He says, “One thing alone seems common in all the stages of early art; the desire of making all other excellences tributary to the expression of thought and sentiment.”
The early painters had no other excellences except those of thought and expression; therefore could not sacrifice what they did not possess. They drew incorrectly, coloured ineffectively, and were ignorant of perspective.
134.
When at Dusseldorf, I found the President of the Academy, Wilhelm Schadow, employed on a church picture in three compartments; Paradise in the centre; on the right side, Purgatory; on the left side, Hell. He explained to me that he had not attempted to paint the interior of Paradise as the sojourn of the blessed, because he could imagine no kind of occupation or delight which, prolonged to eternity, would not be wearisome. He had therefore represented the exterior of Paradise, where Christ, standing on the threshold with outstretched arms, receives and welcomes those who enter. (This was better and in finer taste than the more common allegory of St. Peter and his keys.) On one side of the door, the Virgin Mary and a group of guardian angels encourage those who approach. Among these we distinguish a martyr who has died for the truth, and a warrior who has fought for it. A care-worn, penitent mother is presented by her innocent daughter. Those who were “in the world and the world knew them not,” are here acknowledged—and eyes dim with weeping, and heads bowed with shame, are here uplifted, and bright with the rapturous gleam which shone through the portals of Paradise.
The idea of Purgatory, he told me, was suggested by a vision or dream related by St. Catherine of Genoa, in which she beheld a great number of men and women shut up in a dark cavern; angels descending from heaven, liberate them from time to time, and they are borne away one after another from darkness, pain, and penance, into life and light—again to behold the face of their Maker—reconciled and healed. In his picture, Schadow has represented two angels bearing away a liberated soul. Below in the fore-ground groups of sinners are waiting, sadly, humbly, but not unhopefully, the term of their bitter penance. Among these he had placed a group of artists and poets who, led away by temptation, had abused their glorious gifts to wicked or worldly purposes;—Titian, Ariosto, and, rather to my surprise, the beautiful, lamenting spirit of Byron. Then, what was curious enough, as types of ambition, Lady Macbeth and her husband, who, it seems, were to be ultimately saved, I do not know why—unless for the love of Shakespeare.
Hell, like all the hells I ever saw, was a failure. There was the usual amount of fire and flames, dragons and serpents, ghastly, despairing spirits, but nothing of original or powerful conception. When I looked in Schadow’s face, so beautiful with benevolence, I wondered how he could—but in truth he could not—realise to himself the idea of a hell; all the materials he had used were borrowed and common-place.
But among his cartoons for pictures already painted, there was one charming idea of quite a different kind. It was for an altar, and he called it “The Fountain of Life.” Above, the sacrificed Redeemer lies extended in his mother’s arms. The pure abundant Waters of Salvation, gushing from the rock beneath their feet, are received into a great cistern. Saints, martyrs, teachers of the truth, are standing round, drinking or filling their vases, which they present to each other. From the cistern flows a stream, at which a family of poor peasants are drinking with humble, joyful looks; and as the stream divides and flows away through flowery meadows, little sportive children stoop to drink of it, scooping up the water in their tiny hands, or sipping it with their rosy smiling lips. A beautiful and significant allegory beautifully expressed, and as intelligible to the people as any in the “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
