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

If all ornament be allegoric, if it imply something allusive to the place, the person, or the design for which it is contrived, from that of a public building or a temple, to that of a library or the decorations of a toilette, how have the schools of Design, after the demise of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, observed its principle? Annibale Carracci, with the Capella Sistina and the Vatican before his eye, has filled the mansion of Episcopal dignity with a chaotic series of trite fable and bacchanalian revelry, without allegory, void of allusion, merely to gratify the puerile ostentation of dauntless execution and academic skill. And if we advert to a greater name, that of Pellegrino Tibaldi, is it easy to discover what relation exists between the adventures of Ulysses and the purposes and pursuits of the academical Institute of Bologna? and is it sufficient to exculpate him from impropriety of choice in his plan, if we say that the ceiling of Pellegrino Tibaldi is a doctrine of style, and that design and style are the principal pursuit of the students?

But perhaps it is not to Tiziano, but to Tintoretto and Paolo Cagliari, that the debaucheries of Colour and blind submission to fascinating tints, the rage of scattering flowers to no purpose, are ascribed. Let us select from Tintoretto's most extensive work the Scola of St. Rocco, the most extensive composition, and his acknowledged masterpiece, the Crucifixion, and compare its tone with that of Rubens and of Rembrandt for the same subject. What impression feels he, who for the first time casts a glance on the immense scenery of that work? a whole whose numberless parts are connected by a lowering, mournful, minacious tone. A general fearful silence hushes all around the central figure of the Saviour suspended on the cross, his fainting mother, and a group of male and female mourners at his foot: – a group of colours that less imitate than rival Nature, and tinged by grief itself; a scale of tones for which even Tiziano offers to me no parallel: yet all equally overcast by the lurid tone that stains the whole, and like a meteor hangs in the sickly air. Whatever inequality or derelictions of feeling, whatever improprieties of common place, of local and antique costume, the master's rapidity admitted to fill his space, and they are great, all vanish in the power which compresses them into a single point, and we do not detect them till we recover from our terror.

The picture of Rubens, which we oppose to Tintoretto, was painted for the church of St. Walburgha at Antwerp, after his return from Italy, and has been minutely described, and as exquisitely criticised by Reynolds: "Christ," he says, "is nailed to the cross, with a number of figures exerting themselves to raise it. The invention of throwing the cross obliquely from one corner of the picture to the other, is finely conceived; something in the manner of Tintoretto: " so far Reynolds. In Tintoretto it is the cross of one of the criminals that they attempt to raise, who casts his eye on Christ already raised. The body of Christ is the grandest, in my opinion, that Rubens ever painted; it seems to be imitated from the Torso of Apollonius, and that of the Laocoon. How far it be characteristic of Christ, or correspondent with the situation, I shall not here enquire; my object is the ruling tone of the whole, and of this the criticism quoted says not a word, though much of local colour and gray and ochry balance. Would so great a master of tone as Reynolds have forgot this master-key, if he had found it in the picture? The fact is, the picture has no other than the painter's usual tone: Rubens came to his work with gay technic exultation, and, by the magic of his palette, changed the terrors of Golgotha to an enchanted garden and clusters of flowers. Rembrandt, though on a smaller scale of size and composition, concentrated the tremendous moment in one flash of pallid light. It breaks on the body of Christ, shivers down his limbs, and vanishes on the armour of a crucifix; the rest is gloom.

Of Paolo Veronese, who was by far the most intemperate and florid of ornamental masters, the political allegories on the platfonds and compartments of the Ducal Palace, and the religious legends painted in the refectories of the convents, or as altar-pieces in the churches of Venice, differ materially in tone and style. Those were painted for the Senate, these for the people; and the superior orders were supposed to be better judges of real grandeur and propriety, than monastic ignorance and the bigoted and vulgar majority of the crowds that thronged the churches.

If, therefore, I were able to dissent in any thing relative to Colour from the great Master whose classification I comment, I should probably hesitate on the advice of adopting the palette of Rubens for the regulation of the tones that compose the Venetian style, of which his flowery tint formed but a part. What has been said of M. Agnolo in Form, may be said of Rubens in Colour: they had but one. As the one came to Nature, and moulded her to his generic form, the other came to Nature and tinged her with his colour – the colour of gay magnificence. He levelled his subject to his style, but seldom if ever his style with his subject; whatever be the subject of Rubens, legend, allegoric, stem, mournful, martyrdom, fable, epic, dramatic, lyric, grave or gay – the hues that embody, the air that tinges them, is indiscriminate expanse of gay magnificence. If the economy of his colours be that of an immense nosegay, he has not always connected the ingredients with a prismatic eye; the balance of the iris is not arbitrary, the balance of his colour often is. It was not to be expected that correctness of form should be the object of Rubens, though he was master of drawing, and even ambitious in the display of anatomic knowledge; but there is no mode of incorrectness, unless what directly militated against his style, such as meagreness, of which his works do not set an example. His male forms, generally the brawny pulp of slaughtermen; his females, hillocks of roses in overwhelmed muscles, grotesque attitudes, and distorted joints, are swept along in a gulph of colours, as herbage, trees and shrubs are whirled, tossed, and absorbed by inundation.

But whenever a subject comes genially within the vortex of his manner, such as that of the Gallery of Luxembourg, it then is not only characteristically excellent, but includes nearly a superhuman union of powers. In whatever light we consider that astonishing work, whether as a series of the most sublime conceptions, regulated by an uniform comprehensive plan, or as a system of colours and tones, exalting the subject, and seconded by magic execution, whatever may be its Venetian or Flemish flaws of mythology and Christianity, ideal and contemporary costume promiscuously displayed, it leaves all plans of Venetian allegory far behind, and rivals all their execution; if it be not equal in simplicity, or emulate in characteristic dignity, the plans of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, it excels them in the display of that magnificence which no modern eye can separate from the idea of Majesty.

TENTH LECTURE

THE METHOD OF FIXING A STANDARD AND DEFINING THE PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN FRAME,WITH DIRECTIONS TO THE STUDENT IN COPYING THE LIFETENTH LECTURE

The methods of fixing a standard and defining the proportions of the human frame, are either analytic or synthetic, from the whole to the parts, or from the parts to the whole, and have been promiscuously adopted. The human is the measure of perfection in Vitruvius; he applies its rules to architecture, and indeed to every object of taste.

The length of human proportion in Vitruvius, measured by a perpendicular, or a horizontal, from the middle finger points of both arms extended, is ten heads, the head measured from the chin to the hair-roots of the front; and eight if the head be measured from the extremity of the chin to the vertex of the crown. Three is the favourite number by which the theorists of proportion have divided the human structure, as containing a beginning, a middle, and an end; and Pliny observes that we attain the half of our growth in the third year. The body, as well as all its members, consists of three main parts, which correspond with each other, in the same proportion as the parts of the subordinate members among themselves: the head and body are in the same unison of measure with the thighs and legs, as the thighs with the legs and feet, or the upper part of the arm to the elbow and the hand. Thus the face is divided into three parts, or three times the length of the nose: never into four, as some have imagined; for the upper part of the head, from the hair-roots on the front to the top, measured perpendicularly, has only three-fourths of the nose length, or is in proportion to the nose as nine to twelve.

The rules of proportion originated, probably, with sculpture, but in the progress of art received their final determination from the painter: this is the praise of Parrhasius, and Praxiteles applied to Nicias for the ultimate decision and refinement of his forms. The foot was the main medium of ancient measurement; and six feet, according to Vitruvius, became the measured length of proportion for their statues. Measure is the method of ascertaining an unknown quantity from a known one; and the proportion of the foot is subject to less variation than the head or face. Lomazzo, when he makes the foot of Hercules the seventh part of his length, and fixes ten faces as the standard of ancient proportion for a Venus, nine for a Juno, and eight for Neptune, talked from fancy, and relied on the credulity of his reader.

This relation of the foot to the whole fabric, as established by Nature, the ancients regulated according to ideal or divine, and human or characteristic proportions. Of the Apollo, whose height is somewhat more than seven heads, the standing foot is three inches of a Roman palm longer than the head. The Medicean Venus, however 'suelt,' however small her head, has in length no more than seven heads and a half; and yet her foot measures a palm and a half, and the whole height of the figure six palms and a half.

Of such observations on proportion it would be easier to continue a long series than to make them intelligible or useful without actual demonstration or figures. From Vitruvius with his commentators, and Lionardo da Vinci, to Albert Durer, Lomazzo, and Jerome Cardan, from the corrected measurements of Du Fresnoy and De Piles, to Watelet, Winkelman, and Lavater, it would be easy to show that the mass of variance, peculiarity, and contradiction, greatly overbalances the coincidence of experiment and measure. "The descriptions of the proportions of the human frame," says Mengs, "are infinite, but seldom agree among themselves. Some are too obscure to give the artist a clear idea; some have too much limited the combinations which might produce, or are capable of, proportions homogeneously uniform: others, on the contrary, have, like Albert Durer, displayed a great quantity and variety of proportions, to little purpose for any one who should not choose to imitate his taste. The ordinary method is that of dividing the figure into a fixed number of heads or faces; but this division is of more use to the sculptor than the painter, who never can see the just size of the head, because perspective hides at least a third of the upper fourth; nor does the breadth of the limbs, in painting, admit of sculpture measure, as they would appear meagre and scanty on a flat surface, in comparison of the mass they circumscribe in perspective; because the habit of looking at objects with both eyes swells their mass beyond its just diameter, in reality as well as in sculpture. This difference of limbs the ancients observed in their best basso-relievoes; they exceed in volume the limbs of their statues. Such are the forms of the sacrificing group in the gardens of the Medicean Villa at Rome, represented in the Admiranda of Santes Bartoli, and imitated by Raffaello in the Cartoon of the Sacrifice at Lystra."

The painter is infinitely more in want of variety than the sculptor, and consequently cannot submit to the same restriction of rule. Raffaello, who in a certain sense did no more than multiply the antique style of the second order, uniting it with a certain air of truth not within the reach of sculpture, whether from rule or taste, made use of every kind of proportion without a seeming predilection for any. There are figures of his which have little more than six heads and a half: such as the St. Peter in the Cartoon of the Temple Gate; a proportion insufferable in any other painter but Raffaello.

It is reasonable to suppose, that in endeavouring to form a standard or a canon of proportion for the human figure, the Greeks began with the head, its form, its position, the manner in which it is attached to the trunk; they found that man alone carries his head erect, and that thence he derives a face and a countenance. Of all the brute creation, what is called the head is only an extremity of the horizontal body, whose under parts are shoved forward to seek food or seize prey; front and upper part are driven back, are shortened, and, in more than one genus, hardly perceivable. The more the brute is raised before and erects the neck, the more it gains variety of aspect; still it hangs forward, an appendix to the trunk: it cannot be properly said to have a head; the etymology of the word implies an erect position. A head, strictly speaking, is the prerogative of man, formed beneath a skull which rounds the forehead and determines the face. The more the front recedes and inclines to the horizontal, so much the nearer a head approaches the form of a brute; the more it inclines to the perpendicular, the more it gains of man. This observation has been demonstrated in the least fallible manner by Camper, the anatomist, who, by a contrivance equally ingenious and unequivocal, appears to have ascertained, not only the difference of the faceal line in animals, but that which discriminates nations. Placing the skull or head to be measured into a kind of sash or frame, pierced at equidistant intervals to admit the plummet and horizontal and perpendicular threads, he draws a straight line from the aperture of the ear to the under part of the nose, and another from the utmost projection of the frontal bone to the most prominent part of the upper jaw. The whole is divided into ninety or even one hundred degrees, from the actual maximum and minimum of Nature to those of Art. Birds describe the smallest angles, which widen in proportion as the animal approaches the human form: the heads of apes reach from forty-two to fifty degrees, which last approaches man. The Negro and Kalmuck reach seventy, the European eighty; the ancient Roman artists ascended to ninety-five, the Greeks raised the ideal from ninety to one hundred degrees. What goes beyond this line becomes portentous; the head appears misshapen, and assumes the appearance of a hydrocephalus. It is the limit set by Art, and established on this physical principle: that the more the form of the head reclines to the horizontal or overshoots the given perpendicular, the more the maxillæ are protruded or the more the front, the less it retains of the true human form, and degenerates into brute or monster.

From a head so determined, arose an harmonious system of features. Under a front as full as open, the frontal muscles assumed the seat of meaning; the cavity of the eyes became deeper, and took a regular and equal distance from the centre of the nose, a feature of which few of the moderns ever had a distinct idea; the mouth and lips were shaped for organs of command and persuasion, rather than appetite; and the apodosis of the whole, resolution and support, was given in the chin.

From a head so regulated, and placed on the most beautiful of all columns, the neck, the thinking artist could not fail to conclude to the rest of the body. As the under parts of the head were subordinate to the front, so was the lower part of the torso to the breast. The organs of mere nutrition, or appetite, and secretion, receded and were subjected to the nobler seats of action and vigour. Such harmony of system was not only the result of numeric proportion, of length and breadth of parts; it was the conception of one indivisibly connected whole, variously uniform: – god, goddess, hero, heroine, male, female, infancy, youth, virility and age, majesty, energy, agility, beauty, character, and passions, directed the method of treatment, and formed Style.

The sculptured monuments left by the ancients, that have escaped the wreck of time and compose the magnificent collections of the Academy and the Museum, amply prove that these assertions are not the visionary brood of fancy and sanguine wishes, whilst they offer to the student advantages which, perhaps, no ancient, certainly no modern schools ever could or can offer to theirs, not even that of formerly the real and still the nominal metropolis of Art – Rome.

These monuments may be aptly divided into three classes:

1st. Imitations, not seldom transcripts of Essential Nature.

2nd. Homogeneous delineations of Character; and

3rd. The highest and last —Ideal Figures.

The first shows to advantage what exists or existed; the second collects in one individual, what is scattered in his class; the third subordinates existence and character to beauty and sublimity.

The astonishing remains of gods, demigods, and heroes treasured in the Museum, from the Parthenon and the Temple of Phigalia, constitute the first epoch. They establish the elements of proportion, they show what is essential in the composition and construction of the human frame. The artist's principle remained, however, negative; he understood the best he saw, but did not attempt to add, or conclude from what was, to what might be. These works are commonly considered as the produce of the school of Phidias, and the substantiation of his principles: if they are, and there can be little doubt but they are, it must be owned, that the eulogies lately lavished on them, as presenting, even on their mutilated and battered surfaces, more of the real texture of the human frame, a better discrimination of bone, muscle, and tendon, than most of the works ascribed to more advanced periods, little agree with the verdict of the ancients, as pronounced by Pliny, on the real character of Phidias, the architect of gods, fitter to frame divinities than men, and leave him little more share in the formation of our figures than the conception. In beholding them, we say, such is man, real unsophisticated man, man warm from the hand of Nature, but not yet distinguished by her endless variety and difference of character. The Dioscuri of the Quirinal, the Lapithæ in conflict with the Centaurs from the Parthenon, and the heroes from the fabric of Ictinus, are brothers, and only differ in size and finish; whilst the Panathenaic processions offer the unvaried transcript of Athenian youth.

Delineation of character forms the second class of the figures in our possession, and the distinguishing feature of its artists. They found that, as all were connected by the genus and a central principle of form, so they were divided into classes, and from each other separated by an individual stamp, by character: to unite this with the simplicity of the generic principle was their aim; the symmetry prescribed by general proportion was modified and adapted, not sacrificed, to the demands of the peculiar quality which distinguished the attribute they undertook to personify. Thus the Hercules of Glycon, though the symbol of absolute, irresistible, and uniform strength, appears to be swift as a stag and elastic like a ball; and thus Agasias, the author of what the barbarity of custom still continues to misname the "Fighting Gladiator," though its style, evidently Iconic, be more connected with individual than generic nature, has spread over its whole the rapidity of lightning, and substantiated in its motion all Homer says of Hector rushing through the shattered portals of the Grecian wall – that, at that instant, nothing could have stopped him but a God.

The wounded Cornicularius, known by the name of the Dying Gladiator, the Savage whetting his knife to excoriate Marsyas, the enraged Shepherd Boy ludicrously transformed to a young Patroclus, are too undisguised portraits to deserve being ranked with this higher class of characteristic delineation. We with more exultation subjoin to it the Pathetic Groups which, to the historic artist, at once disclose the whole extent and limits of dramatic composition – the agonies of Niobe and her Progeny; the pangs of the Laocoon; Menelaus raising Patroclus slain by Hector; the Warrior who deserves to be called Hæmon, with Antigone, self-slain, hanging on his arm – the softer and more familiar expression of Æthra and Theseus, maternal enquiry and filial simplicity; Orestes and Pylades pouring libations to Agamemnon's shade; Venus expostulating with Amor, Amor embracing Psyche: works of different periods and different styles, but true to the same unerring principles, – principles not abandoned in the lascivious dream of the Hermaphrodite, the gross sonorous repose of the Faun, and the tottering inebriety of Hercules.

The artists of the third epoch concluded from existence to possibility. The simple purity of the first, and the energetic harmonious variety of the second period, were its bases; it amalgamated their artless angular line and rigid precision with the suavity of undulating contours, elegance of attitude, the soft inflexions of flesh: and created a standard of ideal beauty which regulated the whole, from the most prominent, conspicuous, and interesting, to the most remote and minute parts. The Apollo, the Venus, the Torso, arose to prove that in the same degree as in an image of art the idea of simplicity, or of one, predominates, it will partake of grandeur; and that in the degree as the idea of variety prevails, it will partake of beauty: variety leads to simplicity in images of beauty, simplicity to variety in images of grandeur, and the union of both produces the sublime.

Such are the splendid, and I repeat it, unparalleled advantages that surround you; but lest, by their specious display, I should be suspected of more enthusiasm than becomes the sober office of a teacher, and you be led to delusive expectations and false conclusions, remember that, though even the best directed labour cannot supply what Nature has refused, still it remains an experiment uniformly sanctioned by time, that without unwearied toil, obstinate perseverance, and submissive resignation, neither the theory nor the practice of the art can be fully acquired, and that without them genius is a bubble and talent a trifle.

And now permit me to finish this fragment of observations on Design with a few remarks on our mutual situation, as teachers and as pupils of this Institution: if the advancement of art be the cause and the ultimate aim of its foundation.

When in recommending the antique as the student's guide in copying the life, I comparatively might have seemed to depreciate the servile adherence to the model, I was perfectly aware that the use of life alone can supply the artist with the real expression, and consequently the real appearances of bones and muscles in varied action. It will not be suspected, I trust, that I meant to recommend the frigid introduction of that marble style, that pedantic stiffness, which, under the abused name of correctness, frequently disfigures the labours of those who, at too late a period for successful attempts at changing their manner, abjure or lose the courage to use what they had learnt before, and content themselves with being the tame transcribers of the dead letter, instead of the spirit of the ancients, and importers of nothing but forms and attitudes of stone.

It is to life we must recur, – to warm, fleshy, genial life, – for animated forms. To Nature and life Zeuxis applied, to embody the forms of Polycletus and Alcamenes: and what was the prerogative of Lysippus, but to give the air, the "morbidezza," the soft transitions, the illusions of palpitating life, to bronze and marble? The pedantry of geometrically straight lines is not only no idealism, it is a solecism in Nature. Organization, your object, is inseparable from life; motion from organization: where organization and life are, there is a seat of life, a punctum saliens, acting through veins and branching arteries, consequently with pulsation, and by that, undulating and rounding the passages of parts to parts. Of the milliards of commas, or points, that Nature mediately or immediately produces, no two are alike: how, then, could she produce straight lines, which are all similar, and by their nature cut, divide, interrupt, destroy?