Curl'd many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve,
To lure her eye." —Milton.
ANALYSIS OF BEAUTY, PLATE I.
If the figures which compose this plate are considered independent of the volume, they will appear sufficiently incongruous. He has given us curves and curvatures, straight lines and angles, circles and squares. He has ransacked the garden for examples, and drawn from the shops of the blacksmith, founder, and cabinetmaker, illustrations of his doctrine. To the beauteous and elegant Grecian Venus,[16] he has opposed the venerable English judge, arrayed in an ample robe, with his head enveloped in a periwig like the mane of a lion. The naked majesty of the Apollo Python is contrasted with an English actor, dressed by a modern tailor and barber, to personate a Roman general. The elegant winding lines of an Egyptian sphynx are opposed by a bloated, overcharged, recumbent Silenus. The uniform, coldly correct figures of Albert Durer's drawing-book, that never deviate into grace, to the antique torso, in which Michael Angelo asserted he discovered every principle that gave so grand a gusto to his own works. Three anatomical representations of the muscles which appear in a human leg when the skin is taken off, are placed close to a shapeless pedestal in a shoe and stocking, which by disease has, in the painter's phrase, lost its drawing.
A fine wire, properly twisted round the figure of a cone, represented in Number 26, as giving that elegant wave which adds grace to beauty, is the leading principle on which he builds his system of serpentine lines. Of this ancient grace, opposed to modern air, he could not have selected better examples than Numbers 6 and 7, where Mr. Essex, an English dancing-master, places himself in such an attitude as he thinks the sculptor ought to have given the Antinous, who he is ludicrously enough handing out to dance a minuet.
Number 19 represents the deep-mouth'd Quin! dressed in all the dignity of a playhouse wardrobe, to perform the part of Brutus. That this (and not Coriolanus) is the character meant by the artist, I am inclined to think, from the statue of Julius Cæsar, with a rope round his neck, immediately before him.[17] The rope is passed through a pulley, inserted in one of those triple supporters of great weights, which some of our provincial carpenters call a gallows, and passes to upright beams intersected by poles, in the front of a monument, on which is seated a judge, over whose head is another noosed pulley. How far this may hint at any connection between the law and the rope I cannot determine; but a weeping naked boy, who is seated below, has in his hand what may pass for the model of a gibbet as well as a square. Over the judge's head is written, BIT DECEM. 1752, ÆTATIS; the O preceding BIT is covered: I apprehend the same judge may be found in a print of THE BENCH.
A new order was Hogarth's favourite idea: he has here made an attempt at a capital composed of hats and periwigs.[18] An infant with a man's wig and cap on, is a miniature representation of Mr. Quin's Roman general; and a monkey child, led by a travelling tutor, gives the painter's opinion of those young gentlemen who visited Rome for improvement in connoisseurship.[19] It is copied from a burlesque of Cav. Ghezzi, etched by Mr. Pond.