The best illustration of these principles is in the celebrated Notte of Correggio, where the Infant from the centre tinges the whole with his rays; but perhaps still more in its companion at Dresden, the less known picture of St. Sebastian; for to produce union and tone in the nearly equilateral composition of a votive picture, required a deeper comprehension and a steadier eye. Like the picture of Raffaello at Foligno, it represents the Madonna with the Infant in her arms, throned on clouds, in a central glory of sunny radiance, attended by angels, and surrounded by angelic forms: below are St. Geminian with a maiden by his side, St. Rocco and Sebastian tied to a tree. The first surprise is caused by the central light of the glory, which has all the splendour of a sun, though its colour is a yellow comparatively faint, and terminates in brown. The Madonna, dressed in a robe of glowing lake and a dark blue mantle, seems to start from this body of light as from a sombre ground, and as the Infant from her. The carnation of both is of a low tint, to support the keeping of their distance. The two angels at her side, in tints reflected from the centre, address the Saints below, and connect the upper with the lower part of the picture, which emerges from the darksome clouds on which they stand, and gathers its tones of light from the emanations of the central one, but in subordinate flashes, vanishing from twilight into massy shade. By those who have not seen this picture, a faint idea of its tone may be formed from the votive one of Parmegiano, at the Marquis of Abercorn's, which, had it received its last harmony, would probably have emulated the principle of that we have described.
The tones fit for Poetic painting are like its styles of design, generic or characteristic. The former is called negative, or composed of little more than chiaroscuro; the second admits, though not ambitiously, a greater variety and subdivision of tint. The first is the tone of M. Agnolo, the second that of Raffaello. The sovereign instrument of both is undoubtedly the simple, broad, pure, fresh, and limpid vehicle of Fresco. Fresco, which does not admit of that refined variety of tints that are the privilege of oil painting, and from the rapidity with which the earths, its chief materials, are absorbed, requires nearly immediate termination, is for those very reasons the immediate minister and the aptest vehicle of a great design. Its element is purity and breadth of tint. In no other style of painting could the generic forms of M. Agnolo have been divided, like night and day, into that breadth of light and shade which stamps their character. The silver purity of Correggio is the offspring of Fresco; his oil paintings are faint and tainted emanations of the freshness and "limpidezza" in his Frescoes. Oil, which rounds and conglutinates, spreads less than the sheety medium of Fresco, and if stretched into breadth beyond its natural tone, as the spirits which are used to extenuate its glue escape, returns upon itself, and oftener forms surfaces of dough, or wood, or crust, than fleshy fibre. Oil impeded the breadth even of the elemental colours of Tiziano in the Salute. The minute process inseparable from oil, is the reason why M. Agnolo declared oil painting to be a woman's method, or of idle men. The master of the colour we see in the Sistina could have no other: for though colour be the least considerable of that constellation of powers that blaze in its compartments, it is not the last or least accomplishment of the work. The flesh of the academic figures on the frames of the ceiling is a flesh even now superior to all the flesh of Annibale Carracci in the Farnese, generally pale though not cold, and never bricky though sometimes sanguine. The Jeremiah among the Prophets, glows with the glow of Tiziano, but in a breadth unknown to Giorgione and to him. The Eve under the Tree has the bland pearly harmony of Correggio; and some of the bodies in air on the lower part of the Last Judgement, less impaired by time or accident than the rest, for juice and warmth may still defy all competition. His colour sometimes even borders on characteristic variety, as in the composition of the Brazen Serpent. That a man who mastered his materials with such power, did reject the certain impediments and the precarious and inferior beauties of oil, which Sebastian del Piombo proposed for the execution of the Last Judgement, and who punished him for the proposal with his disdain for life, cannot be wondered at. If I have mentioned particular beauties of colour, it was more for others than to express what strikes me most. The parts, in the process of every man's work, are always marked with more or less felicity; and great as the beauties of those which I distinguished are, they would not be beauties in my eye, if obtained by a principle discordant from the rest.
The object of my admiration in M. Agnolo's colour is the tone, that comprehensive union of tint and hue spread over the whole, which seems less the effect of successive labour than a sudden and instantaneous exhalation, one principle of light, local colour, demi-tint and shade. Even the colours of the draperies, though perhaps too distinct, and often gayer than the gravity of their wearers or the subject allowed, are absorbed by the general tone, and appear so only on repeated inspection or separation from the rest. Raffaello did not come to his great work with the finished system, the absolute power over the materials, and the conscious authority of M. Agnolo. Though the august plan which his mind had conceived, admitted of lyric and allegoric ornament, it was, upon the whole, a drama and characteristic: he could not therefore apply to its mass the generic colour of the Sistina. Hence we see him struggling at the onset between the elements of that tone which the delineation of subdivided character and passions demanded, and the long imbibed habits and shackles of his master. But one great picture decided the struggle. This is evident from the difference of the upper and lower part of the Dispute on the Sacrament. The upper is the summit of Pietro Perugino's style, dignified and enlarged; the lower is his own. Every feature, limb, motion, the draperies, the lights and shades of the lower part, are toned and varied by character. The florid bloom of youth tinged with the glow of eagerness and impatience to be admitted; the sterner and more vigorous tint of long initiated and authoritative manhood; the inflamed suffusion of disputative zeal; the sickly hue of cloistered meditation; the brown and sun-tinged hermit, and the pale decrepit elder, contrast each other; but contrasted as they are, their whole action and colour remain subordinate to the general hue diffused by the serene solemnity of the surrounding medium, which is itself tinctured by the effulgence from above. A sufficient balance of light and shade maintains the whole, though more attention be paid to individual discrimination than masses. In the economy of the detail we find the lights no longer so white, the local colour no longer so crude, the passages to the demi-tints not so much spotted with red, nor the demi-tints themselves of so green a cast as in the four Symbolic Pictures on golden grounds of the ceiling.
It appears to me upon the whole, that for a general characteristic tone, Raffaello has never exceeded the purity of this picture. If in the School of Athens he has excelled it in individual tints, in tints that rival less than challenge the glow and juice of Titian, they are scattered more in fragments than in masses, and at the expense or with neglect of general unison, if we except the central and connecting figure of Epictetus. The predominance of tender flesh, and white or tinted drapery on the foreground, whilst the more distant groups are embrowned by masculine tints and draperies of deeper hue, prove, that if Raffaello could command individual colour, he had not penetrated its general principle.
The Parnassus in the same room has a ruling tone, but not the tone of a poetic fancy. Aërial freshness was his aim, and he is only frigid. Its principal actors are ideals of divine nature, and ought to move in a celestial medium, and Raffaello had no more an adequate colour than adequate forms for either. But whatever is characteristic, from the sublimity of Homer to the submissive affable courtesy of Horace and the directing finger of Pindar, is inimitable and in tune.
The ultimate powers of Raffaello, and, as far as I can judge, of Fresco, appear to me collected in the astonishing picture of the Heliodorus. This is not the place to dwell on the loftiness of conception, the mighty style of design, the refined and appropriate choice of character, the terror, fears, hopes, palpitation of expression, and the far more than Corregiesque graces of female forms; the Colour only, considered as a whole or in subordination, is our object. Though by the choice of the composition the back-ground, which is the sanctuary of the temple, embrowned with gold, diffuses a warmer gleam than the scenery of the foreground, its open area, yet by the dexterous management of opposing to its glazed cast a mass of vigorous and cruder flesh tints, a fiercer ebullition of impassioned hues,—the flash of steel and iron armour, and draperies of indigo, deep black and glowing crimson, the foreground maintains its place, and all is harmony.
Manifold as the subdivisions of character are, angelic, devout, authoritative, violent, brutal, vigorous, helpless, delicate; and various as the tints of the passions that sway them appear, elevated, warmed, inflamed, depressed, appalled, aghast, they are all united by the general tone that diffuses itself from the interior repose of the sanctuary, smoothens the whirlwind that fluctuates on the foreground, and gives an air of temperance to the whole.
FOOTNOTE
[98] S. Bartolomeo del Spagnuoletto. S. Agatha Martirizzata nelle poppe di Seb. del Piombo. Il Porco Sventrato di Ostade. Il Macello dei Carracci. La Caccia Pidocchi di Murillo.