Il fut toujours au delà de la Grace,
Et bien plus loin que les commandements.
He was blindly imitated by his disciples, and in them the want of Grace shocks you still more: for as they were far his inferiors in science, you have no equivalent at all. How little Guilielmo della Porta, the best of them all, understood grace and the antique, you may see in that marble groupe, called the Farnese-bull; where Dirce is his to the girdle. John di Bologna, Algardi, Fiammingo, are great names, but likewise inferior to the ancients, in Grace.
At last Lorenzo Bernini appeared, a man of spirit and superior talents, but whom Grace had never visited even in dreams. He aimed at encyclopædy in art; painter, architect, statuary, he struggled, chiefly as such, to become original. In his eighteenth year he produced his Apollo and Daphne; a work miraculous for those years, and promising that sculpture by him should attain perfection. Soon after he made his David, which fell short of Apollo. Proud of general applause, and sensible of his impotency, either to equal or to offuscate the antiques; he seems, encouraged by the dastardly taste of that age, to have formed the project of becoming a legislator in art, for all ensuing ages, and he carried his point. From that time the Graces entirely forsook him: how could they abide with a man who begun his career from the end opposite to the ancients? His forms he compiled from common nature, and his ideas from the inhabitants of climates unknown to him; for in Italy’s happiest parts nature differs from his figures. He was worshipped as the genius of art, and universally imitated; for, in our days, statues being erected to piety only, none to wisdom, a statue à la Bernini is likelier to make the kitchen prosper than a Laocoon.
From Italy, reader, I leave you to guess at other countries. A celebrated Puget, Girardon, with all his brethren in On, are worse. Judge of the connoisseurs of France by Watelet, and of its designers, by Mariette’s gems.
At Athens the Graces stood eastward, in a sacred place. Our artists should place them over their work-houses; wear them in their rings; seal with them; sacrifice to them; and, court their sovereign charms to their last breath.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Plato in Timæo. Edit. Francof. p. 1044.