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

Raffaelle not only subjected beauty to expression, but, at the command of invention, degraded it into a handmaid of deformity: thus the flowers of infancy and youth, virility and age, are scattered round the temple-gate, to impress us more by comparison with the distorted beings that crawl before and defy the powers of every other hand but the one delegated by Omnipotence.²¹

100. Imitation seems to cease, where the ideal part begins.

101. The imitator rises above the copyist by generalizing the individual to a class; the idealist mounts above the imitator by uniting classes.

102. The imitator, by comparison and taste, unites the scattered limbs of kindred excellence; the idealist, by the "mind's eye," fixes, personifies, embodies possibility: modes and degrees of single powers are the province of the former; the latter unites whatever implies no contradiction in an assemblage of varied excellence.

Coroll.– This is best explained by the Ilias. Each individual of Homer forms a class, and is circumscribed by one quality of heroic power; Achilles alone unites their different energies.

The height, the strength, the giant-stride and supercilious air of Ajax; the courage, the impetuosity, the never-failing aim, the never-bloodless stroke of Diomedes; the presence of mind, the powerful agility of Ulysses; the velocity of the lesser Ajax; Agamemnon's sense of prerogative and domineering spirit, – assign to each his separate class of heroism, yet lessen not their shades of imperfection. Ajax appears the warrior rather than the leader; Ulysses is too prudent to be more than brave; the hawk more than the eagle predominates in the son of Oileus; Agamemnon has the prerogative of power, but not of heroism; Diomede alone might appear to have been raised too high, had he been endowed with an assuming spirit. So far the poet found, ennobled, classified; but all these he sums up, and creates an ideal form from their assemblage, in Achilles: – he is the grandson of Jupiter, the son of a goddess, the favourite of Heaven —²²"What arms can fit me but the shield of Ajax? The lance maddens not in the grasp of Diomede to chase the flames from the ships. Let him confer with thee, Ulysses, and the rest." Such is his language. Before the pursuer of Hector vanishes the velocity of Ajax; from destroying Agamemnon he is prevented by Minerva; he gives his armour to the son of Menœtius, and disperses all but the gods; his spear none can throw, and none tear from the ground when thrown; a miracle alone can save those that oppose him singly; when else he fights, 'tis not to gain a battle, but to subvert Troy.

What Achilles is to his confederates, the Apollo, the Torso, the statues²³ of the Quirinal, are to all other known figures of gods, of demi-gods and heroes.

103. Fancy not to compose an ideal form by mixing up a mass of promiscuous beauties; for, unless you consulted what was homogeneous and what was possible in Nature, you have hatched only a monster: this, we suppose, was understood by Zeuxis when he collected the beauties of Agrigentum to compose a perfect female.²⁴

104. If there be any thing serious in art, it certainly then ought to be exerted when religion is the subject; but idolaters and iconoclasts seem to have conspired, either to banish the author of their faith to the cold sphere of mythology, or to debase him to the dregs of mankind.

Coroll.– Majesty is the feature of the Supreme Being; no eternal Father of the moderns approaches the majesty of Jupiter.

The gods of Michael Angelo are stern. The gods of Raffaelle are affable and weak. The gods of Guido have the air of ancient courtiers.

In the race of Jupiter, majesty is tempered by emanations of beauty and of grace, but never softened into love.

The Christ of Michael Angelo is severe. The Christ of Raffaelle is poised between the heraldry of church tradition and the dignified mildness of his own character. The Christ of Guido is a well suspended corpse.

"The character corresponding with that of Christ," says a critic and a painter,²⁵ "is a mixture of the characters of Jupiter and Apollo, allowing only for the accidental expression of the moment." What magic shall amalgamate the superhuman airs of Rhea's and Latona's sons with sufferings and resignation? The critic, in his exultation, forgot the leading feature of his master – humility.

Whatever be the ideal form of Christ, the Saviour of mankind, extending his arm to relieve the afflicted, the hopeless, the dying, is a subject that comes home to the breast of every one who calls himself after his name: – the artist is in the sphere of adoration with the Christian.

A great and beneficent character, eminently exerting unknown healing powers over the family of disease and pain, claims the participation of every feeling man, though he be no believer: – the artist is in the sphere of sentiment with the Deist or Mahometan.

But a mean man marked with the features of a mean sect, surrounded by a beggarly ill-shaped rabble and stupid masks – is probably a juggler that claims the attention of no one.

The Resurrection of Christ derives its interest from its rapidity, the Ascension from its slowness.

In the Resurrection, the hero, like a ball of fire, shoots up resistless from the bursting tomb, and scatters terror and astonishment, – what apprehension could not dream of, what the eye had never beheld, and tongue had never uttered, blazes before us, – tumultuous agitation rends the whole. Such is the spirit of the Resurrection by Raffaelle.

The Ascension is the last of many similar scenes: no longer with the rapidity of a conqueror, but with the calm serenity of triumphant power, the hero is borne up in splendour, and gradually vanishes from those who, by repeated visions, had been taught to expect whatever was amazing. Silent and composed, with eyes more absorbed in adoration than wonder, they followed the glorious emanation, till addressed by the white-robed messengers of their departed King.

105. We are more impressed by Gothic than by Greek mythology, because the bands are not yet rent which tie us to its magic: he has a powerful hold of us, who holds us by our superstition or by a theory of honour.

106. The east expands, the north concentrates images.

107. Disproportion of parts is the element of hugeness, – proportion, of grandeur; all Oriental, all Gothic styles of Architecture, are huge; the Grecian alone, is grand.

108. The female, able to invigorate her taste without degenerating into a pedant, sloven or virago, may give her hand to the man of elegance, who scorns to sacrifice his sense to the presiding phantoms of an effeminate age.

109. The collector who arrogates not to himself the praise bestowed on his collections, and the reader who fancies himself not the author of the beauties he recites to an admiring circle – are not the last of men.

110. The epoch of rules, of theories, poetics, criticisms in a nation, will add to their stock of authors in the same proportion as it diminishes their stock of genius: their productions will bear the stamp of study, not of nature; they will adopt, not generate; sentiment will supplant images, and narrative invention; words will be no longer the dress but the limbs of composition, and feeble elegance will supply the want of nerves.

111. He "lisped not in numbers, no numbers came to him," though he count his verses by thousands, who has not learnt to distinguish the harmony of two lines from that of a period – whom dull monotony of ear condemns to the drowsy psalmody of one returning couplet.

112. Some seek renown as the Parthians sought victory – by seeming to fly from it.

113. He has more than genius – he is a hero – who can check his powers in their full career to glory, merely not to crush the feeble on his road.

114. He who could have the choice, and should prefer to be the first painter of insects, of flowers, or of drapery, to being the second in the ranks of history, though degraded to the last class of art, would undoubtedly be in the first of men by the decision of Cæsar.

115. Such is the aspiring nature of man, that nothing wounds the copyist more sorely than the suspicion of being thought what he is.

116. He who depends for all upon his model, should treat no other subject but his model.

117. The praises lavished on the sketches of vigorous conception, only sharpen the throes of labour in finishing.

118. As far as the medium of an art can be taught, so far is the artist confined to the class of mere mechanics; he only then elevates himself to talent, when he imparts to his method, or his tool, some unattainable or exclusive excellence of his own.

119. None but the first can represent the first. Genius, absorbed by the subject, hastens to the centre; and from that point disseminates, to that leads back the rays: talent, full of its own dexterities, begins to point the rays before they have a centre, and aggregates a mass of secondary beauties.

120. The ear absorbed in harmonies of its own creation, is deaf to all external ones.

121. Harmony disposes, melody determines.

122. There is not a bauble thrown by the sportive hand of fashion, which may not be caught with advantage by the hand of art.

Coroll.– Shakspeare has been excused for seeking in the Roman senate what he knew all senates could furnish – a buffoon. Paulo of Verona, with equal strength of argument, may be excused for cramming on the foreground of an assembly or a feast, what he knew a feast or assembly could furnish – a dog, an ape, a scullion, a parrot, or a dwarf.

123. He has done much in art who raises your curiosity – he has done all who has raised it and keeps it up restless and uniform; prostrate yourself before the genius of Homer.

124. Difficulties surmounted to obtain what in itself is of no real value, deserve pity or contempt: the painted catalogue of wrinkles by Denner are not offsprings of art, but fac-similes of natural history.

125. Love for what is called deception in painting, marks either the infancy or decrepitude of a nation's taste.

126. Indiscriminate execution, like the monkey's rasor, cuts shear asunder the parts it meant to polish.

Coroll.– Francesco Barbieri broke like a torrent over the academic rules of his masters. As the desire of disseminating character over every part of his composition made Raphael less attentive to its general effect, so an ungovernable itch of copying all that lay in his way made this man sacrifice order, costume, mind, to mere effects of colour: a map of flesh, a pile of wood, a sleeve, a hilt, a feathered hat, a table-cloth, or a gold-tissued robe, were for Guercino what a quibble was for Shakspeare. The countenance of his Dido has that sublimity of woe which affects us in the Æneis, but she is pierced with a toledo and wrapped in brocade; Anna is an Italian Duenna; the scene, the Mole of Ancona or of Naples, the spectators a brace of whiskered Spaniards, and a deserting Amorino winds up the farce. In his St. Petronilla the rags and brawny limbs of two gigantic porters crush the effect which the saint ought to have, and all the rest is frittered into spots. Yet is that picture a tremendous instance of mechanic powers and intrepidity of hand. As a firm base supports, pervades, unites the tones of harmony, so a certain stern virility inspires, invigorates and gives a zest to all Guercino's colour. The gayer tints of Guido vanish before his as insipid,²⁶ Domenichino appears laboured, and the Carracci dim. Nor was Guercino a stranger to the genuine expressions of untaught nature, and there is more of pathos in the dog which he introduced caressing the returned prodigal, than in all the Farnese gallery; as the Argus of Ulysses, looking up at his old master, then dropping his head and dying, moves more than all the metamorphoses of Ovid. If his male figures be brought to the test of style, it may be said, that he never made a man; their virility is tumour or knotty labour; to youth he gave emaciated lankness, and to old age little besides decrepitude and beards – meanness to all: and though he was more cautious in female forms, they owe the best part of their charms to chiaroscuro.

127. Execution has its classes.

Coroll.– Satan summoning the Princes of Hell stretched over the fiery flood; or the giant snake of the Norway seas hovering over a storm-vexed vessel, by Gerard Douw, or Vanderverf – are incongruous ideas; would be incongruous though Michael Angelo had planned their design and Rembrandt massed their light and shade.

128. It has been said, but let us repeat it: the proportion of will and power is not always reciprocal. A copious measure of will is sometimes assigned to ordinary and contracted minds; whilst the greatest faculties as frequently evaporate in indolence and languor.

129. Mighty execution of impotent conception, and vigour of conception with trembling execution, are coalitions equally deplorable.

130. He is a prince of artists and of men who knows the moment when his work is done. On this Apelles founded his superiority over his contemporaries; the knowledge when to stop, left Sylla nothing to fear, though disarmed; the want of knowing this, exposed Cæsar to the dagger of Brutus.

131. Next to him who can finish, is he who has hid from you that he cannot.

132. If finishing be to terminate all the parts of a performance in an equal degree, no artist ever finished his work. A great part of conception or execution is always sacrificed to some individual excellence which either he possesses or thinks he possesses. The colourist makes lines only the vehicle of colour; the designer subordinates hue to his line; the man of breadth or chiaroscuro overwhelms sometimes both, and the subject itself to produce effect.

133. The fewer the traces that appear of the means by which any work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of Nature, and the nearer it is to sublimity.

134. Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

Coroll.– Take the design of Rome, Venetian motion and shade, Lombardy's tone of colour, add the terrible manner of Angelo, Titian's truth of nature, and the supreme purity of Corregio's style; mix them up with the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, with the learned invention of Primaticcio, and a few grains of Parmegiano's grace: and what do you think will be the result of this chaotic prescription, such elemental strife? Excellence, perhaps, equal to one or all of the names that compose these ingredients? You are deceived, if you fancy that a multitude of dissimilar threads can compose a uniform texture – that dissemination of spots will make masses, or a little of many things produce a whole. If Nature stamped you with a character, you will either annihilate it by indiscriminate imitation of heterogeneous excellence, or debase it to mediocrity and add one to the ciphers of art. Yet such is the prescription of Agostino Carracci,²⁷ and such in general must be the dictates of academics.

135. If you mean to reign dictator over the arts of your own times, assail not your rivals with the blustering tone of condemnation and rigid censure; – sap with conditional or lamenting praise – confine them to unfashionable excellence – exclude them from the avenues of fame.

136. If you wish to give consequence to your inferiors, answer their attacks.

Coroll.– Michael Angelo, advised to resent the insolence of some obscure upstart who was pushing forward to notice by declaring himself his rival, answered: "Chi combatte con dappochi, non vince a nulla: " who contests with the base, loses with all!

137. Genius knows no partner. All partnership is deleterious to poetry and art: one must rule.²⁸

138. The wish of perpetuating a name by enlisting under the banners of another, is the ambition of inferior minds: biography, with all its branches of "Ana," translation and engraving, however useful to man or dear to art, is the unequivocal homage of inferiority offered by taste and talent to the majesty of genius.

139. Dive in the crowd, meet beauty: follow vigour, compare character, snatch the feature that moves unobserved and the sudden burst of passion – and you are at the school of nature with Lysippus.²⁹

140. The lessons of disappointment, humiliation and blunder, impress more than those of a thousand masters.

141. There are artists, who have wasted much of life in abstruse theories on proportion, who have measured the Antique in all its forms and characters, compared it with Nature, and mixed up amalgamas of both, yet never made a figure stand or move.

Coroll.– "The Apollo is altogether composed of lines sweetly convex, of very small obtuse angles, and of flats, but the soft convexities predominate the character of the figure, being a compound of strength, dignity and delicacy. The artist has expressed the first by convex outlines, the second by their uniformity, and the third by undulation of forms. The convex line predominates in the Laocoon, and the forms of the muscles are angular at their insertions and ends to express agitation; for by these means the nerves and tendons become more visible, straight lines meeting with concave and convex ones, form those angles which produce violence of action. The sculptor of the Farnesian Hercules invented a style totally different; to obtain fleshiness, he composed the figure of round and convex muscles, but made their insertions flat to signify that they are nervous and unincumbered with fat, the characteristic of strength."

"In the Gladiator there is a mixture of the Herculean and the Laocoontic forms, the muscles in action are angulated, whilst those at rest are short and round, a variety conformable to nature," &c.

Opere di A.R. Mengs, t. i. p. 203.

142. Neither he who forms lines without the power of embodying them, nor he who floats on masses, can be said to draw: the one is the slave of a brush, the other of a point.

143. Pulp without solidity absorbs, and relentless tension tears character.

144. In following too closely a model, there is danger in mistaking the individual for Nature herself; in relying only on the schools, the deviation into manner seems inevitable: what then remains, but to transpose yourself into your subject?

145. Style is the selection of forms and groups and tones to suit a subject.

Coroll.– The Italian Style Grandioso, the French Il y a du style, the English great style and breadth, when applied to a performance, only mean, that the artist followed those who have enlarged the principles of imitation and execution.

146. Style pervades the object; manner floats on the surface.

147. Antient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece, and the servant of Rome.

148. The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means. If they had schools, the Ionian, that of Athens and of Sicyon appear to have directed their instruction to one grand principle, proportion: this was the stamen which they drew out into one immense connected web; whilst modern art, with its schools of designers, colourists, machinists, eclectics, is but a tissue of adventitious threads. Apollonius and the sculptor of the small Hesperian Hercules in bronze are distinguished only by the degree of execution; whilst M. Angelo and Bernini had no one principle in common but that of making groups and figures.

149. Art among a religious race produces reliques; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.

150. Modern art, reared by superstition in Italy, taught to dance in France, plumped up to unwieldiness in Flanders, reduced to "chronicle small beer" in Holland, became a rich old woman by "suckling fools" in England.

151. The rules of art are either immediately supplied by Nature herself, or selected from the compendiums of her students who are called masters and founders of schools. The imitation of Nature herself leads to style, that of the schools to manner.

Coroll.– The line of Michael Angelo is uniformly grand; character and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to grandeur: – the child, the female, meanness, deformity were indiscriminately stamped with grandeur; a beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man, his men are a race of giants.

The design of Raphael is either historic or poetic. The forms of his historic style are characteristic, those of his poetic style he himself calls ideal:³⁰ the former are regulated by nature, but these are only exaggerations of another style.

The forms of Julio Pipi are poised between character and caricature, but verge to this; even his dresses and ornaments are caricatures; but no poet or painter ever rocked the cradle of infant mythology with simpler or more primitive grace; none ever imparted to allegory a more insinuating power, or swayed the strife of elemental war with a bolder hand. What ever equalled the exuberance of invention scattered over the T of Mantoua?

The line of Polydoro, is that of the antique basso-relievo, seen from beneath (da sotto in su).

The forms of Titian are those of sanguine health; robust, not grand; soft without delicacy.

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michael Angelo with colour, without tracing its principle.

As Michael Angelo was impressed with an idea of grandeur, so Correggio was charmed with a notion of harmony: his line was correct when harmony permitted; it strayed as harmony commanded.

Elegance (sueltezza) was the principle of Parmegiano's line, but he forgot proportion.

Annibale Carracci, one of the founders of the Eclectic school, attempted to combine in his line the appearance of Nature with style, and became the standard of academic drawing.

The medium, not the thing, was the object of the Tuscan and Venetian schools; the school of Urbino³¹ aimed at subjecting the medium to the character of things; the Lombards strove to unite the separate attainments of the three with the unattainable spell of Correggio; the Germans, with their Flemish and Dutch branches, now humbly followed, now boldly attempted to improve their Italian masters; the French passed the Alps to study at Rome and Venice what they were to forget at Paris.

Domenichino aimed at the characteristic line of Raffaelle, the compactness of Annibale, and the beauty of the antique; and mixing something of each fell short of all.

Rosso carried anatomy, and the Bolognese Abbate the poetry of their art to the court of Francis. To the haggard melancholy of the Tuscan and the laboured richness of the Lombard, the French added their own cold gaiety, and the French school arose.

The forms of Guido's female heads are abstracts of the antique. The forms of his male bodies are transcripts of models, such as are found in a genial climate, though sometimes distorted by fatigue or emaciated by want.

Pietro Testa copied the Torsos of antiquity, and supplied them with extremities drawn from the dregs of Nature.

The forms³² of Caravaggio are either substantial flesh or the starveling produce of beggary rendered important by ideal light and shade.

The limbs of Joseph Ribera are excrescences of disease on hectic bodies.

Andrea Mantegna was in Italy what Albert Durer was at Nuremberg; Nature seems not to have existed in any shape of health in his time: though a servile copyist of the antique, he never once adverted from the monuments he copied to the originals that inspired them.

The forms of Albert Durer are blasphemies on Nature, the thwarted growth of starveling labour and dry sterility – formed to inherit his hell of paradise. To extend the asperity of this verdict beyond the forms of Albert Durer, would be equally unjust and ungrateful to the father of German art, on whom invention often flashed, whom melancholy marked for her own, whose influence even on Italian art was such that he produced a temporary revolution in the style of the Tuscan school. Andrea del Sarto and Giacopo da Puntormo became his imitators and his copyists; nor was his influence unfelt by Raffaelle himself, but his Christ led to the Cross (engraved by E. Sadler),³³ compared with that of the Madonna del Spasimo, leaves the claim of superiority doubtful for sublimity and pathos. It is a likewise probable that we owe the horrors of the St. Felicitas to the abominations of his Martyr scenes. The felicity of his organs, the delicacy of his finger, the freedom and sweep of his touch, have found an encomiast in the author of the life prefixed to the Latin edition of his works. What would have been the result of his intended interview, when in Italy, with Andrea Mantegna, had the death of the latter (1505) not prevented it, is difficult to guess: if some amelioration, certainly not the entire change of style, which the uninterrupted study of the antique, during a long life, had failed to produce in Andrea himself.

The forms of Luke of Leyden are the vegetation of a swamp.

The forms of Martin Hemskerck are dislocated lankness.³⁴

The forms of Spranger and Goltzius are blasphemies on art; the monstrous incubations of dropsied fancy on phlegm run mad. This verdict, though uniformly true of every male figure of Goltzius that demanded energy of exertion, cannot be equally applied to his females, the features of the face excepted. On limbs and bodies resembling the antique in elegance if not correctness, he placed heads with Dutch features, ideally, often voluptuously dressed: such are his Venus between Ceres and Bacchus; and still more his Diana and Calisto, a composition which in elegance and dignity excels that of Tiziano. In the dreadful familiarity with which the guardian snake of the Beotian well approaches the companions of Cadmus, he has touched the true vein of terror and its limits, and atoned in some degree for the loathsome horror that had polluted his graver, when he condescended to copy the abominable process of that scene from the design of Pistor.

The male forms of Rubens are the brawny pulp of slaughtermen, his females are hillocks of roses: overwhelmed muscles, dislocated bones, and distorted joints are swept along in a gulph of colours, as herbage, trees and shrubs are whirled, tossed, or absorbed by vernal inundation.

The female forms of Rembrandt are prodigies of deformity; his males are the crippled produce of shuffling industry and sedentary toil.

The line of Vandycke is balanced between Flemish corpulence and English slenderness.

Sebastian Bourdon, sublime in his conceptions, filled classic ground and eastern vests with local limbs and Gallic actors.

Poussin renounced his national character to follow the antique; but could not separate the spirit from the stone.

152. The imitator seldom mounts to the investigation of the principles that formed his model; the copier probably never.

153. Many beauties in art come by accident, that are preserved by choice.

Coroll.– Neither the froth formed on the mouth of Jalysus' hound by a lucky dash from the sponge of Protogenes, nor the modern experiments of extracting composition from an ink-splashed wall, are relatives of the beauties alluded to in this aphorism.

154. The praise due to a work, reflects not always on its master; and superiority may beam athwart the blemishes that we despise or pity; some, says Milton, praised the work and some the master: would you prefer him who is able to finish the image which he was unable to conceive, to its inventor?

155. It is the privilege of Nature alone to be equal. Man is the slave of a part; the most equal artist is only the first in the list of mediocrity.

156. He who seeks the grand, will find it in a trifle: but some seem made to find it only there. Rösel saw man like an insect, and insects as Michael Angelo men.

157. Physiognomy teaches what is homogeneous and what is heterogeneous in forms.

158. The solid parts of the body are the base of physiognomy, the muscular that of pathognomy; the former contemplates the animal at rest, this its action.

159. Pathognomy allots expression to character.

160. Those who allow physiognomy to regulate the great outlines of character, and reject its minute discriminations, admit a language and reject its elements.

161. The difficulty of physiognomy is to separate the essence from accident, growth from excrescence.

162. He who aims at the sublime, consults the classes assigned to character by physiognomy, not its anatomy of individuals; the oak in its full majesty, and not the thwarted pollard.

163. None ever escaped from himself by crossing seas; none ever peopled a barren fancy and a heart of ice with images or sympathies by excursions into the deserts of mythology or allegory.

164. The principles of allegory and votive composition are the same; they unite with equal right the most distant periods of time and the most opposite modes of society: both surround a real being, or allude to a real act, with symbols by long general consent adopted, as expressive of the qualities, motives, and circumstances that distinguished or gave evidence to the person or the transaction. Such is the gallery of the Luxembourg, such the Attila of the Vatican.

165. Pure history rejects allegory.

Coroll.– The armed figure of Rome, with Fortune behind her frowning at Coriolanus, surrounded by the Roman matrons in the Volscian camp (by Poussin), is a vision seen by that warrior, and not an allegory; it is a sublime image, which, without diminishing the credibility of the fact, adds to its importance, and raises the hero, by making him submit, not to the impulse of private ties, but to the destiny of his country.

166. All ornament ought to be allegoric.

167. Dignity is the salt of art.

Coroll.– In the Salutation of Michael Angelo,³⁵ the angelic messenger emerges from solitary twilight, his countenance seems to labour with the awful message, and his knees to bend as he approaches the mysterious personage: with virgin majesty and humble grace Mary bows to the extended arm of the lucid herald, as if waked from sacred meditation, and appears entranced by celestial sounds.