To the view of the early Christian ages, too, the body is old clothes, ready to be cast off at any moment, good only as means to something higher. It might seem that Christianity should give a higher value to the body, since it was believed to have been inhabited by God himself. But the Passion was a fact of equal importance with the Incarnation. This honor could be allowed to matter only for an instant, and on the condition of immediate resumption. That the Highest should suffer death as a man might well seem to the Greeks foolishness. To the understanding it is the utmost conceivable contradiction. Yet it is only a more complete statement of what is involved in the Greek worship of beauty. The complete incarnation of Spirit, which is the definition of beauty, demands equally that there be no point it does not inhabit, and none in which it abides. The transience of things is no defect in them, but only the affirmation of their reality through the incessant casting-off of its inadequate manifestations. It is not from the excellence, but from the impotence of its nature, that the stone endures and does not pass away as the plant and the animal. The higher the organization, the more rapid and thorough the circulation.
The same truth holds in Art, also, and drives it to forsake these beautiful petrifactions and seek an expression less bound to the material. Ideal form is good so far as it brings together in one compact image what in Nature is scattered and partial; but it is an ideality of the surface only, not of the substance. It shuts out the defect of this or that form, but not of Form itself. The Greek ideal is after all a thing, and its impassive perfection a stony death.
The justification is, that the sculptor did not say quite what he meant. He said flesh, but he meant spirit, and this is what the Greek statues mean to us. The modern sculptor does not mean spirit, and knows that he does not; and so, with all his efforts, he gives us only the outside. Is it asked, Whence this divorce of flesh and spirit? why not give both at once as Nature does? Then we must do as Nature does, and make our forms as fluid as hers. But this the sculptor contravenes at the outset. To follow Nature, he should make his statue of snow. To make it of stone is to pretend that the form is something of itself. This the Greeks never meant, for then it would follow that all parts of it were alike significant. Haydon was delighted to find reproduced in the Elgin marbles certain obscure and seeming insignificant details of the anatomy that later schools had overlooked, such as a fold of skin under the armpit of the Neptune, etc. But any beginner at a life-school could have pointed out in the same statue endless deficiencies in anatomical detail. The fold was put in, not because it was there, but because to the mind of the Greek artist it meant something. Sculptors of the present day comfort themselves with the belief that their works are more complete and more accurate in the anatomy than the antique. Very likely, for the ancients did not dissect. But this accuracy, if it is founded on no interest beyond accuracy, is after all an impertinence.
The Greek ideal is founded on the exclusion of accident. It is a declaration that the casual shape is not the true form; it is only a step farther to the perception that all shape is casual,—the reality seen, not in it, but through it. The ideal is then no longer perfect shape, but transparency to the sentiment; the image is not sought to be placed before the beholder's eyes, but painted as it were in his mind. Henceforth, suggestion only is aimed at, not representation; the coöperation of the spectator is relied upon as the indispensable complement of the design. The Zeus of Phidias seemed to the Greeks, Plotinus says, Zeus himself, as he would be, if he chose to appear to human eyes. But a Crucifixion is of itself not at all what the artist meant. It is not the agony of the flesh, but the triumph of the spirit, that is intended to be portrayed. If the end be attained, the slighter and more unpromising the means the better. Thus a new scale of values is established; nothing is worthy or unworthy of itself; nothing is excluded, but also in nothing is the interest identified with the thing, but imparted.
Christian Art, after mere tradition had died out,—for instance, in the Byzantine and early Italian pictures from the eighth to the middle of the thirteenth century,—presents the strongest contrast to all that had gone before. The morose and lifeless monotony or barbarous rudeness of these figures seems like contempt not only of beauty, but of all natural expression. They are meaningless of themselves, and quite indifferent to the character they represent, which is appended to them by inscriptions,—their relative importance, even, indicated only by size, more or less splendor of costume, etc., but the faces all alike, and no attempt made to adapt the action to the occasion. It is another world they belong to; the present they pointedly renounce and disdain, condescending to communicate with it only indirectly and by signs.
The main peculiarities were common to Painting and Sculpture, though most noticeable in Painting. An interest in the actual world seems never so far lost sight of, and earlier revived, in Sculpture. Even down to the spring-tide of Modern Art in the thirteenth century, the "pleasant days" when Guido of Siena was painting his Madonna, the improvement in Painting was rather a stirring within the cerements of conventional types, a flush on the cheek of the still rigid form,—while in the bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors we meet already a realism as much in excess of the antique as the Byzantine fell short of it.
It is commonly said that Nicola Pisano revived Art through study of the antique; his models, even, are pointed out, particularly a sarcophagus, said to have been brought to Pisa in the eleventh century from Greece. But this sarcophagus, wherever it came from, is not Greek, but late Roman work; and we find in Nicola no mark of direct Greek influence, but only of the late Roman and early Christian sarcophagus-sculptures. In the reliefs upon his celebrated pulpit at Pisa we have the same short-legged, large-headed, indigenous Italian or Roman figures, and the same arrangement of hair, draperies, etc., as on those sarcophagi. Taken by themselves, his works would, no doubt, indicate a new direction. But by the side of his son Giovanni, or the sculptors of the Northern cathedrals, he seems to belong to the third century rather than to the thirteenth.
In Giovanni Pisano the new era was distinctly announced. The Inferno, usually ascribed to him, among the reliefs on the front of Orvieto Cathedral,[1] and in his noble pulpit at Pistoia, shows the traces of the antique only in unimportant details, ornamentation, etc. The antique served him, no doubt, as a hint to independent study, but the whole intent is different,—all the beauties and all the defects arrived at by a different road. In place of the impassive Minos of the Shades, we have a fiend, serpent-girt,[2] his judicial impartiality enforced apparently against his will by manacles and anklets of knotted snakes; and throughout, instead of the calm impersonality of the Greek, dealing out the typical forms of things like a law of Nature, we have the restless, intense, partisan, modern man, not wanting in tenderness, but full of a noble scorn at the unworthiness of the world, and grasping at a reality beyond it. He is intent, first of all and at all risks, upon vivid expression, upon telling the story, and speedily outruns the possibilities of his material. He must make his creatures alive to the last superficies; and as he cannot give them motion, he puts an emphasis upon all their bones, sinews, veins, and wrinkles,—every feather is carved, and even the fishes under the water show their scales. That mere literalness is not the aim is shown by the open disregard of it elsewhere; for instance, the size of each figure is determined, not by natural rules, but by their relative importance, so that in the Nativity, Mary is twice as large as Joseph and three times as large as the attendants. And the detail is not everywhere equally minute, but follows the intensity of the theme, reaching its height in the lower compartment, where the damned are in suffering, and especially in the figures of the fiends. This is no aim at literalness, but a struggle for an emphasis beyond the reach of Sculpture,—taking these means in despair of others, and, in its thirst for expression, careless alike of natural probability, typical perfection of form, and pleasing effect. Different as it seems, the same spirit is at work here and in Painting. In both it is the repudiation of the classic ideal,—in Sculpture by a reductio ad absurdum, putting its implicit claims to the test of realization,—in Painting by mere negation, as was natural at the outset of a new career, before the means of any positive expression were discovered.
Ideal form was to the Greeks the highest result, the success of the universe. The end of Art was conceived as Nature's end as well, whether actually attained or not. Nor was this preference of certain forms arbitrary, but it followed the plain indications written on every particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever is means only, not showing any individuality, or end within itself. A handful of earth is definable only by its chemical or physical properties, which do not distinguish it, but confound it with other things. By itself it is only so much phosphate or silicate, and can come to be something only in a foreign organism, a plant or an animal. In form is seen the dawning of individuality, and just as the thing rises in the scale the principle of form becomes dominant. The handful of earth is sufficiently described by the chemist's formula,—these ingredients make this substance. But an organic body cannot be so described. The chemist's account of sugar, for instance, is C6 H10 O5. But if we ask what starch is, we have, again, C6 H10 O5,—and the cellular tissue of plants, also, is the same. These things, then, as far as he knows, are identical. Evidently, he is beyond his depth, and the higher we go in the scale the less he has to say to the purpose,—the separate importance of the material ingredients constantly decreasing, and the importance of their definite connection increasing, as the reference to an individual centre predominates over helpless gravitation. First, aggregation about a centre, as in the crystal,—then, arrangement of the parts, as upper, under, and lateral, as in the plant,—then, organization of these into members. Form is the self-assertion of the thing as no longer means only; this makes its attractiveness to the artist. The root of his delight in ideal form is that it promises some finality amid the endless maze of matter. But this higher completeness, which is beauty, whether it happen to exist or not, is never the immediate aim of Nature. It is everywhere implied, but nowhere expressed; for Nature is unwearied in producing, but negligent of the product. As soon as the end seems anywhere about to be attained, it is straightway made means again to something else, and so on forever. The earth and the air hasten to convert themselves into a plant, the flower into fruit, the fruit into flesh, and the animal at last to die and give back again to the air and the earth what they have transmitted to him. Whatever beauty a thing has is by the way, not as the end for which it exists, and so it is left to be baffled and soiled by accident. This is the "jealousy of the gods," that could not endure that anything should exist without some flaw of imperfection to confess its mortal birth.
The world is full of beauty, but as it were hinted,—as in the tendency to make the most conspicuous things the most beautiful, as flowers, fruits, birds, the insects of the sunshine, the fishes of the surface, the upper side of the leaf; and perhaps more distinctly (in accordance with Lord Bacon's suggestion that "Nature is rather busy not to err, than in labor to produce excellency") in the tendency to hide those that are ugly, as toads, owls, bats, worms, insects that flee the light, the fishes of the bottom, the intestines of animals. But these are hints only, and Nature, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, will sometimes introduce "not ugliness only, but ugliness in the wrong place." Were beauty the aim, it should be most evident in her chief products; whereas it is in things transient, minute, subordinate,—flowers, snow-flakes, the microscopic details of structure,—that it meets us most invariably, rather than in the higher animals or in man. Nor in man does it keep pace with his civilization, but obeys laws that belong to the lower regions of his nature.