Professor Kinkel, to whom we owe the work whose title is placed at the foot of the present article, is in every respect a specimen, and perhaps a prototype, of the German professor of the nineteenth century. To the deep and solid learning of a former generation, he adds the good taste and social accomplishments indispensable in these more advanced times. Thirteen years ago he was a student of theology in the university of Bonn, and even at that period the extraordinary application and the commanding faculties of the "studiosus Kinkel" had earned for him a scholastic reputation, and won the respect of his fellow-students and of the professors of the university. Indefatigable, then, in his theological pursuits, he was the subject of general admiration on account of the vast extent of his acquirements, and of the enthusiastic interest with which he engaged in the sacred study of the fine arts. No less general was the complaint that a mind so happily formed to range through the boundless realms of philosophy, a genius so brilliant, a soul so deeply imbued with a love of the beautiful and the great, should be suffered to pine beneath the monotonous duties of a theological professorship, and dissipate unparalleled energies in splitting the straws of a controversy, or deciding the dusty quibbles of an antiquated lore. At the close of his academical career, Gottfried Kinkel was admitted into the university as a licentiate in theology; but shortly after his promotion, he quitted his native country, and was for some years a wanderer amongst the splendid ruins of Italy. The treasures of art which mock the nakedness of this ill-starred country were to him what they are ever to the mind of the artist,—they revealed a new world. Unlike many others, however, Kinkel was not bewildered by the beauty which so suddenly burst upon his view. He was not surfeited. His enthusiasm, tempered by the metallic reasoning of the Hegel school, was closely allied with the subtlest criticism. His admiration was never an obstacle to comparison. Whilst he admired he remembered: individual faults or excellencies, he found to be reducible to common causes. His conclusions he drew from the objects: he did not force the one upon the other.
In like manner, and intent upon the same purpose, the theological licentiate travelled through France, Belgium, and Holland; and when he returned to Bonn, his spirit as well as his habits of life were more than ever wedded to the critical contemplation of the results of the creative faculty in the mind of man. The annual exhibitions of paintings in Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Frankfort, found in him an indulgent and impartial critic. His researches on the monuments of ancient sacred architecture were at intervals published in The Domban Blatt, and immediately secured the attention and regard of all antiquarians.
The cherished pursuits, however, were ill calculated to reconcile Kinkel to his adopted profession. In 1845, the licentiate in theology doffed his gown, and was forthwith appointed a professor of philosophy in the university of Bonn. It is to his lectures in this capacity that we owe the treatise on Art in the Early Christian Ages. This remarkable book was written with the purpose of instructing the public mind, and of enabling the many to participate in the intellectual enjoyment as yet confined to a favoured few. Its objects were to vindicate the merits of Christianity as a fosterer of the arts, and to encourage, all lovers of art by opening new fields for exploration.
The productions of real art are the most universally instructive of all creations. Nothing acts so powerfully on individual and national character; nothing so beneficially. Wherever art has been without these consequences, we may be sure that art was false. Its prophets were false prophets. The assumption of charlatans, however, is no condemnation of the art itself. The abuses of idolaters is no argument against religion. M. Kinkel's introduction to the plan of his work has but one fault. It is a national one. His mode of reasoning is conclusive; but the English reader, less accustomed to metaphysical phraseology than his German neighbours, will find some difficulty in grasping it. According to our author, two conditions are necessary to true art, which he defines to be "the incorporation of the spirit in a beautiful form." Beauty, then, and spirit are, the two conditions of true art. If one be wanting, true art is likewise wanting. The spirit, separate from beauty of form, may be religion and ethics—it can never be art. Beauty of form without the spirit, is likewise not a work of art. It remains on a level with matter; but the production of the artist soars higher. Hence true art is capable of yielding more universal satisfaction both to the artist and to the spectator than all other intellectual creations. The reason is obvious. We express and meet with the two grand constituents of our being; and, whilst other branches of knowledge are apter to separate than to unite—whilst science is exclusive, and even religion herself is sometimes productive of discord, true art asserts her right to be regarded as the great Pantheon of mankind. No idea is universal property unless expressed by art. Even the vast abyss which separates the lower orders of men from the ranks above them is overcome by art, for all are sensible of the joys which art produces. To know, therefore, what and how the mind and hand of man have hitherto worked, is a necessary, if it be not an indispensable, investigation and pursuit. "We are not ambitious," says M. Kinkel, "to conquer fame by profound hypotheses concerning things which, both by time and place, are indeed far from us. It is not our object to look for art in its infancy amongst nations which have long ceased to exist, nor shall we at once turn to Greece and Rome. Our desire is to contemplate those creations, which from their time and spirit are kindred to our feelings, and to speak of that branch of art with which Christianity has been busy within the last eighteen hundred years."
The author proceeds to point out the two grand directions in which all original art branches off. It serves either religion or history. The first productions of art were idols and monuments. Palaces, theatres, paintings, are the work of progressive civilisation. Christian art has one principal feature in common with pagan art,—its origin. They are alike the offspring of religion. They are also similar in their progress; they acquired an inclination towards history, and both have at last taken a decided realistic direction. But the vast difference between Christian and antique art is no less palpable. The art of antiquity was far more deeply imbued with the principle of nationality than the former. Nations were isolated; each had its proper gods and its peculiar history. The diversity of religion and of political institutions engendered a difference of feeling. This civilised world of ours, on the other hand, has a community of feeling, in as much as it has one religion common to all. The Celtic, Sclavonian, and German nations exhibit far greater diversities of origin and climate than the inhabitants of Persia and India in ancient times; yet the artistic productions of the former are more alike. Their religion furnishes one point at which all meet, and in respect of which they are inseparable. The prevalence of the ecclesiastical element in modern art, is, however, liable to one great objection. For many years it served to exclude historical art, which even in our own time has not attained so high a perfection. It is true that Christianity makes amends in some degree for the want of this historical development. A total absence of historical facts is the great characteristic of the religions of antiquity. The Son of David, on the contrary, is in himself the greatest of historical facts. The Apostles are no mythical personages. The great men of Judaic history, the family of our Saviour, and the people with whom he conversed, all form one large group of historical personages, and religion and history, formerly separated, are here united. Christ on the cross is an object of touching adoration, but he is also the monument of the greatest event in the history of the world. But that this is no national history is undeniable. Offspring of a foreign soil, it had no connexion with the state.
The exclusively ecclesiastical character of early Christian art, is another grand feature which at once destroys all analogy between this art and the creations of pagan antiquity. In Hellenic paganism, we behold the triumph of humanity. The human form in its most ideal beauty is the type of all things divine. Christianity starts at once with the peremptory condition of a renunciation of individual beauty and strength. Christianity counted sensual beauty as nothing: she regarded the mind alone. She permits the human form only as the incorporation of some hidden thought divine. In the one instance, the form was all in all; in the other, it is the expression. The heathen delighted in naked bodies, for every single part might convey the sensation of beauty. The face sufficed for Christian art, as solely expressive of divine beauty. And since the adopted Jewish custom excludes nudity in life, it must needs die in art. In the new order of things, sculpture is lost, and painting is better adapted to the narrow limits of early Christian art.
Upon the question whether this fear of the world, as exhibited in the rejection of the world's material forms, be truly the character of real Christianity, Professor Kinkel answers with a decided negative. He rather favours the opinion of those who hold the fear and hate of the world which distinguished the early Christian ages, to have been founded on an erroneous comprehension of the doctrine and example of the great Founder, who, as far as we are able to learn, facilitated the creation of real art. The misconception, so fatal to the civilising influence of art, M. Kinkel, explains by reminding us of the fears of idolatry, so justly entertained by Christianity in its first existence, of the oppression and persecution which the early church experienced, and of the natural desire entertained by the oppressed, to be as little like the oppressors as possible.
The extreme opinions, however, could not last. They began with the fury of persecution, and they died with it. An earnest admiration of the beautiful is implanted deeply in the soul of man for noble purposes, which Providence will not suffer to be thwarted. Mistaken notions of duty, religious zeal maddened by oppression, for a time clouded the faculty amongst the early Christians, but it soon burst forth again. Faint at first in its appearance, it gained strength with every passing lustre; and however sweeping the condemnation pronounced by early believers against vain signs and images expressive of the objects of this fleeting world, the voices of the cursers gradually hushed, and the mind of man, asserting its prerogative, was active again with new and regenerated power. The history of civilisation must needs count by centuries, and it took ages to effect the transition. From our present lofty and unprejudiced height, from that height at which modern art strives to emulate that of antiquity, it may not be wholly uninstructive to look back towards the first trembling attempts of the early Christian people.
It would appear that the first attempts of the early Christians were of a symbolical and allegorical kind. The same figures, with little or no variation, were constantly repeated to express ideas which, whilst they led the thoughts of the believer into the channel which to him appeared most satisfactory, were mere forms, and void of meaning to pagan eyes. Chief amongst these was the Cross, but without the body of Christ affixed to it. The crucifix is an invention of the seventh century. In the beginning, the Cross did not expose the Christians to suspicion, for it was known to many religions of antiquity. The nations of Egypt adored the cross as a sign of their salvation, since they placed it in the hands of one of their idols as a key to the annual flux of the Nile. The Persian worshippers of Mithras considered the cross a sacred symbol. When pagan persecution finally discovered the exclusive and peculiar signification of the sign amongst the Christians, the latter ingeniously contrived forms of the cross translatable by the eyes of the elect alone. To these, the image of a flying bird was a cross; the human figure in a swimming attitude was the same thing, and so also the cross-trees of a sailing ship; the letters Α and Ω are seen frequently engraved at the extremities of these disguised emblems in remembrance of Revelation, i. 8. Doves, ships, lyres, anchors, fishes and fishermen, are recommended by Clemens Alexandrinus, as the most fitting objects for Christians to contemplate, and for representation on seals. Amongst other symbols we find the seven-branched chandelier, though originally a Jewish sign, employed as a type of our Saviour, who calls himself (John, viii. 12.) the "light of the world." A wreath of flowers was expressive of the crown of life. A pair of scales, in remembrance of the last judgment, and a house, have been occasionally discovered on ancient grave-stones; and once, a simple curriculum has been traced with the pole thrown backwards and a whip leaning against it,—an unmistakable allusion to a departure for that place where "the weary are at rest." Amongst plants, the olive, the vine, and the palm were favourite symbols, the latter being generally reserved for the grave-stones of martyrs. Birds, too, are frequently met with on the walls of houses: the phœnix and the peacock being emblems of immortality. The fable of the phœnix is minutely told by Clemens Romanus; but the common superstition which ascribes imputrescibility to the flesh of the latter, easily rendered this bird a symbol of the resurrection of the body. Saint Augustine is said to have subjected this peculiar quality of the peacock's flesh to a practical test. He ordered one to be roasted, and at the close of a twelvemonth requested it to be served up. Tradition does not inform us whether he ate it, and with what appetite.
The dove occurs more frequently than any other bird. Two doves bearing olive branches, are seen on Christian grave-stones in the Cologne museum, and on the porta nigra at Treves. The meaning of the sign of a fish will not readily occur: but the frequency of its appearance establishes its character as a secret mark of recognition. It was used to signify both Christ and his church. Of quadrupeds we find the stag,[20] the ox,[21] the lion,[22] and the lamb,[23] constantly in connexion with the cross. The lion and the lamb are typical of Christ. The transition to his representation in human form is rendered by two figures, which, whilst human, are still symbolical. In the catacombs of Saint Calintus, in the Via Appia at Rome, Christ is discovered in the character of Orpheus, whilst at other places he is represented as a shepherd.