The meaning of pictures

by John C. Van Dyke

With broad and burning face.”

The introduction of the “dungeon grate” still further increases the effect. We now have the flaming sky, the sea, and the skeleton ship through which the sun mockingly peers, as through dungeon bars, at the dying crew. The effect is weird, uncanny, unearthly, just what Coleridge intended it should be. This, I should say, was the imagination adding and combining. And so far as I can see it is also the intelligent mind composing.

It would be difficult to find a parallel in painting to this picture from the “Ancient Mariner.” One thinks at once of Turner’s “Ulysses and Polyphemus” as resembling the Coleridge conception, because of the sea and the sun; but the likeness is superficial. In the Turner the spread of the sea, the golden waves in the foreground, the heave of the mountains out of the water, the spectral figure on the mountain top, the far distance of the ocean with the sun on the uttermost verge, are all highly imaginative; but the real glory of the picture is its decorative splendor rather than its expressive meaning. The “Fighting Téméraire,” as we have already noted, is imaginative in the magnitude of the bulk and there is something of the Coleridge effect in the glare of the red setting sun that peers through clouds, taking its farewell look at the old war-ship being towed to its last berth; but the imagination is not so clear-cut here as with Coleridge (Plate [11]).

In some of Turner’s “Approaches to Venice” there is perhaps a better example of the combining imagination, for Turner never hesitated about “composing”—putting things into the picture that were not there in reality; and in the Venetian pictures he sometimes did this with startling results. I have in mind one of these pictures, where Venice is seen a mile or more away; but the domes of the Salute and the tops of the campaniles have been so shifted about to suit Turner’s views of composition that I have never been able to determine whether the city is seen from the east or the west. And apparently Turner did not care anything about geography or topography. His imagination brought up out of the blue-green sea a city of palaces, builded of marble and hued like mother-of-pearl, with distant towers shining in the sun—a fairy city floating upon the sea, opalescent as a mirage, dream-like as an Eastern story, a glamour of mingled color and light beneath a vast-reaching sky glowing with the splendor of sun-shot clouds. It is most beautifully unreal, and yet by dint of its great imagination and suggestion it is more Venetian than Venice itself. It is that kind of distortion by the imagination which sacrifices the form to gain the spirit of things.

Here at Venice one can see the work of the combining imagination very well in some of the old Venetian pictures. Paolo Veronese, for instance, has upon the ceiling of one of the rooms in the Ducal Palace, a towering majestic figure, clad in silks and ermines, crowned with pearls and sceptred with power, seated under a gorgeous canopy in a chair of state, and representing the glory of Venice. She is a magnificent type of womanhood, splendid enough in herself to symbolize the splendor of Venice, but Paolo’s imagination adds to her importance still further by placing her upon a portion of a great globe representing the world, while below at her feet are two superb figures representing Justice and Peace, offering the tributes of the sword and the olive branch (Plate [14]).

XIV.—PAOLO VERONESE, Venice Enthroned. Doge’s Palace, Venice.

Another Venetian, Tintoretto, had possibly more imagination than any other of his school—yes, any other Italian in art-history; and yet it is not always possible to say just how his ideas originally took form. No doubt he labored and composed and tried effects by putting things in and taking them out. No doubt the “Ariadne and Bacchus,” or the “Miracle of the Slave” (Plate [15]) as we see it to-day, was the third or fourth thought instead of the first; but there is no questioning the exaltation of the final result. The subject of the Resurrection in his day had become a tradition in painting, and was usually shown as a square tomb of marble with a man rising from it between two angels. This stereotyped tradition had been handed down for centuries; but how greatly Tintoretto changed it and improved it in his picture in the Scuola San Rocco! He imagined the side of a mountain, a rock-cut tomb with angels pulling away the great door, and as it slowly opens the blinding light within the tomb bursts forth, and the figure of Christ rises swiftly, supported by the throbbing wings of angels.

However this last-named picture was produced, by combination or association, at least it is purely pictorial—that is, it deals with forms, lights, and colors, things that can be seen. I hardly know what to make of Mr. Ruskin’s remarks upon some of the other pictures by Tintoretto, in the Scuola San Rocco. He seeks to exemplify the painter’s ever-fertile imagination by pointing out, in the “Annunciation,” that the corner-stone of the building is meant by Tintoretto to be that of the old Hebrew Dispensation, which has been retained by the builders as the corner-stone of the new Christian Dispensation; and that, in the “Crucifixion,” the donkey at the back eating the palm-branches recently thrown down before Christ upon his entry into Jerusalem is a great piece of imaginative sarcasm. I confess my inability to follow Mr. Ruskin just here, and I cannot believe that Tintoretto meant anything of the sort about either the corner-stone or the palm-branches. If he did, it was perhaps a mistake. The motives would be more literary than pictorial. I think it all exemplifies Mr. Ruskin’s imagination rather than Tintoretto’s, and in either case it has little to do with imagination in painting as generally understood among painters. Painting and the pictorial conception, it must be repeated, have to do with forms and colors seen by the eye or in the mind’s eye; they have very little to do with a sarcasm or a Hebraic mystery.

There is still another phase of imagination which figures in metaphysical text-books under the name of fancy. It is sometimes called the passive imagination, apparently for no reason other than distinction’s sake. It is supposed to be temporary and accidental in its association of ideas and images, to be light, airy, capricious, perhaps indefinite; whereas, imagination is said to be more sober, serious, single in purpose, seeking unity of effect. The illustrations usually cited are taken from Shakespeare. The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is said to be a product of fancy, while “Lear” or “Hamlet” is a work of the imagination. But again I must confess my inability to comprehend the distinction. The thought in the one case busies itself with a light or gay theme, and in the other with a sober or tragic theme; but the mental process would seem to be the same in either case. The mind may grow happy over a birth or grieve over a death, but one mind and one imagination would seem flexible enough to comprehend them both. There is a difference in art between what is called the serious and what is called the clever; but the imagination has nothing to do with it. A figure of a soubrette dashed off in a Parisian studio, and sent in a hurry to a Salon or Academy exhibition as a “stunning thing,” may be clever. Mr. La Farge has defined such cleverness as “intelligence working for the moment without a background of previous thought or strong sentiment.” And this definition suggests that the serious in art is just the opposite of the clever. A figure by Millet, such as that of “The Sower,” is serious just because the intelligence has been working upon it for many months. But, in spite of calling a Jacquet soubrette fanciful and a Millet sower imaginative, there would seem to be no difference in the mental processes. The difference is one of subject, time, men, original endowment; not a difference in the kind of thought.