The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 2 (of 3)

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

The homage sparingly granted or callously refused to chiaroscuro by the two schools of design was with implicit devotion paid to it by the nurse of colour, the school of Venice. Whether as tradition, on the authority of Vasari, maintains, they received it as a principle of imitation from the perspicacity, or as a native discovery from the genius of Giorgione Barbarelli, though from what has been advanced on both sides of the question, it would be presumptuous positively to decide on either, it must be allowed, that if the Venetian received a hint from the Florentine, he extended it through a system, the harmony of which was all his own, and excelled in breadth and amenity the light which it could not surpass in splendour, added transparence to purity of shade, rounded by reflexes and discovered by the contrast of deep with aerial colour, that energy of effect which mere chiaroscuro could not have reached, and which was carried near perfection by Paolo Cagliari.

Among the varied mischief poured into this country by the rapacious sophistry of traders and the ambitious cullibility of wealthy collectors, no fraud perhaps has been more destructive to the genuine appreciation of original styles than the baptism of pictures with names not their own: by this prolific method worse ones than those of Luini, Aretusi, Timoteo della Vite, Bonifacio, are daily graced with the honours due to Lionardo, Correggio, Raffaello, Tizian; though none have suffered more by the multiplication than Giorgione, whom shortness of life, a peculiar fatality of circumstances, and the ravages of time, have conspired to render one of the scarcest as well as least authenticated artists even in Italy: to whom his earliest and latest biographers have been as critically unjust as chronologically inattentive; Vasari by transferring to another his principal work; Fiorillo by making him paint the portrait of Calvin the Reformer.91

To form our opinion therefore of Giorgione's chiaroscuro from a few portraits or single figures, if legitimate, often restored, or from the crumbling remnants of his decayed frescoes, would be to form an estimate of a magnificent fabric from some loose fragment or stone: to do full justice to his powers we must have recourse to his surprising work in the School of S. Marco at Venice; a composition whose terrific graces Vasari descants on with a fervour inferior only to the artist's own inspiration, though he unaccountably ascribes it to the elder Palma.92

"In the School of S. Marco he painted the story of the ship which conducts the body of St. Mark through a horrible tempest, with other barges assailed by furious winds; and besides, groups of aërial apparitions, and various forms of fiends who vent their blasts against the vessels, that by dint of oars and energy of arms strive to force their way through the mountainous and hostile waves which threaten to submerge them. You hear the howling blast, you see the grasp and fiery exertion of the men, the fluctuation of the waves, the lightning that bursts the clouds, the oars bent by the flood, the flood broke by the oars, and dashed to spray by the sinews of the rowers. What more? In vain I labour to recollect a picture that equals the terrors of this whose design, invention, and colour make the canvass tremble! Often when he finishes, an artist, absorbed in the contemplation of parts, forgets the main point of a design, and as the spirits cool, loses the vein of his enthusiasm; but this man, never losing sight of the subject, guided his conceit to perfection."

The effect of this work, when it drew such a stream of eulogy from lips else so frugal in Venetian praise, may be guessed at from the impression it makes in its present decay – for even now, it might defy the competition of the most terrific specimens in chiaroscuro, the boat of Charon in M. Angelo's Last Judgment, perhaps, only excepted. Yet its master was defrauded of its glory by his panegyrist, whilst it was exciting the wonder and curiosity of every beholder: Lanzi is the only historian who notices its remains, and the real author;93 we look in vain for it in Ridolfi, who in his Life of Giorgione treats us instead of it with a delectable account of a night-piece which he painted, exhibiting the tragi-comedy of castrating a cat.

It has been treated as a mistake to confine the chiaroscuro of a subject exclusively to one source; nor can it be doubted that often it is and has been proved to be both necessary and advantageous to admit more; this is however a licence to be granted with considerable caution, and it appears to be the privilege of superior powers to raise a subject, by the admission of subordinate, sometimes diverging, sometimes opposite streams of light, to assist and invigorate the effect of the primary one, without impairing that unity which alone can ensure a breadth to effect, without which each part, for mastery striving, soon would be lost in confusion, or crumble into fragments. The best instances of the advantages gained by the superinduction of artificial light, appear to be the Pietro Martire and the S. Lorenzo of Tiziano: if selection can be made from the works of a master, where to count is to choose. In the first, the stern light of evening far advanced in the background, is commanded by the celestial emanation bursting from above, wrapping the summit in splendour, and diffusing itself in rays more or less devious over the scenery. The subject of S. Lorenzo, a nocturnal scene, admits light from two sources – the fire beneath the Saint, and a raised torch: but receives its principal splendour from the aërial reflex of the vision on high, which sheds its mitigating ray on the martyr.

The nocturnal studies of Tintoretto from models and artificial groups have been celebrated: these, prepared in wax or clay, he arranged, raised, suspended, to produce masses, foreshortening, and variety of effect: it was thence he acquired that decision of chiaroscuro unknown to more expanded daylight, by which he divided his bodies, and those wings of obscurity and light by which he separated the groups of his composition, though the mellowness of his eye nearly always instructed him to connect the two extremes by something intermediate that partook of both, as the extremes themselves by reflexes with the back-ground or the scenery. The general rapidity of his process, by which he baffled his competitors and often overwhelmed himself, did not indeed always permit him to attend deliberately to this principle, and often hurried him into an abuse of practice, which in the lights turned breadth into mannered or insipid flatness, and in the shadows into total extinction of parts: of all this, he has in the schools of S. Rocco and Marco given the most unquestionable instances; the Resurrection of Christ and the Massacre of the Innocents, comprehend every charm by which chiaroscuro fascinates its votaries: in the Vision, dewy dawn melts into deep but pellucid shade, itself rent or reflected by celestial splendour and angelic hues: whilst in the Infant-massacre at Bethlehem alternate sheets of stormy light and agitated gloom dash horror on the astonished eye.

He pursued, however, another method to create, without more assistance from chiaroscuro than individual light and shade, an effect equivalent and perhaps superior to what the utmost stretch of its powers could have produced, in the Crucifixion of the Albergo, or Guest-room of S. Rocco, the largest and most celebrated of his works. The multitudinous rabble dispersed over that picture, (for such, rather than composition, one group excepted, that assemblage of accidental figures deserves to be called,) he connected by a sovereign tone, ingulphing the whole in one mass of ominous twilight, an eclipse, or what precedes a storm, or hurricane, or earthquake; nor suffering the captive eye to rest on any other object than the faint gleam hovering over the head of the Saviour in the centre, and in still fainter tones dying on the sainted group gathered beneath the Cross. Yet this nearly superhuman contrivance, which raises above admiration a work whose incongruous parts else must have sunk it beneath mediocrity, Agostino Carracci, in his print, with chalcographic callus, has totally overlooked; for notwithstanding the iron sky that overhangs the whole, he has spread, if not sunshine, the most declared daylight from end to end, nor left the eye uninformed of one motley article, or one blade of grass.

With Iacopo Robusti may be named, though adopted by another school, Belisario Corenzio, an Achæan Greek, his pupil, his imitator in the magic of chiaroscuro, and with still less compunction his rival in dispatch and rapidity of hand: the immense compositions in which he overflowed, he encompassed, and carried to irresistible central splendour by streams of shade, and hemmed his glories in with clouds, or showery, or pregnant with thunder. The monasteries and churches of Naples and its dependencies abound in his frescoes.

The more adscititious effects of chiaroscuro produced by the opposition of dark to lucid, opaque to transparent bodies, and cold to warm tints, though fully understood by the whole Venetian school, were nearly carried to perfection by Paolo Cagliari. There is no variety of harmonious or powerful combination in the empire of colour, as a substitute of light and shade, which did not emanate from his eye, variegate his canvass, and invigorate his scenery. Many of his works, however, and principally the masses scattered over his Suppers, prove that he was master of that legitimate chiaroscuro which, independent of colour, animates composition: but the gaiety of his mind, which inspired him with subjects of magnificence and splendour, of numerous assemblies canopied by serene skies or roving lofty palaces, made him seek his effects oftener in opposed tints, than in powerful depths of light and shade.

But all preceding, contemporary, and subsequent schools, with their united powers of chiaroscuro, were far excelled both in compass and magnitude of its application by the genius of Antonio Allegri, from the place of his nativity surnamed Correggio. To them light and shade was only necessary as the more or less employed, or obedient attendant on design, composition, and colour. But design, composition, and colour, were no more than the submissive vehicles, or enchanted ministers of its charms to Correggio. If, strictly speaking, he was not the inventor of its element, he fully spanned its measure, and expanded the powers of its harmony through Heaven and earth; in his eye and hand it became the organ of sublimity; the process of his cupolas made it no longer a question whether an art circumscribed by lines and figure could convey ideas of reality and immensity at once. Entranced by his spell, and lapped in his elysium, we are not aware of the wide difference between the conception of the medium, the place, space, and mode in which certain beings ought, or may be supposed to move, and that of those beings themselves; and forget, though fully adequate to the first, that Correggio was unequal to the second; that though he could build Heaven, he could not people it. If M. Agnolo found in the depth of his mind and in grandeur of line the means of rendering the immediate effect of will and power intuitive in the Creation of Adam, by darting life from the finger of Omnipotence, the coalition of light and darkness opened to the entranced eye of Correggio the means of embodying the Mosaic "Let there be light," and created light in that stream of glory which, issuing from the divine Infant in his Notte, proclaims a God. If Thought be personified in the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel, he has made Silence audible in the slumbering twilight that surrounds the Zingara; and filled the gloom which enbosoms Jupiter and Io, with the whispers of Love.

And though perhaps we should be nearer truth by ascribing the cause of Correggio's magic to the happy conformation of his organs, and his calm serenity of mind, than to Platonic ecstasies, a poet might at least be allowed to say "that his soul, absorbed by the contemplation of infinity, soared above the sphere of measurable powers, knowing that every object whose limits can be distinctly perceived by the mind, must be within its grasp; and however grand, magnificent, beautiful, or terrific, fall short of the conception itself, and be less than sublime." – In this, from whatever cause, consists the real spell of Correggio – which neither Parmegiano nor Annibale Carracci seem to have been able to penetrate: the Bolognese certainly not; for if we believe himself in his letters to Ludovico, expressive of his emotions at the first sight of Correggio's cupolas, he confines his admiration to the foreshortening and grace of forms, the successful imitation of flesh, and rigorous perspective.

Of Correggio's numerous pretending imitators Ludovico Carracci appears to be the only one who penetrated his principle: the axiom, that the less the traces appear of the means by which a work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of nature, is not an axiom likely to spring from the infancy of art. The even colour, veiled splendour, the solemn twilight; that tone of devotion and cloistered meditation, which Ludovico Carracci spread over his works, could arise only from the contemplation of some preceding style, analogous to his own feelings and its comparison with nature; and where could that be met with in a degree equal to what he found in the infinite unity and variety of Correggio's effusions? They inspired his frescoes in the cloisters of St. Michele in Bosco: the foreshortenings of the muscular Labourers at the Hermitage, and of the ponderous Dæmon that mocks their toil, the warlike splendour in the homage of Totila, the nocturnal conflagration of Monte Cassino, the wild graces of deranged beauty, and the insidious charms of the sister nymphs in the garden-scene, equally proclaim the pupil of Correggio.

His triumph in oil is the altar-piece of St. John preaching, in a chapel of the Certosa at Bologna, whose lights seem embrowned by a golden veil, and the shadowy gleam of Vallombrosa; though he sometimes indulged in tones austere, pronounced, and hardy: such is the Flagellation of Christ in the same church, whose tremendous depth of flesh-tints contrasts the open wide-expanded sky, and less conveys than dashes its terrors on the astonished sense.

The schools of Bologna, Parma, Milano, with more or less geniality, imitated their predecessors, but added no new features to the theory of light and shade. As to its progress on this side of the Alps, it is better to say nothing than little on the wide range of Rubens, and the miracles of Rembrandt.

SEVENTH LECTURE

ON DESIGN

SEVENTH LECTURE

It is perhaps unnecessary to premise, that by the word Design I mean here not what that word denotes in a general sense, the plan of a whole, but what it applies in its narrowest and most specific sense, the drawing of the figures and component parts of the subject. The Arts of Design have been so denominated from their nearly exclusive power of representing Form, the base and principal object of plastic in contradistinction to vocal imitation. In forms alone the idea of existence can be rendered intuitive and permanent. Languages perish; words succeed each other, become obsolete and die; even colours, the dressers and ornaments of bodies, fade; Lines alone can neither be obliterated nor misconstrued; by application to their standard alone, discrimination takes place, and description becomes intelligible. Here is the only ostensible seat of corporeal Beauty; here only it can strictly exist; for, as the notion of Beauty arises from the pleasure we feel in the harmonious co-operation of the component forms of some favourite object towards one end at once– it implies their immediate co-existence in the mass they compose; and as that immediately and at once can be perceived and conveyed to the mind by the eye alone, – Figure is the legitimate vehicle of Beauty, and Design the physical element of the Art.

Of Design, the element is correctness and style; its extinction, incorrectness and manner. On the first principle of correctness, or the power of copying and drawing with precision the proportions of any object singly, or in relation with others, – as it may be considered in the light of an elementary qualification without which none would presume to enter himself a student of the Academy, – I should perhaps forbear to speak, did I not consider it as the basis of Design, and were I not apprehensive that from the prevalent bend of the reigning taste, you do not lay on it all the stress you ought, and that, if you neglect the acquisition of the power to copy with purity and precision any given object, you will never acquire that of imitating what you have chosen for your model.

Our language generally confounds, or rather those who use it, when they speak of the art, the two words copy and imitation, though essentially different in their operation, as well as their meaning. An eye geometrically just, with a hand implicitly obedient, is the requisite of the former, without all choice, without selection, amendment, or omission; whilst choice, directed by judgment and taste, constitutes the essence of imitation, and raises the humble copyist to the noble rank of an artist.

Those who have stopped short at the acquisition of the former faculty have made a means their end, have debased the designer to the servile though useful draughtsman of natural history: and those who have aspired to the second without gaining the first, have substituted air for substance, and attempted to raise a splendid fabric on a quicksand: the first have retarded the progress of the art; the second have perverted its nature: each has erred, to prove that the coalition of both is indispensable.

It has been said by a high authority within these walls, and indeed in the whole province of modern art, that as painting is the student's ultimate aim, the sooner you acquire the power of using the pencil, the better; but I am persuaded that we should pervert the meaning of the great artist we speak of, were we to conclude, that by this observation rather than precept, he meant to discourage the acquisition of correctness. The zealous votary of M. Agnolo could never mean this; he was too well acquainted with the process of that great man's studies, who placed the compass in the eye, not to find in the precision with which he had traced the elements, the foundation of his style. His breadth, he knew, was only the vehicle of his comprehension, and not vacuity; for breadth might easily be obtained, if emptiness can give it. All he meant to say was, that it mattered not whether you acquired correctness by the pencil, the crayon, or the pen, and that, as the sculptor models, the painter may paint his line; for though neither he who anxiously forms lines without the power of embodying them, nor he who floats loosely on masses of colour, can be said to design, this being merely the slave of a brush, that of a point, yet both tools may serve alternately or indiscriminately the purposes of the real designer. It is with the same intention of emancipating your practice from an exclusive and slavish attachment to any particular tool, that you are reminded by the same authority of the proverbial expression "Io tengo il disegno alle punta dei pennelli," "My design is at the point of my brush;" – though I am afraid the expression is dignified with the great name of Correggio through a lapse of memory, as it appears from Vasari that it was the petulant effusion of Girolamo da Trevigi, an obscure painter, in derision of the elaborate cartoon prepared by Pierino del Vaga for his fresco-painting in the great saloon of the Palace Doria at Genoa.

The same authority has repeatedly told us, that if we mean to be correct, we must scrutinize the principles on which the ancients reared their forms. What were those principles?

I shall not digress in search of them to that primitive epoch when the cestrum performed the functions of light and shade, and perhaps supplied linear painting with the faint hues of a stained drawing; nor yet to the second period, when practice had rendered the artist bolder, and the pencil assisted the cestrum; when Parrhasius, on the subtile examination of line and outline, established the canon of divine and heroic form; we shall find them acknowledged with equal submission in the brightest æra of Grecian execution, and the honour of exclusively possessing them contested by the most eminent names of that æra, Apelles and Protogenes. The name of Apelles, in ancient record, is the synonyme of unrivalled and unattainable excellence – he is the favourite mortal in whom, if we believe tradition, Nature exhibited for once a specimen of what her union with education and circumstances could produce; though the enumeration of his works by Pliny points out the modification which we ought to apply to the idea of that superiority. It consisted more in the union than in the extent of his powers; he knew better what he could do, what ought to be done, at what point he could arrive, and what lay beyond his reach, than any other artist. Grace of conception and refinement of taste were his elements, and went hand in hand with grace of execution and taste in finish. That he built both, not on the precarious and volatile blandishments of colour, or the delusive charms of light and shade, but on the solid foundation of form, acquired by precision and obedience of hand – not only the confessed inability of succeeding artists to finish his ultimate Venus, but his well-known contest of lines with Protogenes (the correctest finisher of his time), not a legendary tale, but a well attested fact, irrefragably proves. The panel on which they were drawn made part of the Imperial collection in the Palatium, existed in the time of Pliny, and was inspected by him; their evanescent subtilty, the only trait by which he mentions them, was not, as it appears, the effect of time, but of a delicacy, sweep, and freedom of hand nearly miraculous. What they were, drawn in different colours, and with the point of a brush, one upon the other, or rather within each other, it would be equally unavailing and useless for our purpose to enquire; but the corollaries we may deduce from the contest are obviously these: that all consists of elements; that the schools of Greece concurred in one elemental principle, fidelity of eye, and obedience of hand; that these form precision, precision proportion,94proportion symmetry, and symmetry Beauty: that it is the "little more or less," imperceptible to vulgar eyes, which constitutes Grace, and establishes the superiority of one artist over another: that the knowledge of the degrees of things, or Taste, presupposes a comparative knowledge of things themselves: that colour, grace, and taste are companions, not substitutes of form, expression, and character, and, when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid faults.

This precision of hand and eye presupposed, we now come to its application and object, Imitation, which rests on Nature.