For this reason they were kept out of the frescoes of Polygnotus. And for this reason also, an “infinitesimal” blue-to-green is the space-creating element throughout the history of our perspective oil-painting, from the Venetians right into the 19th Century; it is the basic and supremely important tone which supports the ensemble of the intended colour-effect, as the basso continuo supports the orchestra, whereas the warm yellow and red tones are put on sparingly and in dependence upon this basic tone. It is not the full, gorgeous and familiar green that Raphael and Dürer sometimes—and seldom at that—use for draperies, but an indefinite blue-green of a thousand nuances into white and grey and brown; something deeply musical, into which (notably in Gobelin tapestry) the whole atmosphere is plunged. That quality which we have named aerial perspective in contrast to linear—and might also have called Baroque perspective in contrast to Renaissance—rests almost exclusively upon this. We find it with more and more intense depth-effect in Leonardo, Guercino, Albani in the case of Italy, and in Ruysdael and Hobbema in that of Holland, but, above all, in the great French painters, from Poussin and Claude Lorrain and Watteau to Corot. Blue, equally a perspective colour, always stands in relation to the dark, the unillumined, the unactual. It does not press in on us, it pulls us out into the remote. An “enchanting nothingness” Goethe calls it in his Farbenlehre.
Blue and green are transcendent, spiritual, non-sensuous colours. They are missing in the strict Attic fresco and therefore dominant in oil-painting. Yellow and red, the Classical colours, are the colours of the material, the near, the full-blooded. Red is the characteristic colour of sexuality—hence it is the only colour that works upon the beasts. It matches best the Phallus-symbol—and therefore the statue and the Doric column—but it is pure blue that etherealizes the Madonna’s mantle. This relation of the colours has established itself in every great school as a deep-felt necessity. Violet, a red succumbing to blue, is the colour of women no longer fruitful and of priests living in celibacy.
Yellow and red are the popular colours, the colours of the crowd, of children, of women, and of savages. Amongst the Venetians and the Spaniards high personages affected a splendid black or blue, with an unconscious sense of the aloofness inherent in these colours. For red and yellow, the Apollinian, Euclidean-polytheistic colours, belong to the foreground even in respect of social life; they are meet for the noisy hearty market-days and holidays, the naïve immediateness of a life subject to the blind chances of the Classical Fatum, the point-existence. But blue and green—the Faustian, monotheistic colours—are those of loneliness, of care, of a present that is related to a past and a future, of destiny as the dispensation governing the universe from within.
The relation of Shakespearian destiny to space and of Sophoclean to the individual body has already been stated in an earlier chapter. All the genuinely transcendent Cultures—that is all whose prime-symbol requires the overcoming of the apparent, the life of struggle and not that of acceptance—have the same metaphysical inclination to space as to blues and blacks. There are profound observations on the connexion between ideas of space and the meaning of colour in Goethe’s studies of “entoptic colours” in the atmosphere; the symbolism that is enunciated by him in the Farbenlehre and that which we have deduced here from the ideas of Space and Destiny are in complete agreement.
The most significant use of dusky green as the colour of destiny is Grünewald’s. The indescribable power of space in his nights is equalled only by Rembrandt’s. And the thought suggests itself here, is it possible to say that his bluish-green, the colour in which the interior of a great cathedral is so often clothed, is the specifically Catholic colour?—it being understood that we mean by “Catholic” strictly the Faustian Christianity (with the Eucharist as its centre) that was founded in the Lateran Council of 1215 and fulfilled in the Council of Trent. This colour with its silent grandeur is as remote from the resplendent gold-ground of Early Christian-Byzantine pictures as it is from the gay, loquacious “pagan” colours of the painted Hellenic temples and statues. It is to be noted that the effect of this colour, entirely unlike that of yellow and red, depends upon work being exhibited indoors. Classical painting is emphatically a public art, Western just as emphatically a studio-art. The whole of our great oil-painting, from Leonardo to the end of the 18th Century, is not meant for the bright light of day. Here once more we meet the same opposition as that between chamber-music and the free-standing statue. The climatic explanation of the difference is merely superficial; the example of Egyptian painting would suffice to disprove it if disproof were necessary at all. Infinite space meant for Classical feeling complete nothingness, and the use of blue and green, with their powers of dissolving the near and creating the far, would have been a challenge to the absolutism of the foreground and its unit-bodies, and therefore to the very meaning and intent of Apollinian art. To the Apollinian eye, pictures in the colours of Watteau would have been destitute of all essence, things of almost inexpressible emptiness and untruth. By these colours the visually-perceived light-reflecting surface of the picture is made effectively to render, not circumscribed things, but circumambient space. And that is why they are missing in Greece and dominant in the West.
IX
Arabian art brought the Magian world-feeling to expression by means of the gold ground of its mosaics and pictures. Something of the uncanny wizardry of this, and by implication of its symbolic purpose, is known to us through the mosaics of Ravenna, in the work of the Early Rhenish and especially North Italian masters who were still entirely under the influence of Lombardo-Byzantine models, and last but not least in the Gothic book-illustrations of which the archetypes were the Byzantine purple codices.
In this instance we can study the soul of three Cultures working upon very similar tasks in very dissimilar ways. The Apollinian Culture recognized as actual only that which was immediately present in time and place—and thus it repudiated the background as pictorial element. The Faustian strove through all sensuous barriers towards infinity—and it projected the centre of gravity of the pictorial idea into the distance by means of perspective. The Magian felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the world-cavern with their spiritual substance—and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours. Gold is not a colour. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours—whether coloured substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment applied with the brush—are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.[[311]] It recalls impressively the other symbols of the Culture, Alchemy and Kabbala, the Philosophers’ Stone, the Holy Scriptures, the Arabesque, the inner form of the tales of the “Thousand and One Nights.” The gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their substantial being. Everything that was taught in the circle of Plotinus or by the Gnostics as to the nature of things, their independence of space, their accidental causes—notions paradoxical and almost unintelligible to our world-feeling—is implicit also in the symbolism of this mysterious hieratic background. The nature of bodies was a principal subject of controversy amongst Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-Platonists, as it was later in the schools of Baghdad and Basra. Suhrawardi distinguishes extension, as the primary existence of the body, from width and height and depth as its accidents. Nazzâm pronounced against the corporeal substantiality and space-filling character of the atom. These and the like were the metaphysical notions that, from Philo and Paul to the last great names of the Islamic philosophy, manifested the Arabian world-feeling. They played a decisive part in the disputes of the Councils upon the substantiality of Christ.[[312]] And thus the gold background possesses, in the iconography of the Western Church, an explicit dogmatic significance. It is an express assertion of the existence and activity of the divine spirit. It represents the Arabian form of the Christian world-consciousness, and with such a deep appropriateness that for a thousand years this treatment of the background was held to be the only one metaphysically—and even ethically—possible and seemly in representations of the Christian legend. When “natural” backgrounds, with their blue-green heavens, far horizons and depth perspective, began to appear in early Gothic, they had at first the appearance of something profane and worldly. The change of dogma that they implied was, if not acknowledged, at any rate felt, witness the tapestry backgrounds with which the real depth of space was covered up by a pious awe that disguised what it dared not exhibit. We have seen how just at this time, when the Faustian (German-Catholic) Christianity attained to consciousness of itself through the institution of the sacrament of Contrition—a new religion in the old garb—the tendency to perspective, colour, and the mastering of aerial space in the art of the Franciscans[[313]] transformed the whole meaning of painting.
The Christianity of the West is related to that of the East as the symbol of perspective to the symbol of gold-ground—and the final schism took place almost at the same moment in Church and in Art. The landscape-background of the depicted scene and the dynamic infiniteness of God were comprehended at the same moment; and, simultaneously with the gold ground of the sacred picture, there vanished from the Councils of the West that Magian, ontological problem of Godhead which had so passionately agitated Nicæa, Ephesus, Chalcedon and all the Councils of the East.