Let us again take up Rubens' "Kermesse." These blooming merry wives, these roystering drunkards, these busts and visages of burly unbridled brutes, probably found counterparts in the carousals of the day. Over-nourished and exuberant nature aimed at producing such gross forms and such coarse manners, but she only half accomplished her task; other causes intervened to stay this excess of a carnal jovial energy. There is, at first, poverty. In the best of times, and in the best countries, many people have not enough to eat, and fasting, at least partial abstinence, misery, and bad air, all the accompaniments of indigence, diminish the development and boisterousness of native brutality. A suffering man is not so strong, and more sober. Religion, law, police regulations, and habits due to steady labor, operate in the same direction; education does its part. Out of a hundred subjects who, under favorable conditions, might have furnished Rubens with models, only five or six, perhaps, could be of any service to him. Suppose now that these five or six figures in the actual festivities which he might have seen were lost in a crowd of people more or less indifferent and common; consider again, that at the moment they came under his eye they exhibited neither the attitude, the expression, the gestures, the abandonment, the costume, or the disorder requisite to make this teeming excitement apparent. Through all these draw-backs nature called art to its aid; she could not clearly distinguish the character; it was necessary that the artist should supplement her.
Thus is it with every superior work of art. While Raphael was painting his "Galatea," he wrote that, beautiful women being scarce, he was following a conception of his own. This means that, looking at human nature from a certain point of view, its repose, its felicity, its gracious and dignified sweetness, he found no living model to express it satisfactorily. The peasant or laboring girl who posed for him, had hands deformed by work, feet spoiled by their covering, and eyes disordered by shame, or demoralized by her calling. His "Fornarina" has drooping shoulders, a meagre arm above the elbow, a hard and contracted expression.[1] If he painted her in the Farnesini Palace, he completely transformed her, developing a character in his painted figure of which the real figure only contributed parts and suggestions.
Thus the province of a work of art is to render the essential character, or, at least, some capital quality, the predominance of which must be made as perceptible as possible. In order to accomplish this the artist must suppress whatever conceals it, select whatever manifests it, correct every detail by which it is enfeebled, and recast those in which it is neutralized.
Let us no longer consider works but artists, that is to say, the way in which artists feel, invent, and produce: you will find it consistent with the foregoing conception of the work of art. There is one gift indispensable to all artists; no study, no degree of patience, supplies its place; if it is wanting in them they are nothing but copyists and mechanics. In confronting objects the artist must experience original sensation; the character of an object strikes him, and the effect of this sensation is a strong, peculiar impression. In other words, when a man is born with talent his perceptions—or at least a certain class of perceptions—are delicate and quick; he naturally seizes and distinguishes, with a sure and watchful tact, relationships and shades; at one time the plaintive or heroic sense in a sequence of sounds, at another the listlessness or stateliness of an attitude, and again the richness or sobriety of two complimentary or contiguous colors. Through this faculty he penetrates to the very heart of things, and seems to be more clear-sighted than other men. This sensation, moreover, so keen and so personal, is not inactive—by a counter-stroke the whole nervous and thinking machinery is affected by it. Man involuntarily expresses his emotions; the body makes signs, its attitude becomes mimetic; he is obliged to figure externally his conception of an object; the voice seeks imitative inflections, the tongue finds pictorial terms, unforeseen forms, a figurative, inventive, exaggerated style. Under the force of the original impulse the active brain recasts and transforms the object, now to illumine and ennoble it, now to distort and grotesquely pervert it; in the free sketch, as in the violent caricature, you readily detect, with poetic temperaments, the ascendency of involuntary impressions. Familiarize yourselves with the great artists and great authors of your century; study the sketches, designs, diaries, and correspondence of the old masters, and you will again everywhere find the same inward process. We may adorn it with beautiful names; we may call it genius or inspiration, which is right and proper; but if you wish to define it precisely you must always verify therein the vivid spontaneous sensation which groups together the train of accessory ideas, master, fashion, metamorphose and employ them in order to become manifest.
We have now arrived at a definition of a work of art. Let us, for a moment, cast our eyes backward, and review the road we have passed over. We have, by degrees, arrived at a conception of art more and more elevated, and consequently more and more exact. At first we thought that the object of art was to imitate sensible appearances. Then separating material from intellectual imitation, we found that what it desired to reproduce in sensible appearances is the relationships of parts. Finally, remarking that relationships are, and ought to be, modified in order to obtain the highest results of art, we proved that if we study the relationships of parts it is to make predominant an essential character. No one of these definitions destroys its antecedent, but each corrects and defines it. We are consequently able now to combine them, and by subordinating the inferior to the superior, thus to sum up the result of our labor:—"The end of a work of art is to manifest some essential or salient character, consequently some important idea, clearer and more completely than is attainable from real objects. Art accomplishes this end by employing a group of connected parts, the relationships of which it systematically modifies. In the three imitative arts of sculpture, painting, and poetry, these groups correspond to real objects."
[1] See the two portraits of the "Fornarina," in the Sciarra and the Borghese palaces.
[VI.]
That established, gentlemen, we see, on examining the different parts of this definition, that the first is essential and the second accessory. An aggregate of connected parts is necessary in all art which the artist may modify so as to portray character; but in every art it is not necessary that this aggregate should correspond with real objects; it is sufficient that it exists. If we therefore meet with aggregates of connected parts which are not imitations of real objects, there will be arts which will not have imitation for their point of view. This is the case, and it is thus that architecture and music are born. In short, besides connections, proportions, moral and organic dependencies, which the three imitative arts copy, there are mathematical relationships which the two others, imitating nothing, combine.
Let us, at first, consider the mathematical relationships perceived by the sense of sight. Magnitudes sensible to the eye may form amongst each other aggregates of parts connected by mathematical laws. For instance, a piece of wood or stone may have geometrical form, that of a cube, a cone, a cylinder, or a sphere, which establishes regular relationships of distance between the different points of its outline. Furthermore, its dimensions may be quantities mutually related in simple proportions which the eye can seize readily; height, may be two, three, or four times greater than thickness or breadth: this constitutes a second series of mathematical relationships. Finally, many of these pieces of wood or stone may be placed symmetrically on the top or by the side of each other, according to distances and angles mathematically combined. Architecture is established on this aggregate of connected parts. An architect conceiving some dominant character, either serenity, simplicity, strength, or elegance, as formerly in Greece or Rome, or the strange, the varied, the infinite, the fantastic, as in Gothic times, may select and combine connections, proportions, dimensions, forms, and positions—in short, the relationships of materials, that is to say, certain visible magnitudes in such a way as to display the character aimed at.