How long the pencil continued only to assist, when it began to engross and when it at last entirely supplanted the cestrum, cannot in the perplexity of accidental report be ascertained. Apollodorus in the 93d Olymp. and Zeuxis in the 94th, are said to have used it with freedom and with power. The battle of the Lapithæ and the Centaurs, which according to Pausanias, Parrhasius painted on the shield of the Minerva of Phidias, to be chased by Mys, could be nothing but a monochrom, and was probably designed with the cestrum, as an instrument of greater accuracy.[6] Apelles and Protogenes, nearly a century afterwards, drew their contested lines with the pencil; and that alone, as delicacy and evanescent subtlety were the characteristic of those lines, may give an idea of their mechanic excellence. And yet in their time the diagraphic process[7], which is the very same with the linear one we have described, made a part of liberal education. And Pausias of Sicyon, the contemporary of Apelles, and perhaps the greatest master of composition amongst the ancients, when employed to repair the decayed pictures of Polygnotus at Thespiæ, was adjudged by general opinion to have egregiously failed in the attempt, because he had substituted the pencil to the cestrum, and entered a contest of superiority with weapons not his own.
Here it might seem in its place to say something on the Encaustic method used by the ancients; were it not a subject by ambiguity of expression and conjectural dispute so involved in obscurity that a true account of its process must be despaired of: the most probable idea we can form of it is, that it bore some resemblance to our oil-painting, and that the name was adopted to denote the use of materials, inflammable or prepared by fire, the supposed durability of which, whether applied hot or cold, authorised the terms ἐνεκαυσε and inussit.
The first great name of that epoch of the preparatory period when facts appear to overbalance conjecture, is that of Polygnotus of Thasos, who painted the poecile at Athens, and the lesche or public hall at Delphi. Of these works, but chiefly of the two large pictures at Delphi, which represented scenes subsequent to the eversion of Troy, and Ulysses consulting the spirit of Tiresias in Hades, Pausanias[8] gives a minute and circumstantial detail; by which we are led to surmise, that what is now called composition was totally wanting in them as a whole: for he begins his description at one end of the picture, and finishes it at the opposite extremity, a senseless method if we suppose that a central group, or a principal figure to which the rest were in a certain degree subordinate, attracted the eye; it appears as plain that they had no perspective, the series of figures on the second or middle ground being described as placed above those on the fore-ground, and the figures in the distance above the whole: the honest method too which the painter chose of annexing to many of his figures, their names in writing, savours much of the infancy of painting.—We should however be cautious to impute solely to ignorance or imbecility, what might rest on the firm base of permanent principle. The genius of Polygnotus was more than that of any other artist before or after, Phidias perhaps alone excepted, a public genius, his works monumental works, and these very pictures the votive offerings of the Gnidians. The art at that summit, when exerting its powers to record the feats, consecrate the acts, perpetuate the rites, propagate the religion, or to disseminate the peculiar doctrines of a nation, heedless of the rules prescribed to inferior excellence and humbler pursuits, returns to its elements, leaps strict possibility, combines remote causes with present effects, connects local distance and unites separate moments.—Simplicity, parallelism, apposition, take place of variety, contrast and composition.—Such was the Lesche painted by Polygnotus, and if we consider the variety of powers that distinguished many of the parts, we must incline to ascribe the primitive arrangement of the whole rather to the artist’s choice and lofty simplicity, than want of comprehension: nature had endowed him with that rectitude of taste which in the individuum discovers the stamen of the genus, hence his style of design was essential with glimpses of grandeur[9] and ideal beauty. Polygnotus, says Aristotle, improves the model. His invention reached the conception of undescribed being, in the dæmon Eurynomus; filled the chasm of description in Theseus and Pirithous, in Ariadne and Phædra; and improved its terrours in the spectre of Tityus; whilst colour to assist it, became in his hand an organ of expression; such was the prophetic glow which still crimsoned the cheeks of his Cassandra in the time of Lucian.[10] The improvements in painting which Pliny ascribes to him, of having dressed the heads of his females in variegated veils and bandeaus, and robed them in lucid drapery, of having gently opened the lips, given a glimpse of the teeth, and lessened the former monotony of face, such improvements I say were surely the most trifling part of a power to which the age of Apelles and that of Quintilian paid equal homage: nor can it add much to our esteem for him, to be told by Pliny that there existed, in the portico of Pompey, a picture of his with the figure of a warrior in an attitude so ambiguous as to make it a question whether he were ascending or descending. Such a figure could only be the offspring of mental or technic imbecility, even if it resembled the celebrated one of a Diomede carrying off the palladium with one and holding a sword in the other hand, on the intaglio inscribed, I think, with the name of Dioscorides.
With this simplicity of manner and materials the art seems to have proceeded from Polygnotus, Aglaophon, Phidias, Panænus, Colotes, and Evenor, the father of Parrhasius, during a period of more or less disputed olympiads, to the appearance of Apollodorus the Athenian, who applied the essential principles of Polygnotus to the delineation of the species, by investigating the leading forms that discriminate the various classes of human qualities and passions. The acuteness of his taste led him to discover that as all men were connected by one general form, so they were separated each by some predominant power, which fixed character and bound them to a class: that in proportion as this specific power partook of individual peculiarities, the farther it was removed from a share in that harmonious system which constitutes nature, and consists in a due balance of all its parts; thence he drew his line of imitation, and personified the central form of the class, to which his object belonged; and to which the rest of its qualities administered without being absorbed: agility was not suffered to destroy firmness, solidity or weight; nor strength and weight agility; elegance did not degenerate to effeminacy, or grandeur swell to hugeness; such were his principles of style: his expression extended them to the mind, if we may judge from the two subjects mentioned by Pliny, in which he seems to have personified the characters of devotion and impiety; that, in the adoring figure of a priest, perhaps of Chryses, expanding his gratitude at the shrine of the God whose arrows avenged his wrongs and restored his daughter: and this, in the figure of Ajax wrecked, and from the sea-swept rock hurling defiance unto the murky sky. As neither of these subjects can present themselves to a painters mind without a contrast of the most awful and terrific tones of colour, magic of light and shade, and unlimited command over the tools of art, we may with Pliny and with Plutarch consider Apollodorus as the first assertor of the pencil’s honours, as the first colourist of his age, and the man who opened the gates of art which the Heracleot Zeuxis entered.[11]
From the essential style of Polygnotus and the specific discrimination of Apollodorus, Zeuxis, by comparison of what belonged to the genus and what to the class, framed at last that ideal form, which in his opinion, constituted the supreme degree of human beauty, or in other words, embodied possibility, by uniting the various but homogeneous powers scattered among many, in one object, to one end. Such a system, if it originated in genius, was the considerate result of taste refined by the unremitting perseverance with which he observed, consulted, compared, selected the congenial but scattered forms of nature. Our ideas are the offspring of our senses, we are not more able create the form of a being, we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence, and he alone can comprehend what one degree of beauty wants to become equal to another, and at last superlative. He who thinks the pretty handsome, will think the handsome a beauty, and fancy he has met an ideal form in a merely handsome one, whilst he who has compared beauty with beauty, will at last improve form upon form to a perfect image; this was the method of Zeuxis, and this he learnt from Homer, whose mode of ideal composition, according to Quintilian, he considered as his model. Each individual of Homer forms a class, expresses and is circumscribed by one quality of heroic power; Achilles alone unites their various but congenial energies. The grace of Nireus, the dignity of Agamemnon, the impetuosity of Hector, the magnitude, the steady prowess of the great, the velocity of the lesser Ajax, the perseverance of Ulysses, the intrepidity of Diomede, are emanations of energy that reunite in one splendid centre fixed in Achilles. This standard of the unison of homogeneous powers exhibited in successive action by the poet, the painter, invigorated no doubt by the contemplation of the works of Phidias, transferred to his own art and substantiated by form, when he selected the congenial beauties of Croton to compose a perfect female. Like Phidias too, he appears to have been less pathetic than sublime, and even in his female forms more ample and august than elegant or captivating: his principle was epic, and this Aristotle either considered not or did not comprehend, when he refuses him the expression of character in action and feature: Jupiter on his throne encircled by the celestial synod, and Helen, the arbitress of Troy, contained probably the principal elements of his style; but he could trace the mother’s agitation in Alcmena, and in Penelope the pangs of wedded love.
On those powers of his invention which Lucian relates in the memoir inscribed with the name of Zeuxis, I shall reserve my observations for a fitter moment. Of his colour we know little, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that it emulated the beauties and the grandeur of his design; and that he extended light and shade to masses, may be implied from his peculiar method of painting monochroms on a black ground, adding the lights in white.[12]
The correctness of Parrhasius succeeded to the genius of Zeuxis. He circumscribed his ample style, and by subtle examination of outline established that standard of divine and heroic form which raised him to the authority of a legislator from whose decisions there was no appeal. He gave to the divine and heroic character in painting, what Polycletus had given to the human in sculpture, by his Doryphorus, a canon of proportion. Phidias had discovered in the nod of the Homeric Jupiter the characteristic of majesty, inclination of the head: this hinted to him a higher elevation of the neck behind, a bolder protrusion of the front, and the increased perpendicular of the profile. To this conception Parrhasius fixed a maximum; that point from which descends the ultimate line of celestial beauty, the angle within which moves what is inferior, beyond which what is portentous. From the head conclude to the proportions of the neck, the limbs, the extremities; from the father to the race of gods; all, the sons of one, Zeus; derived from one source of tradition, Homer; formed by one artist, Phidias: on him measured and decided by Parrhasius. In the simplicity of this principle, adhered to by the succeeding periods, lies the uninterrupted progress and the unattainable superiority of Grecian art. With this prerogative, which evidently implies a profound as well as general knowledge of the parts, how are we to reconcile the criticism passed on the intermediate parts of his forms as inferior to their outline? or how could Winkelmann, in contradiction with his own principles, explain it, by a want of anatomic knowledge[13]? how is it possible to suppose that he who decided his outline with such intelligence that it appeared ambient, and pronounced the parts that escaped the eye, should have been uninformed of its contents? let us rather suppose that the defect ascribed to the intermediate forms of his bodies, if such a fault there was, consisted in an affectation of smoothness bordering on insipidity, in something effeminately voluptuous, which absorbed their character and the idea of elastic vigour; and this Euphranor seems to have hinted at, when in comparing his own Theseus with that of Parrhasius, he pronounced the Ionian’s to have fed on roses, his own on flesh[14]: emasculate softness was not in his opinion, the proper companion of the contour, or flowery freshness of colour an adequate substitute for the sterner tints of heroic form.
None of the ancients seem to have united or wished to combine as man and artist, more qualities seemingly incompatible than Parrhasius.—The volubility and ostentatious insolence of an Asiatic with Athenian simplicity and urbanity of manners; punctilious correctness with blandishments of handling and luxurious colour, and with sublime and pathetic conception, a fancy libidinously sportive[15]. If he was not the inventor, he surely was the greatest master of allegory, supposing that he really embodied by signs universally comprehended that image of the Athenian ΔΗΜΟΣ or people, which was to combine and to express at once its contradictory qualities. Perhaps he traced the jarring branches to their source, the aboriginal moral principle of the Athenian character, which he made intuitive. This supposition alone can shed a dawn of possibility on what else appears impossible. We know that the personification of the Athenian Δημος was an object of sculpture, and that its images by Lyson and Leochares[16] were publicly set up; but there is no clue to decide whether they preceded or followed the conceit of Parrhasius. It was repeated by Aristolaus, the son of Pausias.
The decided forms of Parrhasius, Timanthes the Cythnian, his competitor for fame, attempted to inspire with mind and to animate with passions. No picture of antiquity is more celebrated than his immolation of Iphigenia in Aulis, painted, as Quintilian informs us, in contest with Colotes of Teos, a painter and sculptor from the school of Phidias; crowned with victory at its rival exhibition, and since, the theme of unlimited praise from the orators and historians of antiquity, though the solidity or justice of their praise relatively to our art, has been questioned by modern criticism. On this subject, which not only contains the gradations of affection from the most remote to the closest link of humanity, but appears to me to offer the fairest specimen of the limits which the theory of the ancients had prescribed to the expression of pathos, I think it my duty the more circumstantially to expatiate, as the censure passed on the method of Timanthes, has been sanctioned by the highest authority in matters of art, that of your late President, in his eighth discourse at the delivery of the academic prize for the best picture painted from this very subject.