SECOND LECTURE.
In the preceding discourse I have endeavoured to impress you with the general features of ancient art in its different periods of preparation, establishment and refinement. We are now arrived at the epoch of its restoration in the fifteenth century of our æra, when religion and wealth rousing emulation, reproduced its powers, but gave to their exertion a very different direction. The reigning church found itself indeed under the necessity of giving more splendour to the temples and mansions destined to receive its votaries, of subduing their senses with the charm of appropriate images and the exhibition of events and actions, which might stimulate their zeal and inflame their hearts: but the sacred mysteries of Divine Being, the method adopted by Revelation, the duties its doctrine imposed, the virtues it demanded from its followers, faith, resignation, humility, sufferings, substituted a medium of art as much inferior to the resources of Paganism in a physical sense as incomparably superior in a spiritual one. Those public customs, that perhaps as much tended to spread the infections of vice as they facilitated the means of art, were no more; the heroism of the Christian and his beauty were internal, and powerful or exquisite forms allied him no longer exclusively to his God. The chief repertory of the artist, the sacred records, furnished indeed a sublime cosmogony, scenes of patriarchal simplicity and a poetic race, which left nothing to regret in the loss of heathen mythology; but the stem of the nation whose history is its exclusive theme, if it abounded in characters and powers fit for the exhibition of passions, did not teem with forms sufficiently exalted to inform the artist and elevate the art. Ingredients of a baser cast mingled their alloy with the materials of grandeur and of beauty. Monastic legend and the rubric of martyrology claimed more than a legitimate share from the labours of the pencil and the chisel, made nudity the exclusive property of emaciated hermits or decrepit age, and if the breast of manhood was allowed to bare its vigour, or beauty to expand her bosom, the antidotes of terror and of horror were ready at their side to check the apprehended infection of their charms. When we add to this the heterogeneous stock on which the reviving system of arts was grafted, a race indeed inhabiting a genial climate, but itself the fæces of barbarity, the remnants of Gothic adventurers, humanised only by the cross, mouldering amid the ruins of the temples they had demolished, the battered fragments of the images their rage had crushed,—when we add this, I say, we shall less wonder at the languor of modern art in its rise and progress, than be astonished at the vigour by which it adapted and raised materials partly so unfit and defective, partly so contaminated, to the magnificent system which we are to contemplate.
Sculpture had already produced respectable specimens of its reviving powers in the basso-relievos of Lorenzo Ghiberti, some works of Donato, and the Christ of Philippo Brunelleschi,[27] when the first symptoms of imitation appeared in the frescoes of Tommaso da St. Giovanni, commonly called Masaccio, from the total neglect of his appearance and person.[28] Masaccio first conceived that parts are to constitute a whole; that composition ought to have a centre; expression, truth; and execution, unity: his line deserves attention, though his subjects led him not to investigation of form, and the shortness of his life forbade his extending those elements which Raphael, nearly a century afterward, carried to perfection—it is sufficiently glorious for him to have been more than once copied by that great master of expression, and in some degree to have been the herald of his style: Masaccio lives more in the figure of Paul preaching on the areopágus, of the celebrated cartoon in our possession, and in the borrowed figure of Adam expelled from paradise in the loggia of the Vatican, than in his own mutilated or retouched remains.
The essays of Masaccio in imitation and expression, Andrea Mantegna[29] attempted to unite with form; led by the contemplation of the antique, fragments of which he ambitiously scattered over his works: though a Lombard, and born prior to the discovery of the best ancient statues, he seems to have been acquainted with a variety of characters, from forms that remind us of the Apollo, Mercury or Meleager, down to the fauns and satyrs: but his taste was too crude, his fancy too grotesque, and his comprehension too weak to advert from the parts that remained to the whole that inspired them: hence in his figures of dignity or beauty we see not only the meagre forms of common models, but even their defects tacked to ideal Torsos; and his fauns and satyrs, instead of native luxuriance of growth and the sportive appendages of mixed being, are decorated with heraldic excrescences and arabesque absurdity. His triumphs are known to you all; they are a copious inventory of classic lumber, swept together with more industry than taste, but full of valuable materials. Of expression he was not ignorant: his burial of Christ furnished Raphael with the composition, and some of the features and attitudes in his picture on the same subject in the palace of the Borgheses,—the figure of St. John, however, left out by Raphael, proves that Mantegna sometimes mistook grimace for the highest degree of grief. His oil-pictures exhibit little more than the elaborate anguish of missal-painting; his frescoes, destroyed at the construction of the Clementine museum, had freshness, freedom, and imitation.
To Luca Signorelli, of Cortona,[30] nature more than atoned for the want of those advantages which the study of the antique had offered to Andrea Mantegna. He seems to have been the first who contemplated with a discriminating eye his object, saw what was accident and what essential; balanced light and shade, and decided the motion of his figures. He foreshortened with equal boldness and intelligence, and thence it is, probably, that Vasari fancies to have discovered in the last judgment of Michael Angelo traces of imitation from the Lunetta, painted by Luca, in the church of the Madonna, at Orvieto; but the powers which animated him there, and before at Arezzo, are no longer visible in the Gothic medley with which he filled two compartments in the chapel of Sixtus IV. at Rome.
Such was the dawn of modern art, when Lionardo da Vinci[31] broke forth with a splendour which distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius, favoured by education and circumstances, all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor, anatomist, architect, engineer, chemist, machinist, musician, man of science, and sometimes empiric,[32] he laid hold of every beauty in the enchanted circle, but without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed in her turn each. Fitter to scatter hints than to teach by example, he wasted life, insatiate, in experiment. To a capacity which at once penetrated the principle and real aim of the art, he joined an inequality of fancy that at one moment lent him wings for the pursuit of beauty, and the next, flung him on the ground to crawl after deformity: we owe him chiaroscuro with all its magic, we owe him caricature with all its incongruities. His notions of the most elaborate finish and his want of perseverance were at least equal:—want of perseverance alone could make him abandon his cartoon destined for the great council-chamber at Florence, of which the celebrated contest of horsemen was but one group; for to him who could organize that composition, Michael Angelo himself ought rather to have been an object of emulation than of fear: and that he was able to organize it, we may be certain from the remaining imperfect sketch in the 'Etruria Pittrice;' but still more from the admirable print of it by Edelinck, after a drawing of Rubens, who was Lionardo's great admirer, and has said much to impress us with the beauties of his Last Supper in the refectory of the Dominicans at Milano, the only one of his great works which he carried to ultimate finish, through all its parts, from the head of Christ to the least important one: it perished soon after him, and we can estimate the loss only from the copies that survive.
Bartolomeo della Porta, or di S. Marco, the last master of this period,[33] first gave gradation to colour, form, and masses to drapery, and a grave dignity, till then unknown, to execution. If he were not endowed with the versatility and comprehension of Lionardo, his principles were less mixed with base matter and less apt to mislead him. As a member of a religious order, he confined himself to subjects and characters of piety; but the few nudities which he allowed himself to exhibit, show sufficient intelligence and still more style: he foreshortened with truth and boldness, and whenever the figure did admit of it, made his drapery the vehicle of the limb it invests. He was the true master of Raphael, whom his tuition weaned from the meanness of Pietro Perugino, and prepared for the mighty style of Michael Angelo Buonarotti.
Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner are the elements of Michael Angelo's style.[34] By these principles he selected or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter, as sculptor, as architect, he attempted, and above any other man succeeded, to unite magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts with the utmost simplicity and breadth. His line is uniformly grand: character and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to grandeur. The child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man; his men are a race of giants. This is the 'terribil via' hinted at by Agostino Carracci, though perhaps as little understood by the Bolognese as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To give the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty, was the exclusive power of Michael Angelo. He is the inventor of epic painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine chapel which exhibits the origin, the progress, and the final dispensations of theocracy. He has personified motion in the groups of the cartoon of Pisa; embodied sentiment on the monuments of St. Lorenzo, unravelled the features of meditation in the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine chapel; and in the Last Judgement, with every attitude that varies the human body, traced the master-trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though as sculptor, he expressed the character of flesh more perfectly than all who went before or came after him, yet he never submitted to copy an individual; Julio the second only excepted, and in him he represented the reigning passion rather than the man.[35] In painting he contented himself with a negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected all meretricious ornament.[36] The fabric of St. Peter, scattered into infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex gave the air of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him all in all, was M. Angelo, the salt of art: sometimes he no doubt had his moments of dereliction, deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his forms with futile and ostentatious anatomy: both met with armies of copyists; and it has been his fate to have been censured for their folly.
The inspiration of Michael Angelo was followed by the milder genius of Raphael Sanzio,[37] the father of dramatic painting; the painter of humanity; less elevated, less vigorous, but more insinuating, more pressing on our hearts, the warm master of our sympathies. What effect of human connexion, what feature of the mind, from the gentlest emotion to the most fervid burst of passion, has been left unobserved, has not received a characteristic stamp from that examiner of man? M. Angelo came to nature, nature came to Raphael—he transmitted her features like a lucid glass, unstained, unmodified. We stand with awe before M. Angelo, and tremble at the height to which he elevates us—we embrace Raphael, and follow him wherever he leads us. Energy, with propriety of character and modest grace, poise his line and determine his correctness. Perfect human beauty he has not represented; no face of Raphael's is perfectly beautiful; no figure of his, in the abstract, possesses the proportions that could raise it to a standard of imitation: form to him was only a vehicle of character or pathos, and to those he adapted it in a mode and with a truth which leaves all attempts at emendation hopeless. His invention connects the utmost stretch of possibility with the most plausible degree of probability, in a manner that equally surprises our fancy, persuades our judgment, and affects our heart. His composition always hastens to the most necessary point as its centre, and from that disseminates, to that leads back as rays, all secondary ones. Group, form, and contrast are subordinate to the event, and common-place ever excluded. His expression, in strict unison with and decided by character, whether calm, animated, agitated, convulsed, or absorbed by the inspiring passion, unmixed and pure, never contradicts its cause, equally remote from tameness and grimace: the moment of his choice never suffers the action to stagnate or to expire; it is the moment of transition; the crisis big with the past and pregnant with the future.—If, separately taken, the line of Raphael has been excelled in correctness, elegance, and energy; his colour far surpassed in tone, and truth, and harmony; his masses in roundness, and his chiaroscuro in effect—considered as instruments of pathos, they have never been equalled; and in composition, invention, expression, and the power of telling a story, he has never been approached.