Do you know in Italy or Holland a greater landscape painter than Claude? And seize well his true character. Look at those vast and beautiful solitudes, lighted by the first or last rays of the sun, and tell me whether those solitudes, those trees, those waters, those mountains, that light, that silence,—whether all that nature has a soul, and whether those luminous and pure horizons do not lift you involuntarily, in ineffable reveries, to the invisible source of beauty and grace! Lorrain is, above all, the painter of light, and his works might be called the history of light and all its combinations, in small and great, when it is poured out over large plains or breaks in the most varied accidents, on land, on waters, in the heavens, in its eternal source. The human scenes thrown into one corner have no other object than to relieve and make appear to advantage the scenes of nature by harmony or contrast. In the Village Fête, life, noise, movement are in front,—peace and grandeur are at the foundation of the landscape, and that is truly the picture. The same effect is in the Cattle Crossing a River. The landscape placed immediately under your eyes has nothing in it very rare, we can find such a one anywhere; but follow the perspective,—it leads you across flowering fields, a beautiful river, ruins, mountains that overlook these ruins, and you lose yourself in infinite distances. That Landscape crossed by a river, where a peasant waters his herd, means nothing great at first sight. Contemplate it some time, and peace, a sort of meditativeness in nature, a well-graduated perspective, will, little by little, gain your heart, and give you in that small picture a penetrating charm. The picture called a Landscape represents a vast champagne filled with trees, and lighted by the rising sun,—in it there is freshness and—already—warmth, mystery, and splendor, with skies of the sweetest harmony. A Dance at Sunset expresses the close of a beautiful day. One sees in it, one feels in it the decline of the heat of the day; in the foreground are some shepherds and shepherdesses dancing by the side of their flocks.[144]
Is it not strange, that Champagne has been put in the Flemish school?[145] He was born at Brussels, it is true, but he came very early to Paris, and his true master was Poussin, who counselled him. He devoted his talent to France, lived there, died there, and what is decisive, his manner is wholly French. Will it be said that he owes to Flanders his color? We respond that this quality is balanced by a grave defect that he also owes to Flanders, the want of ideality in the figures; and it was from France that he learned how to repair this defect by beauty of moral expression. Champagne is inferior to Lesueur and Poussin, but he is of their family. He was, also, of those artists contemporaneous with Corneille, simple, poor, virtuous, Christian.[146] Champagne worked both for the convent of the Carmelites in the Rue St. Jacques, that venerable abode of ardent and sublime piety, and Port-Royal, that place of all others that contained in the smallest space the most virtue and genius, so many admirable men and women worthy of them. What has become of that famous crucifix that he painted for the Church of the Carmelites, a master-piece of perspective that upon a horizontal plane appeared perpendicular? It perished with the holy house. The Last Supper (Cène) is a living picture, on account of the truth of all the figures, movements, and postures, but to my eyes it is blemished by the absence of the ideal. I am obliged to say as much of the Repast with Simon the Pharisee. The chef-d'œuvre of Champagne is the Apparition of St. Gervais and St. Protais to St. Ambrose in a Basilica of Milan. All the qualities of French art are seen in it,—simplicity and grandeur in composition, with a profound expression. On that canvas are only four personages, the two martyrs and St. Paul, who presents them to St. Ambrose. Those four figures fill the temple, lighted above all in the obscurity of the night, by the luminous apparition. The two martyrs are full of majesty. St. Ambrose, kneeling and in prayer, is, as it were, seized with terror.[147]
I certainly admire Champagne as an historical painter, and even as a landscape painter; but he is perhaps greatest as a portrait painter. In portraits truth and nature are particularly in their place, relieved by coloring, and idealized in proper measure by expression. The portraits of Champagne are so many monuments in which his most illustrious contemporaries will live forever. Every thing about them is strikingly real, grave, and severe, with a penetrating sweetness. Should the records of Port-Royal be lost, all Port-Royal might be found in Champagne. Among those portraits we see the inflexible Saint-Cyran,[148] as well as his persecutor, the imperious Richelieu.[149] We see, too, the learned, the intrepid Antoine Arnaud, to whom the contemporaries of Bossuet decreed the name of Great;[150] and Mme. Angélique Arnaud, with her naïve and strong figure.[151] Among them is mother Agnes and the humble daughter of Champagne himself, sister St. Suzanne.[152] She has just been miraculously cured, and her whole prostrated person bears still the impress of a relic of suffering. Mother Agnes, kneeling before her, regards her with a look of grateful joy. The place of the scene is a poor cell; a wooden cross hanging on the wall, and some straw chairs, are all the ornaments. On the picture is the inscription,—Christo uni medico animarum et corporum, etc. There is possessed the Christian stoicism of Port-Royal in its imposing austerity. Add to all these portraits that of Champagne;[153] for the painter may be put by the side of his personages.
Had France produced in the seventeenth century only these four great artists, it would be necessary to give an important place to the French school; but she counts many other painters of the greatest merit. Among these we may distinguish P. Mignard, so much admired in his times, so little known now, and so worthy of being known. How have we been able to let fall into oblivion the author of the immense fresco of Val-de-grâce, so celebrated by Molière, which is perhaps the greatest page of painting in the world![154] What strikes at first, in this gigantic work, is the order and harmony. Then come a thousand charming details and innumerable episodes which form themselves important compositions. Remark also the brilliant and sweet coloring which should at least obtain favor for so many other beauties of the first order. Again, it is to the pencil of Mignard that we owe that ravishing ceiling of a small apartment of the King at Versailles, a master-piece now destroyed, but of which there remains to us a magnificent translation in the beautiful engraving of Gerard Audran. What profound expression in the Plague of Æacus,[155] and in the St. Charles giving the Communion to the Plague-infected of Milan! Mignard is recognized as one of our best portrait painters: grace, sometimes a little too refined, is joined in him to sentiment. The French school can also present with pride Valentin, who died young and was so full of promise; Stella, the worthy friend of Poussin, the uncle of Claudine, Antoinette, and Françoise Stella; Lahyre, who has so much spirit and taste;[156] Sébastien Bourdon, so animated and elevated;[157] the Lenains, who sometimes have the naïveté of Lesueur and the color of Champagne; Bourguignon, full of fire and enthusiasm; Jouvenet, whose composition is so good;[158] finally, besides so many others, Lebrun, whom it is now the fashion to treat cavalierly, who received from nature, with perhaps an immoderate passion for fame, passion for the beautiful of every kind, and a talent of admirable flexibility,—the true painter of a great king by the richness and dignity of his manner, who, like Louis XIV., worthily closes the seventeenth century.[159]
Since we have spoken somewhat extensively of painting, would it not be unjust to pass in silence over engraving, its daughter, or its sister? Certainly it is not an art of ordinary importance; we have excelled in it; we have above all carried it to its perfection in portraits. Let us be equitable to ourselves. What school—and we are not unmindful of those of Marc' Antonio, Albert Durer, and Rembrandt—can present such a succession of artists of this kind? Thomas de Leu and Léonard Gautier make in some sort the passage from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Then come a crowd of men of the most diverse talents,—Mellan, Michel Lasne, Morin, Daret, Huret, Masson, Nanteuil, Drevet, Van Schupen, the Poillys, the Edelincks, and the Audrans. Gérard Edelinck and Nanteuil alone have a popular renown, and they merit it by the delicacy, splendor, and charm of their graver. But the connoisseurs of elevated taste find at least their rivals in engravers now less admired, because they do not flatter the eye so much, but have, perhaps, more truth and vigor. It must also be said, that the portraits of these two masters have not the historic importance of those of their predecessors. The Condé of Nanteuil is justly admired; but if we wish to know the great Condé, the conqueror of Rocroy and Lens, we must not demand him from Nanteuil, but from Huret, Michel Lasne, and Daret,[160] who designed and engraved him in all his force and heroic beauty. Edelinck and Nanteuil himself scarcely knew and retraced the seventeenth century, except at the approach of its decline.[161] Morin and Mellan were able to see it, and transmit it in its glorious youth. Morin is the Champagne of engraving: he does not engrave, he paints. It is he who represents and transmits to posterity the illustrious men of the first half of the great century—Henry IV., Louis XIII., the de Thous, Bérulle, Jansenius, Saint-Cyran, Marillac, Bentivoglio, Richelieu, Mazarin, still young, and Retz, when he was only a coadjutor.[162] Mellan had the same advantage. He is the first in date of all the engravers of the seventeenth century, and perhaps is also the most expressive. With a single line, it seems that from his hands only shades can spring; he does not strike at first sight; but the more we regard him, the more he seizes, penetrates, and touches, like Lesueur.[163]
Christianity, that is to say, the reign of the spirit, is favorable to painting, is particularly expressive. Sculpture seems to be a pagan art; for, if it must also contain moral expression, it is always under the imperative condition of beauty of form. This is the reason why sculpture is as it were natural to antiquity, and appeared there with an incomparable splendor, before which painting somewhat paled,[164] whilst among the moderns it has been eclipsed by painting, and has remained very inferior to it, by reason of the extreme difficulty of bringing stone and marble to express Christian sentiment, without which, material beauty suffers; so that our sculpture is too insignificant to be beautiful, too mannered to be expressive. Since antiquity, there have scarcely been two schools of sculpture:[165]—one at Florence, before Michael Angelo, and especially with Michael Angelo; the other in France, at the Renaissance, with Jean Cousin, Goujon, Germain Pilon. We may say that these three artists have, as it were, shared among themselves grandeur and grace: to the first belong nobility and force, with profound knowledge;[166] to the other two, an elegance full of charm. Sculpture changes its character in the seventeenth century as well as every thing else: it no longer has the same attraction, but it finds moral and religious inspiration, which the skilful masters of the Renaissance too much lacked. Jean Cousin excepted, is there one of them that is superior to Jacques Sarazin? That great artist, now almost forgotten, is at once a disciple of the French school and the Italian school, and to the qualities that he borrows from his predecessors, he adds a moral expression, touching and elevated, which he owes to the spirit of the new school. He is, in sculpture, the worthy contemporary of Lesueur and Poussin, of Corneille, Descartes, and Pascal. He belongs entirely to the reign of Louis XIII., Richelieu, and Mazarin; he did not even see that of Louis XIV.[167] Called into France by Richelieu, who had also called there Poussin and Champagne, Jacques Sarazin in a few years produced a multitude of works of rare elegance and great character. What has become of them? The eighteenth century passed over them without regarding them. The barbarians that destroyed or scattered them, were arrested before the paintings of Lesueur and Poussin, protected by a remnant of admiration: while breaking the master-pieces of the French chisel, they had no suspicion of the sacrilege they were committing against art as well as their country. I was at least able to see, some years ago, at the Museum of French Monuments, collected by the piety of a friend of the arts, beautiful parts of a superb mausoleum erected to the memory of Henri de Bourbon, second of the name, Prince of Condé, father of the great Condé, the worthy support, the skilful fellow-laborer of Richelieu and Mazarin. This monument was supported by four figures of natural grandeur,—Faith, Prudence, Justice, Charity. There were four bas-reliefs in bronze, representing the Triumphs of Renown, Time, Death, and Eternity. In the Triumph of Death, the artist had represented a certain number of illustrious moderns, among whom he had placed himself by the side of Michael Angelo.[168] We can still contemplate in the court of the Louvre, in the pavilion of the Horloge, those caryatides of Sarazin at once so majestic and so graceful, which are detached with admirable relief and lightness. Have Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon done any thing more elegant and lifelike? Those females breathe, and are about to move. Take the pains to go a short distance[169] to visit the humble chapel that now occupies the place of that magnificent church of the Carmelites, once filled with the paintings of Champagne, Stella, Lahire, and Lebrun; where the voice of Bossuet was heard, where Mlle. de Lavallière and Mme. de Longueville were so often seen prostrated, their long hair shorn, and their faces bathed in tears. Among the relics that are preserved of the past splendor of the holy monastery, consider the noble statue of the kneeling Cardinal de Bérulle. On those meditative and penetrating features, in those eyes raised to heaven, breathes the soul of that great servant of God, who died at the altar like a warrior on the field of honor. He prays God for his dear Carmelites. That head is perfectly natural, as Champagne might have painted it, and has a severe grace that reminds one of Lesueur and Poussin.[170]
Below Sarazin, the Anguiers are still artists that Italy would admire, and to whom there is wanting, since the great century, nothing but judges worthy of them. These two brothers covered Paris and France with the most precious monuments. Look at the tomb of Jacques-Auguste de Thou, by François Anguier: the face of the great historian is reflective and melancholy, like that of a man weary of the spectacle of human things; and nothing is more amiable than the statues of his two wives, Marie Barbançon de Cany, and Gasparde de la Châtre.[171] The mausoleum of Henri de Montmorency, beheaded at Toulouse in 1632, which is still seen at Moulins, in the church of the ancient convent of the daughters of Sainte-Marie, is an important work of the same artist, in which force is manifest, with a little heaviness.[172] To Michel Anguier are attributed the statues of the duke and duchess of Tresmes, and that of their illustrious son, Potier, Marquis of Gêvres.[173] Behold in him the intrepid companion of Condé, arrested in his course at thirty-two years of age before Thionville, after the battle of Rocroy, already lieutenant-general, and when Condé was demanding for him the bâton of a marshal of France, deposited on his tomb; behold him young, beautiful, brave, like his comrades cut down also in the flower of life, Laval, Châtillon, La Moussaye. One of the best works of Michel Anguier is the monument of Henri de Chabot, that other companion, that faithful friend of Condé, who by the splendor of his valor, especially by the graces of his person, knew how to gain the heart, the fortune, and the name of the beautiful Marguerite, the daughter of the great Duke of Rohan. The new duke died, still young, in 1655, at thirty-nine years of age. He is represented lying down, the head inclined and supported by an angel; another angel is at his feet. The whole is striking, and the details are exquisite. The face of Chabot has every beauty, as if to answer to its reputation, but the beauty is that of one dying. The body has already the languor of death, longuescit moriens, with I know not what antique grace. This morsel, if the drawing were more severe, would rival the Dying Gladiator, of which it reminds one, which it perhaps even imitates.[174]
In truth, I wonder that men now dare speak so lightly of Puget and Girardon. To Puget qualities of the first order cannot be refused. He has the fire, the enthusiasm, the fecundity of genius. The caryatides of the Hôtel de Ville of Toulon, which have been brought to the Museum of Paris, attest a powerful chisel. The Milon reminds one of the manner of Michael Angelo; it is a little overstrained, but it cannot be denied that the effect is striking. Do you want a talent more natural, and still having force and elevation? Take the trouble to search in the Tuileries, in the gardens of Versailles, in several churches of Paris, for the scattered works of Girardon, here for the mausoleum of the Gondis,[175] there for that of the Castellans,[176] that of Louvois,[177] etc.; especially go to see in the church of the Sorbonne the mausoleum of Richelieu. The formidable minister is there represented in his last moments, sustained by religion and wept by his country. The whole person is of a perfect nobility, and the figure has the fineness, the severity, the superior distinction given to it by the pencil of Champagne, and the gravers of Morin, Michel Lasne, and Mellan.
Finally, I do not regard as a vulgar sculptor Coysevox, who, under the influence of Lebrun, unfortunately begins the theatrical style, who still has the facility, movement, and elegance of Lebrun himself. He reared worthy monuments to Mazarin, Colbert, and Lebrun,[178] and thus to speak, sowed busts of the illustrious men of his time. For, remark it well, artists then took scarcely any arbitrary and fanciful subjects. They worked upon contemporaneous subjects, which, while giving them proper liberty, inspired and guided them, and communicated a public interest to their works. The French sculpture of the seventeenth century, like that of antiquity, is profoundly natural. The churches and the monasteries were filled with the statues of those who loved them during life, and wished to rest in them after death. Each church of Paris was a popular museum. The sumptuous residences of the aristocracy—for at that period, there was one in France, like that of England at the present time—possessed their secular tombs, statues, busts, and portraits of eminent men whose glory belonged to the country as well as their own family. On its side, the state did not encourage the arts in detail, and, thus to speak, in a small way; it gave them a powerful impulse by demanding of them important works, by confiding to them vast enterprises. All great things were thus mingled together, reciprocally inspired and sustained each other.
One man alone in Europe has left a name in the beautiful art that surrounds a chateau or a palace with graceful gardens or magnificent parks,—that man is a Frenchman of the seventeenth century, is Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre may be reproached with a regularity that is perhaps excessive, and a little mannerism in details; but he has two qualities that compensate for many defects, grandeur and sentiment. He who designed the park of Versailles, who to the proper arrangement of parterres, to the movement of fountains, to the harmonious sound of waterfalls, to the mysterious shades of groves, has known how to add the magic of infinite perspective by means of that spacious walk where the view is extended over an immense sheet of water to be lost in the limitless distances,—he is a landscape-painter worthy of having a place by the side of Poussin and Lorrain.