Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 65, No. 400, February, 1849

Even the introduction of Io in the tale is suggestive – the virgin-mother who was so strangely to conceive (and this too given in a prophecy) miraculously.

"Jove at length shall give thee back thy mind,With one light touch of his unquailing hand,And, from that fertilising touch, a sonShall call thee mother."

Her whom Prometheus thus addresses, —

"In that the son shall overmatch the sire."– "Of thine own stem the strong one shall be born."

Then again Sampson passes into the Egyptian or Tyrian Hercules, to lose his life by another Delilah in Dejaneira. Whence the prophetic Sybils, whence and what the Eleusinian mysteries? and that strange glimpse of them in the significant passage of the Alcestis, where the restored from the dead must abstain from speech till the third day – the duration of her consecration to Hades!

"Ὁύπω δέμις σοι τησδε προσφωνηματων,Κλύειν, πρίν ἄν θεωισι τοῖσι νερτέροιςΑφαγνῖσηται, καὶτρίτον μολῃ φαος."

We might enter largely into the mysteries of heathen mythology, and discover strange coincidences and resemblances, but it would take us too wide from our present subject. Our present purpose is to show that we are apt to attribute too much to the Grecian fable, when we ascribe to it all the beauty which Grecian art has elaborated from it. For, in fact, the origin of that fabulous poetry is beyond them in far-off time; and by them how corrupted, shorn of its real grandeur, and at once magnificent and lovely beauty! How much more, then, is it ours than theirs, as it is deducible from that high revelation which is part of the Christian religion. We overlook, in the excellence of Grecian art, the far better materials for all art, which we in our religion possess, and have ever possessed. With the Greeks it was an instinct to love the beautiful, sensual and intellectual: it was a part of their nature to discover it or to create it. They would have fabricated it out of any materials; and deteriorated, indeed, were those which came to their hands. And even this excess of their love, at least in their poets, made the sensuous to overcome the intellectual; but the far higher than intellectual – the celestial, the spiritual – they had not: their highest reach in the moral sense was a sublime pride: they had no conception of a sublime humility. Their highest divinity was how much lower than the lowest order of angels that wait around the heavenly throne and adore, – low as is their Olympus, where they placed their Zeus and all his band, to the Christian "heaven of heavens," which yet cannot contain the universal Maker. It is bad taste, indeed, in us, as some do, to give them the palm of the possession of a better field – poetic field for the exercise of art. "Christian and Legendary art" has a principle which no other art could have, and which theirs certainly had not; they were sensuous from a necessity of their nature, lacking this principle. We ought to ascribe all which they have left us to their skill, their genius: wonderful it was, and wonderful things did it perform; but, after all, we admire more than we love. Their divine was but a grand and stern repose; their loveliness, but the perfection of the human form. And so great were they in this their genius, that the monuments of heathen art are beyond the heathen creed; for in those the unsensuous prevailed.

Let us suppose the gift of their genius to have been delayed to the Christian era – as poetical subjects, their whole mythology would have been set aside for a far better adoption; and we should be now universally acknowledging how lovely and how great, how full and bountiful, for poetry and for art, are the ever-flowing fountains, gushing in life, giving exuberance from that high mount, to the sight of which Pindus cannot lift its head, nor show its poor Castalian rills. The "gods of Greece," the far-famed "gods of Greece," what are they to the hierarchy of heaven – angels and archangels, and all the host – powers, dominions, hailing the admission to the blissful regions of saints spiritualised, and after death to die no more – glorified? What loveliness is like that of throned chastity? Graces and Muses in their perfectness of marbled beauty – what are they to faith, hope, and charity, and the veiled virtues that like our angels shroud themselves? When these became subjects for our Christian art, then was true expression first invented in drapery. "Christian and legendary art" is not denied the nude; but no other has so made drapery a living, speaking poetry. There is a dignity, a grace, a sweetness, in the drapery of mediæval sculpture, that equally commands our admiration, and more our reverence and our love, than ancient statues, draped or nude. And this is the expression of Scripture poetry – the represented language, the "clothing with power," the "garment of righteousness." We often loiter about our old cathedrals, and look up with wonder at the mutilated remains as a new type of beauty, beaming through the obscurity of the so-called dark ages. Lovers of art, as we profess to be, in all its forms, we profess without hesitation that we would not exchange these – that is, lose them as never to have existed – for all that Grecian art has left us. Even now, what power have we to restore these specimens of expressive workmanship, broken and mutilated as they have been by a low and misbegotten zeal? We maintain further, generally, that the works of "Christian and legendary art," in painting, sculpture, and architecture, are as infinitely superior to the works of all Grecian antiquity, as is the source of their inspiration higher and purer: we are, too, astonished at the perfect agreement of the one with the other, showing one mind, one spirit – devotion. We strongly insist upon this, that there has been a far higher character and equal power in Christian art compared with heathen. It ought to be so, and it is so. It has been too long set aside in the world's opinion (often temporary and ill-formed) to establish the inferior. This country, in particular, has yielded a cold neglect of these beautiful things, in shameful and indolent compliance with the mean, tasteless, degrading Puritanism, that mutilated and would have destroyed them utterly if it could, as it would have treated every and all the beautiful.

Even at the first rise of this Christian art, the superiority of the principle which moved the artists was visible through their defect of knowledge of art, as art. The devotional spirit is evident; a sense of purity, that spiritualised humanity with its heavenly brightness, dims the imperfections of style, casting out of observation minor and uncouth parts. Often, in the incongruous presence of things vulgar in detail of habit and manners, an angelic sentiment stands embodied, pure and untouched, as if the artist, when he came to that, felt holy ground, and took his shoes from off his feet. It was not long before the art was equal to the whole work. There are productions of even an early time that are yet unequalled, and, for power over the heart and the judgment, are much above comparison with any preceding works of boasted antiquity.

Take only the full embodying of all angelic nature: what is there like to it out of Christian art? How unlike the cold personifications of "Victories" winged, – though even these were borrowed, – are the ministering and adoring angels of our art – now bringing celestial paradise down to saints on earth, and now accompanying them, and worshipping with them, in their upward way, amid the receding and glorious clouds of heaven! Look at the sepulchral monuments of Grecian art – the frigid mysteries, the abhorrent ghost, yet too corporeal, shrinking from Lethé; and the dismal boat – the unpromising, unpitying aspect of Charon: then turn to some of the sublime Christian monuments of art, that speak so differently of that death – the Coronation of the Virgin, the Ascension of Saints. The dismal and the doleful earth has vanished – choirs of angels rush to welcome and to support the beatified, the released: death is no more, but life breathing no atmosphere of earth, but all freshness, and all joy, and all music; the now changed body glowing, like an increasing light, into its spirituality of form and beauty, and thrilling with

"That undisturbed song of pure consent,Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throneTo Him that sits thereon;With saintly shout and solemn jubilee,Where the bright seraphim, in burning row,Their loud uplifted angel-trumpets blow;And the cherubic host, in thousand choirs,Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,With those just spirits that wear victorious palms,Hymns devout and holy psalmsSinging everlastingly."

Then shall we doubt, and not dare to pronounce the superior capabilities of Christian art, arising out of its subject – poetry? We prefer, as a great poetic conception, Raffaelle's Archangel, Michael, with his victorious foot upon his prostrate adversary, to the far-famed Apollo Belvidere, who has slain his Python; and his St Margaret, in her sweet, her innocent, and clothed grace, to that perfect model of woman's form, the Venus de Medici. Not that we venture a careless or misgiving thought of the perfectness of those great antique works: their perfectness was according to their purpose. Higher purposes make a higher perfectness. Nor would we have them viewed irreverently; for even in them, and the genius that produced them, the Creator, as in "times past, left not Himself without witness." In showing forth the glory of the human form, they show forth the glory of Him who made it – who is thus glorified in the witnesses; and so we accept and love them. But to a certain degree they must stand dethroned – their influence faded. Lowly unassuming virtues – virtues of the soul, far greater in their humility, in the sacred poetry of our Christian faith, shine like stars, even in their smallness, on the dark night of our humanity; and they are to take their places in the celestial of art; and we feel that it is His will, who, as the hymn of the blessed Virgin – that type of all these united virtues – declares, "hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek."

We trust yet to see sacred art resumed; for the more we consider its poetry, the more inexhaustible appears the mine. Nor do we require to search and gather in the field of fabulous legends; though in a poetic view, and for their intention, and resumed merely as a fabulous allegory, they are not to be set aside. But sure we are that, whatever can move the heart, can excite to the greatest degree our pity, our love, or convey the greatest delight through scenes for which the term beautiful is but a poor describer, and personages for whose magnificence languages have no name – all is within the volume and the history of our suffering and triumphant religion.

Would that we could stir but one of our painters to this, which should be his great business! Genius is bestowed for no selfish gratification, but for service, and for a "witness," to bear which let the gifted offer only a willing heart, and his lamp will not be suffered to go out for lack of oil. Why is the tenderness of Mr Eastlake's pencil in abeyance? That portion of the sacred history which commences with his "Christ weeping over Jerusalem," might well be continued in a series. Even still more power has he shown in the creative and symbolic, as exemplified in his poetic conception of Virtue from Milton —

"She can teach you how to climbHigher than the sphery chime;Or if Virtue feeble were,Heaven itself would stoop to her."

If we believe genius to be an inspiring spirit, we may contemplate it hereafter as an accusing angel. With such a paradise of subjects before them, why do so many of our painters run to the kennel and the stable, or plunge their pencils into the gaudy hues of meretricious enticement? We do verily believe that the world is waiting for better things. It is taking a greater interest in higher subjects, and those of a pure sentiment. It is that our artists are behind the feeling, and not, as they should be, in the advance. It is a great fact that there is such a growing feeling. The resumption of sacred art in Germany is not without its effect, and is making its way here in prints. Most of these are from the Aller Heiligen Kapelle at Munich, the result of the taste of at least one crowned head in Europe, who, with more limited means and power, has set an example of a better patronage, which would have well become Courts of greater splendour, and more imperial influence. Must it be asked what our own artists – the Academy, with all its staff – are doing?

We must stay our hand; for we took up the pen to notice the two volumes just published of Mrs Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art. They have excited, in the reading, an enthusiastic pleasure, and led the fancy wandering in the delightful fields sanctified by heavenly sunshine, and trod by sainted feet; and, like a traveller in a desert, having found an oasis, we feel loath to leave it, and would fain linger and drink again of its refreshing springs. These volumes have reached us most seasonably, at a period of the year when the mind is more especially directed to contemplate the main subjects of which they treat, and to anticipate only by days the vision of joy and glory which will be scripturally put before us – to see the Virgin Mother and the Holy Babe —

"And all about the courtly stable,Bright harness'd angels sit in order serviceable."

Mrs Jameson disclaims in this work any other object than the poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art; and to enable those who are, or wish to be, conversant with the innumerable productions of Italian and other schools, in an artistic view, likewise at once to know the subjects upon which they treat. Even as a handbook, therefore, these volumes are valuable. Much of the early painting was symbolical. Ignorance of the symbols rejects the sentiment, or at least the intention, and at the same time makes what is only quaint appear absurd.

"The first volume contains the legends of the Scripture personages, and the primitive fathers. The second volume contains those sainted personages who lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the first ages of Christianity, and whose real history, founded on fact or tradition, has been so disguised by poetical embroidery, that they have in some sort the air of ideal beings." Possibly this poetical disguise is favourable upon the whole to art, but it renders a key necessary, and that Mrs Jameson has supplied – not pretending, however, to more than a selection of the most interesting; and, what is extremely valuable, there are marginal references to pictures, and in what places they are to be met with, and by whom painted, of the subjects given in the text, and of the view the artists had in so painting them. The emblems are amply noted with their meanings; and even the significance of colours, which has been so commonly overlooked, and is yet so important for the comprehension of the full subject of a picture, is clearly laid down. It is well said:

"All the productions of art, from the time it has been directed and developed by the Christian influences, may be regarded under three different aspects: – 1st, The purely religious aspect, which belongs to one mode of faith; 2d, The poetical aspect, which belongs to all; 3d, The artistic, which is the individual point of view, and has reference only to the action of the intellect on the means and material employed. There is a pleasure, an intense pleasure, merely in the consideration of art, as art; in the faculties of comparison and nice discrimination brought to bear on objects of beauty; in the exercise of a cultivated and refined taste on the productions of mind in any form whatever. But a threefold, or rather a thousandfold, pleasure is theirs, who to a sense of the poetical unite a sympathy with the spiritual in art, and who combine with a delicacy of perception and technical knowledge, more elevated sources of pleasure, more variety of association, habits of more excursive thought. Let none imagine, however, that in placing before the uninitiated these unpretending volumes, I assume any such superiority as is here implied. Like a child that has sprang on a little way before its playmates, and caught a glimpse through an opening portal of some varied Eden within, all gay with flowers, and musical with birds, and haunted by divine shapes which beckon forward, and, after one rapturous survey, runs back and catches its companions by the hand, and hurries them forwards to share the new-found pleasure, the yet unexplored region of delight: even so it is with me: I am on the outside, not the inside, of the door I open."

This is a happy introduction to that which immediately follows of angels and archangels.

Mrs Jameson has so managed to open the door as to frame in her subject to the best advantage; and the reader is willing to stand for a moment with her to gaze upon the inward brightness of the garden, ere he ventures in to see what is around and what is above. It is on the first downward step that we stand breathless with Aladdin, and feel the influence of the first – the partial and framed-in picture – glowing in the unearthly illumination of its magical creation.

There is nothing more interesting than these few pages upon angels. The information we receive is very curious. It is beautiful poetry to see orders, and degrees, and ministrations various, types of an embodied, a ministering church here, and ordained, together with the saints of earth, to make one glorified triumphant church hereafter. Without entering upon the theological question, as to the extension and mystification of the ideas of angels after the Captivity, (yet we think it might be shown that there was originally no Chaldaic belief on the subject not taken, first or last, from the Jews themselves,) it may not be unworthy of remark, that the word "angel," signifying messenger, could scarcely with propriety have been at the first applied to Satan, the deceiving serpent, until, in the after-development of the history of the human race, the ministering offices gave the general title, which, when established, included all who had not "kept their first estate." Nor do we think, with Mrs Jameson, that Chaldea had anything to do with the introduction of the worship of angels into the Christian church. The "gods many" of the heathen countries in which Christianity established itself, will sufficiently account for the readiness of the people to transfer the multifarious worship to which they had been accustomed to names more suitable to the new religion. It is with the poetical development we have here to do; and what ground is there for that full development in the New Testament, wherein they are represented as "countless – as superior to all human wants and weaknesses – as deputed messengers of God? They rejoice over the repentant sinner; they take deep interest in the mission of Christ; they are present with those who pray; they bear the souls of the just to heaven; they minister to Christ on earth, and will be present at his second coming." From such authority, from such a sacred theatre of scenes and celestial personages, arose the beautiful, the magnificent visions of the workers of sacred art. Heresy, however, reached it, as might have been expected; and the agency of angels, in the creation of the world and of man, has been represented, to the deterioration of its great poetry. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, a great change seems to have taken place in the representation of the angel with reference to the Virgin: the feeling is changed; "the veneration paid to the Virgin demanded another treatment. She becomes not merely the principal person, but the superior being; she is the 'regina angelorum,' and the angel bows to her, or kneels before her, as to a queen. Thus, in the famous altar-piece at Cologne, the angel kneels; he bears the sceptre, and also a sealed roll, as if he were a celestial ambassador delivering his credentials. About the same period we sometimes see the angel merely with his hands folded over his breast, and his head inclined, delivering his message as if to a superior being."

It is a great merit in this work of Mrs Jameson's, that we are not only referred to the most curious and to the best specimens of art, but have likewise beautiful woodcuts, and some etchings admirably executed by Mrs Jameson's own hand in illustration. There is a greatness in the simplicity of Blake's angels: "The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." Poor Blake! Yet why say poor? he was happy in his visions – a little before his time, and one of whom the world (of art) in his day were not worthy: though, with a wild extravagance of fancy, his creations were his faith, often great, and always gentle. Exquisitely beautiful are the "angels of the planets" from Raffaelle, and copied by Mrs Jameson from Gruner's engravings of the frescoes of the Capella Chigiana. That great painter of mystery, Rembrandt, whom the mere lovers of form would have mistakenly thought it a profanation to commission with an angelic subject, is justly appreciated. A perfect master of light, and of darkness, and of colour, it mattered not what were the forms, so that they were unearthly, that plunged into or broke through his luminous or opaque. Of the picture in the Louvre it is thus remarked: "Miraculous for true and spirited expression, and for the action of the soaring angel, who parts the clouds and strikes through the air like a strong swimmer through the waves of the sea." Strange – but so it is – we cannot conceive an alteration of his pictures, all parts so agree. Attention to the more beautiful in form would have appeared to him a mistrust in his great gift of colour and chiaroscuro; and, stranger still, that without, and seemingly in a marked defiance of mere beauty, he is, we would almost say never, vulgar, never misses the intended sentiment, nor fails where it is of tenderness, even of feminine tenderness, for which, if he does not give beauty, he gives its equivalent in the fulness of the feeling. We instance his Salutation – Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary. There is something terrifically grand in the crouching angel in the Campo Santo, – not in the form, nor in the face, which is mostly hid, but in the conception of the attitude of horror with which he beholds the awful scene. It is from the Last Judgment of Orcagua in the Campo Santo. We must not speak of Rubens as a painter of angels; and, for real angelic expression, perhaps the earlier painters are the best. It is surprising that Mrs Jameson, from whose refined taste, and from whose sense of the beautiful and the graceful in their highest qualities, we should have expected another judgment, could have ventured to name together Raffaelle and Murillo as angel painters. It is true, in speaking of the Visit to Abraham, she admits that the painter has set aside the angelic and mystic character, and merely represented three young men travellers; but she generally, throughout these volumes, speaks of that favourite Spaniard in terms of the highest admiration, – terms, as we think, little merited. The angels in the Sutherland Collection are as vulgar figures as can well be, and quite antagonistic in feeling to a heavenly mission. We confess that we dislike almost all the pictures by this so much esteemed master: their artistic manner is to us uncertain and unpleasing, – disagreeable in colour, deficient in grace. We often wonder at the excess of present admiration. We look upon his vulgarity in scriptural subjects as quite profane. His highest power was in a peasant gentleness; he could not embody a sacred feeling: yet thus is he praised for a performance beyond his power: – "St Andrew is suspended on the high cross, formed not of planks, but of the trunks of trees laid transversely. He is bound with cords, undraped, except by a linen cloth, his silver hair and beard loosely streaming on the air, his aged countenance illuminated by a heavenly transport, as he looks up to the opening skies, whence two angels, of really celestial beauty, like almost all Murillo's angels, descend with the crown and palm." The angels of Correggio are certainly peculiar: they are not quite celestial, but perhaps are sympathetically more lovely from their touch of humanity; they are ever pure. Those in the Ascension of the the Virgin, in the Cupola at Parma, seem to be rather adopted angels than of the "first estate;" for they are of several ages, and, if we mistake not, many of them are feminine, and, we suspect, are meant really to represent the loveliest of earth beatified, adopted into the heavenly choir. Those who have seen Signor Toschi's fine drawings of the Parma frescoes, (now in progress of engraving), will readily give assent to this impression. We remember this feeling crossing our mind, and as it were lightly touching the heart with angelic wings – if we have lost a daughter of that sweet age, let us fondly see her there. We cannot forbear quoting the passage upon the angels of Titian: – "And Titian's angels impress me in a similar manner: I mean those in the glorious Assumption at Venice, with their childish forms and features, but an expression caught from beholding the face of 'our Father which is in heaven:' it is glorified infancy. I remember standing before this picture, contemplating those lovely spirits one after another, until a thrill came over me, like that which I felt when Mendelssohn played the organ: I became music while I listened. The face of one of those angels is to the face of a child, just what that of the Virgin, in the same picture, is, compared with the fairest daughter of earth. It is not here superiority of beauty, but mind, and music, and love, kneaded together, as it were, into form and colour." This is very eloquent, but it was not the thought which supplied that ill word "kneaded."