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

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 - In the Letter to C.B. Castiglione. Ideal is properly the representation of pure human essence.] 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 basso-relievo, seen from beneath (da sotto in su).

The forms of Titian 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 - Raffaelle and the best of his pupils; their successors, commonly known by the name of the Roman school, followed principles diametrically opposite.] 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 passed 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 - "Macinava carne," said Annibale Carracci.] 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 hell 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 - Ægidius Sadeler sculpsit ex Prototypo Alberti Dureri.] 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 - "Elumbis," as applied by the author of the Dialogue on Orators to the style of Brutus, will nearly suit all imitators of Michael Angelo.]

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.

Sebastian Bourdon, sublime in his conceptions, filled classic ground and eastern vests with local limbs and Gallic actors.

Poussin renounced his national character to follow the antique; but could not separate the spirit from the stone.

152. The imitator seldom mounts to the investigation of the principles that formed his model; the copier probably never.

153. Many beauties in art come by accident, that are preserved by choice.

Coroll.– Neither the froth formed on the mouth of Jalysus' hound by a lucky dash from the sponge of Protogenes, nor the modern experiments of extracting composition from an ink-splashed wall, are relatives of the beauties alluded to in this aphorism.

154. The praise due to a work, reflects not always on its master; and superiority may beam athwart the blemishes that we despise or pity; some, says Milton, praised the work and some the master: would you prefer him who is able to finish the image which he was unable to conceive, to its inventor?

155. It is the privilege of Nature alone to be equal. Man is the slave of a part; the most equal artist is only the first in the list of mediocrity.

156. He who seeks the grand, will find it in a trifle: but some seem made to find it only there. Rösel saw man like an insect, and insects as Michael Angelo men.

157. Physiognomy teaches what is homogeneous and what is heterogeneous in forms.

158. The solid parts of the body are the base of physiognomy, the muscular that of pathognomy; the former contemplates the animal at rest, this its action.

159. Pathognomy allots expression to character.

160. Those who allow physiognomy to regulate the great outlines of character, and reject its minute discriminations, admit a language and reject its elements.

161. The difficulty of physiognomy is to separate the essence from accident, growth from excrescence.

162. He who aims at the sublime, consults the classes assigned to character by physiognomy, not its anatomy of individuals; the oak in its full majesty, and not the thwarted pollard.

163. None ever escaped from himself by crossing seas; none ever peopled a barren fancy and a heart of ice with images or sympathies by excursions into the deserts of mythology or allegory.

164. The principles of allegory and votive composition are the same; they unite with equal right the most distant periods of time and the most opposite modes of society: both surround a real being, or allude to a real act, with symbols by long general consent adopted, as expressive of the qualities, motives, and circumstances that distinguished or gave evidence to the person or the transaction. Such is the gallery of the Luxembourg, such the Attila of the Vatican.

165. Pure history rejects allegory.

Coroll.– The armed figure of Rome, with Fortune behind her frowning at Coriolanus, surrounded by the Roman matrons in the Volscian camp (by Poussin), is a vision seen by that warrior, and not an allegory; it is a sublime image, which, without diminishing the credibility of the fact, adds to its importance, and raises the hero, by making him submit, not to the impulse of private ties, but to the destiny of his country.

166. All ornament ought to be allegoric.

167. Dignity is the salt of art.

Coroll.– In the Salutation of Michael Angelo,[35 - In the Sacristy of St. Giovanni in Laterano, painted from the cartoon by Marcello Venusti.] the angelic messenger emerges from solitary twilight, his countenance seems to labour with the awful message, and his knees to bend as he approaches the mysterious personage: with virgin majesty and humble grace Mary bows to the extended arm of the lucid herald, as if waked from sacred meditation, and appears entranced by celestial sounds.

The Madonnas of Raffaelle, whether hailed parents of a God, or pressing the divine offspring to their breast, whether receiving him from his slumbers, or contemplating his infant motions, are uniformly transcripts from the daily domestic images of common life and of some favourite face matronized: the eyes of his Fornarina beamed with other fires than those of sanctity; the sense and native dignity of her lover could veil their fierceness, but not change their language.

The Madonna of Titiano receives her celestial visitant under an open portico of Palladian structure, and skirted by gay gardens; the usual ray precedes the floating angel; gold-ringleted and in festive attire, he waves a lily wand: in sable weeds the Virgin receives the gorgeous homage, proudly devout, like a young abbess amidst her cloistered lambs.

Tintoretto has turned salutation into irruption. The angel bursts through the shattered casement and terrifies a vulgar female; but his wings are tipped in heaven.[36 - This and the foregoing picture are in the Scuola di S. Rocco at Venice. The skeleton of the former is known by an etching of Le Fevre.]

168. Dignity gives probability to the impossible: we listen to the monstrous tale of Ulysses with all the devotion due to a creed. By dignity, even deformity becomes an instrument of art: Vulcan limps like a god at the hand of Homer: the hump and withered arm of Richard are engines of terror or persuasion in Shakspeare; the crook-back of Michael Angelo strikes with awe.

169. Luxuriance of ornament destroys simplicity and repose, the attendants of dignity.

Coroll.– "Simon Mosca, one of the most distinguished sculptors of ornament and foliage in the sixteenth century, when proposed by Vasari to embellish by his designs the monument of the Cardinal di Monte, was discountenanced by Michael Angelo on this principle." Vasari, vita de Simone Mosca.