Sectan. Sat.
How trivial, how mean are the great Poussin’s reflexions on painting, published by Bellori, and annexed to his life of that artist[43]?
Another digression!—let me now again resume the character of your Aristarchus.
You are bold enough to attack the authority of Bernini, and to challenge a man, the bare mention of whose name would do honour to any treatise. It was Bernini, you ought to recollect, Sir, who at the same age in which Michael Angelo performed his Studiolo[44], viz. in his eighteenth year, produced his Daphne, as a convincing instance of his intimacy with the ancients, at an age in which perhaps the genius of Raphael was yet labouring under darkness and ignorance!
Bernini was one of those favourites of nature, who produce at the same time vernal blossoms and autumnal fruits; and I think it by no means probable, that his studying nature in riper years misled either him or his disciples. The smoothness of his flesh was the result of that study, and imparted to the marble the highest possible degree of life and beauty. Indeed ’tis nature which endows art with life, and “vivifies forms,” as Socrates says[45], and Clito the sculptor allows. The great Lysippus, when asked which of his ancestors he had chosen for his master, replied, “None; but nature alone.” It is not to be denied, that the too close imitation of antiquity is very often apt to lead us to a certain barrenness, unknown to those who imitate nature: various herself, nature teaches variety, and no votary of her’s can be charged with a sameness: whereas Guido, Le Brun, and some other votaries of antiquity, repeated the same face in many of their works. A certain ideal beauty was become so familiar to them, as to slide into their figures even against their will.
But as for such an imitation of nature, as is quite regardless of antiquity, I am entirely of the author’s opinion; though I should have chosen other artists as instances of following nature in painting.
Jordans certainly has not met with the regard due to his merit; let me appeal to an authority universally allowed. “There is, says Mr. d’Argenville, more expression and truth in Jordans, than even in Rubens.
“Truth is the basis and origin of perfection and beauty; nothing, of any kind whatever, can be beautiful or perfect, without being truly what it ought to be, without having all it ought to have.”
The solidity of this judgment presupposed, Jordans, according to Rochefoucault’s maxims, ought rather to be ranked among the greatest originals, than among the mimicks of common nature, where Rembrandt may fill up his place, as Raoux or Vatteau that of Stella; though all these painters do nothing but what Euripides did before them; they draw man ad vivum. There are no trifles, no meannesses in the art, and if we recollect of what use the Caricatura was to Bernini, we should be cautious how we pass judgment even on the Dutch forms. That great genius, they say[46], owed to this monster of the art, a distinction for which he was so eminent, the “Franchezza del Tocco.” When I reflect on this, I am forced to alter my former opinion of the Caricatura, so far as to believe that no artist ever acquired a perfection therein without gaining a farther improvement in the art itself. “It is, says the author, a peculiar distinction of the ancients to have gone beyond nature:” our artists do the same in their Caricaturas: but of what avail to them are the voluminous works they have published on that branch of the art?
The author lays it down, in the peremptory style of a legislator, that “Precision of Contour can only be learned from the Greeks:” but our academies unanimously agree, that the ancients deviate from a strict Contour in the clavicles, arms, knees, &c. over which, in spite of apophyses and bones, they drew their skin as smooth as over mere flesh; whereas our academies teach to draw the bony and cartilaginous parts, more angularly, but the fat and fleshy ones more smooth, and carefully to avoid falling into the ancient style. Pray, Sir, can there be any error in the advices of academies in corpore?