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

Colour, like Design, has two essential parts, Imitation and Style. It begins in glare, is caught by deception, emerges to imitation, is finished by style, and debauched by manner.

Glare is always the first feature of a savage or an infant taste. The timid or barbarous beginner, afraid of impairing the splendour by diminishing the mass, exults in the Egyptian glare which he spreads over a surface unbroken by tint and not relieved by shade. Such are in general the flaming remnants of feudal decoration. This is the stage of missal painting; what Dante called "alluminar," the art of Cimabue; its taste continued, though in degrees less shocking, to the time of M. Agnolo and Raffaello. Gods, and mothers of Gods, Apostles and Martyrs, attracted devotion in proportion to the more or less gaudy colours in which they were arrayed. It was for this reason that Julius the Second wished M. Agnolo had added to the majesty of the Patriarchs and Sibyls by gold and lapis lazuli.

Deception follows glare; attempts to substitute by form or colour the image for the thing, always mark the puerility of taste, though sometimes its decrepitude. The microscopic precision of Denner, and even the fastidious, though broader detail of Gherard Douw, were symptoms of its dotage. The contest of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, if not a frolic, was an effort of puerile dexterity. But Deception, though at its ultimate pitch never more than the successful mimicry of absent objects, and for itself below the aim of art, is the mother of Imitation. We must penetrate the substances of things, acquaint ourselves with their peculiar hue and texture, and colour them in detail, before we can hope to seize their principle and give their general air.

Tiziano laboured first to make facsimiles of the stuffs he copied, before he changed them into drapery, and gave them local value and a place; he learnt first to distinguish tint from tint, and give the skeleton of colour, before he emboldened himself to take the greatest quantity of colour in an object for the whole; to paint flesh which abounded in demi-tints, entirely in demi-tints, and to deprive of all, that which had but a few. It was in the school of Deception he learnt the difference of diaphanous and opaque, of firm and juicy colour; that this refracts and that absorbs the light, and hence their place; those that cut and come forward, first, and those which more or less partake of the surrounding medium in various degrees of distance. It was here he learnt the contrast of the tints, of what is called warm and cold, and by their balance, diffusion, echo, to poise a whole. His eye as musical, if I may be allowed the metaphor, as his ear, abstracted here, that colour acts, affects, delights, like sound; that stern and deep-toned tints rouse, determine, invigorate the eye, as warlike sound or a deep bass the ear; and that bland, rosy, gray, and vernal tints soothe, charm, and melt like a sweet melody.

Such were the principles whose gradual evolution produced that coloured imitation which, far beyond the fascination of Giorgione, irresistibly entranced every eye that approached the magic of Tiziano Vecelli. To no colourist before or after him, did Nature unveil herself with that dignified familiarity in which she appeared to Tiziano. His organ, universal and equally fit for all her exhibitions, rendered her simplest to her most compound appearances with equal purity and truth. He penetrated the essence and the general principle of the substances before him, and on these established his theory of colour. He invented that breadth of local tint which no imitation has attained, and first expressed the negative nature of shade: his are the charms of glazing, and the mystery of reflexes, by which he detached, rounded, corrected or enriched his objects. His harmony is less indebted to the force of light and shade, or the artifices of contrast, than to a due balance of colour equally remote from monotony and spots. His tone springs out of his subject, solemn, grave, gay, minacious, or soothing; his eye tinged Nature with gold without impairing her freshness: she dictated his scenery. Landscape, whether it be considered as the transcript of a spot, or the rich combination of congenial objects, or as the scene of a phenomenon, as subject and as background, dates its origin from him. He is the father of portrait-painting, of resemblance with form, character with dignity, and costume with subordination.

Colour may be considered relatively to the whole or the detail of the parts that compose a picture. In that point of view it depends on the choice of a sovereign tone; in this on the skilful disposition, gradation, rounding, and variety of the subordinate tones, their principal light, the local colour, the half tints, the shades, and the reflexes.

The general regulation of the primary tone, and the specific arrangement of the subordinate ones for the rounding of every figure, is the same. In both, the attention is to be directed to obtain a principal mass of light, and a predominant colour. This is to be supported by the mutual assistance and reciprocal relief of secondary ones, must be associated with the demi-tint and the shades, and recalled and relieved by the reflexes.

When treating on Chiaroscuro, we have observed what may now be applied to Colour, that the primary tone depends on choice, and is arbitrary; but it decides all the rest, as the tone of the first violin in a regular concert tunes all the voices and all the instruments. Its effect entirely depends on the union of the surrounding tones with it, and has no other value but what it derives from contrast. By this the simplest tone, well managed, may become rich, splendid, and harmonious; it is then the tone of nature; whilst the most brilliant colour, if contradicted or disappointed by the detail of inferior ones, may become heavy, leathern, and discordant.

The best illustration of these principles is in the celebrated Notte of Correggio, where the Infant from the centre tinges the whole with his rays; but perhaps still more in its companion at Dresden, the less known picture of St. Sebastian; for to produce union and tone in the nearly equilateral composition of a votive picture, required a deeper comprehension and a steadier eye. Like the picture of Raffaello at Foligno, it represents the Madonna with the Infant in her arms, throned on clouds, in a central glory of sunny radiance, attended by angels, and surrounded by angelic forms: below are St. Geminian with a maiden by his side, St. Rocco and Sebastian tied to a tree. The first surprise is caused by the central light of the glory, which has all the splendour of a sun, though its colour is a yellow comparatively faint, and terminates in brown. The Madonna, dressed in a robe of glowing lake and a dark blue mantle, seems to start from this body of light as from a sombre ground, and as the Infant from her. The carnation of both is of a low tint, to support the keeping of their distance. The two angels at her side, in tints reflected from the centre, address the Saints below, and connect the upper with the lower part of the picture, which emerges from the darksome clouds on which they stand, and gathers its tones of light from the emanations of the central one, but in subordinate flashes, vanishing from twilight into massy shade. By those who have not seen this picture, a faint idea of its tone may be formed from the votive one of Parmegiano, at the Marquis of Abercorn's, which, had it received its last harmony, would probably have emulated the principle of that we have described.

The tones fit for Poetic painting are like its styles of design, generic or characteristic. The former is called negative, or composed of little more than chiaroscuro; the second admits, though not ambitiously, a greater variety and subdivision of tint. The first is the tone of M. Agnolo, the second that of Raffaello. The sovereign instrument of both is undoubtedly the simple, broad, pure, fresh, and limpid vehicle of Fresco. Fresco, which does not admit of that refined variety of tints that are the privilege of oil painting, and from the rapidity with which the earths, its chief materials, are absorbed, requires nearly immediate termination, is for those very reasons the immediate minister and the aptest vehicle of a great design. Its element is purity and breadth of tint. In no other style of painting could the generic forms of M. Agnolo have been divided, like night and day, into that breadth of light and shade which stamps their character. The silver purity of Correggio is the offspring of Fresco; his oil paintings are faint and tainted emanations of the freshness and "limpidezza" in his Frescoes. Oil, which rounds and conglutinates, spreads less than the sheety medium of Fresco, and if stretched into breadth beyond its natural tone, as the spirits which are used to extenuate its glue escape, returns upon itself, and oftener forms surfaces of dough, or wood, or crust, than fleshy fibre. Oil impeded the breadth even of the elemental colours of Tiziano in the Salute. The minute process inseparable from oil, is the reason why M. Agnolo declared oil painting to be a woman's method, or of idle men. The master of the colour we see in the Sistina could have no other: for though colour be the least considerable of that constellation of powers that blaze in its compartments, it is not the last or least accomplishment of the work. The flesh of the academic figures on the frames of the ceiling is a flesh even now superior to all the flesh of Annibale Carracci in the Farnese, generally pale though not cold, and never bricky though sometimes sanguine. The Jeremiah among the Prophets, glows with the glow of Tiziano, but in a breadth unknown to Giorgione and to him. The Eve under the Tree has the bland pearly harmony of Correggio; and some of the bodies in air on the lower part of the Last Judgement, less impaired by time or accident than the rest, for juice and warmth may still defy all competition. His colour sometimes even borders on characteristic variety, as in the composition of the Brazen Serpent. That a man who mastered his materials with such power, did reject the certain impediments and the precarious and inferior beauties of oil, which Sebastian del Piombo proposed for the execution of the Last Judgement, and who punished him for the proposal with his disdain for life, cannot be wondered at. If I have mentioned particular beauties of colour, it was more for others than to express what strikes me most. The parts, in the process of every man's work, are always marked with more or less felicity; and great as the beauties of those which I distinguished are, they would not be beauties in my eye, if obtained by a principle discordant from the rest.

The object of my admiration in M. Agnolo's colour is the tone, that comprehensive union of tint and hue spread over the whole, which seems less the effect of successive labour than a sudden and instantaneous exhalation, one principle of light, local colour, demi-tint and shade. Even the colours of the draperies, though perhaps too distinct, and often gayer than the gravity of their wearers or the subject allowed, are absorbed by the general tone, and appear so only on repeated inspection or separation from the rest. Raffaello did not come to his great work with the finished system, the absolute power over the materials, and the conscious authority of M. Agnolo. Though the august plan which his mind had conceived, admitted of lyric and allegoric ornament, it was, upon the whole, a drama and characteristic: he could not therefore apply to its mass the generic colour of the Sistina. Hence we see him struggling at the onset between the elements of that tone which the delineation of subdivided character and passions demanded, and the long imbibed habits and shackles of his master. But one great picture decided the struggle. This is evident from the difference of the upper and lower part of the Dispute on the Sacrament. The upper is the summit of Pietro Perugino's style, dignified and enlarged; the lower is his own. Every feature, limb, motion, the draperies, the lights and shades of the lower part, are toned and varied by character. The florid bloom of youth tinged with the glow of eagerness and impatience to be admitted; the sterner and more vigorous tint of long initiated and authoritative manhood; the inflamed suffusion of disputative zeal; the sickly hue of cloistered meditation; the brown and sun-tinged hermit, and the pale decrepit elder, contrast each other; but contrasted as they are, their whole action and colour remain subordinate to the general hue diffused by the serene solemnity of the surrounding medium, which is itself tinctured by the effulgence from above. A sufficient balance of light and shade maintains the whole, though more attention be paid to individual discrimination than masses. In the economy of the detail we find the lights no longer so white, the local colour no longer so crude, the passages to the demi-tints not so much spotted with red, nor the demi-tints themselves of so green a cast as in the four Symbolic Pictures on golden grounds of the ceiling.

It appears to me upon the whole, that for a general characteristic tone, Raffaello has never exceeded the purity of this picture. If in the School of Athens he has excelled it in individual tints, in tints that rival less than challenge the glow and juice of Titian, they are scattered more in fragments than in masses, and at the expense or with neglect of general unison, if we except the central and connecting figure of Epictetus. The predominance of tender flesh, and white or tinted drapery on the foreground, whilst the more distant groups are embrowned by masculine tints and draperies of deeper hue, prove, that if Raffaello could command individual colour, he had not penetrated its general principle.

The Parnassus in the same room has a ruling tone, but not the tone of a poetic fancy. Aërial freshness was his aim, and he is only frigid. Its principal actors are ideals of divine nature, and ought to move in a celestial medium, and Raffaello had no more an adequate colour than adequate forms for either. But whatever is characteristic, from the sublimity of Homer to the submissive affable courtesy of Horace and the directing finger of Pindar, is inimitable and in tune.

The ultimate powers of Raffaello, and, as far as I can judge, of Fresco, appear to me collected in the astonishing picture of the Heliodorus. This is not the place to dwell on the loftiness of conception, the mighty style of design, the refined and appropriate choice of character, the terror, fears, hopes, palpitation of expression, and the far more than Corregiesque graces of female forms; the Colour only, considered as a whole or in subordination, is our object. Though by the choice of the composition the back-ground, which is the sanctuary of the temple, embrowned with gold, diffuses a warmer gleam than the scenery of the foreground, its open area, yet by the dexterous management of opposing to its glazed cast a mass of vigorous and cruder flesh tints, a fiercer ebullition of impassioned hues, – the flash of steel and iron armour, and draperies of indigo, deep black and glowing crimson, the foreground maintains its place, and all is harmony.

Manifold as the subdivisions of character are, angelic, devout, authoritative, violent, brutal, vigorous, helpless, delicate; and various as the tints of the passions that sway them appear, elevated, warmed, inflamed, depressed, appalled, aghast, they are all united by the general tone that diffuses itself from the interior repose of the sanctuary, smoothens the whirlwind that fluctuates on the foreground, and gives an air of temperance to the whole.

NINTH LECTURE

COLOUR. – OIL PAINTING

NINTH LECTURE

Having finished the preceding lecture with observations on Fresco, a method of painting almost as much out of use as public encouragement, and perhaps better fitted for the serene Italian than the moist air of more northern climates, I now proceed to Oil Painting. The general medium of paint is Oil; and in that, according to the division of our illustrious commentator on Du Fresnoy, "all the modes of harmony, or of producing that effect of colours which is required in a picture, may be reduced to three, two of which belong to the Grand style, and the other to the Ornamental. The first may be called the Roman manner, where the colours are of a full and strong body, such as are found in the Transfiguration. The next is that harmony which is produced by what the ancients called the corruption98 of the colours, by mixing and breaking them till there is a general union in the whole, without any thing that shall bring to your remembrance the painter's palette or the original colours: this may be called the Bolognian style, and it is this hue and effect of colours which Ludovico Carracci seems to have endeavoured to produce, though he did not carry it to that perfection which we have seen since his time in the small works of the Dutch school, particularly Jan Steen, where art is completely concealed, and the painter, like a great orator, never draws the attention from the subject on himself. The last manner belongs properly to the ornamental style, which we call the Venetian, being first practised at Venice, but is perhaps better learned from Rubens: here the brightest colours possible are admitted, with the two extremes of warm and cold, and these reconciled by being dispersed over the picture, till the whole appears like a bunch of flowers."

As I perfectly coincide with this division, and the practical corollaries deduced from it, what I have to say relatively to each of these classes or styles will rather be a kind of commentary on it than a text containing a doctrine of my own.

If the Roman style of Historic colour be the style of Raffaello in the Transfiguration, it died with him; it is certainly not that Roman style which distinguishes that school from Giulio Romano to Carlo Maratti.

Though the Transfiguration be more remarkable for the characteristic division of its parts than for its masses, yet it has more than the breadth, a closer alliance and larger proportion of correspondent colours, and a much purer theory of shade than we meet with in the subsequent pictures of the same school; the picture at Genoa of the Lapidation of St. Stephen, by Giulio Romano, only excepted, which was probably soon after framed on the principles of the Transfiguration.

The crudeness of colour and asperity of tone observable in the Roman School, though founded on simplicity, is perhaps a greater proof of their want of eye and taste than of a pure historic principle. Harmony of colour consists in the due balance of all, equally remote from monotony and from spots. Though each part of Roman pictures be painted with sufficient breadth of manner, their discordance is such that they do not coalesce into one whole, but appear unconnected fragments in apposition. Their theory of shade is so defective, that the parts deprived of light of the same body, or the same piece of drapery, are not effaced, but coloured. If the positive reds and blues of the Roman school invigorate the eye, they likewise command it, and counteract the grandeur of History in a degree not much inferior to the bad effect produced by the imitation of stuffs discriminated according to their texture; their bright asperity, and bleak purity, equally pervert the negative and subordinate character of drapery, and attract a larger share of attention from the beholder than they deserve. A Madonna in the hands of Carlo Maratti, and sometimes even of Raffaello, at least in his earlier productions, is the least visible part of herself. The most celebrated Madonna of Andrea del Sarto, though in Fresco, is certainly more indebted to her drapery than her face, perhaps still more to the sack on which her husband rests, and from which the picture got its name.

From this censure we ought to except M. Angelo Caravaggi, and Andrea Sacchi, whose works, though else so dissimilar in principle and execution, coincide in reducing colour frequently to little more than chiaroscuro; the one for melancholy and forcible, the other for visionary or devotional effects.

The Pilgrims adoring the Madonna with the Infant in St. Agostino, by the former, seem not painted but tinged in the last golden ray of departing eve; whilst the Vision of St Romualdo, by the latter, surrounds us with gray twilight and gradual evanescence.

A general style of colours thus amalgamated, appears to me a principle much superior to that of corruption of them, which Plutarch mentions as the invention of Apollodorus the Athenian, when painting had scarcely emerged from the linear process, and it required some courage to wield a brush. If the ancients ever possessed the Bolognese corruption of colours, it must have been in periods of refinement. The Φθορα of Apollodorus was probably the invention of demi-tints, the effect of which is produced by "corrupting" or lowering the elemental purity of the two of which it is composed. 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 Lodovico Carracci spread over his works, could arise only from the contemplation of various preceding styles, or their comparison with nature and the object of his choice.

The ideal of his style is a harmony equally remote from affected brilliancy and vulgar resemblance of tints. Its element is gravity, and whenever this inspires not its imitation, it will be less serious than sullen, flat not even, heavy without vigour, and the despatching tool of mediocrity.

If this be that dignified colour of Lombardy, recommended by Agostino Carracci, his own picture of the Communion of St. Jerome, and the Dead Christ among the Maries by Annibale, (which we have seen here,) excepted, its principle was not adopted by that third ruler of the Carracci school, nor any of its pupils.

Annibale, from want of feelings, changed the mild evening ray of his Cousin to the sullen light of a cloudy day, and in the exultation of mechanic power swims on his work like oil: Guido was too gay and affected; Guercino too cutting and vulgar; Albano too airy and insubstantial for it. Under the hand and guided by the sensibility of Lodovico, it communicated itself even to the open silvery tone of Fresco.

In the cloisters of St. Michele in Bosco, it equally moderates the deep-toned tints of the muscular labourers of the hermitage and of the ponderous demon who mocks their toil, the warlike splendour in the homage of Totila, the flash of the nocturnal conflagration, and the three insidious Nymphs in the garden scene, who even now, though nearly in a state of evanescence, seem moulded by the hand and tinged by the breath of Love; all are sainted by this solemn tone.

Its triumph in Oil is the altar-piece of St. John preaching, in a chapel of the Certosa, whose lights seem embrowned by a golden veil, and the shadowy gleam of Valombrosa; but Lodovico sometimes indulged in tones austere, pronounced, and hardy. Such is the Flagellation of Christ in the same church, of which the tremendous depth of flesh-tints contrasts the open, wide-expanded sky, and less conveys, than dashes its terrors on the astonished sense.

The third, or Ornamental style, could scarcely arise in any other state of Italy than Venice. Venice was the centre of commerce, the repository of the riches of the globe, the splendid toy-shop of the time: its chief inhabitants princely merchants, or a patrician race elevated to rank by accumulations from trade or naval prowess; the bulk of the people mechanics or artisans, administering the means, and, in their turn, fed by the produce of luxury. Of such a system, what could the Art be more than the parasite? Religion itself had exchanged its gravity for the allurements of ear and eye, and even sanctity disgusted, unless arrayed by the gorgeous hand of fashion. Such was, such will always be the birth-place and the theatre of Colour; and hence it is more matter of wonder that the first and greatest colourists should so long have foreborne to overstep the modesty of Nature in the use of that alluring medium, than that they sacrificed, in part, propriety to its golden solicitation.

I say in part, for Tiziano perhaps never, Paolo and Tintoretto, though by much too often, yet not always, spread the enchanting nosegay, which is the characteristic of this style, with indiscriminate hand. The style of Tiziano may be divided into three periods: when he copied, when he imitated, when he strove to generalize, to elevate, or invigorate the tones of Nature. The first is anxious and precise, the second beautiful and voluptuous, the third sublime. In the second the parts lead to the whole, in this the whole to the parts; it is that master-style which in discriminated tones imparts to ornament a monumental grandeur. It gave that celestial colour which consideration like an angel spread over the Salutation in St. Rocco; the colour that wafts its wide expanse and elemental purity over the primitive scenes of his Abel, Abraham, and David, in the Salute; the colour that tinged with artless solemn majesty the Apotheosis of the Virgin in the church de' Frati, embodied adoration in its portraits, and changed the robes of pomp and warlike glitter to servants of simplicity. Such is the tone which diffuses its terrors and its glories in Pietro Martyre over the martyred hermits of the mountain forest, and taught the painter's eye to "glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." If this be ornament, what but the Vatican can the schools of Design oppose to its grandeur and propriety!