To means so arbitrary, confused and precarious, the ancients never descended: their general ideas had an uniform and general typus, which invention never presumed to alter or to transgress; but this typus lay less in the attributes than in the character and form. The inverted torch and moon-flower were the accompaniments, and not the substitutes, of Death and Sleep; neither Psyche nor Victory depended on her wings. Mercury was recognized without the caduceus or purse, and Apollo without his bow or lyre; various and similar, the branches of one family, their leading lines descended from that full type of majesty which Phidias, the architect of gods, had stamped on his Jupiter. Whether we ought to consider the son of Charmidas as the inventor or the regulator of this supreme and irremovable standard, matters not, from him the ancient writers date the epoch of mythic invention; no revolutions of style changed the character of his forms, talent only polished with more or less success what his laws had established. Phidias, says Quintilian, was framed to form gods; Phidias, says Pliny, gave in his Jupiter a new motive to religion.
Whether or not, after the restoration of art, the Supreme Being, the eternal essence of incomprehensible perfection, ought ever to have been approached by the feeble efforts of human conception, it is not my office to discuss, perhaps it ought not—but since it has, as the Roman Church has embodied divine substance, and called on our arts for an auxiliary, it was to be expected that, to make assistance effectual, a full type, a supreme standard of form, should have been established for the author and the agents of the sacred circle: but, be it from the tyranny of religious barbarians, or inability, or to avoid the imputation of copying each other, painters and sculptors, widely differing among themselves in the conception of divine or sainted form and character, agree in nothing but attributes and symbols: triangular glories, angelic ministry and minstrelsy, the colours of the drapery; the cross, the spear, the stigmata; the descending dove; in implements of ecclesiastic power or instruments of martyrdom.
The Biblic expression, as it is translated, "of the Ancient of Days"—which means, "He that existed before time," furnished the primitive artists, instead of an image of supreme majesty, only with the hoary image of age: and such a figure borne along by a globe of angels, and crowned with a kind of episcopal mitre, recurs on the bronzes of Lorenzo Ghiberti. The sublime mind of M. Agnolo, soaring beyond the idea of decrepitude and puny formality, strove to form a type in the elemental energy of the Creator of Adam, and darted life from His extended hand, but in the Creator of Eve sunk again to the idea of age. Raphael strove to compound a form from M. Angelo and his predecessors, to combine energy and rapidity with age: in the Loggia he follows M. Agnolo, in the Stanza the prior artists; here his gods are affable and mild, there rapid, and perhaps more violent than energetic. After these two great names, it were profanation to name the attempts of their successors.
The same fluctuation perplexes the effigy of the Saviour. Lionardo da Vinci attempted to unite power with calm serenity, but in the Last Supper alone presses on our hearts by humanity of countenance. The Infant Christ of M. Agnolo is a superhuman conception, but as man and Redeemer with his cross, in the Minerva, he is a figure as mannered in form and attitude, as averting by stern severity; and, as the Judge of Mankind in the Last Judgment, he seems to me as unworthy of the artist's mind as of his master-hand. The Christs of Raphael, as infants, are seldom more than lovely children; as a man, the painter has poised His form between church tradition and the dignified mildness of his own character.
Two extremes appear to have co-operated to impede the establishment of a type in the formation of the Saviour: by one He is converted into a character of mythology, the other debases Him to the dregs of mankind.
"The character corresponding with that of Christ," says Mengs,[83] "ought to be a compound of the characters of Jupiter and of Apollo, allowing only for the accidental expression of the moment." What magic shall amalgamate the superhuman airs of Rhea's and Latona's sons, with patience in suffering and resignation? The critic in his exultation forgot the leading feature of his Master—condescending humility. In the race of Jupiter majesty is often tempered by emanations of beauty and of grace, but never softened to warm humanity. Here lies the knot:—
The Saviour of mankind extending his arm to relieve, without visible means, the afflicted, the hopeless, the dying, the dead, is a subject that visits with awe the breast of every one who calls himself after His name; the artist is in the sphere of adoration.
An exalted sage descending to every beneficent office of humanity, instructing ignorance, not only forgiving but excusing outrage, pressing his enemy to his breast, commands the sympathy of every man, though he be no believer; the artist is in the sphere of sentiment.
But a mean man, marked with the features of a mean race, surrounded by a beggarly, ill-shaped rabble and stupid crowds—may be mistaken for a juggler, that claims the attention of no man. Of this let Art beware.