Pellegrino Tibaldi penetrated the technic without the moral principle of his master's style; he had often grandeur of line without sublimity of conception; hence the manner of M. Agnolo is frequently the style of Pellegrino Tibaldi. Conglobation and eccentricity, an aggregate of convexities suddenly broken by rectangular, or cut by perpendicular lines, compose his system. His fame principally rests on the Frescoes of the Academic Institute at Bologna, and the Ceiling of the Merchants' Hall at Ancona. It is probably on the strength of those, that the Carracci, his countrymen, are said to have called him their "M. Agnolo riformato,"—M. Agnolo corrected. I will not do that injustice to the Carracci to suppose, that for one moment they could allude by this verdict to the Ceiling and the Prophets and Sibyls of the Capella Sistina; they glanced perhaps at the technic exuberance of the Last Judgement, and the senile caprices of the Capella Paolina. These, they meant to inform us, had been pruned, regulated, and reformed by Pellegrino Tibaldi. Do his works in the Institute warrant this verdict? So far from it, that it exhibits little more than the dotage of M. Agnolo. The single figures, groups, and compositions of the Institute, present a singular mixture of extraordinary vigour and puerile imbecility of conception, of character and caricature, of style and manner.
The figure of Polypheme groping at the mouth of his cave for Ulysses, and the composition of Æolus granting to Ulysses favourable winds, are striking instances of both. Than the Cyclops, M. Agnolo himself never conceived a form of savage energy, provoked by sufferings and revenge, with attitude and limbs more in unison; whilst the God of Winds is degraded to the scanty and ludicrous semblance of Thersites, and Ulysses with his companions travestied by the semi-barbarous look and costume of the age of Constantine or Attila.
From Pellegrino Tibaldi, the Germans, Dutch, and Flemings, Hemskerk, Goltzius, and Spranger, borrowed the compendium of the great Tuscan's peculiarities, dropsied the forms of vigour, or dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes.
Parmegiano poised his line between the grace of Correggio and the energy of M. Agnolo, and from contrast produced Elegance; but instead of making propriety her measure, degraded her to affectation. That disengaged play of delicate forms, the "sueltezza" of the Italians, is the prerogative of Parmegiano, though nearly always obtained at the expense of proportion. He conceived the variety, but not the simplicity of beauty, and drove contrast to extravagance. The figure of St. John, in the altar-piece of St. Salvador at Città di Castello, now at the Marquis of Abercorn's, and known from the print of Giulio Bonasone, which less imitates than exaggerates its original in the Cartoon of Pisa, is one proof among many: his action is the accident of his attitude; he is conscious of his grandeur, and loses the fervour of the apostle in the orator.
So his celebrated Moses, if I see right, has in his forms less of grandeur than agility, in his action more passion than majesty, and loses the legislator in the savage. This figure, together with Raphael's figure of God in the Vision of Ezekiel, is said to have furnished Gray with some of the master-traits of his Bard,—figures than which Painting cannot produce two more dissimilar: calm, placid contemplation, and the decided burst of passion in coalition.
Whilst M. Agnolo was doomed to live and brood over the perversion of his style, death prevented Raffaello from witnessing the gradual decay of his.
Such was the state of style, when, toward the decline of the sixteenth century, Lodovico Carracci, with his cousins Agostino and Annibale, founded at Bologna, on the hints caught from Pellegrino Tibaldi, that Eclectic School which, by selecting the beauties, correcting the faults, supplying the defects, and avoiding the extremes of the different styles, attempted to form a perfect system. The specious ingredients of this technic panacea have been preserved in a complimentary sonnet of Agostino Carracci, and are compounded of the design and symmetry of Raffaello, the terrible manner of M. Agnolo, the sovereign purity of Correggio's style, Tiziano's truth and nature, Tintoretto's and Paolo's vivacity and chiaroscuro, Lombardy's tone of colour, the learned invention of Primaticcio, the decorum and solidity of Pellegrino Tibaldi, and a little of Parmegiano's grace, all amalgamated by Niccolo dell' Abbate.
I shall not attempt a parody of this prescription by transferring it to Poetry, and prescribing to the candidate for dramatic fame the imitation of Shakspeare, Otway, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Congreve, Racine, Addison, as amalgamated by Nicholas Rowe. Let me only ask whether such a mixture of demands ever entered with equal evidence the mind of any one artist, ancient or modern; whether, if it be granted possible that they did, they were ever balanced with equal impartiality; and grant this, whether they ever were or could be executed with equal felicity? A character of equal universal power is not a human character; and the nearest approach to perfection can only be in carrying to excellence one great quality with the least alloy of collateral defects: to attempt more will probably end in the extinction of character, and that, in mediocrity—the cypher of Art.
And were the Carracci such? Separate the precept from the practice, the artist from the teacher, and the Carracci are in possession of my submissive homage. Lodovico is the inventor of that solemn hue, that sober twilight, which you have heard so often recommended as the proper tone of historic colour. Agostino, with learning, taste, and form, combined Corregiesque tints. Annibale, inferior to both in sensibility and taste, in the wide range of talent, undaunted execution and academic prowess, left either far behind. But if he preserved the breadth of the style we speak of, he added nothing to its dignity; his pupils were inferior to him, and to his pupils, their successors. Style continued to linger, with fatal symptoms of decay, in Italy; and if it survives, has not yet found a place to re-establish its powers on this side of the Alps.