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ARGUMENT.

Introduction--different direction of the art. Preparative style--Masaccio--Lionardo da Vinci. Style of establishment--Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titiano, Correggio. Style of refinement, and depravation. Schools--of Tuscany, Rome, Venice, Lombardy. The Ecclectic school. Machinists. The German school--Albert Durer. The Flemish school--Rubens. The Dutch school--Rembrandt. Observations on art in Switzerland. The French school. The Spanish school. England--Conclusion.

SECOND LECTURE

In the preceding discourse I have endeavoured to impress you with the general features of ancient art in its different periods of preparation, establishment, and refinement. We are now arrived at the epoch of its restoration in the fifteenth century of our aera, when religion and wealth rousing emulation, reproduced its powers, but gave to their exertion a very different direction. The reigning church found itself indeed under the necessity of giving more splendour to the temples and mansions destined to receive its votaries, of subduing their senses with the charm of appropriate images and the exhibition of events and actions, which might stimulate their zeal and inflame their hearts: but the sacred mysteries of divine Being, the method adopted by Revelation, the duties its doctrine imposed, the virtues it demanded from its followers, faith, resignation, humility, sufferings, substituted a medium of art as much inferior to the resources of Paganism in a physical sense as incomparably superior in a spiritual one. Those public customs, that perhaps as much tended to spread the infections of vice as they facilitated the means of art, were no more; the heroism of the Christian and his beauty were internal, and powerful or exquisite forms allied him no longer exclusively to his God. The chief repertory of the artist, the sacred records, furnished indeed a sublime cosmogony, scenes of patriarchal simplicity and a poetic race, which left nothing to regret in the loss of heathen mythology; but the stem of the nation whose history is its exclusive theme, if it abounded in characters and powers fit for the exhibition of passions, did not teem with forms sufficiently exalted, to inform the artist and elevate the art. Ingredients of a baser cast mingled their alloy with the materials of grandeur and of beauty. Monastic legend and the rubric of martyrology claimed more than a legitimate share from the labours of the pencil and the chisel, made nudity the exclusive property of emaciated hermits or decrepit age, and if the breast of manhood was allowed to bare its vigour, or beauty to expand her bosom, the antidotes of terrour and of horrour were ready at their side to check the apprehended infection of their charms. When we add to this the heterogeneous stock on which the reviving system of arts was grafted, a race indeed inhabiting a genial climate, but itself the foeces of barbarity, the remnants of Gothic adventurers, humanised only by the cross, mouldering amid the ruins of the temples they had demolished, the battered fragments of the images their rage had crushed--when we add this, I say, we shall less wonder at the languor of modern art in its rise and progress, than be astonished at the vigour by which it adapted and raised materials partly so unfit and defective, partly so contaminated, to the magnificent system which we are to contemplate.

Sculpture had already produced respectable specimens of its reviving powers in the bassorelievos of Lorenzo Ghiberti, some works of Donato, and the Christ of Philippo Brunelleschi, when the first symptoms of imitation appeared in the frescos of Tommaso da St. Giovanni, commonly called Masaccio, from the total neglect of his appearance and person: Masaccio first conceived that parts are to constitute a whole; that composition ought to have a centre; expression, truth; and execution, unity: his line deserves attention, though his subjects led him not to investigation of form, and the shortness of his life forbade his extending those elements which Raphael, nearly a century afterward, carried to perfection--it is sufficiently glorious for him to have been more than once copied by that great master of expression, and in some degree to have been the herald of his style: Masaccio lives more in the figure of Paul preaching on the areopagus, of the celebrated cartoon in our possession, and in the borrowed figure of Adam expelled from paradise in the loggia of the Vatican, than in his own mutilated or retouched remains.

The essays of Masaccio in imitation and expression, Andrea Mantegna attempted to unite with form; led by the contemplation of the antique, fragments of which he ambitiously scattered over his works: though a Lombard, and born prior to the discovery of the best ancient statues, he seems to have been acquainted with a variety of characters, from forms that remind us of the Apollo, Mercury or Meleager, down to the fauns and satyrs: but his taste was too crude, his fancy too grotesque, and his comprehension too weak to advert from the parts that remained to the whole that inspired them: hence in his figures of dignity or beauty we see not only the meagre forms of common models, but even their defects tacked to ideal Torso's; and his fauns and satyrs, instead of native luxuriance of growth and the sportive appendages of mixed being, are decorated with heraldic excrescences and arabesque absurdity. His triumphs are known to you all; they are a copious inventory of classic lumber, swept together with more industry than taste, but full of valuable materials. Of expression he was not ignorant: his burial of Christ furnished Raphael with the composition, and some of the features and attitudes in his picture on the same subject in the palace of the Borghese's--the figure of St. John, however, left out by Raphael, proves that Mantegna sometimes mistook grimace for the highest degree of grief. His oil-pictures exhibit little more than the elaborate anguish of missal-painting; his frescoes destroyed at the construction of the Clementine museum, had freshness, freedom and imitation.

Such was the dawn of modern art, when Lionardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour which distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius, favoured by education and circumstances, all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor, anatomist, architect, engineer, chemist, machinist, musician, man of science, and sometimes empiric, he laid hold of every beauty in the enchanted circle, but without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed in her turn each. Fitter to scatter hints than to teach by example, he wasted life, insatiate, in experiment. To a capacity which at once penetrated the principle and real aim of the art, he joined an inequality of fancy that at one moment lent him wings for the pursuit of beauty, and the next, flung him on the ground to crawl after deformity: we owe him chiaroscuro with all its magic, we owe him caricature with all its incongruities. His notions of the most elaborate finish and his want of perseverance were at least equal:--want of perseverance alone could make him abandon his cartoon destined for the great council-chamber at Florence, of which the celebrated contest of horsemen was but one group; for to him who could organize that composition, Michael Angelo himself ought rather to have been an object of emulation than of fear: and that he was able to organize it, we may be certain from the remaining imperfect sketch in the 'Etruria Pittrice;' but still more from the admirable print of it by Edelinck, after a drawing of Rubens, who was Lionardo's great admirer, and has said much to impress us with the beauties of his last supper in the refectory of the Dominicans at Milano, the only one of his great works which he carried to ultimate finish, through all its parts, from the head of Christ to the least important one: it perished soon after him, and we can estimate the loss only from the copies that survive.

Bartolomeo della Porta, or di S. Marco, the last master of this period, first gave gradation to colour, form and masses to drapery, and a grave dignity, till then unknown, to execution. If he was not endowed with the versatility and comprehension of Lionardo, his principles were less mixed with base matter and less apt to mislead him. As a member of a religious order, he confined himself to subjects and characters of piety, but the few nudities which he allowed himself to exhibit, show sufficient intelligence and still more style: he foreshortened with truth and boldness, and whenever the figure did admit of it, made his drapery the vehicle of the limb it invests. He was the true master of Raphael, whom his tuition weaned from the meanness of Pietro Perugino, and prepared for the mighty style of Michael Angelo Buonarroti.

The inspiration of Michael Angelo was followed by the milder genius of Raphael Sanzio, the father of dramatic painting, the painter of humanity; less elevated, less vigorous, but more insinuating, more pressing on our hearts, the warm master of our sympathies. What effect of human connexion, what feature of the mind, from the gentlest emotion to the most fervid burst of passion, has been left unobserved, has not received a characteristic stamp from that examiner of man? M. Angelo came to nature, nature came to Raphael--he transmitted her features like a lucid glass unstained, unmodified. We stand with awe before M. Angelo, and tremble at the height to which he elevates us--we embrace Raphael, and follow him wherever he leads us. Energy, with propriety of character and modest grace poise his line and determine his correctness. Perfect human beauty he has not represented; no face of Raphael's is perfectly beautiful; no figure of his, in the abstract, possesses the proportions that could raise it to a standard of imitation: form to him was only a vehicle of character or pathos, and to those he adapted it in a mode and with a truth which leaves all attempts at emendation hopeless. His invention connects the utmost stretch of possibility, with the most plausible degree of probability, in a manner that equally surprizes our fancy, persuades our judgment, and affects our heart. His composition always hastens to the most necessary point as its centre, and from that disseminates, to that leads back as rays, all secondary ones. Group, form, and contrast are subordinate to the event, and common-place ever excluded. His expression, in strict unison with and decided by character, whether calm, animated, agitated, convulsed, or absorbed by the inspiring passion, unmixed and pure, never contradicts its cause, equally remote from tameness and grimace: the moment of his choice never suffers the action to stagnate or to expire; it is the moment of transition, the crisis big with the past and pregnant with the future.--If, separately taken, the line of Raphael has been excelled in correctness, elegance, and energy; his colour far surpassed in tone and truth, and harmony; his masses in roundness, and his chiaroscuro in effect--considered as instruments of pathos, they have never been equalled; and in composition, invention, expression, and the power of telling a story, he has never been approached.

Whilst the superiour principles of the art were receiving the homage of Tuscany and Rome, the inferiour but more alluring charm of colour began to spread its fascination at Venice, from the pallet of Giorgione da Castel Franco, and irresistibly entranced every eye that approached the magic of Titiano Vecelli of Cador. To no colourist before or after him, did nature unveil herself with that dignified familiarity in which she appeared to Titiano. 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, connected, 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 backgrounds seem to be dictated by nature. Landscape, whether it be considered as the transcript of a spot, or the rich combination of congenial objects, or as the scene of a phoenomenon, dates its origin from him: he is the father of portrait painting, of resemblance with form, character with dignity, and costume with subordination.

Another charm was yet wanting to complete the round of art--harmony: it appeared with Antonio Laeti called Correggio, whose works it attended like an enchanted spirit. The harmony and the grace of Correggio are proverbial: the medium which by breadth of gradation unites two opposite principles, the coalition of light and darkness by imperceptible transition, are the element of his style.--This inspires his figures with grace, to this their grace is subordinate: the most appropriate, the most elegant attitudes were adopted, rejected, perhaps sacrificed to the most awkward ones, in compliance with this imperious principle: parts vanished, were absorbed, or emerged in obedience to it. This unison of a whole, predominates over all that remains of him, from the vastness of his cupolas to the smallest of his oil-pictures.--The harmony of Correggio, though assisted by exquisite hues, was entirely independent of colour: his great organ was chiaroscuro in its most extensive sense; compared with the expanse in which he floats, the effects of Lionardo da Vinci are little more than the dying ray of evening, and the concentrated flash of Giorgione discordant abruptness. The bland central light of a globe, imperceptibly gliding through lucid demi-tints into rich reflected shades, composes the spell of Correggio, and affects us with the soft emotions of a delicious dream.

Such was the ingenuity that prepared, and such the genius that raised to its height the fabric of modern art. Before we proceed to the next epoch, let us make an observation:

Form not your judgment of an artist from the exceptions which his conduct may furnish, from the exertions of accidental vigour, some deviations into other walks, or some unpremeditated flights of fancy, but from the predominant rule of his system, the general principle of his works. The line and style of Titian's design, sometimes expand themselves like those of Michael Angelo. His Abraham prevented from sacrificing Isaac; his David adoring over the giant-trunk of Goliah; the Friar escaping from the murderer of his companion in the forest, equal in loftiness of conception and style of design, their mighty tone of colour and daring execution: the heads and groups of Raphael's frescos and portraits sometimes glow and palpitate with the tints of Titian, or coalesce in masses of harmony, and undulate with graces superior to those of Correggio; who in his turn once reached the highest summit of invention, when he embodied silence and personified the mysteries of love in the voluptuous group of Jupiter and Io; and again exceeded all competition of expression in the divine features of his Ecce-Homo. But these sudden irradiations, these flashes of power are only exceptions from their wonted principles; pathos and character own Raphael for their master, colour remains the domain of Titian, and harmony the sovereign mistress of Correggio.

Whilst Michael Angelo was doomed to lament the perversion of his style, death prevented Raphael from witnessing the gradual decay of his. The exuberant fertility of Julio Pipi called Romano, and the less extensive but classic taste of Polydoro da Caravaggio deserted indeed the standard of their master, but with a dignity and magnitude of compass which command respect. It is less from his tutored works in the Vatican, than from the colossal conceptions, the pathetic or sublime allegories, and the voluptuous reveries which enchant the palace del T, near Mantoua, that we must form our estimate of Julio's powers; they were of a size to challenge all competition, had he united purity of taste and delicacy of mind with energy and loftiness of thought; as they are, they resemble a mighty stream, sometimes flowing in a full and limpid vein, but oftener turbid with rubbish. He has left specimens of composition from the most sublime to the most extravagant; to a primeval simplicity of conception in his mythologic subjects, which transports us to the golden age of Hesiod, he joined a rage for the grotesque; to uncommon powers of expression a decided attachment to deformity and grimace, and to the warmest and most genial imagery, the most ungenial colour.

The compact style of Polydoro, formed on the antique, such as it is exhibited in the best series of the Roman military bassorelievos, is more monumental, than imitative or characteristic. But the virility of his taste, the impassioned motion of his groups, the simplicity, breadth, and never excelled elegance and probability of his drapery, with the forcible chiaroscuro of his compositions, make us regret the narrowness of the walk, to which he confined his powers.

No painter ever painted his own mind so forcibly as Michael Angelo Amerigi, surnamed Il Caravaggi. To none nature ever set limits with a more decided hand. Darkness gave him light; into his melancholy cell light stole only with a pale reluctant ray, or broke on it, as flashes on a stormy night. The most vulgar forms he recommended by ideal light and shade, and a tremendous breadth of manner.

The aim and style of the Roman school deserve little further notice here, till the appearance of Nicolas Poussin a Frenchman, but grafted on the Roman stock. Bred under Quintin Varin a French painter of mediocrity, he found on his arrival in Italy that he had more to unlearn than to follow of his master's principles, renounced the national character, and not only with the utmost ardour adopted, but suffered himself to be wholly absorbed by the antique. Such was his attachment to the ancients, that it may be said he less imitated their spirit than copied their relics and painted sculpture; the costume, the mythology, the rites of antiquity were his element; his scenery, his landscape are pure classic ground. He has left specimens to shew that he was sometimes sublime, and often in the highest degree pathetic, but history in the strictest sense, was his property, and in that he ought to be followed. His agents only appear, to tell the fact, they are subordinate to the story. Sometimes he attempted to tell a story that cannot be told: of his historic dignity the celebrated series of Sacraments; of his sublimity, the vision he gave to Coriolanus; of his pathetic power, the infant Pyrrhus; and of the vain attempt to tell by figures what words alone can tell, the testament of Eudamidas, are striking instances. His eye, though impressed with the tint, and breadth, and imitation of Titiano, seldom inspired him to charm with colour, crudity and patches frequently deform his effects. He is unequal in his style of design; sometimes his comprehension fails him, he supplies, like Pietro Testa, ideal heads and torso's with limbs and extremities transcribed from the model. Whether from choice or want of power he has seldom executed his conceptions on a larger scale than that which bears his name, and which has perhaps as much contributed to make him the darling of this country, as his merit.

The wildness of Salvator Rosa opposes a powerful contrast to the classic regularity of Poussin. Terrific and grand in his conceptions of inanimate nature, he was reduced to attempts of hiding by boldness of hand, his inability of exhibiting her impassioned, or in the dignity of character: his line is vulgar: his magic visions less founded on principles of terrour than on mythologic trash and caprice, are to the probable combinations of nature, what the paroxysms of a fever are to the flights of vigorous fancy. Though so much extolled and so ambitiously imitated, his banditti are a medley made up of starveling models, shreds and bits of armour from his lumber-room, brushed into notice by a daring pencil. Salvator was a satyrist and a critic, but the rod which he had the insolence to lift against the nudities of Michael Angelo, and the anachronism of Raphael, would have been better employed in chastising his own misconceptions.

The principle of Titiano, less pure in itself and less decided in its object of imitation, did not suffer so much from its more or less appropriate application by his successors, as the former two. Colour once in a very high degree attained, disdains subordination and engrosses the whole. Mutual similarity attracts, body tends to body, as mind to mind, and he, who has once gained supreme dominion over the eye, will hardly resign it to court the more coy approbation of mind, of a few opposed to nearly all. Add to this the character of the place and the nature of the encouragement held out to the Venetian artists. 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 forborne to overstep the modesty of nature in the use of that alluring medium, than that they yielded by degrees to its golden solicitations.

The principle of Correggio vanished with its author, though it found numerous imitators of its parts. Since him, no eye has conceived that expanse of harmony with which the voluptuous sensibility of his mind arranged and enchanted all visible nature. His grace, so much vaunted and so little understood, was adopted and improved to elegance by Francesco Mazzuoli, called il Parmegiano, but instead of making her the measure of propriety he degraded her to affectation: in Parmegiano's figures action is the adjective of the posture; the accident of attitude; they 'make themselves air, into which they vanish.' That disengaged play of delicate forms, the 'Sueltezza' of the Italians, is the prerogative of Parmegiano, though nearly always obtained at the expence of proportion. His grandeur as conscious as his grace, sacrifices the motive to the mode, simplicity to contrast: his St. John loses the fervour of the apostle in the orator; his Moses the dignity of the lawgiver in the savage. With incredible force of chiaroscuro, he united bland effects and fascinating hues, but their frequent ruins teach the important lesson, that the mixtures which anticipate the beauties of time, are big with the seeds of premature decay.

Such was the state of the art, when, towards the decline of the sixteenth century, Lodovico Carracci, with his cousins Agostino and Annibale, founded at Bologna that ecclectic school, which by selecting the beauties, correcting the faults, supplying the defects and avoiding the extremes of the different styles, attempted to form a perfect system. But as the mechanic part was their only object, they did not perceive that the projected union was incompatible with the leading principle of each master. Let us hear this plan from Agostino Carracci himself, as it is laid down in his sonnet on the ingredients required to form a perfect painter, if that may be called a sonnet, which has more the air of medical prescription. 'Take,' says Agostino, 'the design of Rome, Venetian motion and shade, the dignified tone of Lombardy's colour, the terrible manner of Michael Angelo, the just symmetry of Raphael, Titiano's truth of nature, and the sovereign purity of Correggio's style: add to these the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, the learned invention of Primaticcio, and a little of Parmegiano's grace: but to save so much study, such weary labour, apply your imitation to the works which our dear Nicolo has left us here.' Of such advice, balanced between the tone of regular breeding and the cant of an empiric, what could be the result? excellence or mediocrity? who ever imagined that a multitude of dissimilar threads could compose an uniform texture, that dissemination of spots would make masses, or a little of many things produce a legitimate whole? indiscriminate imitation must end in the extinction of character, and that in mediocrity--the cypher of art.

And were the Carracci such? separate the precept from the practice, the artist from the teacher; and the Carracci are in possession of my submissive homage. Lodovico, far from implicitly subscribing to a master's dictates, was the sworn pupil of nature. To a modest style of form, to a simplicity eminently fitted for those subjects of religious gravity which his taste preferred, he joined that solemnity of hue, that sober twilight, the air of cloistered meditation, which you have so often heard recommended as the proper tone of historic colour. Too often content to rear the humbler graces of his subject, he seldom courted elegance, but always, when he did, with enviable success. Even now, though nearly in a state of evanescence, the three nymphs in the garden scene of St. Michele in Bosco, seem moulded by the hand, inspired by the breath of love. Agostino, with a singular modesty which prompted him rather to propagate the fame of others by his graver, than by steady exertion to rely on his own power for perpetuity of name, combined with some learning a cultivated taste, correctness, though not elegance of form, and a corregiesque colour. Annibale, superior to both in power of execution and academic prowess, was inferior to either in taste and sensibility and judgment; for the most striking proof of this inferiority I appeal to his master-work, the work on which he rests his fame, the gallery of the Farnese palace: a work whose uniform vigour of execution, nothing can equal but its imbecility and incongruity of conception. If impropriety of ornament were to be fixed by definition, the subjects of the Farnese gallery might be quoted as the most decisive instances. Criticism has attempted to dismiss Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto from the province of legitimate history with the contemptuous appellation of ornamental painters, not for having painted subjects inapplicable to the public and private palaces, the churches and convents, which they were employed to decorate, but because they treated them sometimes without regard to costume, or the simplicity due to sacred, heroic or allegoric subjects: if this be just, where shall we class him, who with the Capella Sistina, and the Vatican before his eye, fills the mansion of religious austerity and 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 vigour? if the praise given to a work be not always transferable to its master; if, as Milton says, 'the work some praise and some the architect,' let us admire the splendour, the exuberance, the concentration of powers displayed in the Farnese gallery, whilst we lament their misapplication by Annibale Carracci.

The heterogeneous principle of the ecclectic school soon operated its own dissolution: the great talents which the Carracci had tutored, soon found their own bias, and abandoned themselves to their own peculiar taste. B. Schidone died young in 1615. Barto. Schidone, Guido Reni, Giovanni Lanfranco, Francesco Albani, Domenico Zampieri, and Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino, differed as much in their objects of imitation as their names. Schidone, all of whose mind was in his eye, embraced, and often to meaner subjects applied the harmony and colour of Correggio, whilst Lanfranco strove, but strove without success, to follow him through the expanse of his creation and masses. Grace attracted Guido, but it was the studied grace of theatres: his female forms are abstracts of antique beauty, attended by languishing attitudes, arrayed by voluptuous fashions. His male forms, transcripts of models, such as are found in a genial climate, are sometimes highly characteristic of dignified manhood or apostolic fervour, like his Peter and Paul, formerly in the Zampieri at Bologna: sometimes stately, courteous, insipid, like his Paris attending Helen, more with the air of an ambassadour, by proxy, than carrying her off with a lover's fervour. His Aurora deserved to precede a more majestic sun, and hours less clumsy: his colour varies with his style, sometimes bland and harmonious, sometimes vigorous and stern, sometimes flat and insipid. Albani, chiefly attracted by soft mythologic conceits, formed nereids and oreads on plump Venetian models, and contrasted their pearly hues with the rosy tints of loves, the juicy brown of fauns and satyrs, and rich marine or sylvan scenery. Domenichino, more obedient than the rest to his masters, aimed at the beauty of the antique, the expression of Raphael, the vigour of Annibale, the colour of Lodovico, and mixing something of each, fell short of all; whilst Guercino broke like a torrent over all academic rules, and with an ungovernable itch of copying whatever lay in his way, sacrificed mind, form and costume, to effects of colour, fierceness of chiaroscuro, and intrepidity of hand.

Such was the state of art, when the spirit of machinery, in submission to the vanities and upstart pride of papal nepotism, destroyed what yet was left of meaning; when equilibration, contrast, grouping, engrossed composition, and poured a deluge of gay common-place over the platfonds, pannels, and cupolas of palaces and temples. Those who could not conceive a figure singly, scattered multitudes; to count, was to be poor. The rainbow and the seasons were ransacked for their hues, and every eye became the tributary of the great, but abused talents of Pietro da Cortona, and the fascinating but debauched and empty facility of Luca Giordano.

The same revolution of mind that had organized the arts of Italy, spread, without visible communication, to Germany, and towards the decline of the fifteenth century, the uncouth essays of Martin Sch?n, Michael Wolgemuth, and Albrecht Altorfer, were succeeded by the finer polish and the more dextrous method of Albert Durer. The indiscriminate use of the words genius and talent has perhaps no where caused more confusion than in the classification of artists. Albert Durer was in my opinion a man of great ingenuity, without being a genius. He studied, and, as far as his penetration reached, established certain proportions of the human frame, but he did not invent a style: every work of his is a proof that he wanted the power of imitation, of concluding from what he saw, to what he did not see, that he copied rather than selected the forms that surrounded him, and sans remorse tacked deformity and meagreness to fulness, and sometimes to beauty. Such is his design; in composition copious without taste, anxiously precise in parts, and unmindful of the whole, he has rather shewn us what to avoid than what to follow. He sometimes had a glimpse of the sublime, but it was only a glimpse: the expanded agony of Christ on the mount of Olives, and the mystic conception of his figure of Melancholy, are thoughts of sublimity, though the expression of the last is weakened by the rubbish he has thrown about her. His Knight, attended by Death and the Fiend, is more capricious than terrible; and his Adam and Eve are two common models shut up in a rocky dungeon. If he approached genius in any part of art, it was in colour. His colour went beyond his age, and as far excelled in truth and breadth and handling the oil colour of Raphael, as Raphael excels him in every other quality. I speak of easel-pictures--his drapery is broad though much too angular, and rather snapt than folded. Albert is called the father of the German school, though he neither reared scholars, nor was imitated by the German artists of his or the succeeding century. That the exportation of his works to Italy should have effected a temporary change in the principles of some Tuscans who had studied Michael Angelo, of Andrea del Sarto, and Jacopo da Pontormo, is a fact which proves that minds at certain periods may be subject to epidemic influence as well as bodies.

Lucas of Leyden was the Dutch imitator of Albert; but the forms of Aldegraver, Sebald Beheim, and George Pentz, appear to have been the result of careful inspection of Marc Antonio's prints from Raphael, of whom Pentz was probably a scholar; and ere long the style of Michael Angelo, as adopted by Pelegrino Tibaldi, and spread by the graver of Giorgio Mantuano, provoked those caravans of German, Dutch and Flemish students, who on their return from Italy, at the courts of Prague and Munich, in Flanders and the Netherlands, introduced that preposterous manner, the bloated excrescence of diseased brains, which in the form of man left nothing human, distorted action and gesture with insanity of affectation, and dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes; the style of Golzius and Spranger, Heynz and ab Ach: but though content to feed on the husks of Tuscan design, they imbibed the colour of Venice, and spread the elements of that excellence which distinguished the succeeding schools of Flanders and of Holland.

In this censure I am under no apprehension of being suspected to include either the illustrious name of Vandyck, or that of Abraham Diepenbeck. Vandyck, more elegant, more refined, to graces, which the genius of Rubens disdained to court, joined that exquisite taste which, in following the general principle of his master, moderated, and adapted its application to his own pursuits. His sphere was portrait, and the imitation of Titiano insured him the second place in that. The fancy of Diepenbeck, though not so exuberant, if I be not mistaken, excelled in sublimity the imagination of Rubens: his Bellerophon, Dioscuri, Hippolytus, Ixion, Sisyphus, fear no competitor among the productions of his master.

Rembrandt was, in my opinion, a genius of the first class in whatever relates not to form. In spite of the most portentous deformity, and without considering the spell of his chiaroscuro, such were his powers of nature, such the grandeur, pathos, or simplicity of his composition, from the most elevated or extensive arrangement to the meanest and most homely, that the best cultivated eye, the purest sensibility, and the most refined taste dwell on them, equally enthralled. Shakspeare alone excepted, no one combined with so much transcendent excellence, so many, in all other men unpardonable faults--and reconciled us to them. He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of all the tints that float between them: he tinged his pencil with equal success in the cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in the livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a stedfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity or baldness, and plucked a flower in every desart. None ever like Rembrandt knew to improve an accident into a beauty, or give importance to a trifle. If ever he had a master, he had no followers; Holland was not made to comprehend his power. The succeeding school of colourists were content to tip the cottage, the hamlet, the boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and the haze of winter, with orient hues, or the glow of setting summer suns.

In turning our eye to Switzerland we shall find great powers without great names, those of Hans Holbein and Francis Mola only excepted. But the scrupulous precision, the high finish, and the tizianesque colour of Hans Holbein, make the least part of his excellence for those who have seen his Designs of the Passion, and that series of emblematic groups, known under the name of Holbein's Dance of Death. From Belinzona to Basle, invention appears to have been the characteristic of Helvetic art: the works of Tobias Stimmer, Christopher Murer, Jost Amman, Gotthard Ringgli, are mines of invention, and exhibit a style of design, equally poised between the emaciated dryness of Albert Durer and the bloated corpulence of Golzius.

The seeds of mediocrity which the Carracci had attempted to scatter over Italy, found a more benign soil, and reared an abundant harvest in France: to mix up a compound from something of every excellence in the catalogue of art, was the principle of their theory and their aim in execution. It is in France where Michael Angelo's right to the title of a painter was first questioned. The fierceness of his line, as they call it, the purity of the antique, and the characteristic forms of Raphael, are only the road to the academic vigour, the librated style of Annibale Carracci, and from that they appeal to the model; in composition they consult more the artifice of grouping, contrast and richness, than the subject or propriety; their expression is dictated by the theatre. From the uniformity of this process, not to allow that the school of France offers respectable exceptions, would be unjust; without recurring again to the name of Nicolas Poussin, the works of Eustache le Sueur, Charles le Brun, Sebastien Bourdon, and sometimes Pierre Mignard, contain original beauties and rich materials. Le Sueur's series of pictures in the Chartreux exhibit the features of contemplative piety, in a purity of style and a placid breadth of manner that moves the heart. His dignified martyrdom of St. Laurence and the burning of the magic books at Ephesus, breathe the spirit of Raphael. The powerful comprehension of a whole, only equalled by the fire which pervades every part of the battles of Alexander, by Charles le Brun, would entitle him to the highest rank in history, had the characters been less mannered, had he not exchanged the Argyraspids and the Macedonian phalanx for the compact legionaries of the Trajan pillar; had he distinguished Greeks from barbarians, rather by national feature and form than by accoutrement and armour. The seven works of charity by Seb. Bourdon teem with surprising pathetic and always novel images; and in the plague of David, by Pierre Mignard, our sympathy is roused by energies of terrour and combinations of woe, which escaped Poussin and Raphael himself.

The obstinacy of national pride, perhaps more than the neglect of government or the frown of superstition, confined the labours of the Spanish school, from its obscure origin at Sevilla to its brightest period, within the narrow limits of individual imitation. But the degree of perfection attained by Diego Velasquez, Joseph Ribera, and Morillo, in pursuing the same object by means as different as successful, impresses us with deep respect for the variety of their powers.

That the great style ever received the homage of Spanish genius, appears not; neither Alfonso Berruguette, nor Pellegrino Tibaldi, left followers: but that the eyes and the taste fed by the substance of Spagnuoletto and Morillo, should without reluctance have submitted to the gay volatility of Luica Giordano, and the ostentatious flimsiness of Sebastian Conca, would be matter of surprize, did we not see the same principles successfully pursued in the platfonds of Antonio Raphael Mengs, the painter of philosophy, as he is stiled by his biographer D'Azara. The cartoons of the frescoes painted for the royal palace at Madrid, representing the apotheosis of Trajan and the temple of Renown, exhibit less the style of Raphael in the nuptials of Cupid and Psyche at the Farnesina, than the gorgeous but empty bustle of Pietro da Cortona.

THIRD LECTURE.

INVENTION.

Homer. Odyss. A. 346.

ARGUMENT.

Introduction. Discrimination of Poetry and Painting. General idea of Invention--its right to select a subject from nature itself. Visiones--Theon--Agasias. Cartoon of Pisa--Incendio del Borgo. Specific idea of Invention: Epic subjects--Michael Angelo. Dramatic subjects--Raphael. Historic subjects--Poussin, &c. Invention has a right to adopt ideas--examples. Duplicity of subject and moment inadmissible. Transfiguration of Raphael.

THIRD LECTURE.

And this was the power of Theon; such was the unpremeditated conception that inspired him with the idea of that warriour, who in the words of AElian, seemed to embody the terrible graces and the enthusiastic furor of the god of war. Impetuous he rushed onward to oppose the sudden incursion of enemies; with shield thrown forward and high brandished faulchion, his step as he swept on, seemed to devour the ground: his eye flashed defiance; you fancied to hear his voice, his look denounce perdition and slaughter without mercy. This figure, single and without other accompaniments of war than what the havock of the distance shewed, Theon deemed sufficient to answer the impression he intended to make on those whom he had selected to inspect it. He kept it covered, till a trumpet, prepared for the purpose, after a prelude of martial symphonies, at once, by his command, blew with invigourated fierceness, a signal of attack--the curtain dropped, the terrific figure appeared to start from the canvass, and irresistibly assailed the astonished eyes of the assembly.

To prove the relation of AElian no hyperbolic legend, I need not insist on the magic effect which the union of two sister powers must produce on the senses: of what our art alone and unassisted may perform, the most unequivocal proof exists within these walls; your eyes, your feelings, and your fancy have long anticipated it: whose mind has not now recalled that wonder of a figure, the misnomed gladiator of Agasias, a figure whose tremendous energy embodies every element of motion, whilst its pathetic dignity of character enforces sympathies, which the undisguised ferocity of Theon's warriour in vain solicits. But the same irradiation which shewed the soldier to Theon, shewed to Agasias the leader: Theon saw the passion, Agasias its rule.

But the most striking instance of the eminent place due to this intuitive faculty among the principal organs of invention, is that celebrated performance, which by the united testimony of cotemporary writers, and the evident traces of its imitation, scattered over the works of cotemporary artists, contributed alone more to the restoration of art and the revolution of style, than the united effort of the two centuries that preceded it: I mean the astonishing design commonly called the cartoon of Pisa, the work of Michael Agnolo Buonarrotti, begun in competition with Lionardo da Vinci, and at intervals finished at Florence. This work, whose celebrity subjected those who had not seen it to the supercilious contempt of the luckier ones who had; which was the common centre of attraction to all the students of Tuscany and Romagna, from Raphael Sanzio to Bastian da St. Gallo, called Aristotile, from his loquacious descants on its beauties; this inestimable work itself is lost, and its destruction is with too much appearance of truth fixed on the mean villany of Baccio Bandinelli, who, in possession of the key to the apartment where it was kept, during the revolutionary troubles of the Florentine republic, after making what use he thought proper of it, is said to have torn it in pieces. Still we may form an idea of its principal groups from some ancient prints and drawings; and of its composition from a small copy now existing at Holkham, the outlines of which have been lately etched. Crude, disguised, or feeble, as these specimens are, they will prove better guides than the half-informed rhapsodies of Vasari, the meagre account of Ascanio Condivi, better than the mere anatomic verdict of Benvenuto Cellini, who denies that the powers afterward exerted in the Capella Sistina, arrive at 'half its excellence.'

It represents an imaginary moment relative to the war carried on by the Florentines against Pisa: and exhibits a numerous group of warriours, roused from their bathing in the Arno, by the sudden signal of a trumpet and rushing to arms. This composition may without exaggeration be said to personify with unexampled variety that motion, which Agasias and Theon embodied in single figures: in imagining this transient moment from a state of relaxation to a state of energy, the ideas of motion, to use the bold figure of Dante, seem to have showered into the artist's mind. From the chief, nearly placed in the centre, who precedes, and whose voice accompanies the trumpet, every age of human agility, every attitude, every feature of alarm, haste, hurry, exertion, eagerness, burst into so many rays, like sparks flying from the hammer. Many have reached, some boldly step, some have leaped on the rocky shore; here two arms emerging from the water grapple with the rock, there two hands cry for help, and their companions bend over or rush on to assist them; often imitated, but inimitable is the ardent feature of the grim veteran whose every sinew labours to force over the dripping limbs his cloaths, whilst gnashing he pushes the foot through the rending garment. He is contrasted by the slender elegance of a half averted youth, who, though eagerly buckling the armour to his thigh, methodizes haste; another swings the high-raised hauberk on his shoulder, whilst one who seems a leader, mindless of dress, ready for combat, and with brandished spear, overturns a third, who crouched to grasp a weapon--one naked himself buckles on the mail of his companion, and he, turned toward the enemy, seems to stamp impatiently the ground.--Experience and rage, old vigour, young velocity, expanded or contracted, vie in exertions of energy. Yet in this scene of tumult one motive animates the whole, eagerness to engage with subordination to command; this preserves the dignity of action, and from a straggling rabble changes the figures to men whose legitimate contest interests our wishes.

I shall not at present expatiate in tracing from this source the novel combinations of affection by which Raphael contrived to interest us in his numerous repetitions of Madonnas and holy Families, selected from the warmest effusions of domestic endearment, or in Milton's phrase, from 'all the charities of father, son, and mother.' Nor shall I follow it in its more contaminated descent, to those representations of local manners and national modifications of society, whose characteristic discrimination and humorous exuberance, for instance, we admire in Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passions of the day, every hour contributes something to obliterate, which soon become unintelligible by time, or degenerate into caricature, the chronicle of scandal, the history-book of the vulgar.

On the immense plain of the last judgment, Michael Angelo has wound up the destiny of man, simply considered as the subject of religion, faithful or rebellious; and in one generic manner has distributed happiness and misery, the general feature of passions is given, and no more.--But had Raphael meditated that subject, he would undoubtedly have applied to our sympathies for his choice of imagery; he would have combined all possible emotions with the utmost variety of probable or real character: a father meeting his son, a mother torn from her daughter, lovers flying into each others arms, friends for ever separated, children accusing their parents, enemies reconciled; tyrants dragged before the tribunal by their subjects, conquerors hiding themselves from their victims of carnage; innocence declared, hypocrisy unmasked, atheism confounded, detected fraud, triumphant resignation; the most prominent features of connubial, fraternal, kindred connexion.--In a word, the heads of that infinite variety which Dante has minutely scattered over his poem--all domestic, politic, religious relations; whatever is not local in virtue and in vice: and the sublimity of the greatest of all events, would have been merely the minister of sympathies and passions.

Such is the rapid outline of the cycle painted or designed by Raphael on the compartments of the stanzas sacred to his name. Here is the mass of his powers in poetic conception and execution, here is every period of his style, his emancipation from the narrow shackles of Pietro Perugino, his discriminations of characteristic form, on to the heroic grandeur of his line. Here is that master-tone of fresco painting, the real instrument of history, which with its silver purity and breadth unites the glow of Titiano and Correggio's tints. Every where we meet the superiority of genius, but more or less impressive, with more or less felicity in proportion as each subject was more or less susceptible of dramatic treatment. From the bland enthusiasm of the Parnassus, and the sedate or eager features of meditation in the school of Athens, to the sterner traits of dogmatic controversy in the dispute of the sacrament, and the symptoms of religious conviction or inflamed zeal at the mass of Bolsena. Not the miracle, as we have observed, the fears and terrours of humanity inspire and seize us at the conflagration of the Borgo: if in the Heliodorus the sublimity of the vision balances sympathy with astonishment, we follow the rapid ministers of grace to their revenge, less to rescue the temple from the gripe of sacrilege, than inspired by the palpitating graces, the helpless innocence, the defenceless beauty of the females and children scattered around; and thus we forget the vision of the labarum, the angels and Constantine in the battle, to plunge in the wave with Maxentius, or to share the agonies of the father who recognizes his own son in the enemy he slew.

Such were the principles on which he treated the beautiful tale of Amor and Psyche: the allegory of Apuleius became a drama under the hand of Raphael, though it must be owned, that with every charm of scenic gradation and lyric imagery, its characters, as exquisitely chosen as acutely discriminated, exhibit less the obstacles and real object of affection, and its final triumph over mere appetite and sexual instinct, than the voluptuous history of his own favourite passion. The faint light of the maxim vanishes in the splendour which expands before our fancy the enchanted circle of wanton dalliance and amorous attachment.

But the powers of Raphael in combining the drama with pure historic fact, are best estimated when compared with those exerted by other masters on the same subject. For this we select from the series we examine that which represented the massacre, as it is called, of the innocents, or of the infants at Bethlem; an original, precious part of which still remains in the possession of a friend of art among us. On this subject Baccio Bandinelli, Tintoretto, Rubens, Le Brun, and Poussin, have tried their various powers.

The massacre of the infants by Baccio Bandinelli, contrived chiefly to exhibit his anatomic skill, is a complicated tableau of every contorsion of human attitude and limbs that precedes dislocation; the expression floats between a studied imagery of frigid horrour and loathsome abomination.

The stormy brush of Tintoretto swept individual woe away in general masses. Two immense wings of light and shade divide the composition, and hide the want of sentiment in tumult.

To Rubens magnificence and contrast dictated the actors and the scene. A loud lamenting dame, in velvet robes, with golden locks dishevelled, and wide extended arms, meets our first glance. Behind, a group of steel-clad satellites open their rows of spears to admit the nimble, naked ministers of murder, charged with their infant prey, within their ranks, ready to close again against the frantic mothers who pursue them: the pompous gloom of the palace in the middle ground is set off by cottages and village scenery in the distance.

Le Brun surrounded the allegoric tomb of Rachel with rapid horsemen, receiving the children whom the assassins tore from their parents arms, and strewed the field with infant-slaughter.

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