To prove the relation of Ælian 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[71] 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.’[72]
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.
This intuition into the pure emanations of nature, Raphael Sanzio possessed in the most enviable degree, from the utmost conflict of passions, to the enchanting round of gentler emotion, and the nearly silent hints of mind and character. To this he devoted the tremendous scenery of that magnificent fresco, known to you all under the name of the Incendio del Borgo, in which he sacrificed the historic and mystic part of his subject to the effusion of the various passions roused by the sudden terrours of nocturnal conflagration. It is not for the faint appearance of the miracle which approaches with the pontiff and his train in the back-ground, that Raphael invites our eyes; the perturbation, necessity, hope, fear, danger, the pangs and efforts of affection grappling with the enraged elements of wind and fire, displayed on the fore-ground, furnish the pathetic motives that press on our hearts. That mother, who but half awake or rather in a waking trance, drives her children instinctively before her; that prostrate female half covered by her streaming hair, with elevated arms imploring heaven; that other who over the flaming tenement, heedless of her own danger, absorbed in maternal agony, boldly reaches over to drop the babe into the outstretched arms of its father; that common son of nature, who careless of another’s woe, intent only on his own safety, librates a leap from the burning wall; the vigorous youth who followed by an aged mother bears the palsied father on his shoulder from the rushing wreck; the nimble grace of those helpless females that vainly strive to administer relief—these are the real objects of the painter’s aim, and leave the pontiff and the miracle, with taper, bell and clergy—unheeded in the distance.
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.
Invention in its more specific sense receives its subjects from poetry or authenticated tradition; they are epic or sublime, dramatic or impassioned, historic or circumscribed by truth. The first astonishes; the second moves; the third informs.
The aim of the epic painter is to impress one general idea, one great quality of nature or mode of society, some great maxim, without descending to those subdivisions, which the detail of character prescribes: he paints the elements with their own simplicity, height, depth, the vast, the grand, darkness, light; life, death; the past, the future; man, pity, love, joy, fear, terrour, peace, war, religion, government: and the visible agents are only engines to force one irresistible idea upon the mind and fancy, as the machinery of Archimedes served only to convey destruction, and the wheels of a watch serve only to tell time.
Such is the first and general sense of what is called the sublime, epic, allegoric, lyric substance. Homer, to impress one forcible idea of war, its origin, its progress, and its end, set to work innumerable engines of various magnitude, yet none but what uniformly tends to enforce this and only this idea; gods and demigods are only actors, and nature but the scene of war; no character is discriminated but where discrimination discovers a new look of war; no passion is raised but what is blown up by the breath of war, and as soon absorbed in its universal blaze:—As in a conflagration we see turrets, spires, and temples illuminated only to propagate the honours of destruction, so through the stormy page of Homer, we see his heroines and heroes, but by the light that blasts them.
This is the principle of that divine series of frescoes, with which under the pontificates of Julius II. and Paul III. Michael Angelo adorned the lofty compartments of the Capella Sistina, and from a modesty or a pride for ever to be lamented, only not occupied the whole of its ample sides. Its subject is theocracy or the empire of religion, considered as the parent and queen of man; the origin, the progress, and final dispensation of Providence, as taught by the sacred records. Amid this imagery of primeval simplicity, whose sole object is the relation of the race to its Founder, to look for minute discrimination of character, is to invert the principle of the artist’s invention: here is only God with man. The veil of eternity is rent; time, space, and matter teem in the creation of the elements and of earth; life issues from God and adoration from man, in the creation of Adam and his mate; transgression of the precept at the tree of knowledge proves the origin of evil, and of expulsion from the immediate intercourse with God; the œconomy of justice and grace commences in the revolutions of the deluge, and the covenant made with Noah; and the germs of social character are traced in the subsequent scene between him and his sons; the awful synod of prophets and sibyls are the heralds of the Redeemer, and the host of patriarchs the pedigree of the Son of Man; the brazen serpent and the fall of Haman, the giant subdued by the stripling in Goliah and David, and the conquerour destroyed by female weakness in Judith, are types of his mysterious progress, till Jonah pronounces him immortal; and the magnificence of the last judgment by shewing the Saviour in the judge of man, sums up the whole, and reunites the founder and the race.