The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 3 (of 3)

ELEVENTH LECTURE.

ON THE PREVAILING METHOD OF TREATING THE HISTORY OF PAINTING, WITH OBSERVATIONS ON THE PICTURE OF LIONARDO DA VINCI OF "THE LAST SUPPER."

In this Lecture I shall submit to your consideration some criticisms on the prevailing method of treating the History of our Art; attended by a series of observations on the magnificent picture of the Last Supper, by Lionardo da Vinci, now before you.

History, mindless of its real object, sinking to Biography, has been swelled into a diffuse catalogue of individuals, who, tutored by different schools, or picking something from the real establishers of Art, have done little more than repeat, or imitate through the medium of either, what those had found in Nature, discriminated, selected, and applied to Art, according to her dictates. Without wishing to depreciate the merit of that multitude who felt, proved themselves strong enough, and strenuously employed life to follow, it must be pronounced below the historian's dignity to allow them more than a transitory glance. Neither originality, nor selection and combination of materials scattered over the various classes of Art by others, have much right to attention from him who only investigates the real progress of Art, if the first proves to have added nothing essential to the system by novelty, and the second to have only diluted energy, and by a popular amalgama to have pleased the vulgar. Novelty, without enlarging the circle of knowledge, may delight or strike, but is nearer allied to whim than to invention; and an eclectic system, without equality of parts, as it originated in want of comprehension, totters on the brink of mediocrity.

The first ideas of Expression, Character, Form, Chiaroscuro, and Colour, originated in Tuscany: Masaccio, Lionardo da Vinci, M. Agnolo, Bartolomeo della Porta. The first was carried off before he could give more than hints of dramatic composition; the second appears to have established character on physiognomy, and to have seen the first vision of chiaroscuro, though he did not penetrate the full extent of its charm; the third had power, knowledge, and life sufficiently great, extensive, and long, to have fixed style on its basis, had not an irresistible bias drawn off his attention from the modesty and variety of Nature; Baccio gave amplitude to drapery, and colour to form.

Of the Tuscan School that succeeded these, the main body not only added nothing to their discoveries, but, if their blind attachment to the singularities rather than the beauties of the third be excepted, equally inattentive to expression, character, propriety of form, the charms of chiaroscuro, and energies of colour, contented themselves to give to tame or puerile ideas, obvious and common-place conceptions, a kind of importance by mastery of execution and a bold but monotonous and always mannered outline; and though Andrea del Sarto, with Francia Bigio, Giacopo da Pontormo, and Rosso, may be allowed to have thought sometimes for themselves and struck out paths of their own, will it be asserted that they enlarged or even filled the circle traced out before? The most characteristic work of Andrea's original powers, is, no doubt, the historic series in S. Giovanni dei Scalzi; yet, when compared with the patriarchal simplicity of the groups in the Lunette of the Sistine Chapel, the naïveté of his characters and imagery will be found too much tainted with contemporary, local, and domestic features, for Divine, Apostolic, and Oriental agents. His drapery, whenever he escapes from the costume of the day, combines with singular felicity the breadth of the Frati, and the acute angles of Albert Durer; but neither its amplitude, nor the solemn repose and tranquillity of his scenery, can supply the want of personal dignity, or consecrate vulgar forms and trivial features.

The Roman school like an Oriental sun rose, not announced by dawn, and, setting, left no twilight. Raffaello established his school on the Drama; its scenery, its expression, its forms; History, Lyrics, Portrait, became under his hand the organs of passion and character. With his demise the purity of this principle vanished. Julio Romano, too original to adopt, formed a school of his own at Mantoua, which, as it was founded on no characteristic principle, added nothing to Art, and did not long survive its founder. Polydoro Caldara was more ambitious to emulate the forms of the antique than to propagate the style of his master, which was not comprehended by Penny, called Il Fattore, mangled by Perrino del Vaga, became common-place in the hands of the Zuccari, barbarous manner during the usurpation of Giuseppe Cesari, sunk to tameness in the timid imitation of Sacchi and Maratta, and expired under the frigid method of Mengs.

A certain national, though original character, marks the brightest epoch of the Venetian School. However deviating from each other, Tiziano, Tintoretto, Jacopo da Ponte, and Paolo Veronese, acknowledge but one element of imitation, Nature herself: this principle each bequeathed to his school, and no attempt to adulterate its simplicity by uniting different methods, distinguishes their immediate successors: hence they preserved features of originality longer than the surrounding schools, whom the vain wish to connect incompatible excellence, soon degraded to mediocrity, and from that plunged to insignificance.

If what is finite could grasp infinity, the variety of Nature might be united by individual energy; till then the attempt to amalgamate her scattered beauties by the imbecility of Art, will prove abortive. Genius is the pupil of Nature; perceives, is dazzled, and imperfectly transmits one of her features: thus saw M. Agnolo, Raffaello, Tiziano, Correggio; and such were their technic legacies, as inseparable from their attendant flaws, as in equal degrees irreconcilable. That Nature is not subject to decrepitude, is proved by the superiority of modern over ancient science; what hinders modern Art to equal that of classic eras, is the effect of irremovable causes.

But I hasten to the principal object of this Lecture, the consideration of the technic character of Lionardo da Vinci, one, and in my opinion the first of the great restorers of modern Art, as deduced from his most important work, the Last Supper, surviving as a whole in the magnificent copy of Marco Uggione, rescued from a random pilgrimage by the courage and vigilance of our President, and by the Academy made our own. The original of this work, the ultimate test of his most vigorous powers, the proof of his theory, and what may be called with propriety the first characteristic composition since the revival of the Art, was the principal ornament of the Refectory in the Dominican Convent of S. Maria delle Gratie, at Milan.

Let us begin with the centre, the seat of the principal figure, from which all the rest emanate like rays. Sublimely calm, the face of the Saviour broods over the immense, whilst every face and every limb around him, roused by his mysterious word, fluctuate in restless curiosity and sympathetic pangs.

The face of the Saviour is an abyss of thought, and broods over the immense revolution in the economy of mankind, which throngs inwardly on his absorbed eye – as the spirit creative in the beginning over the water's darksome wave – undisturbed and quiet. It could not be lost in the copy before us: how could its sublime conception escape those who saw the original? It has survived the hand of Time in the study which Lionardo made in crayons, exhibited with most of the attendant heads in the British Gallery; and even in the feebler transcript of Del Testa.

I am not afraid of being under the necessity of retracting what I am going to advance, that neither during the splendid period immediately subsequent to Lionardo, nor in those which succeeded to our own time, has a face of the Redeemer been produced which, I will not say equalled, but approached the sublimity of Lionardo's conception, and in quiet and simple features of humanity embodied divine, or, what is the same, incomprehensible and infinite powers. To him who could contrive and give this combination, the unlimited praise lavished on the inferior characters who surround the hero, whilst his success in that was doubted – appears to me not only no praise, but a gross injustice.

Yet such was the judgment of Vasari, and in our days of Lanzi, both founded on the pretended impossibility of transcribing the beauty of forms and the varied energies of expression distributed by the artist among the disciples. "The moment," says Lanzi, and says well, "is that in which the Saviour says to the Disciples, "One of you will betray me!" On every one of the innocent men the word acts like lightning: he who is at a greater distance, distrusting his own ears, applies to his neighbour; others, according to their variety of character, betray raised emotions. One of them faints, one is fixed in astonishment; this wildly rises, the simple candour of another tells that he cannot be suspected: Judas, meanwhile, assumes a look of intrepidity, but, though he counterfeits innocence, leaves no doubt of being the traitor. Vinci used to tell, that for a year he wandered about, perplexed with the thought how to embody in one face the image of so black a mind; and frequenting a village which a variety of villains haunted, he met at last, by the help of some associated features, with his man. Nor was his success less conspicuous in furnishing both the Jameses with congenial and characteristic beauty; but being unable to find an ideal superior to theirs for Christ, he left the head, as Vasari affirms, imperfect, though Arminine ascribes a high finish even to that."

Thus is the modesty and diffidence of the artist, who, in the midst of the most glorious success, always sought and wished for more, brought as evidence against him by all his pretended judges and critics, if we except the single Bottari, who finds in it, with the highest finish, all the fortitude of mind characteristic of the Saviour, united to lively consideration of the suffering that awaited him – though even that is, in my opinion, below the conception of Lionardo.

Lest those who have read and recollect the character of Lionardo which I have submitted to the public, should, from the predilection with which I have dwelt on what I think the principal feature of his performance, the face and attitude of the hero, suspect I shift my ground, or charge me with inconsistency, I repeat what I said then, when I was nearly unacquainted with this work, that the distinguishing feature of his powers lay in the delineation of character, which he often raised to a species, and not seldom degraded to caricature. The triumphant proof of both is the great performance before us; the same mind that could unite divine power with the purest humanity, by an unaccountable dereliction, not only of the dignity due to his subject, but of sound sense, thought it not beneath him to haunt the recesses of deformity to unkennel a villain. Did he confine villainy to deformity? If he had, he would have disdained to give him two associates in feature; for the face of him who holds up his finger, and his who argues on the left extremity of the table, seem to have proceeded, if not absolutely from the same, from a very similar mould, yet they are in the number of the elect, and, though on the brink of caricature, have the air of good men. Expression alone separates them from the traitor, whom incapacity of remorse, hatred, rage at being discovered, and habitual meanness, seem to have divided into equal shares.

The portrait of Cesar Borgia, by Giorgione, now hung up for your study in the Academy for Painting, proves that the most atrocious mind may lurk under good, sedate, and even handsome features. Though his hand were not drawing a dagger, who would expect mercy or remorse from the evil methodized villainy of that eye? But Judas was capable of remorse; intolerant of the dreadful suffering with which the horrid act had overwhelmed him, he rushed on confession of his crime, restitution, and suicide.

To the countenance and attitude of St. John, blooming with youth, innocent, resigned, partaking perhaps somewhat too much of the feminine, and those of the two James's invigorated by the strength of virility, energetic and bold, none will refuse a competent praise of varied beauty; but they neither are nor ought to be ideal, and had they been so, they could neither compete nor interfere with the sublimity that crowns the Saviour's brow, and stamps his countenance with the God.

The felicity, novelty, and propriety of Lionardo's conception and invention, are powerfully seconded by every part of execution: – the tone which veils and wraps actors and scene into one harmonious whole, and gives it breadth; the style of design, grand without affectation, and, if not delicate or ideal, characteristic of the actors; the draperies folded with equal simplicity, elegance, and costume, with all the propriety of presenting the highest finish, without anxiety of touch, or thronging the eye.

So artless is the assemblage of the figures, that the very name of composition seems to degrade what appears arranged by Nature's own hand. That the nearest by relation, characters and age, should be placed nearest the master of the feast, and of course attract the eye soonest, was surely the most natural arrangement; but if they are conspicuous, they are not so at the expense of the rest: distance is compensated by action; the centre leads to all, as all lead to the centre. That the great restorer of light and shade sacrificed the effects and charms of chiaroscuro at the shrine of character, raised him at once above all his future competitors; changes admiration to sympathy, and makes us partners of the feast.

As expression sprang from the subject, so it gave rise to competition. That Raffaello was acquainted with Lionardo's work, and felt its power, is evident from his composition, engraved by M. Antonio: finding invention anticipated, he took refuge in imitation, and filled it with sentiments of his own; whether, beyond the dignity of attitude, he attempts to approach the profundity of Lionardo's Christ, cannot, from a print of very moderate dimensions, be decided. In the listening figure of Judas, with equal atrocity of guilt he appears to have combined somewhat more of apostolic consequence.

The well-known Last Supper of the Loggia, painted, or what is more probable, superintended by Raffaello, is, by being made a night scene, by contrast and chiaroscuro, become an original conception; but as it presents little more than groups busy to arrange themselves for sitting down or breaking up, it cannot excite more interest than what is due to contrast and effect, and active groups eager to move yet not tumultuary.

But if Lionardo disdained to consult the recesses of composition and the charms of artificial chiaroscuro, he did not debase his work to mere apposition: uniting the whole by tone, he gave it substance by truth of imitation, and effect by the disposition of the characters; the groups flanking each side of the Saviour, emerge, recede, and support each other with a roundness, depth, and evidence which leave all attempts at emendation or improvement hopeless. But why should I attempt to enumerate beauties which are before you, and which if you do not perceive yourselves, no words of mine can ever make you feel?

The universality of Lionardo da Vinci is become proverbial: but though possessed of every element, he rather gave glimpses than a standard of form; though full of energy, he had not powers effectually to court the various graces he pursued. His line was free from meagreness, and his forms presented volume, but he appears not to have ever been much acquainted, or to have sedulously sought much acquaintance, with the Antique. Character was his favourite study, and character he has often raised from an individual to a species, and as often depressed to caricature. The strength of his execution lay in the delineation of male heads; those of his females owe nearly all their charms to chiaroscuro, of which he is the supposed inventor: they are seldom more discriminated than the children they fondle; they are sisters of one family. The extremities of his hands are often inelegant, though timorously drawn, like those of Christ among the Doctors in the picture we lately saw exhibited. Lionardo da Vinci touched in every muscle of his forms the master-key of the passion he wished to express, but he is ideal only in chiaroscuro.

Such was the state of the Art before the appearance of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, and the establishment of style.

Of M. Agnolo it is difficult to decide who have understood less, his encomiasts or his critics, though both rightly agree in dating from him an epoch – those of the establishment, these of the subversion of Art.

It is the lot of Genius to be opposed, and to be invigorated by opposition. All extremes touch each other: frigid praise and frigid censure wait on easily attainable or common powers: but the successful adventurer in the realms of Discovery, in spite of the shrugs, checks, and sneers of the timid, the malign, and the envious, leaps on an unknown or long lost shore, ennobles it with his name, and grasps immortality.

M. Agnolo appeared, and soon discovered that works worthy of perpetuity could neither be built on defective and unsubstantial forms, nor on the transient whim of fashion and local sentiment; that their stamina were the real stamina of Nature, the genuine feelings of humanity; and planned for painting what Homer had planned for poetry, the epic part, which, with the utmost simplicity of a whole, should unite magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts. His line became generic, but perhaps too 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 by him 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. This is the "terribil via," this is that "magic circle," in which we are told that none durst move but he. No, none but he who makes sublimity of conception his element of form. M. Agnolo himself offers the proof: for the lines that bear in a mass on his mighty tide of thought in the Gods and Patriarchs and Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel, already too ostentatiously show themselves in the Last Judgement, and rather expose than support his ebbing powers in the Chapel of Paul. Considered as a whole, the Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion of Paul, in that place, are the dotage of M. Agnolo's style; but they have parts which make that dotage more enviable than the equal vigour of mediocrity.

With what an eye M. Agnolo contemplated the Antique, we may judge from his Bacchus, the early production of his youth: in style it is at least equal, perhaps in pulp and fleshiness superior, to what is called the Antique Roman Style. His idea seems to have been the personification of youthful inebriety, but it is the inebriety of a superior being, not yet forsaken by grace, not yet relinquished by mind. In more advanced years, the Torso of Apollonius became his standard of form. But the Dæmons of Dante had too early tinctured his fancy to admit in their full majesty the Gods of Homer and of Phidias.

Such was the opinion formed of the plan and style of M. Agnolo by the judges, the critics, the poets, the artists, the public, of his own and the following age, from Bembo to Ariosto, from Raffaello to Tiziano, down to Agostino and Annibale Carracci. Let us now compare it with the technical verdict given by the greatest professional critic, on the Continent, of our times. "M. Agnolo," says Mengs, "seeking always to be grand, was perhaps only bulky, and by the perpetual use of a convex line, over-spanned the forms and irrecoverably lost the line of Nature. This charged style attended him in his youth, and engrossed him when a man. For this reason his works will always be much inferior to the antique of the good style; for though they made robust and muscular figures, they never made them heavy: – an instance is the Hercules of Glycon, who, though so bulky, and of form so majestic, is easily seen to be swift like a stag, and elastic like a ball. The style of M. Agnolo could not give similar ideas, for the joints of his figures are too contracted, and seem only made for the posture into which he puts them. The forms of his flesh are too round, his muscles of a mass and shape always similar, which hides their springs of motion; nor do you ever see in his works a muscle in repose, than which a greater fault Design knows not. He perfectly knew what place each muscle ought to occupy, but never gave its form. Nor did he understand the nature of tendons, as he made them equally fleshy from end to end, and his bones too round. Raffaello partook of all these defects, without ever reaching the profundity of his muscular theory. Raffaello's strength lay in characterizing aged and nervous frames; he was too hard for delicacy, and in figures of grandeur an exaggerated copy of M. Agnolo." So far Mengs.

M. Agnolo appears to have had no infancy; if he had, we are not acquainted with it. His earliest works are equal in principle and compass of execution to the vigorous proofs of his virility. Like an oriental sun, he burst upon us at once, without a dawn. Raffaello Sanzio we see in his cradle, we hear him stammer, but propriety rocked the cradle, and character formed his lips. Even in the trammels of Pietro Perugino, dry and servile in his style of design, he traced what was essential, and separated it from what was accidental in his model. The works of Lionardo da Vinci and the Cartoon of Pisa are said to have invigorated his eye, but it was the Antique that completed the system which he had begun to establish on Nature; from them he learned discrimination and choice of forms. He found that in the construction of the body the articulations of the bones were the true cause of ease and grace in the action of the limbs, and that the knowledge of this was the reason of the superiority of antique design. He found that certain features were fittest for certain expressions and peculiar to certain characters; that such a head, such hands, such feet, are the stamen or the growth of such a body, and on physiognomy established homogeneousness. Of all artists he was the greatest, the most precise, the most acute observer. When he designed, he first attended to the primary intention and motive of his figure, next to its general measure, then to the bones and their articulations; from them to the principal muscles, or the muscles eminently wanted, and their attendant nerves, and at last to the more or less essential minutiæ. But the characteristic part of the subject is infallibly the characteristic part of his design, if it be formed even by a few rapid or a single stroke of his pen or pencil. The strokes themselves are characteristic, they follow or indicate the texture or fibre of the part; flesh in their rounding, nerves in straight, bones in angular touches.

Such was the felicity and such the propriety of Raffaello when employed in the dramatic evolutions of character, – both suffered when he attempted to abstract the forms of sublimity or beauty. The painter of humanity not often wielded with success superhuman weapons. His Gods never rose above prophetic or patriarchial forms: if the finger of M. Agnolo impressed the divine countenance oftener with sternness than awe, the Gods of Raffaello are sometimes too affable and mild, like him who speaks to Jacob in the ceiling of the Vatican; sometimes too violent, like him who separates light from darkness in the Loggia: but though made chiefly to walk with dignity on earth, he soared above it in the mild effulgence and majestic rapture of Christ on Tabor, not indeed as we see his face now from the repairs of the manufacturers in the Louvre, and still more in the frown of the angelic countenance that withers all the strength of the warrior Heliodorus. Of ideal female beauty, though he himself, in his letter to Count Castiglione, tells us that from its scarcity in life he made attempts to reach it by an idea formed in his own mind, he certainly wanted that standard which guided him in character. His Goddesses and mythologic females are no more than aggravations of the generic forms of M. Agnolo. Roundness, mildness, sanctimony, and insipidity, compose the features and air of his Madonnas: transcripts of the nursery, or some favourite face. The Madonna del Impanato, the Madonna Bella, the Madonna della Sedia, and even the longer proportions and greater delicacy and dignity of the Madonna formerly in the collection of Versailles, share more or less of this insipidity: it chiefly arises from the high, smooth, roundish forehead, the shaven vacuity between the arched semicircular eye-brows, their elevation above the eyes, and the ungraceful division, growth and scantiness of hair. This indeed might be the result of his desire not to stain the virgin character of sanctity with the most distant hint of coquetry or meretricious charms; for in his Magdalens, he throws it with luxuriant profusion, and surrounds the breast and shoulders with undulating waves and plaits of gold. The character of Mary Magdalen met his, – it was the character of a passion.