This art of giving to the principal figure the command of the horizon, is perhaps the only principle by which modern art might have gained an advantage over that of the ancients, and improved the dignity of composition, had it been steadily pursued by its great restorers, the painters of Julio II. and Leone X., though we find it more attended to in the monumental imagery of the Capella Sistina than in the Stanze and the Cartoons of Raffaello, which being oftener pathetic or intellectual than sublime, suffered less by neglecting it.
The same principle which has developed in the cone, the form generally most proper for composing a single figure or a group, contains the reason why the principal figure or group should be the most elevated object of a composition, and locally command the accidents of scenery and place. The Apollo of Belvedere, singly or in a group, was surely not composed to move at the bottom of a valley, nor the Zeus of Phidias to be covered with a roof.
The improprieties attendant on the neglect of this principle are, perhaps, in no work of eminence more offensively evident than in the celebrated Resuscitation of Lazarus by Sebastian del Piombo, whose composition, if composition it deserved to be called, seems to have been dictated by the back-ground. It usurps the first glance; it partly buries, everywhere throngs, and in the most important place squeezes the subject into a corner. The horizon is at the top, Jesus, Maria, and Lazarus at the bottom of the scene. Though its plan and groups recede in diminished forms, they advance in glaring opaque colour, nor can it avail in excuse of the artist, to say that the multitude of figures admitted are characters chosen to show in different modes of expression the effect of the miracle, whilst their number gives celebrity to it and discriminates it from the obscure trick of a juggler: all this, if it had been done, though perhaps it has not, for by far the greater part are not spectators, might have been done with subordination: the most authentic proof of the reality of the miracle ought to have beamed from the countenance of Him who performed it, and of the restored man's sister.—In every work something must be first, something last; that is essential, this optional; that is present by its own right, this by courtesy and convenience.[86]
The rival picture of the resuscitation of Lazarus, the Transfiguration of Christ by Raffaello, avoids the inconvenience of indiscriminate crowding, and the impertinent luxuriance of scenery which we have censured, by the artifice of escaping from what is strictly called back-ground, and excluding it altogether: the action on the fore-ground is the basis and Christ the apex of the cone, and what they might have suffered from diminution of size is compensated by elevation and splendour. In sacrificing to this principle the rules of a perspective which he was so well acquainted with, Raffaello succeeded to unite the beginning, the middle, and the end of the event which he represented in one moment; he escaped every atom of common-place or unnecessary embellishment with a simplicity and so artless an air, that few but the dull, the petulant, and the pedant, can refuse him their assent, admiration and sympathy; if he has not, strictly speaking, embodied possibility, he has perhaps done more, he has done what Homer did, by hiding the unmanageable but less essential part of his materials, he has transformed it to probability.
I have said that by the choice of scenery alone we may often, if not always, judge how far an artist has penetrated his subject, what emotion in treating it he meant to excite. No subjects can elucidate this with so much perspicuity as those generally distinguished by the name of Madonnas: subjects stamped with a mystery of religion, and originally contrived under the bland images of maternal fondness to subdue the heart. In examining the considerable number of those by Raffaello, we find generally some reciprocal feature of filial and parental love, "the charities of father, son, and mother," sometimes varied by infant play and female caresses, sometimes dignified by celestial ministry and homage; the endearments of the nursery selected and embodied by forms more charming than exalted, less beautiful than genial—accordingly the choice of scenery consists seldom in more than a pleasing accompaniment: the flower and the shrub, the rivulet and grove, enamel the seat or embower the repose of the sacred pilgrims under the serenity of a placid sky, expanded or breaking through trees, or sheltering ruins; whilst in those surrounded by domestic scenery, a warm recess veils the mother, now hiding her darling from profane aspect, now pressing him to her bosom, or contemplating in silent rapture his charms displayed on her lap—accompaniments and actions, though appropriate, without allusion to the mysterious personages they profess to exhibit—to discriminate them the chair, the window, the saddle on which Joseph sits in one, the flowers which he kneeling presents in another, the cradle, the bath, are called on. Raffaello was less penetrated by a devout than by an amorous principle; his design was less to stamp maternal affection with the seal of religion than to consecrate the face he adored; his Holy Families, with one exception, are the apotheosis of his Fornarina.
This exception, as it proves what had been advanced of the rest, so it proves likewise that the omission of its beauties in them was more a matter of choice than want of comprehension. Than the face and attitude of the Madonna of Versailles, known from a print by Edelinck, copied by Giac. Frey, nature and art combined never offered to the sense and heart a more exalted sentiment, or more correspondent forms. The face still, indeed, offers his favourite lines, lines not of supreme beauty, but they have assumed a sanctity which is in vain looked for in all its sister faces: serious without severity, pure without insipidity, humble though majestic, charming and modest at once, and without affectation graceful: face and figure unite what we can conceive of maternal beauty, equally poised between effusion of affection and the mysterious sentiment of superiority in the awful Infant, whom she bends to receive from his slumbers.
The bland imagery of Raffaello was exalted to a type of devotion by M. Angelo, and place and scenery are adjusted with allegoric or prophetic ornament: thus in the picture painted for Angelo Doni, where the enraptured mother receives the Infant from the hands of Joseph, the scene behind exhibits the new sacrament in varied groups of Baptists, immersing themselves or issuing from the fount. In another, representing the annunciation, we discover in the awful twilight of a recess, the figure of Moses breaking the tables he received on Sinai, an allusion to the abolition of the old law—an infringement of Jewish habits, for the figure is not an apparition, but a statue, readily forgiven to its allegoric beauty. Even in those subjects relating to Christ and his family, where the back-ground is destitute of allusive ornament, it appears the seat of meditation or virgin purity, and consecrates the sentiment or action of the figures, as in the salutation of St. Giovanni in Laterano, and in that where Maria contemplates her son spread in her lap, and seems to bend under the presentiment of the terrible moment which shall spread him at her feet, under the cross; but in that monumental image of Jesus expired on the cross, with the Madonna and John on each side, what is the scenery but the echo of the subject? The surrounding element sympathises with the woe of the sufferers in the two mourning Genii emerging from the air—a sublime conception, which Vasari fancied to have successfully imitated and perhaps improved, when in a repetition of the same subject, he travestied them to Phœbus and Diana extinguishing their orbs, as symbols of sun and moon eclipsed.[87]
What has been said of the luxuriance of Poussin's scenery, leads to that intemperate abuse which allots it a greater space, a more conspicuous situation, a higher finish and effect than the importance of the subject itself permits—by which, unity is destroyed, and it becomes doubtful to what class a work belongs, whether it be a mixture of two or more, or all, where portrait with architecture, landscape with history for "mastery striving, each rules a moment." It cannot be denied that some of the noblest works of art are liable to this imputation, and that the fond admiration of the detailed beauties in the scenery of the Pietro Martire of Titian, if it does not detract from the main purpose for which the picture was or ought to have been painted, certainly adds nothing to its real interest—nature finishes all, but an attempt to mimic nature's universality palsies the hand of art; the celebrated "Cene," or Supper-Scenes of Paolo Cagliari can escape this imputation only by being classed as models of ornamental painting; and were it not known, that notwithstanding their grandeur, propriety, and pathos of composition, the Cartoons of Raffaello had been originally destined still more for popular amusement than the poised admiration of select judges, it would be difficult to excuse or to account for the exuberance, not seldom the impropriety of accompaniment and of scenery, with which some of them are loaded: in the Cartoon of the miraculous draught of fishes, perhaps Giovanni d'Udine would not have been allowed to treat us with fac-similes of the herons of the lake on its fore-ground; in that of Paul on the Areopagus, there would probably have been less agglomeration of finished, unfinished, or half demolished buildings; in the Miracle of Peter and John, the principal agents would scarcely have been hemmed in by a barbaric colonnade, loaded with profane ornament; or in the Massacre of the Infants, the humble cottages of Bethlehem been transformed to piles of Ionian architecture, girt with gods in intercolumnar niches, and the metropolitan pomp of Rome.
FOOTNOTES
[80] The group in the Ludovisi, ever since its discovery, absurdly misnamed Pætus and Arria, notwithstanding some dissonance of taste and execution, may with more plausibility claim the title of Hæmon and Antigone.