‘I leave to learned fingers and wise hands
The artist and his ape, to teach and tell
How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend and the voluptuous swell:
Let these describe the indescribable;
I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream
Wherein that image shall for ever dwell;
The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream
That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam.’

There are heads of men and women delineated hundreds of years ago, so knit into the mystic web of memory and imagination, so familiar through engravings, cameos, and other reproductive forms of art, and so identified with tragic experience, ideal aspiration, or heroic deeds, that the first view of the originals is an epoch in life; we seem to behold them down a limitless vista of time, and they appeal to our consciousness like the faces of the long-loved, long-lost, and suddenly restored. It is as if we had entered a spiritual realm, and were greeted by the vanished idols of the heart, or the ‘beings of the mind and not of clay,’ once arbiters of destiny and oracles of genius. Beatrice Cenci, through soulful eyes, infinitely deepened by a life of tears dried up by the fever of intense anguish, looks the incarnation of beauty and woe—beauty we have adored in dreams, woe we have realized through sympathy. With the first sight of that alabaster skin, those lips quivering with pain, those golden locks, the theme of poets, that corpse-like headband; the fragility, the fervour, the sensibility, and the chaste, ineffable grace; above all, the soulful world of terror, pity, and meekness in the lustrous and melancholy orbs, how familiar, yet how new, how pathetic, yet sublime! The hoary wretch who called her child, seems lurking somewhere in that hushed and sombre palace; the brother whose fair brow was lacerated by parental violence; the resigned mother, the infernal banquet, the prison, the tribunal, the bloody axe, flit with fearful distinctness between our entranced vision and the picture; for tradition, local association, Shelley’s muse, the secret pen of the annalist, and the pencil of Guido, combine to make absolutely real an unparalleled story of loveliness and persecution, maidenhood and martyrdom. It is but recently that the true history of this picture has been authenticated. According to Guerazzi, who has minutely explored contemporary archives, the ‘study’ from which it was painted, Ubaldo Ubaldini made from memory, to console his sister for the loss of Beatrice. He was one of the many artists who loved the beautiful victim, with the passion of youth and the fancy of a painter; one of the courageous but inadequate band who conspired to rescue her at the scaffold;[11] and it was long believed that he died of indignant grief after the catastrophe. Imagine him with the shadow of that mighty sorrow upon his soul, his hand inspired by tender recollection, secluded with her image stamped on his broken heart, and patiently reproducing those delicate features and that anguished expression—his last offering to her he so quickly followed into the valley of death! His ‘study’ fell into the hands of Maffei Barberini, and furnished Guido Reni the materials for this, his most effective and endeared creation. Its marvellous, almost magnetic expression, doubtless gave rise to the belief, so long current, that he sketched Beatrice on her way to execution; but the later explanation is more accordant with probability and more satisfactory to the mind, for such a work requires for the conditions of success both the inspiration of love and the aptitude of skill. Ubaldini furnished one, and Guido the other.

Many travellers, especially women, have expressed great disappointment with the ‘Fornarina.’ They cannot associate a figure so much the reverse of ethereal, and charms so robust, with the refined taste and delicate person of Raffaelo. But such objections are founded on an imaginative not philosophic theory of love. There never was a genuine artist who, in matters of feeling, was not a child of Nature; and we have but to recognize the idiosyncrasies of poet and painter to find a key to their human affinities. What a peculiar interest we feel in the objects of love whose affection cheered, and whose sympathy inspired those products of pen and pencil, which have become part of our mental being! I have seen a crowd of half-bashful and wholly intent English girls watch the carriage which contained the obese, yet still fair-haired Countess, whose youthful charms so long made Byron a methodical hermit at Ravenna; and the respectable matron who, as a child, was deemed by sentimentalists in Germany and her own exaggerated fancy the object of Goëthe’s senile passion, was long courted on that account, at tea-drinkings, by foreign visitors enamoured of Faust and Wilhelm Meister. Still more natural is the sentiment which lures us to earnest acquaintance with the countenance, on which he who gave an angelic semblance to maternity and caught the most gracious aspect of childhood used to gaze with rapture; the eye that responded to his glance, the smile that penetrated his heart, and were fixed on his canvas. The impression which the ‘Fornarina’ of the Tribune instantly gives, is that of genuine womanhood: there is generosity, a repose, a world of latent emotion, an exuberance of sympathetic power, in the full impassioned eye, the broad symmetrical bosom, the rich olive tint; it is precisely the woman to harmonize by her simple presence, and to soothe or exalt by her spontaneous love, the mood of a man of nervous organization and ardent temper. There is a tranquil self-possession in the face and figure which the sensitive and excitable artist especially finds refreshing—a candid nature such as alone can inspire such a man’s confidence, a majestic simplicity peculiar to the best type of Roman women, more delightful to the over-tasked brain and sensibilities than the highest culture of an artificial kind; and there is the fresh, unperverted, richly-developed, harmoniously-united heart and physique, which, notwithstanding the modern standard of female charms, is the normal and the essential basis of honest, natural affinity. I could never turn, in the Florence Gallery, from the pale, delicately-rounded, ideal brow, the almost pleading eye, and the cherubic lips of Raffaelo, instinct with the needs as well as the immortal longings of genius, to the mellow, calm, self-sustained, and healthful ‘Fornarina,’ without fancying the support, the rest, the inexhaustible comfort—in Othello’s sense of that expressive word—which the sensitive artist could find in the cheerful baker’s daughter, the irritable seeker in the serene and satisfied woman, the delicate in the strong, the gentle in the hearty, the ideal in the real, the poetic in the practical, the spiritual in the human; and I contemplated her noble contour, her contented smile, her beaming cheek, and eye undeepened by the experience that withers as it teaches—yet soulful with latent emotion, with an ever-increasing sense of her native claims to Raphael’s love.

Musical organizations are especially sensitive to the pictorial spell; the letters of Mendelssohn indicate how it influenced his development. Writing from Venice of church services he attended, he says:—‘Nothing impressed me with more solemn awe than when, on the very spot for which they were originally created, the “Presentation of Mary and the Child in the Temple,” “The Assumption of the Virgin,” “The Entombment of Christ,” and “The Martyrdom of St. Peter,” in all their grandeur, gradually steal forth out of the darkness in which the long lapse of time has veiled them. Often I feel a musical inspiration, and since I came here have been busily engaged in composition.’ And from Florence he writes:—‘There is a small picture here which I discovered for myself. It is by Fra Bartolomeo, who must have been a man of most devout, tender, and earnest spirit. The figures are finished in the most exquisite and consummate manner. You can see in the picture itself that the pious master has taken delight in painting it, and in finishing the most minute details, probably with a view of giving it away to gratify some friend; we feel as if the painter belonged to it, and still ought to be sitting before his work, or had this moment left.’ This personal magnetism about pictures is an authentic evidence of their vital relation to character, and it is felt often in an incredible way by the imaginative and susceptible. The same gifted and generous composer, who thus wrote of Titian and Fra Bartolomeo, speaks of the impression he received from Raphael’s portrait by himself:—‘Youthful, pale, delicate, and with such inward aspirations, such longing and wistfulness in the mouth and eyes, that it is as if you could see into his very soul; that he cannot succeed in expressing all that he sees and feels, and is thus impelled to go forward, and that he must die an early death;—all this is written on his mournful, suffering, yet fervid countenance.’

Vandyke’s portraits of Charles the First impress the spectator with regal fanaticism, and a tragic destiny, more than some of the written histories of his reign. The exquisite hands of Leonardo’s ‘Gioconde’ are as eloquent of feminine grace and sensibility as the most elaborate description. Correggio’s ‘Magdalen,’ in the remorseful abandon and beautiful sadness of its expression, reveals her who ‘loved much,’ repented, and was forgiven. Giovanni di Medici, in the Uffizzi Gallery, fulfils to the imagination the ideal of mediæval Italian soldiership. Stuart’s ‘Washington’ embodies the serene conscience, the self-control, the humane dignity and birthright of command, which consecrate our peerless chief; and Delaroche’s ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’ perpetuates the intense purpose and insatiable ambition that won so many battles and died of anxiety on an ocean-rock. Such instances, which might easily be multiplied, prove how a single department of art, and that the least estimated, is allied to history, patriotism, and sentiment, and capable of touching their secret springs and unveiling their limitless perspective at a glance. Guercino’s ‘Hagar’ is a biblical poem. Hamlet’s filial reproaches borrow their keenest sting from two ‘counterfeit presentments,’ and Trumbull’s faithful and assiduous pencil has transmitted the individualities of our Revolutionary drama. And thus the art of portraiture, even in its general relations, may become, through illustrious subjects and rare fidelity, the romance which association of ideas breeds from reality.

I was never more impressed with the absolute line of demarcation between the imitative and the inventive, even in the lighter processes of art, than when examining the graphic series of illustrations of The Wandering Jew. Nature is represented under all forms—the woods, the desert, the ocean, caves, meadows, and skies; and these fixed elemental features might be well reflected by mechanical aids, photographed or reproduced through chemical and optical means; but the true meaning of each picture consisted in the ever-present shadow pursuing the Wanderer—the form of the Holy One bowed under his cross: it glimmered in the water, was stamped on the rock, outlined in the gnarled forest branches, pencilled in the floating vapour, reflected in the ice-mirrored lake, with a latent and inevitable yet unobtrusive and apparently accidental omni-presence, as if wrought into the texture of nature through the creative anguish of conscience—which emphatically announced an intelligence far beyond all mechanical art, and interfused the material with the abstract, the imaginative, and the human, as only genius can. The same thing is evinced by comparing the best photographs of architecture, figures, or landscapes with the sketch-book of a genuine artist; in certain points there will be found a special intelligence and feeling which transcend the most remarkable imitative truth. How much of this is suggested, for instance, by the mere catalogue of an album on the table at a Parisian soirée: fleurs de Redonté, chevaux de Carl Vernet, Bedouins d’Horace, aquarelles de Ciceri, petit paysages de Géniole, caricatures de Grandville et de Monnier, beaux brigands de Schnetz—‘tous chéfs d’œuvre au petit pied.’

A portrait of little Fritz drumming, in the Berlin Gallery, Carlyle hails, in his Life of Frederick the Great, as ‘one tiny islet of reality amid the shoreless sea of fantasms, Flaying of Bartholomews, Rape of Europas,’ &c. Napoleon was delighted to remember that his mother reclined on tapestry representing the heroes of the Iliad, when she brought him into the world.

For how long and with what vividness are certain pictures associated with localities. Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy,’ and Reynolds’s ‘Strawberry Girl,’ are among the salient retrospective images of the English school at the Manchester Exhibition. We think of Correggio with Parma, Perugino with Perugia, Fra Angelico with Florence, Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ and Guercino’s ‘Hagar’ with Milan, Murillo with Seville, Vandyke with Madrid, Rubens with Antwerp, Watteau with Paris, and Paul Potter’s ‘Bull’ with the Hague.

The Dutch school, in a philosophical estimate, is but the compensation afforded by the romance of art for its deficiency in nature; the element of the picturesque not found in mountains, forests, and cataracts, the lowland painters wrought from flowers and firesides; the radiant tulips and exquisite interiors, the humble but characteristic in life and manners. To seize upon individuality is the conservative tact of both painter and poet; whoever does this effectively contributes to the world’s gallery of historical portraits, and keeps before the living the faces, costume, and actions of bygone races and heroes. Catlin’s aboriginal portraits introduced the American native tribes to Europe; a naturalist abroad has but to turn over Audubon’s portfolio to become intimately acquainted with every bird whose plumage or song makes beautiful our woodlands and seashore; the traveller who rests an hour at Perugia may trace on the walls of a church the original, crude, yet pious expression which Raphael developed into angelic beauty. Vernet has, by the very multiplicity of his battle-pieces, signalized on canvas the military genius of the French nation; the faith which so distinguishes the fifteenth from the speculation of the eighteenth century is manifest to us most eloquently in the masterpieces of religious art which yet remain in peerless beauty to attest the holy convictions that inspired them; and all that is peculiar in Grecian culture has found no exponent like the statues of her divinities. Hogarth preceded Crabbe and Dickens in making palpable the shadows of want, crime, and luxury. The Italian satirist, who endowed animals with speech and made them represent the absurdities of humanity, hinted their possible significance less than Landseer who individualized their most salient traits, or Kaulbach who revealed the brute creation in the highest intuitive expression. There is a piquant rustic beauty by Greuze, which embodies and embalms, in its exquisite suggestiveness, the special claim of naïve brightness and grace that belongs almost exclusively to French lovable women; and there is a portrait of an American matronly belle of the days of Washington, by Stuart, which represents the type of mingled self-reliance and womanly loveliness that has made the ladies of our Republican court so memorably attractive.