If we apply the same test to the achievements of the past in Painting, where shall we find a similar instance of genuine concurrence between the few who are appointed to teach, and the many who are expected to learn?
I put myself in the position of a man of fair capacity and average education, who labours under the fatal delusion that he will be helped to a sincere appreciation of the works of the Old Masters by asking critics and connoisseurs to form his opinions for him. I am sent to Italy as a matter of course. A general chorus of learned authorities tells me that Michael Angelo and Raphael are the two greatest painters that ever lived; and that the two recognised masterpieces of the highest High Art are the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel, and the Transfiguration, in the Vatican picture gallery. It is not only Lanzi and Vasari, and hosts of later sages running smoothly along the same critical grooves, who give me this information. Even the greatest of English portrait-painters, Sir Joshua Reynolds, sings steadily with the critical chorus, note for note. When experience has made me wiser, I am able to detect clearly enough in the main principles which Reynolds has adopted in his Lectures on Art, the reason of his notorious want of success whenever he tried to rise above portraits to the regions of historical painting. But at the period of my innocence, I am simply puzzled and amazed, when I come to such a passage as the following in Sir Joshua's famous Fifth Lecture, where he sums up the comparative merits of Michael Angelo and Raphael:—
"If we put these great artists in a line of comparison with each other (lectures Sir Joshua), Raphael had more taste and fancy, Michael Angelo more genius and imagination. The one excelled in beauty, the other in energy. Michael Angelo had more of the poetical inspiration; his ideas are vast and sublime; his people are a superior order of beings; there is nothing about them, nothing in the air of their actions or their attitudes, or the style and cast of their limbs or features, that reminds us of their belonging to our own species."
Here I get plainly enough at what Sir Joshua considers to be the crowning excellence of high art. It is one great proof of the poetry and sublimity of Michael Angelo's pictures that the people represented in them never remind us of our own species: which seems equivalent to saying that the representation of a man made in the image of Michael Angelo is a grander sight than the representation of a man made in the image of God. I am a little staggered by these principles of criticism; but as all the learned authorities that I can get at seem to have adopted them, I do my best to follow the example of my teachers, and set off reverently for Rome to see the two works of art which my critical masters tell me are the sublimest pictures that the world has yet beheld.
I go first to the Sistine Chapel; and, on a great blue-coloured wall at one end of it, I see painted a confusion of naked, knotty-bodied figures, sprawling up or tumbling down below a single figure, posted aloft in the middle, and apparently threatening the rest with his hand. If I ask Lanzi, or Vasari, or Sir Joshua Reynolds, or the gentleman who has compiled Murray's Handbook for Central Italy, or any other competent authorities, what this grotesquely startling piece of painter's work can possibly be, I am answered that it is actually intended to represent the unimaginably awful spectacle of the Last Judgment! And I am further informed that, estimated by the critical tests applied to it by these competent authorities, the picture is pronounced to be a masterpiece of grandeur and sublimity. I resolve to look a little closer at this celebrated work, and to try if I can get at any fair estimate of it by employing such plain, uncritical tests, as will do for me and for everybody.
Here is a fresco, which aspires to represent the most impressive of all Christian subjects; it is painted on the wall of a Christian church, by a man belonging to a Christian community—what evidences of religious feeling has it to show me? I look at the lower part of the composition first, and see—a combination of the orthodox nursery notion of the devil, with the Heathen idea of the conveyance to the infernal regions, in the shape of a horned and tailed ferryman giving condemned souls a cast across a river! Pretty well, I think, to begin with.
Let me try and discover next what evidences of extraordinary intellectual ability the picture presents. I look up towards the top now, by way of a change, and I find Michael Angelo's conception of the entrance of a martyr into the kingdom of Heaven, displayed before me in the shape of a flayed man, presenting his own skin, as a sort of credential, to the hideous figure with the threatening hand—which I will not, even in writing, identify with the name of Our Saviour. Elsewhere, I see nothing but unnatural distortion and hopeless confusion; fighting figures, tearing figures, tumbling figures, kicking figures; and, to crown all, a caricatured portrait, with a pair of ass's ears, of a certain Messer Biagio of Sienna, who had the sense and courage, when the Last Judgment was first shown on completion, to protest against every figure in it being painted stark-naked!
I see such things as these, and many more equally preposterous, which it is not worth while to mention. All other people with eyes in their heads see them, too. They are actual matters of fact, not debateable matters of taste. But I am not—on that account—justified, nor is any other uncritical person justified, in saying a word against the picture. It may palpably outrage all the religious proprieties of the subject; but, then, it is full of "fine foreshortening," and therefore we uncritical people must hold our tongues. It may violate just as plainly all the intellectual proprieties, counting from the flayed man with his skin in his hand, at the top, to Messer Biagio of Sienna with his ass's ears, at the bottom; but, then, it exhibits "masterly anatomical detail," and therefore we uncritical spectators must hold our tongues. It may strike us forcibly that, if people are to be painted at all, as in this picture, rising out of their graves in their own bodies as they lived, it is surely important (to say nothing of giving them the benefit of the shrouds in which they were buried) to represent them as having the usual general proportions of human beings. But Sir Joshua Reynolds interposes critically, and tells us the figures on the wall and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are sublime, because they don't remind us of our own species. Why should they not remind us of our own species? Because they are prophets, sibyls, and such like, cries the chorus of critics indignantly. And what then? If I had been on intimate terms with Jeremiah, or if I had been the ancient king to whom the sibyl brought the mysterious books, would not my friend in the one case, and the messenger in the other, have appeared before me bearing the ordinary proportions and exhibiting the usual appearance of my own species? Does not Sacred History inform me that the prophet was a Man, and does not Profane History describe the sibyl as an Old Woman? Is old age never venerable and striking in real life?—But I am uttering heresies. I am mutinously summoning reason and common sense to help me in estimating an Old Master. This will never do: I had better follow the example of all the travellers I see about me, by turning away in despair, and leaving the Last Judgment to the critics and connoisseurs.
Having thus discovered that one masterpiece of High Art does not address itself to me, and to the large majority whom I represent, let me go next to the picture gallery, and see how the second masterpiece (the Transfiguration, by Raphael) can vindicate its magnificent reputation among critics and connoisseurs. This picture I approach under the advantage of knowing, beforehand, that I must make allowances for minor defects in it, which are recognised by the learned authorities themselves. I am indeed prepared to be disappointed, at the outset, because I have been prepared to make allowances:
First, for defects of colour, which spoil the general effect of the picture on the spectator; all the lights being lividly tinged with green, and all the shadows being grimly hardened with black. This mischief is said to have been worked by the tricks of French cleaners and restorers, who have so fatally tampered with the whole surface, that Raphael's original colouring must be given up as lost. Rather a considerable loss, this, to begin with; but not Raphael's fault. Therefore, let it by no means depreciate the picture in my estimation.