How did Timanthes treat it? Iphigenia, the victim ordained by the oracle, to be offered for the success of the Greek expedition against Troy, was represented standing ready for immolation at the altar, the priest, the instruments of death at her side; and around her, an assembly of the most important agents or witnesses of the terrible solemnity, from Ulysses, who had disengaged her from the embraces of her mother at Mycenæ, to her nearest male relations, her uncle Menelaus, and her own father, Agamemnon. Timanthes, say Pliny and Quintilian with surprising similarity of phrase, when, in gradation he had consumed every image of grief within the reach of art, from the unhappy priest, to the deeper grief of Ulysses, and from that to the pangs of kindred sympathy in Menelaus, unable to express with dignity the father’s woe, threw a veil, or if you will, a mantle over his face.——This mantle, the pivot of objection, indiscriminately borrowed, as might easily be supposed, by all the concurrents for the prize, gave rise to the following series of criticisms:
‘Before I conclude, I cannot avoid making one observation on the pictures now before us. I have observed, that every candidate has copied the celebrated invention of Timanthes in hiding the face of Agamemnon in his mantle; indeed such lavish encomiums have been bestowed on this thought, and that too by men of the highest character in critical knowledge,—Cicero, Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, and Pliny,—and have been since re-echoed by almost every modern that has written on the Arts, that your adopting it can neither be wondered at, nor blamed. It appears now to be so much connected with the subject, that the spectator would perhaps be disappointed in not finding united in the picture what he always united in his mind, and considered as indispensably belonging to the subject. But it may be observed, that those who praise this circumstance were not painters. They use it as an illustration only of their own art; it served their purpose, and it was certainly not their business to enter into the objections that lie against it in another Art. I fear we have but very scanty means of exciting those powers over the imagination, which make so very considerable and refined a part of poetry. It is a doubt with me, whether we should even make the attempt. The chief, if not the only occasion which the painter has for this artifice, is, when the subject is improper to be more fully represented, either for the sake of decency, or to avoid what would be disagreeable to be seen; and this is not to raise or increase the passions, which is the reason that is given for this practice, but on the contrary to diminish their effect.
‘Mr. Falconet has observed, in a note on this passage in his translation of Pliny, that the circumstance of covering the face of Agamemnon was probably not in consequence of any fine imagination of the painter,—which he considers as a discovery of the critics,—but merely copied from the description of the sacrifice, as it is found in Euripides.
‘The words from which the picture is supposed to be taken, are these: Agamemnon saw Iphigenia advance towards the fatal altar; he groaned, he turned aside his head, he shed tears, and covered his face with his robe.
‘Falconet does not at all acquiesce in the praise that is bestowed on Timanthes; not only because it is not his invention, but because he thinks meanly of this trick of concealing, except in instances of blood, where the objects would be too horrible to be seen; but, says he, “in an afflicted Father, in a King, in Agamemnon, you, who are a painter, conceal from me the most interesting circumstance, and then put me off with sophistry and a veil. You are (he adds) a feeble painter, without resources: you do not know even those of your Art. I care not what veil it is, whether closed hands, arms raised, or any other action that conceals from me the countenance of the Hero. You think of veiling Agamemnon; you have unveiled your own ignorance.”
‘To what Falconet has said, we may add, that supposing this method of leaving the expression of grief to the imagination, to be, as it was thought to be, the invention of the painter, and that it deserves all the praise that has been given it, still it is a trick that will serve but once; whoever does it a second time, will not only want novelty, but be justly suspected of using artifice to evade difficulties. If difficulties overcome make a great part of the merit of Art, difficulties evaded can deserve but little commendation.’
To this string of animadversions, I subjoin with diffidence the following observations:
The subject of Timanthes was the immolation of Iphigenia; Iphigenia was the principal figure, and her form, her resignation, or her anguish the painter’s principal task; the figure of Agamemnon, however, important, is merely accessory, and no more necessary to make the subject a completely tragic one, than that of Clytemnestra the mother, no more than that of Priam, to impress us with sympathy at the death of Polyxena. It is therefore a misnomer of the French critic, to call Agamemnon ‘the hero’ of the subject.
Neither the French nor the English critic appear to me to have comprehended the real motive of Timanthes, as contained in the words ‘decere, pro dignitate, and digne,’ in the passages of Tully, Quintilian, and Pliny[17]; they ascribe to impotence what was the forbearance of judgment; Timanthes felt like a father: he did not hide the face of Agamemnon, because it was beyond the power of his art, not because it was beyond the possibility, but because it was beyond the dignity of expression, because the inspiring feature of paternal affection at that moment, and the action which of necessity must have accompanied it, would either have destroyed the grandeur of the character and the solemnity of the scene, or subjected the painter with the majority of his judges to the imputation of insensibility. He must either have represented him in tears, or convulsed at the flash of the raised dagger, forgetting the chief in the father, or shown him absorbed by despair, and in that state of stupefaction, which levels all features and deadens expression; he might indeed have chosen a fourth mode, he might have exhibited him fainting and palsied in the arms of his attendants, and by this confusion of male and female character, merited the applause of every theatre at Paris. But Timanthes had too true a sense of nature to expose a father’s feelings or to tear a passion to rags; nor had the Greeks yet learnt of Rome to steel the face. If he made Agamemnon bear his calamity as a man, he made him also feel it as a man. It became the leader of Greece to sanction the ceremony with his presence, it did not become the father to see his daughter beneath the dagger’s point: the same nature that threw a real mantle over the face of Timoleon, when he assisted at the punishment of his brother, taught Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, propriety of expression was his aim.