“Next is Lombardy, and her fine forms and expression; her masterly composition, and colours, so sweetly blended; all the best qualities of “excelling nature” are in this school formed by Correggio, who received, they say, his pencil from the Graces. His drapery seems agitated by the winds. And who are these others, who divide equally with him the admiration of the world? you cannot remove your eyes from their charming figures—it is Permessan and the Caraccis, severe and correct; and he who excels them all three in some of the principal features of the art, he who paints nature in her defects, and with irresistible force and truth, Caravaggio; and next Guido, who paints her majesty and graces; and Albano, in her winning, and poetic enchantments; and Domenichino, whose obstinate genius dragged him to the very heights of Parnassus, in spite of the predictions of his masters.
“In the Roman School, founded upon the antique models, you will have an inexhaustible source of enjoyment. Who does not love Raphael; his works are as well known as Virgil’s. Who can admire enough the natural expression and attitude of his figures, and his composition, simple and sublime. Here are Titian’s lively portraits, and landscapes, never to be surpassed in force and boldness of colouring. And here is the fruitful, and lively, and dignified Paul Veronese, with his brilliant, various and magnificent draperies. His “Marriage of Cana,” is one of the chef-d’œuvres of Italy. And here are tableaux and landscapes by the wild fancy of Salvator Rosa, excelling in savage nature; who paints the arid plain and carnage of the battle as no one else. In America, he would have painted your Mississippi, where its mighty flood rolls through the silent wilderness, or your War Dance; or the Hut of the Woodman, where the panther looks through his window, and the rattlesnake coils upon his pillow, or the savage upon his lonely cliff; while surveying the firmament, he reads God’s Holy Scriptures in the skies.
“—— Of this the composition is perfect; the passions are violent, but natural, and without disagreeable distortion, and the drapery even beyond ideal perfection.—The figures have less majesty than Michael Angelo’s, and are more within our common nature.—His women, as you see, are too plump, and his children too grave, whose is it?
“—— And this exquisite woman? with no sins of her ancestors in her face, and none of their diseases and deformities in her limbs; with all the sweet sensibilities, as the colours of the rainbow, in her expression—Who is she?—Who gathered these fugitive charms into her features, and who this divine grace about her limbs, to play upon her tapering arms, and neck and bosom, as the soft moonlight upon the stream?—— Who made her? * *
“—— All these eminent beauties, and this dove-like innocence to be thrown away, as the fragrance of the wild rose upon a desert; no taste to value; no * *
“* * To be sure, her unforbidden husband! * * * This other figure of the same canvass you will no doubt easily recognise. * *
“—— It is no wonder; it is a bad likeness. It should have less of the terrific attributes. Cloven feet and horns are the stupid imaginations of the monks. Without the temptations to sin what exercise or opportunity is there in virtue? What becomes of human greatness—of honesty, piety, charity, continence and all that props up the dignity of our race?—To be well painted he should have nothing of a supernatural being; he should have human passions to enlist human sympathies. He should be a gentleman; a gentleman too in his most seducing and fascinating form. With such a nature only he can sustain the functions assigned to him by Providence, especially amongst women; and to corrupt the world you must begin by them.
“There is here, as you see, no Ecole Britannique. The English have given us nothing in return for our Claudes and Poussins. Yet England does not yield to any nation of Europe, in the munificence of her patronage. One of her dukes pays for a picture of West’s 3,000 guineas; another buys “Murillo’s” at half a million in a year. Walpole’s collection at Houghton was valued at 200,000 pounds sterling. And she has not only invited the arts from foreign countries, by sumptuous presents, but has pensioned them, given them degrees in the universities, knighted them, and married them with her proudest nobility. Some pretend that she wants the lively and quick sensibilities necessary to success in this art; that she raises paintings, as the fruit of the Indies, not natural to her climate. But the climate of Rubens, Vandyke and Rembrandt is quite as Bœotian as that of Great Britain. Who ever heard of the sensibilities of the Hollander? The atmosphere, which nourished a Milton, would not have smothered a Raphael, or a Michael Angelo; nor would Salvator Rosa have withered, where Shakspeare ‘warbled his native wood-notes wild.’
“One of the great stimulants to excellence has been wanting in England altogether, and is now weakened throughout Europe—the wealth, the influence, the enthusiasm of the Catholic Religion. This spirit which, like the mythology of the Greeks, put a God in every niche of the Temple; which produced the Angelos and Rubens, and breathed inspiration into the artist and spectator, is quenched. Your Presbyterian prejudices of the impressions produced by paintings, as well as by architecture and music, are now obsolete. Idolatry is to be feared only among a savage or very ignorant people. We have got beyond these limits; and a picture of the Saviour or the Virgin can have no worse effect now in a church, than the picture of a father or mother in the habitation of their children.
“England will have a school of paintings, when she will have public galleries and a public taste, when the artist shall hold the reins of his imagination in his own hands, and shall paint, not for private recompense, but public fame, and not for the Duke of Sutherland, but the nation. In portraits, where vanity supplies a public taste, England excels; and the engraver, who ministers to the common pride, and supplies the furniture of the parlour, and the lady’s Annual, succeeds as no where else. Vandyke, who painted the “Descent from the Cross,” in his own country, painted in England only portraits; as affording him a better remuneration than his exertions on historical subjects.