The manifestation of this love under the aspect of its religious content expands in many directions, such as the annunciation, the visitation, the birth, the flight into Egypt, and other such incidents. We may also associate with it, during the later course of the Christ-life, the disciples and women, who follow Him, and in whom the love of God is more or less a personal relation of their love to the living, present Saviour, Who, as actual man, pursues His course among them, and in like manner also the love of those angels who, on the occasion of His birth and at other times, hover around in grave adoration or simple joy. In treating all such figures the art of painting in particular discloses the complete peace and content of such a love.
But this peace, furthermore, is dissolved in the most heartfelt anguish. Mary the mother beholds Christ carrying the cross. She sees Him suffer on the cross and die; she sees Him taken from the cross and buried, and no grief is more poignant than her own. And yet we may observe that it is neither the irreparableness[262] of such a grief, or rather of such a loss, nor the weight of the calamity, nor the lament over the injustice of destiny, which constitutes the real content in such anguish, so that a contrast between it and the sorrow of Niobe is particularly instructive. Niobe, too, has lost all her children, and is set before us in severe loftiness and unperturbed beauty. The main content here is the aspect of the natural life of this ill-starred sufferer, the beauty in which Nature has robed her and which embraces the entire presentment of her actual existence. She, this actual personality, is beauty personified, and therein she persists. But her soul-life, her heart, has lost the entire content of its love, its soul, and her individuality and beauty can only turn into stone. The grief of Mary is of a wholly different type. She feels intimately the dagger which cuts through her soul's very centre, her heart breaks, but she does not become stone. She did not merely possess love, but her soul-life throughout is nothing but love, that is, free and concrete ideality, which retains the absolute content of that which it loses, and in the loss itself of the beloved persists in the peace of love. Her heart indeed breaks, but the substantive principle of her heart, the content of its life[263], which is disclosed through her anguish of soul with a vital strength that can never be lost, is something infinitely more exalted, namely, the living beauty of the human soul, as contrasted with its abstract substance, whose ideal existence as presented in bodily shape, when it is lost remains indeed indestructible, but is turned to stone.
There is one further subject for painting in connection with Mary the mother of Jesus, and that is her death and assumption. Schoreel has with exceptional beauty depicted a death of Mary in which we find the charm of her youth once more restored[264]. This master has united in his picture the expression of somnambulism, presence of death, rigidity, and blindness towards the exterior world with one which seems to suggest that the spirit, which seems somehow to penetrate through their general aspect, has found a home elsewhere and is blessed therein.
(γγ)Thirdly, we must include within the sphere of the actual presence of God in the life, sufferings, and glorification of Himself, mankind at large[265], that is to say the consciousness of individual human life, which God, or more accurately the events of His history, constitutes as itself an object of His love, communicating to it a content which is not merely finite but absolute in its significance. Here, too, we may emphasize the three aspects of tranquil devotion, repentance, and conversion, which both from the point of view of the soul and that of external condition the history of the Divine Passion repeats to mankind, no less than the ideal consummation in glory and the blessedness of pure attainment.
In respect to the first of these, namely, devotion, we have here what is primarily the content of prayer. This relation is in one aspect of it a humbling, surrender of the self, the seeking of peace in another; from another point of view it is not a petition but rather a prayer[266]. Petition and prayer are no doubt closely connected in so far, that is, as a prayer can be a petition. And yet the genuine petition seeks after something for itself. It importunes the man who possesses something of importance to myself, that he may feel inclined to do me a favour in virtue of the request, that his heart may yield, or his love may be roused toward me, in one word that his feeling of identity with myself may be awakened. What I, however, feel in making a petition is the desire for something, which the other person must lose if I am to secure it. The other person is to love me in order that my self-love may be satisfied, and my weal and necessity be promoted. I on the contrary give nothing further in the transaction unless it be contained in an admission that the person thus opportuned may ask for similar favours from myself. Prayer is not a petition of this type. It is an exaltation of the heart to the Absolute, which is assumed to be essentially Love, and as such possesses nothing independently[267]. The devotion itself is the gift, the petition itself is the blessedness. For although prayer may contain a petition for some particular thing, yet it is not this particular thing which is the true purport of the prayer; rather the essential truth of it is the conviction that the petition will be heard, and not heard in its relation to the particular request so much as to the absolute trust that God will apportion that which is best for me to receive. And thus even in such a connection prayer is itself its own satisfaction, the enjoyment, the express feeling and consciousness of eternal Love, which not only with its ray of illumination shines through the object[268] of prayer and its situation, but in fact constitutes the situation and what is there actually or is thereby manifested. It is this type of supplication which we find exemplified by Pope Sixtus in the picture of Raphael already mentioned[269], no less than by Santa Barbara in the same picture, and by many other representations of the prayers of apostles and saints, of Saint Francis[270] and the like at the foot of the Cross, where we find in the place of the suffering of Christ, or the dismay, doubt, and despair of the disciples the love and adoration of God, and the prayer that loses itself in Him is selected as the significant content. We find such rendered with particular force for the most part on the countenances of aged men marked strongly with the sufferings and experience of life in the earlier period of painting, faces that appear to be portraits, souls permeated with devotional feeling to such an extent that this attitude of prayer does not merely appear to be experienced at this particular moment, but rather they are presented us as pious and saintlike persons whose entire life, thought, instinct, and volition is one prayer, and whose expression despite of all the truth of their portraiture may be summed up wholly in this assurance and peace of Love. It is otherwise, however, among many of the earlier German and Flemish masters. The subject of the altar picture in Cologne Cathedral is the adoring kings and patrons of Cologne. We find this subject too frequently selected by the school of Van Eyck. In such examples the persons who adore are frequently famous individuals, princes, as, for instance, in a well-known adoration picture, which has been taken for the work of Van Eyck, critics have identified two of the kings with portraits of Philip of Burgundy and Charles the Bold. In the case of personages of this type we see that they are something more than saints, have affairs in the world, and only go to mass on Sunday or in the early morning, but during the rest of the week or for the rest of the day have other business to look after. And more particularly in our Flemish or German pictures the patrons are pious knights, God-fearing housewives with their sons and daughters. They resemble Martha who fares hither and thither and is concerned with matters of external or mundane significance, rather than Mary who has selected once and for all the best part. Their piety is not deficient, it is true, in intensity and soul; but we do not find here the song of Love which is at once the beginning and end of it, and which is perforce not merely an exaltation, a prayer, or thanks for a gift received, but is as much its unique life as that of the nightingale.
We may summarize the distinction which can be drawn generally in pictures of this kind between saints and worshippers on the one hand, and pious members of the Christian community as they actually appeared on the other, in the statement that the worshippers, more especially in Italian pictures, disclose in the expression of their piety a complete harmony of external and spiritual condition. It is their very soul which we find written for the most part on their countenances, which are not permitted to express anything opposed to the emotions of their heart. In the actual conditions of life this is not always the case. An infant, for example, when it weeps, more particularly when beginning to do so, quite apart from the fact that we know its grief is not worth the trouble of crying over, often makes us smile with its ugly faces. And in the same way old folk pucker up their face when they laugh, because the lines of their features are too pronounced, cold, and stiff to accommodate themselves readily to an unreserved and natural laugh or a friendly smile. The art of painting should endeavour to avoid this incompatibility between the emotions of piety expressed and the sensuous forms which have to express them, and, so far as possible, produce a harmony between the soul and its external mode of expression. And this in the highest degree was effected by the Italians; the Germans and Flemish were less successful, because the main object in their work was living portraiture.
I will add one further remark, that this devotion of the soul ought not to reach the point of the actual cry of anxiety, that cry of tribulation and desire, such as the Psalms and many Lutheran hymns express, and we may illustrate it with the old words: "As the hart crieth for the water-brooks, so crieth my soul for Thee." We may rather indicate it as a gradual melting away, not to that attenuation of sweetness perhaps we associate with the nun, but at any rate a surrender of the soul, and an enjoyment and satisfaction in such surrender. For that travail of faith, that anxious troubling of soul, that doubt and desperation which persists in disunion, such a type of hypochondriacal piety which never is certain whether it is still sin, whether there has been repentance and pardon is complete, a surrender, in which the soul can never advance a step, and is always betraying the fact by his anxiety, such a state is not compatible with the beauty of the romantic Ideal. We much prefer that the eye of devotion should raise its look of yearning heavenwards, although it is both more artistic and gives us yet more satisfaction when it is centred on some present object of adoration, whether it be the Virgin Mother, Christ, or saint. It is a facile thing, only too facile, to attach to a picture a spiritual interest, by making its central figure gaze heavenwards, anywhere beyond the world, just as we find that nowadays people are only too ready to make use of an equally facile way of proving God and religion to be the foundation of society by quoting texts of the Bible rather than establishing such a basis on the reason of actual reality. Such a gaze of countenance upwards becomes in the pictures of Guido Reni[271], for example, a pure mannerism. The Assumption of the Virgin, too, which we find at Munich, has been much eulogized by its admirers and critics, and we may admit that the exalted character of its transfiguration, the absorption and surrender of the soul in the heavenly vision, and indeed the entire pose of the ascending figure, to say nothing of the brilliance and beauty of the colouring, is most impressive. But for myself I find such representations which depict the Virgin Mother in her own daydream of love and blessedness with her glance centred on her babe still more appropriate to her truth. The other type of yearning and strain, with its upward gaze heavenwards, is somewhat too near to our modern sentimentalism.
A further aspect of importance is concerned with the entrance of the principle of negation into the spiritual devotion of Love. The disciples, saints, and martyrs, have to pass through, in some measure as an experience of their souls, and in part, too, as one of their external life, that way of suffering along which the Christ in the history of His Passion passed before them.
This suffering lies to some extent on the confines of art. Painting can very easily overstep this boundary, in so far, that is, as it accepts for its subject-matter the horrors and terrors of the bodily torture, whether it be in flaying, or burning, or crucifixion, and its pains. This it is not permitted to do, if it is not to forsake the spiritual Ideal. This is not solely due to the fact that to present martyrs under such conditions to our sight is not beautiful to the sense, nor because our nerves nowadays are too keenly strung, but on the better ground that this material aspect is not the really important one. The true content we have to follow with sympathy and which should be depicted is the spiritual experience, the soul in all that it suffers through Love, and not the direct bodily pain of a certain individual, the grief for the sufferings of another, or the anguish felt personally for personal demerit. The endurance of martyrs in physical tortures is an endurance which carries with it merely physical pain: what the spiritual Ideal looks for is the trial of the soul in its own domain, its own peculiar suffering, the wounds of its love, the repentance, mourning, anguish, and penance of its heart.
But we must add that in depicting this pain of soul the positive aspect must not wholly be absent. The soul must be assured of the actual and essentially consummated reconciliation between mankind and God, and only experience anxiety that this eternal salvation be realized as a truth in itself. In this connection we not unfrequently meet with repentant people, martyrs, and monks, who, despite of their assuredness of an objective atonement, partly are overwhelmed with sorrow for a heart whose entire surrender they deem to be right, and partly have already made such complete surrender, and yet are always for realizing such reconciliation anew, and consequently for ever imposing on themselves the burden of penances. And we find, therefore, in the artistic treatment of such situations a twofold point of departure. In other words, the artist may, to start with, presuppose in his subject an open disposition, freedom, cheerfulness, and decision of spirit, such as carries with ease life and the yoke of the actual world and knows how to readily deal with the same, then he may fitly associate with such painful experiences a native nobility, grace, freshness, freedom, and beauty of form. When, on the contrary, his work is based upon a natural sense that is more refractory, defiant, savage, and limited, the conflict of the spirit in overcoming the flesh and the world, and securing to itself the religion of salvation will necessarily imply more severe travail. In cases of such obstinacy of soul, therefore, the harsher reflections of force and stability are more apparent, the scars of the wounds which have been inflicted on an obstinacy of this type are more visible and enduring, and the beauty of the physical result tends to vanish[272].