Hence the greatest artists have chosen but vulgar objects. Annibal Caracci, instead of representing in general symbols and sensible images the history of the Farnesian family, as an allegorical poet, wasted all his skill in fables known to the whole world.
Go, visit the galleries of monarchs, and the publick repositories of art, and see what difference there is between the number of allegorical, poetical, or even historical performances, and that of fables, saints, or madonnas.
Among great artists, Rubens is the most eminent, who first, like a sublime poet, dared to attempt this untrodden path. His most voluminous composition, the gallery of Luxembourg, has been communicated to the world by the hands of the best engravers.
After him the sublimest performance undertaken and finished, in that kind, is, no doubt, the cupola of the imperial library at Vienna, painted by Daniel Gran, and engraved by Sedelmayer. The Apotheosis of Hercules at Versailles, done by Le Moine, and alluding to the Cardinal Hercules de Fleury, though deemed in France the most august of compositions, is, in comparison of the learned and ingenious performance of the German artist, but a very mean and short-sighted Allegory, resembling a panegyric, the most striking beauties of which are relative to the almanack. The artist had it in his power to indulge grandeur, and his flipping the occasion is astonishing: but even allowing, that the Apotheosis of a minister was all that he ought to have decked the chief cieling of a royal palace with, we nevertheless see through his fig-leaf.
The artist would require a work, containing every image with which any abstracted idea might be poetically inverted; a work collected from all mythology, the best poets of all ages, the mysterious philosophy of different nations, the monuments of the ancients on gems, coins, utensils, &c. This magazine should be distributed into several classes, and, with proper applications to peculiar possible cases, adapted to the instruction of the artist. This would, at the same time, open a vast field for imitating the ancients, and participating of their sublimer taste.
The taste in our decorations, which, since the complaints of Vitruvius, hath changed for the worse, partly by the grotesques brought in vogue by Morto da Feltro, partly by our trifling house-painting, might also, from more intimacy with the ancients, reap the advantages of reality and common sense.
The Caricatura-carvings, and favourite shells, those chief supports of our ornaments, are full as unnatural as the candle-sticks of Vitruvius, with their little castles and palaces: how easy would it be, by the help of Allegory, to give some learned convenience to the smallest ornament!
Reddere personæ scit convenientia cuique.
Hor.
Paintings of ceilings, doors, and chimney-pieces, are commonly but the expletives of these places, because they cannot be gilt all over. Not only they have not the least relation to the rank and circumstances of the proprietor, but often throw some ridicule or reflection upon him.