth,
and practiced only by Payne, then an engineer in the
citadel. Though mannered in the extreme, his works
obtained reputation; for the best drawings of the
period were feeble both in color and execution, with
commonplace light and shadow, a dark foreground being
a rule absolute, as may be seen in several
of Turner’s first productions. But Turner
was destined to annihilate such rules, breaking through
and scattering them with an expansive force commensurate
with the rigidity of former restraint. It happened
“fortunately,” as it is said, naturally
and deservedly, as it should be said, that
Prout was at this period removed from the narrow sphere
of his first efforts to one in which he could share
in, and take advantage of, every progressive movement.
142. The most respectable of
the Plymouth amateurs was the Rev. Dr. Bidlake, who
was ever kind in his encouragement of the young painter,
and with whom many delightful excursions were made.
At his house, Mr. Britton, the antiquarian, happening
to see some of the cottages sketches, and being pleased
with them, proposed that Prout should accompany him
into Cornwall, in order to aid him in collecting materials
for his “Beauties of England and Wales.”
This was the painter’s first recognized artistical
employment, as well as the occasion of a friendship
ever gratefully and fondly remembered. On Mr.
Britton’s return to London, after sending to
him a portfolio of drawings, which were almost the
first to create a sensation with lovers of Art, Mr.
Prout received so many offers of encouragement, if
he would consent to reside in London, as to induce
him to take this important step the first
towards being established as an artist.
143. The immediate effect of
this change of position was what might easily have
been foretold, upon a mind naturally sensitive, diffident,
and enthusiastic. It was a heavy discouragement.
The youth felt that he had much to eradicate and more
to learn, and hardly knew at first how to avail himself
of the advantages presented by the study of the works
of Turner, Girtin, Cousins, and others. But he
had resolution and ambition as well as modesty; he
knew that
“The noblest honors of the
mind
On rigid terms descend.”
He had every inducement to begin the
race, in the clearer guidance and nobler ends which
the very works that had disheartened him afforded and
pointed out; and the first firm and certain step was
made. His range of subject was as yet undetermined,
and was likely at one time to have been very different
from that in which he has since obtained pre-eminence
so confessed. Among the picturesque material
of his native place, the forms of its shipping had
not been neglected, though there was probably less
in the order of Plymouth dockyard to catch the eye
of the boy, always determined in its preference of
purely picturesque arrangements, than might have been
afforded by the meanest fishing hamlet. But a
strong and lasting impression was made upon him by
the wreck of the “Dutton” East Indiaman
on the rocks under the citadel; the crew were saved
by the personal courage and devotion of Sir Edward
Pellew, afterwards Lord Exmouth. The wreck held
together for many hours under the cliff, rolling to
and fro as the surges struck her. Haydon and Prout
sat on the crags together and watched her vanish fragment
by fragment into the gnashing foam. Both were
equally awe-struck at the time; both, on the morrow,
resolved to paint their first pictures; both failed;
but Haydon, always incapable of acknowledging and
remaining loyal to the majesty of what he had seen,
lost himself in vulgar thunder and lightning.
Prout struggled to some resemblance of the actual
scene, and the effect upon his mind was never effaced.
144. At the time of his first
residence in London, he painted more marines than
anything else. But other work was in store for
him. About the year 1818, his health, which as
we have seen had never been vigorous, showed signs
of increasing weakness, and a short trial of continental
air was recommended. The route by Havre to Rouen
was chosen, and Prout found himself, for the first
time, in the grotesque labyrinths of the Norman streets.
There are few minds so apathetic as to receive no
impulse of new delight from their first acquaintance
with continental scenery and architecture; and Rouen
was, of all the cities of France, the richest in those
objects with which the painter’s mind had the
profoundest sympathy. It was other then than it
is now; revolutionary fury had indeed spent itself
upon many of its noblest monuments, but the interference
of modern restoration or improvement was unknown.
Better the unloosed rage of the fiend than the scrabble
of self-complacent idiocy. The façade of the
cathedral was as yet unencumbered by the blocks of
new stonework, never to be carved, by which it is now
defaced; the Church of St. Nicholas existed, (the
last fragments of the niches of its gateway were seen
by the writer dashed upon the pavement in 1840 to
make room for the new “Hotel St. Nicholas");
the Gothic turret had not vanished from the angle
of the Place de la Pucelle, the Palais de Justice
remained in its gray antiquity, and the Norman houses
still lifted their fantastic ridges of gable along
the busy quay (now fronted by as formal a range of
hotels and offices as that of the West Cliff of Brighton).
All was at unity with itself, and the city lay under
its guarding hills, one labyrinth of delight, its
gray and fretted towers, misty in their magnificence
of height, letting the sky like blue enamel through
the foiled spaces of their crowns of open work; the
walls and gates of its countless churches wardered
by saintly groups of solemn statuary, clasped about
by wandering stems of sculptured leafage, and crowned
by fretted niche and fairy pediment meshed
like gossamer with inextricable tracery: many
a quaint monument of past times standing to tell its
far-off tale in the place from which it has since perished in
the midst of the throng and murmur of those shadowy
streets all grim with jutting props of
ebon woodwork, lightened only here and there by a
sunbeam glancing down from the scaly backs, and points,
and pyramids of the Norman roofs, or carried out of
its narrow range by the gay progress of some snowy
cap or scarlet camisole. The painter’s vocation
was fixed from that hour. The first effect upon
his mind was irrepressible enthusiasm, with a strong
feeling of a new-born attachment to Art, in a new
world of exceeding interest. Previous impressions
were presently obliterated, and the old embankments
of fancy gave way to the force of overwhelming anticipations,
forming another and a wider channel for its future
course.
145. From this time excursions
were continually made to the continent, and every
corner of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy
ransacked for its fragments of carved stone. The
enthusiasm of the painter was greater than his ambition,
and the strict limitation of his aim to the rendering
of architectural character permitted him to adopt a
simple and consistent method of execution, from which
he has rarely departed. It was adapted in the
first instance to the necessities of the moldering
and mystic character of Northern Gothic; and though
impressions received afterwards in Italy, more especially
at Venice, have retained as strong a hold upon the
painter’s mind as those of his earlier excursions,
his methods of drawing have always been influenced
by the predilections first awakened. How far his
love of the picturesque, already alluded to, was reconcilable
with an entire appreciation of the highest characters
of Italian architecture we do not pause to inquire;
but this we may assert, without hesitation, that the
picturesque elements of that architecture were
unknown until he developed them, and that since Gentile
Bellini, no one had regarded the palaces of Venice
with so affectionate an understanding of the purpose
and expression of their wealth of detail. In this
respect the City of the Sea has been, and remains,
peculiarly his own. There is, probably, no single
piazza nor sea-paved street from St. Georgio in Aliga
to the Arsenal, of which Prout has not in order drawn
every fragment of pictorial material. Probably
not a pillar in Venice but occurs in some one of his
innumerable studies; while the peculiarly beautiful
and varied arrangements under which he has treated
the angle formed by St. Mark’s Church with the
Doge’s palace, have not only made every successful
drawing of those buildings by any other hand look like
plagiarism, but have added (and what is this but indeed
to paint the lily!) another charm to the spot itself.
146. This exquisite dexterity
of arrangement has always been one of his leading
characteristics as an artist. Notwithstanding
the deserved popularity of his works, his greatness
in composition remains altogether unappreciated.
Many modern works exhibit greater pretense at arrangement,
and a more palpable system; masses of well-concentrated
light or points of sudden and dextrous color are expedients
in the works of our second-rate artists as attractive
as they are commonplace. But the moving and natural
crowd, the decomposing composition, the frank and
unforced, but marvelously intricate grouping, the breadth
of inartificial and unexaggerated shadow, these are
merits of an order only the more elevated because
unobtrusive. Nor is his system of color less
admirable. It is a quality from which the character
of his subjects naturally withdraws much of his attention,
and of which sometimes that character precludes any
high attainment; but, nevertheless, the truest and
happiest association of hues in sun and shade to be
found in modern water-color art, (excepting only
the studies of Hunt and De Wint) will be found in
portions of Prout’s more important works.
147. Of his peculiar powers
we need hardly speak; it would be difficult to conceive
the circle of their influence widened. There is
not a landscape of recent times in which the treatment
of the architectural features has not been affected,
however unconsciously, by principles which were first
developed by Prout. Of those principles the most
original was his familiarization of the sentiment,
while he elevated the subject, of the picturesque.
That character had been sought, before his time, either
in solitude or in rusticity; it was supposed to belong
only to the savageness of the desert or the simplicity
of the hamlet; it lurked beneath the brows of rocks
and the eaves of cottages; to seek it in a city would
have been deemed an extravagance, to raise it to the
height of a cathedral, an heresy. Prout did both,
and both simultaneously; he found and proved in the
busy shadows and sculptured gables of the Continental
street sources of picturesque delight as rich and
as interesting as those which had been sought amidst
the darkness of thickets and the eminence of rocks;
and he contrasted with the familiar circumstances
of urban life, the majesty and the aerial elevation
of the most noble architecture, expressing its details
in more splendid accumulation, and with a more patient
love than ever had been reached or manifested before
his time by any artist who introduced such subjects
as members of a general composition. He thus
became the interpreter of a great period of the world’s
history, of that in which age and neglect had cast
the interest of ruin over the noblest ecclesiastical
structures of Europe, and in which there had been born
at their feet a generation other in its feelings and
thoughts than that to which they owed their existence,
a generation which understood not their meaning, and
regarded not their beauty, and which yet had a character
of its own, full of vigor, animation, and originality,
which rendered the grotesque association of the circumstances
of its ordinary and active life with the solemn memorialism
of the elder building, one which rather pleased by
the strangeness than pained by the violence of its
contrast.
148. That generation is passing
away, and another dynasty is putting forth its character
and its laws. Care and observance, more mischievous
in their misdirection than indifference or scorn, have
in many places given the mediaeval relics the aspect
and associations of a kind of cabinet preservation,
instead of that air of majestic independence, or patient
and stern endurance, with which they frowned down the
insult of the regardless crowd. Nominal restoration
has done tenfold worse, and has hopelessly destroyed
what time, and storm, and anarchy, and impiety had
spared. The picturesque material of a lower kind
is fast departing and forever. There
is not, so far as we know, one city scene in central
Europe which has not suffered from some jarring point
of modernization. The railroad and the iron wheel
have done their work, and the characters of Venice,
Florence, and Rouen are yielding day by day to a lifeless
extension of those of Paris and Birmingham. A
few lusters more, and the modernization will be complete:
the archaeologist may still find work among the wrecks
of beauty, and here and there a solitary fragment
of the old cities may exist by toleration, or rise
strangely before the workmen who dig the new foundations,
left like some isolated and tottering rock in the
midst of sweeping sea. But the life of the middle
ages is dying from their embers, and the warm mingling
of the past and present will soon be forever dissolved.
The works of Prout, and of those who have followed
in his footsteps, will become memorials the most precious
of the things that have been; to their technical value,
however great, will be added the far higher interest
of faithful and fond records of a strange and unreturning
era of history. May he long be spared to us,
and enabled to continue the noble series, conscious
of a purpose and function worthy of being followed
with all the zeal of even his most ardent and affectionate
mind. A time will come when that zeal will be
understood, and his works will be cherished with a
melancholy gratitude when the pillars of Venice shall
lie moldering in the salt shallows of her sea, and
the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have become
ballast for the barges of the Seine.
SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.
149. Long ago discarded from
our National Gallery, with the contempt logically
due to national or English pictures, lost
to sight and memory for many a year in the Ogygian
seclusions of Marlborough House there have
reappeared at last, in more honorable exile at Kensington,
two great pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two,
with others; but these alone worth many an entanglement
among the cross-roads of the West, to see for half
an hour by spring sunshine: the Holy
Family, and the Graces, side by side now
in the principal room. Great, as ever was work
wrought by man. In placid strength, and subtlest
science, unsurpassed; in sweet felicity,
incomparable.
150. If you truly want to know
what good work of painter’s hand is, study those
two pictures from side to side, and miss no inch of
them (you will hardly, eventually, be inclined to
miss one): in some respects there is no execution
like it; none so open in the magic. For the work
of other great men is hidden in its wonderfulness you
cannot see how it was done. But in Sir Joshua’s
there is no mystery: it is all amazement.
No question but that the touch was so laid; only that
it could have been so laid, is a marvel forever.
So also there is no painting so majestic in sweetness.
He is lily-sceptered: his power blossoms, but
burdens not. All other men of equal dignity paint
more slowly; all others of equal force paint less
lightly. Tintoret lays his line like a king marking
the boundaries of conquered lands; but Sir Joshua leaves
it as a summer wind its trace on a lake; he could
have painted on a silken veil, where it fell free,
and not bent it.
151. Such at least is his touch
when it is life that he paints: for things lifeless
he has a severer hand. If you examine that picture
of the Graces you will find it reverses all
the ordinary ideas of expedient treatment. By
other men flesh is firmly painted, but accessories
lightly. Sir Joshua paints accessories firmly,
flesh lightly; nay, flesh not at all, but
spirit. The wreath of flowers he feels to be
material; and gleam by gleam strikes fearlessly the
silver and violet leaves out of the darkness.
But the three maidens are less substantial than rose
petals. No flushed nor frosted tissue that ever
faded in night wind is so tender as they; no hue may
reach, no line measure, what is in them so gracious
and so fair. Let the hand move softly itself
as a spirit; for this is Life, of which it touches
the imagery.
152. “And yet ”
Yes: you do well to pause. There is a “yet”
to be thought of. I did not bring you to these
pictures to see wonderful work merely, or womanly
beauty merely. I brought you chiefly to look at
that Madonna, believing that you might remember other Madonnas, unlike her; and might think it desirable
to consider wherein the difference lay: other
Madonnas not by Sir Joshua, who painted Madonnas but
seldom. Who perhaps, if truth must be told, painted
them never: for surely this dearest pet of an
English girl, with the little curl of lovely hair
under her ear, is not one.
153. Why did not Sir Joshua or
could not or would not Sir Joshua paint
Madonnas? neither he, nor his great rival-friend Gainsborough?
Both of them painters of women, such as since Giorgione
and Correggio had not been; both painters of men, such
as had not been since Titian. How is it that
these English friends can so brightly paint that particular
order of humanity which we call “gentlemen and
ladies,” but neither heroes, nor saints, nor
angels? Can it be because they were both country-bred
boys, and for ever after strangely sensitive to courtliness?
Why, Giotto also was a country-bred boy. Allegri’s
native Correggio, Titian’s Cadore, were
but hill villages; yet these men painted, not the
court, nor the drawing-room, but the Earth: and
not a little of Heaven besides: while our good
Sir Joshua never trusts himself outside the park palings.
He could not even have drawn the strawberry girl,
unless she had got through a gap in them or
rather, I think, she must have been let in at the
porter’s lodge, for her strawberries are in
a pottle, ready for the ladies at the Hall. Giorgione
would have set them, wild and fragrant, among their
leaves, in her hand. Between his fairness, and
Sir Joshua’s May-fairness, there is a strange,
impassable limit as of the white reef that
in Pacific isles encircles their inner lakelets, and
shuts them from the surf and sound of sea. Clear
and calm they rest, reflecting fringed shadows of
the palm-trees, and the passing of fretted clouds
across their own sweet circle of blue sky. But
beyond, and round and round their coral bar, lies
the blue of sea and heaven together blue
of eternal deep.
154. You will find it a pregnant
question, if you follow it forth, and leading to many
others, not trivial, Why it is, that in Sir Joshua’s
girl, or Gainsborough’s, we always think first
of the Ladyhood; but in Giotto’s, of the Womanhood?
Why, in Sir Joshua’s hero, or Vandyck’s,
it is always the Prince or the Sir whom we see first;
but in Titian’s, the man.
Not that Titian’s gentlemen
are less finished than Sir Joshua’s; but their
gentlemanliness is not the principal thing about
them; their manhood absorbs, conquers, wears it as
a despised thing. Nor and this is
another stern ground of separation will
Titian make a gentleman of everyone he paints.
He will make him so if he is so, not otherwise; and
this not merely in general servitude to truth, but
because in his sympathy with deeper humanity, the
courtier is not more interesting to him than anyone
else. “You have learned to dance and fence;
you can speak with clearness, and think with precision;
your hands are small, your senses acute, and your
features well-shaped. Yes: I see all this
in you, and will do it justice. You shall stand
as none but a well-bred man could stand; and your
fingers shall fall on the sword-hilt as no fingers
could but those that knew the grasp of it. But
for the rest, this grisly fisherman, with rusty cheek
and rope-frayed hand, is a man as well as you, and
might possibly make several of you, if souls were divisible.
His bronze color is quite as interesting to me, Titian,
as your paleness, and his hoary spray of stormy hair
takes the light as well as your waving curls.
Him also I will paint, with such picturesqueness as
he may have; yet not putting the picturesqueness first
in him, as in you I have not put the gentlemanliness
first. In him I see a strong human creature,
contending with all hardship: in you also a human
creature, uncontending, and possibly not strong.
Contention or strength, weakness or picturesqueness,
and all other such accidents in either, shall have
due place. But the immortality and miracle of
you this clay that burns, this color that
changes are in truth the awful things in
both: these shall be first painted and
last.”
155. With which question respecting
treatment of character we have to connect also this
further one: How is it that the attempts of so
great painters as Reynolds and Gainsborough are, beyond
portraiture, limited almost like children’s?
No domestic drama no history no
noble natural scenes, far less any religious subject: only
market carts; girls with pigs; woodmen going home
to supper; watering-places; gray cart-horses in fields,
and such like. Reynolds, indeed, once or twice
touched higher themes, “among the
chords his fingers laid,” and recoiled:
wisely; for, strange to say, his very sensibility
deserts him when he leaves his courtly quiet.
The horror of the subjects he chose (Cardinal Beaufort
and Ugolino) showed inherent apathy: had he felt
deeply, he would not have sought for this strongest
possible excitement of feeling, would not
willingly have dwelt on the worst conditions of despair the
despair of the ignoble. His religious subjects
are conceived even with less care than these.
Beautiful as it is, this Holy Family by which we stand
has neither dignity nor sacredness, other than those
which attach to every group of gentle mother and ruddy
babe; while his Faiths, Charities, or other well-ordered
and emblem-fitted virtues are even less lovely than
his ordinary portraits of women.
It was a faultful temper, which, having
so mighty a power of realization at command, never
became so much interested in any fact of human history
as to spend one touch of heartfelt skill upon it; which,
yielding momentarily to indolent imagination, ended,
at best, in a Puck, or a Thais; a Mercury as Thief,
or a Cupid as Linkboy. How wide the interval
between this gently trivial humor, guided by the wave
of a feather, or arrested by the enchantment of a
smile, and the habitual dwelling of the
thoughts of the great Greeks and Florentines among
the beings and the interests of the eternal world!
156. In some degree it may indeed
be true that the modesty and sense of the English
painters are the causes of their simple practice.
All that they did, they did well, and attempted nothing
over which conquest was doubtful. They knew they
could paint men and women: it did not follow
that they could paint angels. Their own gifts
never appeared to them so great as to call for serious
question as to the use to be made of them. “They
could mix colors and catch likeness yes;
but were they therefore able to teach religion, or
reform the world? To support themselves honorably,
pass the hours of life happily, please their friends,
and leave no enemies, was not this all that duty could
require, or prudence recommend? Their own art
was, it seemed, difficult enough to employ all their
genius: was it reasonable to hope also to be poets
or theologians? Such men had, indeed, existed;
but the age of miracles and prophets was long past;
nor, because they could seize the trick of an expression,
or the turn of a head, had they any right to think
themselves able to conceive heroes with Homer, or
gods with Michael Angelo.”
157. Such was, in the main, their
feeling: wise, modest, unenvious, and unambitious.
Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved
of high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to
themselves an equality with the masters of elder time,
and declaimed against the degenerate tastes of a public
which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidae.
But the two great the two only painters
of their age happy in a reputation founded
as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind,
demanded no higher function than that of soothing the
domestic affections; and achieved for themselves at
last an immortality not the less noble, because in
their lifetime they had concerned themselves less
to claim it than to bestow.
158. Yet, while we acknowledge
the discretion and simple-heartedness of these men,
honoring them for both: and the more when we compare
their tranquil powers with the hot egotism and hollow
ambition of their inferiors: we have to remember,
on the other hand, that the measure they thus set
to their aims was, if a just, yet a narrow one; that
amiable discretion is not the highest virtue; nor
to please the frivolous, the best success. There
is probably some strange weakness in the painter,
and some fatal error in the age, when in thinking over
the examples of their greatest work, for some type
of culminating loveliness or veracity, we remember
no expression either of religion or heroism, and instead
of reverently naming a Madonna di San
Sisto, can only whisper, modestly, “Mrs.
Pelham feeding chickens.”
159. The nature of the fault,
so far as it exists in the painters themselves, may
perhaps best be discerned by comparing them with a
man who went not far beyond them in his general range
of effort, but who did all his work in a wholly different
temper Hans Holbein.
The first great difference between
them is of course in completeness of execution.
Sir Joshua’s and Gainsborough’s work, at
its best, is only magnificent sketching; giving indeed,
in places, a perfection of result unattainable by
other methods, and possessing always a charm of grace
and power exclusively its own; yet, in its slightness
addressing itself, purposefully, to the casual glance,
and common thought eager to arrest the
passer-by, but careless to detain him; or detaining
him, if at all, by an unexplained enchantment, not
by continuance of teaching, or development of idea.
But the work of Holbein is true and thorough; accomplished,
in the highest as the most literal sense, with a calm
entireness of unaffected resolution, which sacrifices
nothing, forgets nothing, and fears nothing.
160. In the portrait of the Hausmann
George Gyzen, every accessory is perfect with
a fine perfection: the carnations in the glass
vase by his side the ball of gold, chased
with blue enamel, suspended on the wall the
books the steelyard the papers
on the table, the seal-ring, with its quartered bearings, all
intensely there, and there in beauty of which no one
could have dreamed that even flowers or gold were
capable, far less parchment or steel. But every
change of shade is felt, every rich and rubied line
of petal followed; every subdued gleam in the soft
blue of the enamel and bending of the gold touched
with a hand whose patience of regard creates rather
than paints. The jewel itself was not so precious
as the rays of enduring light which form it, and flash
from it, beneath that errorless hand. The man
himself, what he was not more; but to all
conceivable proof of sight in all aspect
of life or thought not less. He sits
alone in his accustomed room, his common work laid
out before him; he is conscious of no presence, assumes
no dignity, bears no sudden or superficial look of
care or interest, lives only as he lived but
forever.
161. The time occupied in painting
this portrait was probably twenty times greater than
Sir Joshua ever spent on a single picture, however
large. The result is, to the general spectator,
less attractive. In some qualities of force and
grace it is absolutely inferior. But it is inexhaustible.
Every detail of it wins, retains, rewards the attention
with a continually increasing sense of wonderfulness.
It is also wholly true. So far as it reaches,
it contains the absolute facts of color, form, and
character, rendered with an unaccusable faithfulness.
There is no question respecting things which it is
best worth while to know, or things which it is unnecessary
to state, or which might be overlooked with advantage.
What of this man and his house were visible to Holbein,
are visible to us: we may despise if we will;
deny or doubt, we shall not; if we care to know anything
concerning them, great or small, so much as may by
the eye be known is forever knowable, reliable, indisputable.
162. Respecting the advantage,
or the contrary, of so great earnestness in drawing
a portrait of an uncelebrated person, we raise at present
no debate: I only wish the reader to note this
quality of earnestness, as entirely separating Holbein
from Sir Joshua, raising him into another
sphere of intellect. For here is no question of
mere difference in style or in power, none of minuteness
or largeness. It is a question of Entireness.
Holbein is complete in intellect: what
he sees, he sees with his whole soul: what he
paints, he paints with his whole might. Sir Joshua
sees partially, slightly, tenderly catches
the flying lights of things, the momentary glooms:
paints also partially, tenderly, never with half his
strength; content with uncertain visions, insecure
delights; the truth not precious nor significant to
him, only pleasing; falsehood also pleasurable, even
useful on occasion must, however, be discreetly
touched, just enough to make all men noble, all women
lovely: “we do not need this flattery often,
most of those we know being such; and it is a pleasant
world, and with diligence for nothing can
be done without diligence every day till
four” (says Sir Joshua) “a painter’s
is a happy life.”
Yes: and the Isis; with her swans,
and shadows of Windsor Forest, is a sweet stream,
touching her shores softly. The Rhine at Basle
is of another temper, stern and deep, as strong, however
bright its face: winding far through the solemn
plain, beneath the slopes of Jura, tufted and steep:
sweeping away into its regardless calm of current the
waves of that little brook of St. Jakob, that bathe
the Swiss Thermopylae; the low village nestling
beneath a little bank of sloping fields its
spire seen white against the deep blue shadows of the
Jura pines.
163. Gazing on that scene day
by day, Holbein went his own way, with the earnestness
and silent swell of the strong river not
unconscious of the awe, nor of the sanctities of his
life. The snows of the eternal Alps giving forth
their strength to it; the blood of the St. Jakob brook
poured into it as it passes by not in vain.
He also could feel his strength coming from white
snows far off in heaven. He also bore upon him
the purple stain of the earth sorrow. A grave
man, knowing what steps of men keep truest time to
the chanting of Death. Having grave friends also; the
same singing heard far off, it seems to me, or, perhaps,
even low in the room, by that family of Sir Thomas
More; or mingling with the hum of bees in the meadows
outside the towered wall of Basle; or making the words
of the book more tunable, which meditative Erasmus
looks upon. Nay, that same soft Death-music is
on the lips even of Holbein’s Madonna.
Who, among many, is the Virgin you had best compare
with the one before whose image we have stood so long.
Holbein’s is at Dresden, companioned
by the Madonna di San Sisto; but
both are visible enough to you here, for, by a strange
coincidence, they are (at least so far as I know)
the only two great pictures in the world which have
been faultlessly engraved.
164. The received tradition respecting
the Holbein Madonna is beautiful; and I believe the
interpretation to be true. A father and mother
have prayed to her for the life of their sick child.
She appears to them, her own Christ in her arms.
She puts down her Christ beside them takes
their child into her arms instead. It lies down
upon her bosom, and stretches its hand to its father
and mother, saying farewell.
This interpretation of the picture
has been doubted, as nearly all the most precious
truths of pictures have been doubted, and forgotten.
But even supposing it erroneous, the design is not
less characteristic of Holbein. For that there
are signs of suffering on the features of the child
in the arms of the Virgin, is beyond question; and
if this child be intended for the Christ, it would
not be doubtful to my mind, that, of the two Raphael
and Holbein the latter had given the truest
aspect and deepest reading of the early life of the
Redeemer. Raphael sought to express His power
only; but Holbein His labor and sorrow.
165. There are two other pictures
which you should remember together with this (attributed,
indeed, but with no semblance of probability, to the
elder Holbein, none of whose work, preserved at Basle,
or elsewhere, approaches in the slightest degree to
their power), the St. Barbara and St. Elizabeth.
I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred
schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically
expressive of the need of the heart that conceived
them. Not ascetic, nor quaint, nor feverishly
or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities
of thought. Only entirely true entirely
pure. No depth of glowing heaven beyond them but
the clear sharp sweetness of the northern air:
no splendor of rich color, striving to adorn them with
better brightness than of the day: a gray glory,
as of moonlight without mist, dwelling on face and
fold of dress; all faultless-fair.
Creatures they are, humble by nature, not by self-condemnation;
merciful by habit, not by tearful impulse; lofty without
consciousness; gentle without weakness; wholly in
this present world, doing its work calmly; beautiful
with all that holiest life can reach yet
already freed from all that holiest death can cast
away.
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