It is important to distinguish the materials and the spirit of expression. To give this we must be masters of the forms and of the hues that embody it. Without truth of line no true expression is possible; and the passions, whose inward energy stamped form on feature, equally reside, fluctuate, flash or lower on it in colour, and give it energy by light and shade.
To make a face speak clearly and with propriety, it must not only be well constructed, but have its own exclusive character. Though the element of the passions be the same in all, they neither speak in all with equal energy, nor are circumscribed by equal limits. Though joy be joy, and anger anger, the joy of the sanguine is not that of the phlegmatic, nor the anger of the melancholy that of the fiery character; and the discriminations established by complexion are equally conspicuous in those of climate, habit, education, and rank. Expression has its classes. Decebalus and Syphax, though both determined to die, meet death with eye as different as hues. The tremulous emotion of Hector's breast when he approaches Ajax, is not the palpitation of Paris when he discovers Menelaus; the frown of the Hercynian Phantom may repress the ardour, but cannot subdue the dignity of Drusus; the fear of Marius cannot sink to the panic of the Cimber, who drops the dagger at entering his prison, nor the astonishment of Hamlet degenerate into the fright of vulgar fear.
Le Sueur was not aware of this when he painted his Alexander. Perhaps no picture is, in spite of common sense, oftener quoted for its expression than Alexander sick on his bed, with the cup at his lips, observing the calumniated physician. The manner in which he is represented is as inconsistent with the story as injurious to the character of the Macedonian hero. The Alexander of Le Sueur has the prying look of a spy. He who was capable of that look would no more have ventured on quaffing a single drop of the suspected medicine, than on the conquest of the Persian empire. If Alexander, when he drank the cup, had not the most positive faith in the incorruptibility of Philippus, he was more than an idiot, he was a felon against himself and a traitor to his army, whose safety depended on the success of the experiment. His expression ought to be open and unconcerned confidence—as that of his physician, a contemptuous smile, or curiosity suspended by indignation, or the indifference of a mind conscious of innocence, and fully relying on its being known to his friend. Le Sueur, instead of these, has given him little more than a stupid stare and vulgar form.
The emanations of the passions, which pathognomy has reduced to the four principal sources of calm emotion, joy, grief simple, or with pain, and terror;—may be divided into internal and external ones: those hint their action only, they influence a feature or some extremity: these extend their sway over the whole frame—they animate, agitate, depress, convulse, absorb form. The systematic designers of pathognomy have given their element, their extremes, the mask; the ancients have established their technic standard, and their degrees of admissibility in art. The Apollo is animated; the Warrior of Agasias is agitated; the dying Gladiator or herald suffers in depression; the Laocoon is convulsed; the Niobe is absorbed. The greater the mental vigour, dignity, or habitual self-command of a person, the less perceptible to superficial observation or vulgar eyes will be the emotion of his mind. The greater the predominance of fancy over intellect, the more ungovernable the conceits of self-importance, so much the more will passion partake of outward and less dignified energy. The Jupiter of Homer manifests his will and power by the mere contraction of his eyebrows; Socrates in the School of Athens only moves his finger, and Ovid in the Parnassus only lays it over his lips, and both say enough; but Achilles throws himself headlong, and is prevented from slaying himself by the grasp of his friend. Only then, when passion or suffering become too big for utterance, the wisdom of ancient art has borrowed a feature from tranquillity, though not its air. For every being seized by an enormous passion, be it joy or grief, or fear sunk to despair, loses the character of its own individual expression, and is absorbed by the power of the feature that attracts it. Niobe and her family are assimilated by extreme anguish; Ugolino is petrified by the fate that swept the stripling at his foot, and sweeps in pangs the rest. The metamorphoses of ancient mythology are founded on this principle, are allegoric. Clytia, Biblis, Salmacis, Narcissus, tell only the resistless power of sympathetic attraction.
Similar principles award to Raffaello the palm of expression among the moderns: driven to extremes after his demise by Julio Romano and a long interval of languor, it seemed to revive in Domenichino; I say seemed, for his sensibility was not supported by equal comprehension, elevation of mind, or dignity of motion; his sentiment wants propriety, he is a mannerist in feeling, and tacks the imagery of Theocritus to the subjects of Homer. A detail of petty though amiable conceptions, is rather calculated to diminish than to enforce the energy of a pathetic whole: a lovely child taking refuge in the lap or bosom of a lovely mother, is an idea of nature, and pleasing in a lowly, pastoral or domestic subject; but, perpetually recurring, becomes common-place, and amid the terrors of martyrdom is a shred sewed to a purple robe. In touching the characteristic circle that surrounds the Ananias of Raffaello, you touch the electric chain, a genuine spark irresistibly darts from the last as from the first, penetrates, subdues; at the Martyrdom of St. Agnes by Domenichino, you saunter among the adventitious mob of a lane, where the silly chat of neighbouring gossips announces a topic as silly, till you find with indignation, that instead of a broken pot or a petty theft, you are to witness a scene for which heaven opens, the angels descend, and Jesus rises from his throne.
It is however but justice to observe, that there is a subject in which Domenichino has not unsuccessfully wrestled, and, in my opinion, even excelled Raffaello; I mean the demoniac boy among the series of frescoes at Grotto Ferrata: that inspired figure is evidently the organ of an internal, superior, preternatural agent, darted upward without contortion, and considered as unconnected with the story, never to be confounded with a merely tumultuary distorted maniac, which is not perhaps the case of the boy in the Transfiguration; the subject too being within the range of Domenichino's powers, domestic, the whole of the persons introduced is characteristic: awe, with reliance on the Saint who operates the miracle or cure, and terror at the redoubled fury of his son, mark the rustic father; nor could the agonizing female with the infant in her arm, as she is the mother, be exchanged to advantage, and with propriety occupies that place which the fondling females in the pictures of St. Sebastian, St. Andrew, and St. Agnes only usurp.
The Martyrdom, or rather the brutally ostentatious murder of St. Agnes leads us to the limits of expression: sympathy and disgust are the irreconcileable parallels that must for ever separate legitimate terror and pity from horror and aversion. We cannot sympathise with what we detest or despise, nor fully pity what we shudder at or loathe. So little were these limits understood by the moderns, M. Agnolo excepted, that even the humanity and delicacy of Raffaello did not guard him from excursions into the realms of horror and loathsomeness: it is difficult to conceive what could provoke him to make a finished design of the inhumanities that accompany the martyrdom of St. Felicitas at which even description shudders; a design made on purpose to be dispersed over Europe, perpetuated and made known to all by the graver of Marc Antonio: Was it to prove to Albert Durer and the Germans of his time that they had not exhausted the sources of abomination? He made an equal mistake in the Morbetto, where, though not with so lavish a hand as Poussin after him, instead of the moral effects of the plague, he has personified the effluvia of putrefaction. What he had not penetration to avoid, could not be expected to be shunned by his scholars. Julio Romano delighted in studied images of torture as well as of the most abandoned licentiousness. Among his contemporaries, Correggio even attempted to give a zest to the most wanton cruelty by an affectation of grace in the picture of the Saints Placido and Flavia: but the enamoured trance of Placido with his neck half cut, and the anthem that quivers on the lips of Flavia whilst a sword is entering her side, in vain bespeak our sympathy, for whilst we detest the felons who slaughter them, we loathe to inspect the actual process of the crime; mangling is contagious, and spreads aversion from the slaughterman to the victim. If St. Bartholomew and St. Erasmus are subjects for painting, they can only be so before, and neither under nor after the operation of the knife or windlass. A decollated martyr represented with his head in his hand, as Rubens did, and a headless corpse with the head lying by it, as Correggio, can only prove the brutality, stupidity, or bigotry of the employer, and the callus or venality of the artist.
The gradations of expression within, close to, and beyond its limits cannot perhaps be elucidated with greater perspicuity than by comparison; and the different moments which Julio Romano, Vandyke and Rembrandt, have selected to represent the subject of Samson betrayed by Delilah, offers one of the fairest specimens furnished by art. Considering it as a drama, we may say that Julio forms the plot, Vandyke unravels it, and Rembrandt shows the extreme of the catastrophe.
In the composition of Julio, Samson, satiated with pleasure, plunged into sleep, and stretched on the ground, rests his head and presses with his arm the thigh of Delilah on one side, whilst on the other a nimble minion busily, but with timorous caution, fingers and clips his locks; such is his fear, that, to be firm, he rests one knee on a foot-stool tremblingly watching the sleeper, and ready to escape at his least motion. Delilah, seated between both, fixed by the weight of Samson, warily turns her head toward a troop of warriors in the back ground, with the left arm stretched out she beckons their leader, with the finger of the right hand she presses her lip to enjoin silence and noiseless approach. The Herculean make and lion port of Samson, his perturbed though ponderous sleep, the quivering agility of the curled favourite employed, the harlot graces and meretricious elegance contrasted by equal firmness and sense of danger in Delilah, the attitude and look of the grim veteran who heads the ambush, whilst they give us the clue to all that followed, keep us in anxious suspense, we palpitate in breathless expectation; this is the plot.