MENGS.MOUNT PARNASSUS.

In his huge ecclesiastical paintings he is the son of that period which had just commenced to be touched by the pallor of thought, and groped eclectically now in this direction and now in that. “First of all must the weeds be rooted up,” wrote Zanotti in his Directions to a Young Man upon Painting. “And then we must go back again to Cimabue and Giotto, and again, a few years later, to Buonarotti and Sanzio, and their noble successors whose footsteps are no longer sought or followed by any one. But when such a happy resurrection will take place, God knows!” The old Ismael Mengs believed that that was his concern; he chose Antonio da Allegri and Rafael Sanzio as sponsors for his son. Anton Rafael should become the eclectic reformer of art, and as he was probably the first painter who, by the express permission of the Elector of Saxony, was allowed to visit the hitherto inaccessible Dresden Gallery, this wish was easy of accomplishment.

ANGELICA KAUFFMANN.   Cassell & Co.

He was quick in freeing himself from the immediate tradition of the age, and in harmony with the teaching of the Caracci, in returning to the so-called “higher” models of painting. When one runs across such of his pictures in some gallery—notably his altar pieces—they strike one as the works of some good master of the seventeenth century whose name one cannot, for the moment, recollect. His famous “Holy Night,” in which he wished to enter into rivalry with Correggio, has something of a Maratti about it, only the heads are more vacant and insipid.

It is that unfortunate “Parnassus” in the Villa Albani which first marks the collapse of this great talent. When, upon the advice of his friend Winckelmann, he turned from the study of Raphael and Correggio to that of the antique, Mengs forfeited not only the remnant of all that was essentially natural, but even all the picturesque qualities which had hitherto distinguished him. After painting had so long taken sculpture in tow, now sculpture seemed anxious to be revenged on it, and there was a manifestation of those prettily painted figures in plaster which for some score years afterwards paraded in every German picture.

For Winckelmann’s mistake, as Herder had already pointed out with great justice, consisted not only in this, that he set up for imitation a departed ideal for the consciousness of his contemporaries, but notably in that he obtruded principles upon modern painting which might be valid in ancient sculpture. Since the antique ideal was solely a plastic one, and neither the Greek Prussian nor, later, Meister Ephraim was clear as to the difference between sculpture and painting, they practically recommended the painter to work after plastic models.

The fact that Lessing, in discussing the limits of painting in his Laocoön, took a work of sculpture as his starting-point, proves that to him the laws and conditions of both arts were valued as the same. They denounced the confusion of the art of painting with poetry, and instead advocated the confounding of painting with sculpture, which was no less hazardous.

ANGELICA KAUFFMANN.PORTRAIT OF A LADY AS A VESTAL.

In this manner there came an alien element into Mengs’ hitherto quite pictorial apprehension; a vain and exclusively reproductive ideality deprived his figures of the last remnant of truth to nature which he had formerly understood how to give them. It is difficult to believe that Winckelmann’s paroxysm of friendship should have burst out, upon the completion of the “Parnassus,” into this pæan: “During the whole of the new age a more beautiful work has not appeared in painting; even Raphael would have bowed his head.” The whole is nothing more than a mélange of plagiarism and banal reminiscences, without soul or perception, without freshness or individuality; a mere plastic warehouse, and not even a painted antique group, but a daubed compilation of solitary statues, colder and more lifeless than any Baltoni ever painted. There was an audacious, strong aim, genial strength and an overwhelming flow of fantasy in the contemporary works of the great décorateur Tiepolo; here there is a mere work of intellect which with philological aid builds up the composition entirely of borrowed materials. The only thing which even still points in this work to the good old times is a more solid study of form and colour than all that which originated in Germany during the next fifty years. The figures are painted with a strength and bloom which are still quite worthy of the rococo.