Nor can Physiognomy, the companion of Anatomy, which from the measure of the solid parts ascertains the precise proportion of the moveable, be dispensed with. There have been, perhaps there are, teachers of art, who, whilst they admit physiognomy in the mass, refuse to acknowledge it in detail, or in other words, who admit a language, and reject its elements: as if the whole harmony of every proportionate object did not consist in the correspondence of singly imperceptible, or seemingly insignificant elements, and would not become a deformed mass without them. Let the twelfth part of an inch be added to, or taken from, the space between the upper lip of the Apollo, and the God is lost.
The want of this necessary qualification is one of the chief causes of Manner, the capital blemish of Design, in contradistinction to Style: Style pervades and consults the subject, and co-ordinates its means to its demands; Manner subordinates the subject to its means. A Mannerist is the paltry epitomist of Nature's immense volume; a juggler, who pretends to mimic the infinite variety of her materials by the vain display of a few fragments of crockery. He produces, not indeed the monster which Horace recommends to the mirth of his friends, the offspring of grotesque fancy, and rejected with equal disdain or incredulity by the vulgar and refined, but others not less disgusting, though perhaps confined to a narrower circle of judges.
Mannerists may be divided into three classes:
1st. Those who never consult Nature, but at second hand; only see her through the medium of some prescription, and fix her to the test of a peculiar form.
2ndly. Those who persevere to look for her or to place her on a spot where she cannot be found, some individual one or analogous models; and
3rdly. Those who, without ascending to the principle, content themselves with jumbling together an aggregate of style and model, tack deformity to beauty, and meanness to grandeur.
Of all Taste, the standard lies in the middle between extravagance and scantiness; the best becomes a flaw, if carried to an extreme, or indiscriminately applied. The Apollo, the Hercules of Glycon, and the figure misnamed Gladiator, are each models of style in their respective classes; but their excellence would become a flaw if indiscriminately applied to the distinct demand of different subjects. Neither the Apollo, the Hercules, nor the Gladiator, can singly supply the forms of a Theseus, Meleager, or Achilles, any more than the heroes on Monte Cavallo theirs. It must however be owned, that he would commit a more venial error, and come nearer to the form we require in the Achilles of Homer, who should substitute the form of the Apollo or Hercules with the motion of the Gladiator to the real form, than he who should copy him from the best individual he could meet with: the reason is clear, there is a greater analogy between their form and action and that of Achilles, than between him and the best model we know alive. From the same principle, he who in a subject of pure history would attempt to introduce the generic and patriarchal forms in the Capella Sistina would become ludicrous by the excess of contrast; for to him the organic characteristics of national proportion are little less essential than to the draughtsman of natural history or the portrait painter. The skull of an European, though tinged with African hues, will not assimilate with the legitimate skull of a negro, nor can the foot of Meleager, or even of the Laocoon, ever be exchanged for that of a Mongul or Chinese; and he has probably mistaken his information, who fancies that the expression, gait, and limbs of the Apollo can find their counterpart on the Apalachian mountains, or are related to the unconquered tribes of Florida.
The least pardonable of all Mannerists appears to be he who applies to meanness to furnish him with the instruments to dignity and grandeur. He who relies for all upon his model, should treat no other subject but his model; and I will venture to say, that even the extravagant forms, and, if you will, caricatures of Goltzius seduced by Spranger are preferable to those of Albert Durer or Caravaggio, though recommended by the precision of the one and the chiaroscuro of the other, when applied to a pure heroic or symbolic subject; for though eccentric and extreme, they are eccentricities and extremes of the great style, in which meanness of conception is of all other blemishes the least excusable. From this blemish the mighty genius of Raffaello, before it emerged from the dregs of Pietro Perugino, was not entirely free;—whether from timidity or languor of conception, the Christ in the Dispute on the Sacrament, though the principal figure, the centre from which all the rest like radii emanate and ought to emanate in due subordination, is a tame, mean figure, and, the placidity of the face perhaps excepted, for even that has a tincture of meanness, inferior to all the patriarchs and doctors of that numerous composition.
The third class, or those who mix up a motley assemblage of ideal beauty and common nature, such as was pounded together by Pietro Testa and Gherard Lairesse, and from which neither Guido nor Poussin were entirely free—though perhaps not strictly chargeable with the absolute impropriety of the first and the lowness of the second class, must be content with what we can spare of disapprobation from either: they surprise us into pleasure by glimpses of character and form, and as often disappoint us by the obtrusion of heterogeneous or vulgar forms. But this disappointment is not so general, because we want that critical acquaintance with the principles of ancient art which can assign each trunk its head, each limb its counterpart: a want even now so frequent, notwithstanding the boasted refinements of Roman and German criticisms, that a Mercury, if he have left his caduceus, may exchange his limbs with a Meleager, and he with an Antinous; perhaps a Jupiter on Ida his torso with that of a Hercules anapauomenos, an Ariadne be turned into the head of a hornless Bacchus, and an Isis be substituted for every ideal female.