But there are other proofs, still stronger, and first, every-day experience. When we behold what takes place in the life of an artist, we perceive that it is generally divided into two sections. During the first, in the youth and maturity of his talent, he sees things as they are, and studies them minutely and earnestly; he fixes his eyes on them; he labors and worries to express them, and he expresses them with more than scrupulous fidelity. Arriving at a certain moment of life, he thinks he understands them thoroughly and discovers no more novelty in them; he casts aside the living model, and with certain prescribed rules which he has picked up in the course of his experience he forms a drama or a romance, a picture or a statue. The first epoch is that of natural feeling; the second that of mannerism and decline. If we penetrate the lives of the greatest men, we rarely fail to discover both. In the life of Michael Angelo, the first period lasted a long time, a little less than sixty years; all the works belonging to it disclose the sentiment of force and heroic grandeur. The artist is imbued with it; he has no other thought. His numerous dissections, his countless drawings, the unremitted analysis of his own heart, his study of the tragic passions and of their physical expression, are for him but the means of manifesting outwardly the militant energy with which he is carried away. This idea descends upon you from every corner of the great vault of the Sistine chapel. Enter the Pauline chapel alongside of it, and contemplate the works of his old age—the Conversion of St. Paul, the Crucifixion of St. Peter; consider even the Last Judgment, which he painted in his seventy-seventh year. Connoisseurs, and those who are not, recognize at once that the two frescoes are executed according to prescribed rules; that the artist possessed a certain number of forms, which he used conventionally; that he multiplied extraordinary attitudes, and ingeniously contrived foreshortenings; that the lively invention, naturalness, the great transport of the heart, the perfect truth peculiar to his first works, have, at least in part, disappeared from the abuse of technique and the force of routine; and that if he is still superior to others, he is greatly inferior to himself.
The same comment may be made on another life—that of our French Michael Angelo, Corneille. In the first years of his life, Corneille was likewise struck by the feeling of force, and of moral heroism. He found it around him in the vigorous passions bequeathed by the religious wars to the new monarchy; in the daring acts of duellists; in the proud feeling of honor which still carried away the devotees of feudalism; in the bloody tragedies which the plots of princes and the executions of Richelieu furnished as spectacles for the court; and he created personages like Chimène and the Cid. like Polyeucte and Pauline, like Cornélie, Sertorius, Émilie, and les Horaces. Afterwards he produced Pertharite, Attila, and other feeble works, in which the situations merge into the horrible, and generous emotions lose themselves in extravagance. In this period the living models he once contemplated no longer had a social setting; at least he no longer sought them, he failed to renew his inspiration. He was governed by prescribed rules due to the memory of processes which he had formerly found in the heat of enthusiasm, literary theories, dissertations and distinctions on theatrical catastrophes and dramatic licenses. He copied and exaggerated himself; learning, calculation and routine shut out from him the direct and personal contemplation of powerful emotions and of noble actions; he no longer created, but manufactured.
It is not alone the history of this or that great man which proves to us the necessity of imitating the living model, and of keeping the eye fixed on nature, but rather the history of every great school of art. Every school (I believe without exception) degenerates and falls, simply through its neglect of exact imitation, and its abandonment of the living model. You see it in painting, in the fabricators of muscles and exaggerated attitudes who succeeded Michael Angelo; in the sciolists of theatrical decorations and in the brawny rotundities which have followed the great Venetians; and in the boudoir and alcove painters which closed the French school of art of the eighteenth century. The same thing occurs in literature, with the versifiers and rhetoricians of the Latin decadence; with the sensual and declamatory playwrights closing the bright period of the English drama, and with the manufacturers of sonnets, puns, witticisms, and bombast of the Italian decline. Among these I will cite two striking examples. The first is the decline of sculpture and painting in antiquity, of which you obtain a vivid impression by visiting Pompeii, and afterwards Ravenna. At Pompeii the painting and sculpture belong to the first century of the present era; at Ravenna the mosaics are of the sixth century, about the times of the Emperor Justinian. In this interval of five centuries art becomes irremediably corrupt, and its degeneracy is wholly due to the neglect of the living model. In the first century the pagan manners and tastes of the palestra still existed. Men wore their vestments loose and cast them off easily, frequented the baths, exercised in a state of nudity, witnessed the combats of the circus, ever contemplating sympathetically and intelligently the active movements of the living body. Their sculptors and painters, surrounded by nude and half-nude forms, were capable of reproducing them. Accordingly, you will see on the walls of Pompeii, in the little oratories and in the inner courts, beautiful dancing females, spirited, supple young heroes, with manly chests, agile feet, every posture and form of the body rendered with an ease and accuracy to which the most elaborate study of the present day cannot attain. During the following five hundred years everything gradually changes. Pagan manners, the use of the palestra, and the love of the nude, disappear. The body is no longer exposed, but concealed under complicated drapery, and under a display of lace, purple, and oriental magnificence. People no longer esteem the wrestler and the youthful gymnast,[1] but the eunuch, the scribe, the monk, and the woman. Asceticism gains ground, and with it a love for listless reverie, hollow disputation, scribbling and wrangling. The worn-out babblers of the Lower Empire replace the valiant Greek athletes and the hardy combatants of Rome. By degrees the knowledge and study of the living model are interdicted. People have discarded it. Their eyes rest only on the works of ancient masters, and they copy these. Soon copies are only made of copies, and again copies of these, so that each generation recedes a step from the original type. The artist ceases to have his own idea and his own feeling, and becomes a copying machine. The Fathers declare that he must invent nothing, but must adhere to lineaments prescribed by tradition and sanctioned by authority. This separation of the artist from the living model brings art to the condition in which you see it at Ravenna. At the end of five centuries, artists can only represent man in two ways—seated and standing; other attitudes are too difficult, and are beyond their capacity. Hands and feet appear rigid as if fractured, the folds of drapery are wooden, figures seem to be mannikins, and heads are invaded by the eyes. Art is like an invalid sinking under a mortal consumption; it is languishing, and about to expire.
In a different branch of art amongst ourselves, and in a neighboring century, we find again a similar decline, and brought about by similar causes. In the age of Louis XIV., literature attained to a perfect style, to a purity, to a precision, to a sobriety of which we have no example; dramatic art, especially, created a language and a style of versification deemed by all Europe a masterpiece of the human intellect. This is due to the fact of writers finding their models around them and constantly observing them. The language of Louis XIV. was perfect, displaying a dignity, eloquence, and gravity truly royal. We know by the letters, despatches, and memoirs of the court personages of that time, that an aristocratic tone, sustained elegance, propriety of terms, dignified manners, and the art of correct speaking, were as common to courtiers as to monarch; so that the writer frequenting their society, had but to draw on his memory and experience in order to obtain the very best materials of his art.
[1] ἔφηβος.
[III.]
Is this true in every particular, and must we conclude that absolutely exact imitation is the end of art?
If this were so, gentlemen, absolutely exact imitation would produce the finest works. But, in fact, it is not so. In sculpture, for instance, casting is the process by which a faithful and minute impression of a model is obtained, and certainly a good cast is not equal to a good statue. Again, and in another domain, photography is the art which completely reproduces with lines and tints on a flat surface, without possible mistake, the forms and modelling of the object imitated. Photography is undoubtedly a useful auxiliary to painting, and is sometimes tastefully employed by cultivated and intelligent men; but after all, no one thinks of comparing it with painting. And finally, as a last illustration, if it were true that exact imitation is the supreme aim of art, let me ask what would be the best tragedy? the best comedy? the best drama? A stenographic report of a criminal trial, every word of which is faithfully recorded. It is clear, however, that if we sometimes encounter in it flashes of nature and occasional outbursts of sentiment, these are but veins of pure metal in a mass of worthless dross; it may furnish a writer with materials for his art, but it does not constitute a work of art.
Some may possibly say, that photography, casting, and stenography are mechanical processes, and that we ought to leave mechanism out of the question, and accordingly limit our comparisons to man's work. Let us, therefore, select works by artists conspicuous for minute fidelity. There is a canvas in the Louvre by Denner. This artist worked microscopically, taking four years to finish a portrait. Nothing in his heads is overlooked—the finest lines and wrinkles, the faintly mottled surface of the cheeks, the black specks scattered over the nose, the bluish flush of imperceptible veins meandering under the skin, nor the reflection of objects in the vicinity on the eye. We are struck with astonishment. This head is a perfect illusion; it seems to project out of the frame. Such success and such patience are unparalleled. Substantially, however, a broad sketch by Van Dyck is a hundredfold more powerful. Beside, neither in painting nor in any other art are prizes awarded to deceptions.