CHAPTER XIII
THE NEO-CLASSICAL REVIVAL: EUROPEAN SCULPTURE
OF THE REVOLUTION AND THE REACTION
(1789-1848 a.d.)
The period we are now to consider, covering the last few years of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, is one of the most elusive in the history of sculpture. That is to say, it evades characterization. Moreover, when its individual qualities are stated, it is still more difficult to correlate these with the very definite ideas and emotions astir during a time which includes the French Revolution and the consequent Reaction.
The difficulty in tracing the connection between such men as Canova, Thorvaldsen, Flaxman, and the age in which they worked, seems to be due to the necessity for first abandoning the method which has served us hitherto. In dealing with Greek and Roman, Italian and French sculpture, we have appealed to national history—national circumstances. Now we are concerned with a body of thought and feeling which is not national but European. Instead of thinking in states, we have to think in continents. The men who created the sculpture of the Revolution and Reaction were essentially cosmopolitans; Winckelmann—Saxon; Raphael Mengs—half-Dane, half-Bohemian; Canova—Venetian; Thorvaldsen—Danish; Flaxman and Gibson—Englishmen, long resident in Rome. They did not drift towards Rome as the Hellenistic sculptors had done, because the city was the centre of the political force of the age. Nor did they come with the purpose of Michael Angelo, that they might add to the glory of a universal church seeking to extend its power over the known world. Far from this being the case, in the early part of the nineteenth century Rome was a no-man’s land. If it stood for anything, it was for a disintegrated Italy and an enfeebled Papacy. At the very time Canova was working there, Italy was powerless to prevent Napoleon stripping it of its choicest art treasures. Anything approaching a national stimulus to sculptural production was entirely lacking.
The first result was the rise of the essentially eclectic style which we recognize in the sculptures of Canova and Thorvaldsen. Nominally, it was based upon a return to the Greek example. In reality, it was no more than a borrowed Hellenism, misunderstood and misapplied by men who did no more than steal “The livery of the Court of Heaven.” We shall not be misunderstood. No one can deny—it is impossible to do so—the graceful beauty of very many statues of the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Indeed, no school of sculpture has produced a larger number of popular works—in the best sense of that rather dubious term. But our criticism is justified by the fact that such men as Canova and Thorvaldsen deliberately set out to interpret their experience in the terms of classic art. They rightly judged this to be the highest achievement attained by the sculptor. Unfortunately, they only filched the Hellenic externals.
Strange to say, this fervid adoption of a bastard Hellenism coincided with the re-discovery of the principles at the root of Greek art, and, in consequence, with a renewed appreciation of the best qualities in Hellenic sculpture. Throughout the Renaissance and until the middle of the eighteenth century, Europe did not understand Greek sculpture. Even the best judges rated the “[Apollo Belvedere]” above the “[Theseus]” of the Parthenon pediment. A truer standard was advanced by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (murdered 1768). His dictum, “Greek art has been perpetuated by Roman copies,” revealed the error which had vitiated all earlier criticism. Aided by the poet-philosopher Lessing, Winckelmann led men to distinguish between the Roman and the Greek elements in classic sculpture—between the Hellenic and the Hellenistic. Winckelmann’s “History of Greek Art,” published in 1764, enunciated all the great principles we now recognize in the best Greek sculpture—its truth to nature, its almost austere reserve, the preference accorded to the typical as opposed to the particular. The “History of Greek Art” in turn led to Lessing’s “[Laocoon]” and the magnificent exposition of Hellenism in the works of Goethe. Through these three men the very soul of Greek sculpture lay bare to the later eighteenth-century artists.
CANOVA
CUPID AND PSYCHE
Villa Carlotta, Lake of Como
PAULINE BORGHESE
Borghese Gallery, Rome
CANOVA AND THORVALDSEN
The first really gifted sculptor to absorb the new revelation and give expression to it in marble and bronze was Antonio Canova. Born in 1757, Canova came of a family of sculptors. In his youth he manifested a facility as a modeller which was sufficient to lead his patron, the Senator Falieri, to make it possible for him to visit Rome. Coming there at the age of twenty-two, Canova encountered the full tide of the ideas enunciated by Winckelmann and his school. Like most successful sculptors, the Venetian was a man of boundless energy. His patrons and rivals in Rome soon became impressed with the belief that Canova was capable of founding a school of sculpture worthy of comparison with those of classic times. Indeed, to-day, it is quite easy to realize the intense enthusiasm aroused by the works of Canova. Such a statue as the beautiful “[Cupid and Psyche],” produced in the year 1787, has not yet lost its power to charm. Canova has chosen the moment when Cupid comes to aid the unfortunate girl who has opened the box of Proserpine and has sunk fainting to the earth. It is characteristic of Canova’s sentimental method that he should choose the moment when Psyche, throwing back her head, discovers the god-youth bending over her.
An equally fine example of Canova at his best is the famous statue of “[Pauline Borghese],” a work of later date than the “[Cupid and Psyche].” The light-hearted sister of Napoleon is represented as Venus, despite the fact that she was the wife of Prince Borghese, the ruler of Piedmont. The story runs that a friend remonstrated with her and ended with the question whether Pauline had not found the ordeal “a trying one.” “Trying, not at all,” replied the Princess, “there was a stove.” The anecdote serves to illustrate the difference between Canova and his Greek predecessors. Comparing the story of Pauline Borghese with that of the Hetaera Phryne, the difference between the spirit animating Hellenic art and that animating the imitation Greek art of two thousand years later is unmistakable. Praxiteles’ statue of Phryne was the incarnation of womanhood as he felt it. Pauline Borghese merely suggested to Canova a number of graceful lines and masses, which his sense of form enabled him to combine in a pleasing fashion. He willingly preserved a sufficient likeness to compliment the fair model, who had risked a physical and spiritual chill in the cause of art. But the difference between the lasting value of Canova’s “Venus” and that of Praxiteles’ “[Aphrodite of Cnidus]” can be estimated exactly. It is that which separates the idea of womanhood from the idea of the princely light-o’-love—Pauline Borghese. Canova’s work has not a suggestion of that contact with the eternal verities which is the very essence of a great Greek statue.
No one can doubt that both the “[Cupid and Psyche]” and the “[Pauline Borghese]” are the works of a man who feels the full beauty of pure line. If formal grace were the best that sculpture could give us, there would be no more to be said. But the achievements of the Greek masters prove that this is not the case. A work of sculpture can convey a sense of palpitating life, of vigorous emotion, which is worth far more than the graceful beauty with which Canova has endowed his conception of [Cupid and Psyche], and the Goddess of Desire.
It cannot be said that Canova lacked any opportunity vouchsafed to the earlier sculptors. Before he died, his reputation rivalled that of the great artists of the Renaissance. In 1802 he was appointed curator of the Vatican art treasures, a post resembling that held by Raphael and Michael Angelo. Like Bernini, he was called to France. Instead of a bust of Louis XIV., Canova’s task was to model a colossal statue of Napoleon. If Canova had had it in him, he might have been a Michael Angelo. As it was, he lived and died Antonio Canova.
If our estimate of Canova is correct, can more be said for his rival, the Danish sculptor, Thorvaldsen? Thorvaldsen was born about the year 1770, his father being a journeyman wood-carver of ship’s figure-heads. As a boy he worked on the quays at Copenhagen, much as Puget had done a century earlier at Marseilles. In 1793 Thorvaldsen, then a youth of twenty-three, won the Copenhagen Academy’s gold medal and a travelling scholarship, which made a visit to Rome possible. Four years later, in 1797, Thorvaldsen came to Rome.
Between May and December of the previous year, Italy had been overrun by the French. In October 1797 the Venetian territories were divided by Austria and France. In the following February Pius VI. was deposed by Napoleon. Italy had never stood lower in the scale of nations. Perhaps for that very reason Rome was able to welcome artists from all parts of Europe, and imbue them with entirely non-national ideals, drawn from the treasures of art stored in the Eternal City.
“I was born on March 8, 1797,” said Thorvaldsen himself. “Up to that time I did not exist.”
The Dane’s scholarship only amounted to £24 a year, insufficient for the bare necessities of life. But the young sculptor struggled along until 1803, when his “Jason” was purchased by the English banker, Thomas Hope, and he was relieved from his most pressing difficulties. A little later Thorvaldsen found himself the talk of artistic Rome. The Baron de Schubart, Danish Ambassador at Naples, had commissioned a “[Cupid and Psyche].” The sculptor was in the midst of the work when his studio at Montenero was struck by lightning. The only model which escaped destruction was the Baron’s “[Cupid and Psyche].” Thorvaldsen himself was in Rome at the time, and the pretty little story naturally ran the round of the studios. The tale caught the fancy of the smart set, ever on the look-out for an excitement, and “the miracle of the marble” became the sensation of the hour. A flood of sonnets and epigrams resulted. Thorvaldsen found himself suddenly recognized as the coming sculptor—second only to Canova.
There is no finer example of the genius of Thorvaldsen than his “[Venus].” There is certainly no statue upon which he lavished more care. It exists in several forms, including a fine marble copy in the Duke of Devonshire’s collection at Chatsworth. Starting in 1805, he took ten years to complete the design to his satisfaction. Not that Thorvaldsen was a slow worker. He had no love for the actual carving, and left the greater portion of the marble-work to his assistants. But in the clay he worked with extreme facility, and few sculptors have excelled him in the number and variety of his designs. A statue like the “[Venus]” proves that he also possessed qualities of breadth and emotional austerity, which cannot be claimed for the prettier works of Canova.
But, judging the life-work of the Danish sculptor in its broadest aspects, the only possible verdict is that which must also be passed upon Canova. Both men preferred to echo an earlier art. They made no attempt to realize nature afresh. This acceptance of a purely artificial creed, based upon their admiration for their Greek predecessors, entailed an abandonment of the personal standpoint which alone gives an art the highest value.
THORVALDSEN
VENUS
Duke of Devonshire’s Collection,
Chatsworth
THE SCULPTURE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Why Canova and Thorvaldsen should have found this necessary in an age which was full of pregnant thought and feeling, is hard to say. One can only note a similar tendency in other branches of European activity in the latter years of the eighteenth century. The painter David, for instance, was content to work to a pseudo-Greek standard, instead of constructing a fresh one, fitted to the new state of things in France. The great picture in the Louvre, “The Intervention of the Sabine Women,” is almost icy on account of the artist’s pre-occupation with the externals of classical art. Were it not for the evidence of David’s portraits one would regard the painter of the “Sabine Women” as entirely lacking in human emotion. As it is, we know that the assumption of classical externals is merely the outcome of a bad habit.
A similar tendency to pose in the outworn robes of an earlier civilization was a common fault among the men and women who sought to bring the ideals of the French Revolution home to Europe. Witness the days which the National Assembly devoted to the unending wrangle over the precise wording of the “Rights of Man.” The time was wasted, not because the Declaration really forwarded the ideal of equality before the law and the abolition of all class distinctions, but because the founders of the American Republic had framed a similar Declaration of Rights. The civic dinners in Paris in imitation of the Spartan manner were equally mere poses. Parisians sat, surrounded by their servants, at tables spread in the very streets, while fashionable hostesses called upon passers-by to note “how we love equality.” The tendency which led the Parisians to such follies, led Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Flaxman to follow a pseudo-classic style instead of allowing the passions and thoughts astir in their souls to find an adequate method of expression. This initial error deprived even their most ambitious works of that almost mystical appeal which gives the statuary of the greatest Hellenes and Florentines its unique value. Though full of grace and charm, their marbles impress us at once as devoid of either deep feeling or high thinking.
The one sculptor, who absorbed the patriotic spirit generated by the French Revolution, and also found means to express it in marble, was François Rude (1784-1855). Unlike Thorvaldsen, Canova and Flaxman, Rude never lived in Rome. He was French to the marrow. Indeed, when he won the Grand Prix in 1812, he did not take advantage of the opportunity to visit Italy. The son of a Dijon blacksmith, Rude came to Paris in 1807 with £16 in his pocket. He had nothing except an invincible determination to become a sculptor, to ensure success. However, he secured work and joined the École des Beaux Arts. “Seven lost years,” was Rude’s opinion of the time he spent in this centre of academical method. Rude had always been an ardent politician, and the support he gave to Napoleon during “The Hundred Days” led to his exile. After twelve years in Brussels, he returned to Paris—aged forty-three. The exhibition of the “Neapolitan Fisher Boy” in 1833, established Rude’s reputation. The work is now in the Louvre. The circumstances under which it was carved recall those under which Michael Angelo produced his “[David].” Rude was furnished with an odd prism-shaped piece of marble. The delightful ingenuity with which he has used the happy pose arising from the boy’s crossed legs is worthy to be remembered along with the achievement of Michael Angelo himself.
RUDE
“THE MARSEILLAISE” RELIEF
Arc de Triomphe, Paris
Charming as the “Neapolitan Fisher Boy” is, Rude’s genius is more completely illustrated by his great bas-relief in the Arc de Triomphe at Paris. Thiers was Louis Philippe’s minister at the time, and he gave Rude the commission for all the “grande sculpture” upon the Arch. The intrigues of rivals, however, resulted in half of the work being handed over to Etex, and finally, Rude only contributed a single group. This was the “Chant du Départ,” generally known as “[The Marseillaise].” The magnificent force and vigour with which Rude has carried out the purpose of the memorial is beyond praise. His task was to perpetuate the fame of the Imperial armies which cowed Europe and won such fights as Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, and Friedland. Surely the difference between the emotion expressed in Rude’s “Chant du Départ,” and any works by the more highly endowed Canova and Thorvaldsen is beyond question. Surely it is equally certain that the difference can only be traced to one thing. The Frenchman was expressing what he felt, whereas, the other two men were only expressing what Wincklemann and Lessing had proved to be correct. Rude was able to infuse his marble with the passion it contains because he had lived through a stirring age. The “Chant du Départ” only nominally dates from the ’thirties of the last century. Really, it was carved in the year 1793, when Rude as a boy of nine, marched up and down the squares of Dijon, with his child-companions in the Royal Bourbon Regiment of the National Guard, and felt his loyal little heart burning within him as he sang the Marseillaise before the bust of Marat or Robespierre. It makes us feel that it is the direct outcome of real feeling—experienced at first hand.
THE RISE OF ENGLISH SCULPTURE
The sculpture of Rude leads naturally enough to that of Great Britain—the only other country in Europe with national emotions capable of being translated into a vital art at that time.
Unfortunately, no lover of sculpture, writing in English can turn from the art of France to that of his own country without a pang. For hundreds of years, the sculptor met with no encouragement in Great Britain. The land which had nourished the genius of a Shakespeare, a Milton and a Wren, of a Gainsborough and a Reynolds, could only advance a list of shadowy names against the tangible achievements of its great rival on the other side of the Channel. In the early days of the Renaissance, there was some promise that sculpture might obtain a foothold in England as it was doing in France. Henry VIII. and Wolsey took a keen interest in the infant art, and persuaded several Italian artists to take up their abode in England. Such a tomb as that of Henry VII. in the Abbey, the contract for which was made in 1512, affords an interesting comparison with the tombs of the French kings of the sixteenth century. It was the work of the Italian Torrigiano, best known nowadays as the breaker of Michael Angelo’s nose. Unfortunately, Torrigiano was the greatest, and not the least, of the band of foreign artists who came to England in those days. Consequently, our native sculptors never had the advantage of seeing men like Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto working among them. Torrigiano and Antonio Toto were poor substitutes for Cellini and Primaticcio.
No one can say what would have happened had a more vigorous artistic impulse been received from the country of Michael Angelo and Donatello. But this is certain. Neither sculpture nor painting in England became the living things they were in France. While Francis I. and the three Louis were purchasing statues by Goujon and Pajou, the English kings and nobles preferred to repeat lyrical snatches by such men as Lovelace and Rochester. Almost the only British sculptures from the end of the Tudors to the middle of the reign of George III. were the memorial monuments which still decorate our older churches. For the rest, there was such a work as the Nightingale monument by the foreigner Roubilliac, the still-life carvings of Grinling Gibbons, and the fine tombs by Nicholas Stone in Westminster Abbey.
The profound difference between the English character and the French accounts, in great measure, for Britain’s slowness to develop a national school of sculpture. The temperament which really feels that pure form can adequately express the emotional experience of mankind is rare at any time. It is far less likely to develop among men who prefer positive, concrete mental images than among those who seek the definite, abstract conceptions which the French mind creates. Moreover, during the century after Shakespeare, Britain was fully occupied in settling her religious and political difficulties, and upon such tasks as the absorption of Ireland and Scotland. During the seventeenth century and the early part of the eighteenth England should be pictured by the aid of Arnold’s magnificent image:
“The weary Titan, with deaf Ears, and labour-dimm’d eyes, Regarding neither to right Nor left ... Staggering on to her goal.”
The Scottish Revolution of 1745 marked the conclusion of the period of political and social stress. By the middle of the eighteenth century Great Britain had “found itself.” The foundations of a system of party government had been laid. The rule of Walpole, “the first Prime Minister of England,” had indicated the direction in which the future of English politics lay. For the first time the country was able to devote a portion of its spare energy to an art which was admittedly not quite attuned to the national temperament.
The establishment of the British Museum was an early indication of the new mood. The Royal Academy, founded in 1768, with Reynolds as its first president, indicated the public recognition that a national school of sculpture was possible. Finally, society—with a capital S—condescended to interest itself in classical art. The influence of this upon English sculpture can be happily illustrated from the history of the “Society of Dilettanti.”
At the time of the foundation of the Society of Dilettanti, between 1733 and 1735, young British noblemen were wont to make the “Grand Tour” through France and Italy, much as the Roman aristocrats had visited Greece and Asia Minor, during the later days of the Republic and the Empire. Usually the Englishman was accompanied by a tutor, who enabled his young charge to acquire the rudiments of a classical art education. The youth came back to London equipped as an arbiter in all matters of taste. The Society of Dilettanti only admitted such men as these, and its avowed object was to cultivate a taste for works of art which had attracted them during their tours. At first the Society of Dilettanti was little more than a dining club. Horace Walpole, writing in 1743, sneered: “The nominal qualification is having been in Italy; the real one being drunk.”
As the Society became more staid, with the advancing years of its founders, more ideal methods were adopted. Several of the promoters took leading positions in English life. Sir Francis Dashwood, for instance, became Bute’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. The fourth Earl of Sandwich not only enriched the language with a new term and a novel article of diet, but posed as a leader in all branches of English activity from gambling and theatricals to art criticism. In course of time such men as these had the spending of very considerable funds accumulated by the society. The sources whence the Society derived its income make amusing reading. There was, for instance, the “face money,” levied under a rule which ordained that every member’s portrait should be painted by Kneller for the benefit of the Society. Still larger sums accrued from the “Rule Ann. Soc. Undec.” This set forth that any member who was fortunate enough to secure an advance in his salary should contribute one per cent. of the first year’s rise to the Dilettanti coffers. In the Annals, under date January 6, 1744-5, one finds the following: “Received of the Duke of Bedford eleven guineas for having received the place of the first Commissioner of the Admiralty.”
On the whole, the funds of the Society of Dilettanti were expended with good judgment. Students’ scholarships were endowed in connection with the Royal Academy schools. Finely illustrated works dealing with various antiquarian subjects were published from time to time. Excavations were encouraged. Above all, a body of public opinion was created which took a real interest in classic sculpture.
Proofs of a sincere appreciation of classical art among the leaders of English society in the second half of the eighteenth century could be readily multiplied. We might instance the case of Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond, who celebrated his Italian tour by setting up a collection of painting, sculptures and casts in a gallery of his house in Whitehall and establishing schools of art there under Cipriani, the painter, and Wilton, the sculptor. But the supreme evidence of the value of the system is furnished by the case of Thomas, Earl of Elgin. That nobleman was engaged about 1802 upon a mission to the Ottoman Porte. He was fortunate enough to obtain a firman to examine and remove certain “inscriptions” from the Acropolis of Athens, at that time a Turkish fortress. His agents, under this firman, collected the Elgin marbles, which were conveyed to England in 1812 and finally purchased by the British Government in 1816. Even at this date, in spite of the writings of Lessing and Winckelmann, public opinion was in grave doubt as to the desirability of paying the beggarly £35,000 which the Earl of Elgin asked for his treasures. He had spent upwards of £70,000, so the offer was an exceptionally generous one. Even a man like Flaxman was doubtful as to the real value of the marbles. Like many art-lovers of his age, he preferred Raphael to Rembrandt—the “[Venus of Medici]” to the “[Three Fates].”
FLAXMAN
MICHAEL AND SATAN (SKETCH)
Victoria and Albert Museum,
South Kensington
Flaxman was the first English sculptor of European reputation. He was born in 1755 and died in 1826, so his career practically coincided with that of Canova. The son of a manufacturer of plaster of Paris casts, the boy Flaxman was terribly handicapped by a threatened deformity. But when he laid aside his crutches at ten years of age, his natural bent towards art began to display itself definitely. In 1770 he won the silver medal for sculpture at the Royal Academy. Patrons, however, proved few and far between and the necessity for making a living drove Flaxman to accept the commissions for the classical designs made famous through their association with Wedgwood pottery. His real career as a sculptor began in 1787. Like Thorvaldsen he could have said: “I was born when I first saw Rome. Before I merely existed.” When Flaxman returned to England eight years later, his future was assured. He became an A.R.A. in 1797 and an R.A. in 1800.
Perhaps no modern artist has produced work more nearly approaching the sculpture of Greece in spirit. In Flaxman’s best known work, the “[Michael and Satan],” we can trace a severe restraint which is foreign to the more florid styles of Canova and Thorvaldsen and which brings the Englishman far closer to the masters of the Hellenic school whom he sought to follow. He equalled either Canova or Thorvaldsen in fertility and purity of design, particularly in bas-relief. But Flaxman also suffered as they had done from a too close adherence to the eclectic influences derived from Winckelmann. When Flaxman sought to portray the intense passions, his borrowed style betrayed him. If intensity of emotion was of little moment in sculpture, Flaxman would rank among the immortals. As a fact, we know that it constitutes its very life. Consequently, one can only regret that it was not given to the first great English sculptor to emulate the achievements of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and evolve a style capable of expressing the manifold energies of his age in marble, as truly as they did on canvas. As it was, the genius of Flaxman only served to perpetuate a false ideal. His English followers made no effort to rid themselves of the methods which had marred even the finest work of the earlier masters of their school. Truth to tell, Flaxman’s reputation depends much more upon his non-sculptural work than it does upon his marbles—upon his Homeric illustrations, upon his drawings, with their mysterious reminiscences of Blake, for instance. Flaxman’s facility in design was so tremendous that it alone made him stand out far above his fellow sculptors. Added to this, there is a certain natural austerity in his sculptures which distinguishes them from the conventional theatricalities of the earlier eighteenth-century artists and the Georgian and early Victorian sentimentalities which followed. But it would be untrue to suggest that as a sculptor he rose superior to his age. Weighed in the scale of European art, ancient and modern, the life-work of Flaxman contains the same lesson as that of Canova and Thorvaldsen. It stands as a perpetual memorial of the eternal law, that no living art can be built upon a borrowed style—even though that style be Greek.