The life and writings of Henry Fuseli Volume III Part 6

133. The fewer the traces that appear of the means by which any work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of Nature, and the nearer it is to sublimity.

134. Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

_Coroll._--Take the design of Rome, Venetian motion and shade, Lombardy's tone of colour, add the terrible manner of Angelo, t.i.tian's truth of nature, and the supreme purity of Corregio's style; mix them up with the decorum and solidity of Tibaldi, with the learned invention of Primaticcio, and a few grains of Parmegiano's grace: and what do you think will be the result of this chaotic prescription, such elemental strife? Excellence, perhaps, equal to one or all of the names that compose these ingredients? You are deceived, if you fancy that a mult.i.tude of dissimilar threads can compose a uniform texture--that dissemination of spots will make ma.s.ses, or a little of many things produce a whole. If Nature stamped you with a character, you will either annihilate it by indiscriminate imitation of heterogeneous excellence, or debase it to mediocrity and add one to the ciphers of art. Yet such is the prescription of Agostino Carracci,[27] and such in general must be the dictates of academics.

135. If you mean to reign dictator over the arts of your own times, a.s.sail not your rivals with the bl.u.s.tering tone of condemnation and rigid censure;--sap with conditional or lamenting praise--confine them to unfas.h.i.+onable excellence--exclude them from the avenues of fame.

136. If you wish to give consequence to your inferiors, answer their attacks.

_Coroll._--Michael Angelo, advised to resent the insolence of some obscure upstart who was pus.h.i.+ng forward to notice by declaring himself his rival, answered: "Chi combatte con dappochi, non vince a nulla:" who contests with the base, loses with all!

137. Genius knows no partner. All partners.h.i.+p is deleterious to poetry and art: one must rule.[28]

138. The wish of perpetuating a name by enlisting under the banners of another, is the ambition of inferior minds: biography, with all its branches of "Ana," translation and engraving, however useful to man or dear to art, is the unequivocal homage of inferiority offered by taste and talent to the majesty of genius.

139. Dive in the crowd, meet beauty: follow vigour, compare character, s.n.a.t.c.h the feature that moves un.o.bserved and the sudden burst of pa.s.sion--and you are at the school of nature with Lysippus.[29]

140. The lessons of disappointment, humiliation and blunder, impress more than those of a thousand masters.

141. There are artists, who have wasted much of life in abstruse theories on proportion, who have measured the Antique in all its forms and characters, compared it with Nature, and mixed up amalgamas of both, yet never made a figure stand or move.

_Coroll._--"The Apollo is altogether composed of lines sweetly convex, of very small obtuse angles, and of flats, but the soft convexities predominate the character of the figure, being a compound of strength, dignity and delicacy. The artist has expressed the first by convex outlines, the second by their uniformity, and the third by undulation of forms. The convex line predominates in the Laoc.o.o.n, and the forms of the muscles are angular at their insertions and ends to express agitation; for by these means the nerves and tendons become more visible, straight lines meeting with concave and convex ones, form those angles which produce violence of action. The sculptor of the Farnesian Hercules invented a style totally different; to obtain fles.h.i.+ness, he composed the figure of round and convex muscles, but made their insertions flat to signify that they are nervous and uninc.u.mbered with fat, the characteristic of strength."

"In the Gladiator there is a mixture of the Herculean and the Laoc.o.o.ntic forms, the muscles in action are angulated, whilst those at rest are short and round, a variety conformable to nature," &c.

Opere di A.R. MENGS, t. i. p. 203.

142. Neither he who forms lines without the power of embodying them, nor he who floats on ma.s.ses, can be said to draw: the one is the slave of a brush, the other of a point.

143. Pulp without solidity absorbs, and relentless tension tears character.

144. In following too closely a model, there is danger in mistaking the individual for Nature herself; in relying only on the schools, the deviation into manner seems inevitable: what then remains, but to transpose _yourself_ into your subject?

145. Style is the selection of forms and groups and tones to suit a subject.

_Coroll._--The Italian _Style Grandioso_, the French _Il y a du style_, the English _great style and breadth_, when applied to a performance, only mean, that the artist followed those who have enlarged the principles of imitation and execution.

146. Style pervades the object; manner floats on the surface.

147. Antient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece, and the servant of Rome.

148. The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means. If they had schools, the Ionian, that of Athens and of Sicyon appear to have directed their instruction to one grand principle, proportion: this was the stamen which they drew out into one immense connected web; whilst modern art, with its schools of designers, colourists, machinists, eclectics, is but a tissue of advent.i.tious threads. Apollonius and the sculptor of the small Hesperian Hercules in bronze are distinguished only by the degree of execution; whilst M. Angelo and Bernini had no one principle in common but that of making groups and figures.

149. Art among a religious race produces reliques; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.

150. Modern art, reared by superst.i.tion in Italy, taught to dance in France, plumped up to unwieldiness in Flanders, reduced to "chronicle small beer" in Holland, became a rich old woman by "suckling fools" in England.

151. The rules of art are either immediately supplied by Nature herself, or selected from the compendiums of her students who are called masters and founders of schools. The imitation of Nature herself leads to style, that of the schools to manner.

_Coroll._--The line of Michael Angelo is uniformly grand; character and beauty were admitted only as far as they could be made subservient to grandeur:--the child, the female, meanness, deformity were indiscriminately stamped with grandeur; a beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man, his men are a race of giants.

The design of Raphael is either historic or poetic. The forms of his historic style are characteristic, those of his poetic style he himself calls ideal:[30] the former are regulated by nature, but these are only exaggerations of another style.

The forms of Julio Pipi are poised between character and caricature, but verge to this; even his dresses and ornaments are caricatures; but no poet or painter ever rocked the cradle of infant mythology with simpler or more primitive grace; none ever imparted to allegory a more insinuating power, or swayed the strife of elemental war with a bolder hand. What ever equalled the exuberance of invention scattered over the T of Mantoua?

The line of Polydoro, is that of the antique ba.s.so-relievo, seen from beneath (da sotto in su).

The forms of t.i.tian are those of sanguine health; robust, not grand; soft without delicacy.

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michael Angelo with colour, without tracing its principle.

As Michael Angelo was impressed with an idea of grandeur, so Correggio was charmed with a notion of harmony: his line was correct when harmony permitted; it strayed as harmony commanded.

Elegance (sueltezza) was the principle of Parmegiano's line, but he forgot proportion.

Annibale Carracci, one of the founders of the Eclectic school, attempted to combine in his line the appearance of Nature with style, and became the standard of academic drawing.

The medium, not the thing, was the object of the _Tuscan_ and _Venetian_ schools; the school of Urbino[31] aimed at subjecting the medium to the character of things; the _Lombards_ strove to unite the separate attainments of the three with the unattainable spell of Correggio; the _Germans_, with their Flemish and Dutch branches, now humbly followed, now boldly attempted to improve their Italian masters; the French pa.s.sed the Alps to study at Rome and Venice what they were to forget at Paris.

Domenichino aimed at the characteristic line of Raffaelle, the compactness of Annibale, and the beauty of the antique; and mixing something of each fell short of all.

Rosso carried anatomy, and the Bolognese Abbate the poetry of their art to the court of Francis. To the haggard melancholy of the Tuscan and the laboured richness of the Lombard, the French added their own cold gaiety, and the French school arose.

The forms of Guido's female heads are abstracts of the antique. The forms of his male bodies are transcripts of models, such as are found in a genial climate, though sometimes distorted by fatigue or emaciated by want.

Pietro Testa copied the Torsos of antiquity, and supplied them with extremities drawn from the dregs of Nature.

The forms[32] of Caravaggio are either substantial flesh or the starveling produce of beggary rendered important by ideal light and shade.

The limbs of Joseph Ribera are excrescences of disease on hectic bodies.

Andrea Mantegna was in Italy what Albert Durer was at Nuremberg; Nature seems not to have existed in any shape of health in his time: though a servile copyist of the antique, he never once adverted from the monuments he copied to the originals that inspired them.

The forms of Albert Durer are blasphemies on Nature, the thwarted growth of starveling labour and dry sterility--formed to inherit his h.e.l.l of paradise. To extend the asperity of this verdict beyond the forms of Albert Durer, would be equally unjust and ungrateful to the father of German art, on whom invention often flashed, whom melancholy marked for her own, whose influence even on Italian art was such that he produced a temporary revolution in the style of the Tuscan school. Andrea del Sarto and Giacopo da Puntormo became his imitators and his copyists; nor was his influence unfelt by Raffaelle himself, but his Christ led to the Cross (engraved by E. Sadler),[33] compared with that of the Madonna del Spasimo, leaves the claim of superiority doubtful for sublimity and pathos. It is a likewise probable that we owe the horrors of the St.

Felicitas to the abominations of his Martyr scenes. The felicity of his organs, the delicacy of his finger, the freedom and sweep of his touch, have found an encomiast in the author of the life prefixed to the Latin edition of his works. What would have been the result of his intended interview, when in Italy, with Andrea Mantegna, had the death of the latter (1505) not prevented it, is difficult to guess: if some amelioration, certainly not the entire change of style, which the uninterrupted study of the antique, during a long life, had failed to produce in Andrea himself.

The forms of Luke of Leyden are the vegetation of a swamp.

The forms of Martin Hemskerck are dislocated lankness.[34]

The forms of Spranger and Goltzius are blasphemies on art; the monstrous incubations of dropsied fancy on phlegm run mad. This verdict, though uniformly true of every male figure of Goltzius that demanded energy of exertion, cannot be equally applied to his females, the features of the face excepted. On limbs and bodies resembling the antique in elegance if not correctness, he placed heads with Dutch features, ideally, often voluptuously dressed: such are his Venus between Ceres and Bacchus; and still more his Diana and Calisto, a composition which in elegance and dignity excels that of Tiziano. In the dreadful familiarity with which the guardian snake of the Beotian well approaches the companions of Cadmus, he has touched the true vein of terror and its limits, and atoned in some degree for the loathsome horror that had polluted his graver, when he condescended to copy the abominable process of that scene from the design of Pistor.

The male forms of Rubens are the brawny pulp of slaughtermen, his females are hillocks of roses: overwhelmed muscles, dislocated bones, and distorted joints are swept along in a gulph of colours, as herbage, trees and shrubs are whirled, tossed, or absorbed by vernal inundation.

The female forms of Rembrandt are prodigies of deformity; his males are the crippled produce of shuffling industry and sedentary toil.

The line of Vandycke is balanced between Flemish corpulence and English slenderness.