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

170. Judge not an artist from the exertions of accidental vigour or some unpremeditated flights of fancy, but from the uniform tenor, the never-varying principle of his works: the line and style of Titian sometimes expand themselves like those of Michael Angelo; the heads and groups of Raphael sometimes glow and palpitate with Titiano's tints; and there are masses of both united in Correggio: but if you aim at character, let Raphael be your guide; if at colour, Tiziano; if harmony allure, Correggio: they indulged in alternate excursions, but never lost sight of their own domain.

Coroll.– No one, of whatever period of art, of whatever eminence or school, out-told Rembrandt in telling the story of a subject, in the choice of its real crisis, in simplicity, in perspicuity: still, as the vile crust that involves his ore, his local vulgarity of style, the ludicrous barbarity of his costume, prepossess eyes less penetrating than squeamish against him, it requires some confidence to place him with the classics of invention. Yet with all these defects, with every prejudice or superiority of taste and style against him, what school has produced a work (M. Angelo's Creation of Adam, and the Death of Ananias by Raffaelle excepted,) which looks not pale in the superhuman splendour that irradiates his conception of Christ before Pilate, unless it be the raising of Lazarus by Lievens, a name comparatively obscure, whose awful sublimity reduces the same subject as treated by Rembrandt and Sebastian of Venice, to artificial parade or common-place?

171. Tone is the moral part of colour.

172. If tone be the legitimate principle of colour, he who has not tone, though he should excel in individual imitation, colours in fragments and produces discord.

173. Harmony of colour consists in the due balance of all, equally remote from monotony and spots.

174. The eye tinges all nature with its own hue. The eye of the Dutch and Flemish schools, though shut to forms, tipped the cottage, the boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and even the haze of winter, with orient hues and the glow of setting suns.

175. Clearness, freshness, force of colour, are produced by simplicity; one pure, is more than a mixture of many.

176. Colour affects or delights like sound. Scarlet or deep crimson rouses, determines, invigorates the eye, as the war-horn or the trumpet the ear; the flute soothes the ear, as pale celestial blue or rosy red the eye.

177. The colours of sublimity are negative or generic – such is the colouring of Michael Angelo.

178. The passions that sway features and limbs equally reside, fluctuate, flash and lower in colour.

179. The colours of pleasure and love are hues.

180. The colour of gravity, reverie, solemnity, approaches to twilight.

181. Colour in Raffaelle was the assistant of expression; to Titian it was the vehicle of truth; Correggio made it the minister of harmony. It was sometimes seized, and though reluctant held, but oftener neglected by the first; it was embraced, it domineered over, it coalesced with the second; it attended the third like an enchanted spirit.

182. Lodovico Carracci was the first who gave in oil the colours of gravity, the dignified twilight of cloistered meditation.

183. Annibale Carracci, from want of feelings, though impressed by a grave principle, changed the mild evening-ray of his master to the bleak light of a sullen day.

184. Colour owes its effect sometimes more to position and gradation than to its intrinsic value.[37 - "Whoever looks at a picture by Correggio of a glorified Madonna with a St. Sebastian and other figures, at Dresden, is instantly surprised by the light of the glory, which has all the splendour of a sun, though painted with a low-toned yellow, and dim at the extremities."Opere di R. Mengs, t. ii. p. 161.]

185. The colour of Titian is the most independent of surrounding objects; their union may assist, but their discrepance cannot destroy it.

186. The harmony of Correggio is independent of colour.

187. Historic colour imitates, but copies not.

188. The portrait-painter copies the colour of his object, but chooses the medium through which that object is seen.

189. The mixtures that anticipate the beauties of time are big with the seeds of premature decay.

190. The colours of health are neither cadaverous nor flushed like meteors.

191. There are works whose effect is entirely founded on the contrast of tints, of what is termed warm and cold colour, and on reflected hues: strip them of this charm, reduce them to the principles of light and shade and masses, and as far as the want of those can degrade a picture, they will be fit to take their places on sign-posts.

192. Him who has freshness without frigidity, who glows without being adust, whose tints luxuriate though not fermented by putrefaction; who is juicy yet not clammy, though broad not empty, sharp without dryness, clear not pellucid, airy not volatile, without being clumsy plump – him you may venture to call a colourist.

193. Breadth is not vacuity – Breadth might easily be obtained if emptiness could give it.

194. The forms of virtue are erect, the forms of pleasure undulate: Minerva's drapery descends in long uninterrupted lines; a thousand amorous curves embrace the limbs of Flora.

195. Subordination is the character of drapery. The heraldry of dress, the rows of aggregated mitres and pontifical trappings, are noticed only for the sake of their wearers in the compositions of the Vatican.

Coroll.– The superiority of style in drapery over that of the limbs which it covers in the earliest essays of art after its restoration, is not accounted for by the assertion that it is transcribed from the antique: if it is, by what unaccountable perverseness did the forms of the nudities uniformly escape observation? In painting, this dissonance continues more or less offensively from the epoch of Cimabue to that of Masaccio, and, him excepted, down to Pinturicchio; and ceases not to shock us in sculpture from the Pisani, to the appearance of Lorenzo Ghiberti. Nor did that style of drapery mark only the productions of Italian art; on this side of the Alps it invested that of Germany, from the Angels and Madonnas of Martin Schongaver and Albert Durer, to those of Aldegraver and Sebald Behm: in nearly all their performances, Trans and Cisalpine, the wearer is the appendix of his garment, chucked into vestments not his own, a dwarfish thief hid in a giant's robe.

196. Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character; in Michael Angelo it envelopes grandeur; it is in Rubens the ponderous robe of pomp.

197. If Nature has not taught you to sketch, you apply in vain to art to finish your work.[38 - John, called da Bologna, showed a model to Michael Angelo smoothly polished; Michael Angelo took, and, heedless of its finish, twisted it about; then giving it back to the student, "Learn," said he, "to sketch before you attempt to finish."]

198. Some must be idle lest others should want work.[39 - Such was the proud answer of Frà Sebastian del Piombo, grown fat by the signet of St. Peter, when asked why he had entirely resigned all exercise of his art.]

199. He who submits to follow, is not made to precede.[40 - Said Michael Angelo, when asked whether the copy of the Laocoon by Baccio Bandinelli was not equal or superior to the original. Titiano, with more mordacity though surely with less discrimination, ridiculed the copyist by a caricature in which the Trojan with his sons were changed to baboons.]

200. Consider it as the unalterable law of Nature that all your power upon others depends on your own emotions. Shakspeare wept, trembled, laughed first at what now sways the public feature; and where he did not, he is stale, outrageous or disgusting.

201. None but indelible materials can support the epic. Whatever is local, or the volatile creature of the time, beauties of fashion and sentiments of sects, tears shed over roses, epigrammatic sparkling, passions taught to rave, and graces trained to move, the antiquary's mouldering stores, the bubbles of allegorists – are all with equal contempt passed over or crushed by him who claims the lasting empire of the human heart.

202. The invention of machines to supersede manual labour will at length destroy population and commerce;[41 - "Sineret se plebeculam pascere," said Vespasian to the artist who had contrived a machine to convey some large columns with a trifling expense to the Capitol, and rewarded him without accepting his offer.] and the methods contrived to shorten the apprenticeship of artists annihilate art.

203. Expect no religion in times when it is easier to meet with a saint than a man; and no art in those that multiply their artists beyond their labourers.

204. Expect nothing but trifles in times when those who ought to encourage the arts are content to debase them by their own performances.

205. Mediocrity despatches and exults; the man of talent congratulates himself on the success of his exertions – Genius alone mourns over defeated expectation.

206. Pride. – Call not him proud who is influenced by the tide and ebb of opinion.

207. Modesty. – The touchstone of genuine modesty is the attention paid to criticism, and the temper with which it is received, or its advice adopted; the most arrogant pretence, the most fiery ambition, the most towering conceit, may fence themselves with smoothness, silence and submissive looks – Oil, the smoothest of substances, swims on all.

208. Praise. – Despise all praise but what he gives who has been praised for similar efforts; or his whose interest it is to blame.

209. Emulation. – The vindication of the innate powers, of the individual dignity of man, careless of appendages and accidental advantage, grasps the substance of its object.

210. Envy, the bantling of desperate self-love, grasps the appendages, heedless of things. Emulation embalms the dead; Envy the vampire, blasts the living.

211. Flattery, the midwife of half-born conceits and struggling wishes, sometimes persuades, a boy that he is a man, a dwarf that he is a giant, but too often enervates the limbs of energy.

212. Vanity. – The vain is the most humble of mortals: the victim of a pimple.

213. Those reduced to live on the alms of genius, are the first to deny its existence.

214. Shakspeare is to Sophocles what the incessant flashes of a tempestuous night are to daylight.

215. Things came to Raffaelle and Shakspeare; Michael Angelo and Milton came to things.

216. The women of Michael Angelo are the sex.

Coroll.– Eve emerging from the side of Adam; Eve reclining under the tree of knowledge, in the Capella Sistina; the figures of Night and Dawn on the tombs of the Medici, are pure generic forms, little discriminated by character, and more expressive by action than emotion of features; solidity without heaviness separates them from the females in the Last Judgment, which, with the exception of the Madonna and St. Catharine, are less beholden to grace than anatomy. The Cartoon of the Leda proves that he was not inattentive to the detail of female charms, but beauty did not often visit his slumbers, guide his hand, or interrupt the gravity of his meditation.