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

217. The women of Raffaelle are either his own mistress, or mothers.

Coroll.– This relates chiefly to his Madonnas – Of his saints the St. Cecilia at Bologna has most of antique beauty, and, whether imitated or conceived, resembles the Niobe; but pride is absorbed in devotion, she is the enraptured victim of divine love, and glows with celestial fire: the goddesses of the Farnesina, however gracefully imagined, are too ponderous for aërial forms and amorous conceits.

218. The women of Correggio are seraglio beauties.

Coroll.– The enchantment of the Magdalen, in the picture of the St. Jerome in the Pilotta at Parma, is produced by chiaroscuro and attitude. Sensuality personified is the general character of his females, and the grace of his children, less naiveté than grimace, the caricature of jollity.

219. The women of Titiano are the plump, fair, marrowy Venetian race.

Coroll.– Venus taking a reluctant farewell of Adonis; Diana starting at the intrusion of Acteon, with every allure of attitude, with heads dressed by the Graces, are local beauties, sink under the weight of Venetian limbs, and are only distinguished by contrast from the model that plumped herself down for his Danae. The reposing figure commonly called the Venus of the Tribuna, is an exquisite portrait of some favourite female, but not a Venus.

220. The women of Parmegiano are coquettes.

221. The women of Annibale Carracci are made up by imitation and vulgarity.

Coroll.– Venus with Anchises, Juno with Jupiter, Omphale with Hercules, Diana and Calisto in the Farnese gallery, owe their charms and dignity of action to imitation; the celebrated three Maries, Magdalen penitent in her hempen shroud, are the conceptions of his own mind.

222. The women of Guido are actresses.

223. The forms of Domenichino's female faces are ideal; their expression is poised between pure helpless virginity and sainted ecstasy.

224. The veiled eyes of Guercino's females dart insidious fire.

225. Such is the fugitive essence, such the intangible texture of female genius, that few combinations of circumstances ever seemed to favour its transmission to posterity.

226. In an age of luxury women have taste, decide and dictate; for in an age of luxury woman aspires to the functions of man, and man slides into the offices of woman. The epoch of eunuchs was ever the epoch of viragoes.

227. Female affection is ever in proportion to the impression of superiority in the object. Woman fondles, pities, despises and forgets what is below her; she values, bears and wrangles with her equal; she adores what is above her.

228. Be not too squeamish in the choice of your materials; you will disgrace the best, if you cannot give value to the worst: the gold and azure wasted on Rosselli's[42 - Cosmo Rosselli, one of the Tuscan painters who preceded Michael Angelo in decorating the Chapel of Sixtus IV.] draperies cannot give value to their folds or hide the wants beneath.

229. There are moments when all are men, and only men, and ought to be no more; but the artist, who when his daily task is over can lock his meditation up with his tools – ranks with mechanics.

230. Date the death of emulation and of excellence from the moment of your employer's indifference; and mediocrity of success from the moment of his meddling with the process of your work.

231. One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams, and what may be called the personification of sentiment: the Prophets, Sibyls and Patriarchs of Michael Angelo are so many branches of one great sentiment. The dream of Raffaello is a characteristic representation of a dream; the dream of Michael Angelo is moral inspiration, a sublime sentiment.

Coroll.– Of three visionary subjects ascribed to Raffaello and known from the prints of Marc Antonio, Georgio Mantuano, and Agostino Veneziano, this alludes to the last, called by the Italians Stregozzo, by the French "La Carcasse: " an association of ideas big with the very elements of dreams, and almost a definition. That it be a conception of Raffaello rests on no other proof than the tablet of Marc Antonio and its own internal merit; which is so uniform that although one principal figure is undoubtedly transcribed from another in the cartoon of Pisa, the whole can never be considered as a pasticcio.

232. A trite subject becomes interesting by the introduction of appropriate ornaments; a small statue of Moses breaking the tables in the back-ground of a Salutation; and a number of Baptists in that of a Madonna with her son and Joseph, expressing the dissolution of the old and the institution of the new doctrine, both by Michael Angelo,[43 - This is the Madonna painted for Angelo Doni, now in the Tribuna of Florence, and probably the only existing oil-picture of Michael Angelo, though Lanzi rejects its title to that. Vasari mentions it with his usual extravagance of praise, but appears ignorant of the real meaning of the figures.] give unexpected sublimity to subjects for which Raffaelle and Titiano had ransacked in vain the nursery and heaven.

233. Compilation is the lowest degree in art, but let him who means to borrow with impunity, follow the statesman's maxim: "strip the mean and spare the great."

Coroll.– A composition of which every thing was borrowed from himself, being shown to Michael Angelo, and his opinion asked, "I commend it," said he, "but when on the day of judgement each body shall claim its original limbs, what will remain in this picture?"

234. He ought to possess some himself, who attempts to make use of borrowed excellence: a golden goblet on a beggar's table, serves only to expose its companions of lead.

235. Resemblance, character, costume, are the three requisites of portrait: the first distinguishes, the second classifies, the third assigns place and time to an individual.

236. Landscape is either the transcript of a spot, or a picturesque combination of homogeneous objects, or the scene of a phenomenon. The first pleases by precision and taste; the second adds variety and grandeur; the third may be an instrument of sublimity, affect our passions, or wake a sentiment.

237. Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

238. He never can be great who honours what is little.

Coroll.– Grandeur of style and execution do not exclusively depend upon dimensions: but in an age and amidst a race who have erected littleness or rather diminutiveness of size to the only credentials of admissibility into collections, to the passports without which Raffaelle himself finds it difficult to penetrate the sanctuaries of pigmy art, that which ennobled the age of Pericles, of Julio, and Leone, must be content to look to posterity for its reward. If it were physiognomically true, that the structure of every human face bears some analogy to that of some brute, it might reasonably surprise, that an individual marked by nature with no very remote resemblance to a Hippopotamus, should be considered as the legislator of a taste equally noted for tameness of conception and effeminate finish; but as it is improbable that one individual, however favoured by circumstances or endowed with all-persevering activity, or arrogance, could stamp the taste of a nation exclusively with his own, it may be fairly surmised that he did no more than find and rear the seeds of that Micromania which infects the public taste.

239. The medium of poetry is time and action; that of the plastic arts, space and figure. Poetry then is at its summit, when its hand arrests time and embodies action: and these, when they wing the marble or the canvass, and from the present moment dart rays back to the past and forward to the future.

Coroll.– Subjects are positive, negative, repulsive. The first are the proper materials, the voluntary servants of invention; to the second she gives interest and value; from the last she can escape only by the help of execution, for execution alone can palliate her defeat by the last. The Laocoon, the Hæmon and Antigone, the Niobe and her daughters, the death of Ananias, the Sacrifice at Lystra, Elymas struck blind, are positive subjects, speak their meaning with equal evidences to the scholar and the unlettered man, and excite the sympathy due to the calls of terror and pity with equal energy in every breast. St. Jerome presenting the translation of his Bible to the Infant Jesus, St. Peter at the feet of the Madonna receiving the thanksgivings of victorious Venice, with every other votive altar-piece, little interesting to humanity in general, owe the impression they make on us to the dexterous arrangement, the amorous or sublime enthusiasm of the artist; – but we lament to see invention waste its powers, and execution its skill, to excite our feelings for an action or event that receives its real interest from a motive which cannot be rendered intuitive; such as Alceste expiring, the legacy of Eudamidas, the cause of Demetrius's disorder.

A HISTORY OF ART IN THE SCHOOLS OF ITALY

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL

The analogy of style observable in the figures impressed on Tuscan coins of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth century, and those found in the miniatures that decorate the manuscripts of the contemporary periods, proves that Tuscany had its artists long before the epoch which Vasari and his copyists fix for the importation of Greek art with Greek artists: whether those paintings be all pure Tuscan, or here and there interspersed with Greek ones, none will venture to decide, who knows the impossibility of drawing a limitary line sufficiently severe to distinguish the last spasms of an expiring art from the first stammerings of an infant one. Of the still surviving monuments of painting during those epochs, it may be sufficient to mention the famed Christ, painted on canvass and glued to a wooden cross, of a date anterior to 1003.

In subsequent times, the earliest and least unsuccessful essays in art, were made by the Pisano. Whilst a Greek sarcophagus at Pisa, storied with the incidents of Hippolytus and Phædra, furnished some elements of form to the sculptors Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, painting made some progress with Giunta Pisano: his composition of Christ on the Cross at the Angeli of Assisi, though defective in design, possesses life and expression.[44 - This picture has been confounded with another of the same subject by the same master, and the addition of the Donor's portrait, Frate Elia, which exists no more. The mutilated inscription on that mentioned above, has been thus restored by Lanzi,JuNTA PISanusJunTINI Me fecit.]

A similar progress was made by his contemporary Guido or Guidone of Sienna; a name not mentioned by Vasari, though in his frequent excursions to Sienna, he could not remain unacquainted with the works of Guido, at least one which still exists in the chapel of the Malevolti in S. Dominico, with the following often repeated inscription and date: —

Me Guido de senis diebus depinxit amenis
Quem Christus lenis nullis velit agere penis.

    A.D. M.CCXXI.
This Madonna, twenty years anterior to the birth of Cimabue, is superior to his Madonna in expression, and nearly equal in taste and colour, though inferior in style.

Duccio di Boninsegna, probably of his school, was celebrated as the restorer of that inlaid kind of Mosaic, called "Lavoro di Commesso." His works are from 1275, the year in which he received a commission for Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, to 1311, the period at which he was employed in the Domo of Sienna. If these dates be genuine, he can scarcely have lived till 1357, the year at which Fiorillo fixes his death. It is not probable that he should have stretched his span beyond a century, which must have been the case, if we suppose that he was twenty at the time he painted in S. Maria Novella; it is not probable that he should have chosen, or been suffered, to remain idle with the celebrity he had acquired in the labours of the Domo; and it is still less probable, that, if he was employed, what he produced in the interval, between that period and his death, should have perished or been destroyed, whilst we are still in possession of the paintings in the Domo, which made nearly an epoch in art, at which he laboured three years, for which he was paid upwards of 3000 scudi d'oro, the expense of gilding and ultramarine included. That part of it which faced the audience, represented in large figures the Madonna and various saints; that which fronted the choir, divided into many compartments, exhibited numerous compositions of Gospel subjects in figures of small proportion; it cannot be denied, that with all its copiousness, the whole savours strongly of the Greek manner.

Andrea Taffi, born 1213, the scholar of Apollonius, a Greek painter, and his assistant in some mosaics at S. Giovanni of Florence, is not mentioned out of that line by Vasari and Baldinucci: but the discovery of a picture with his name by Ignazio Stugford adds another legitimate name to the predecessors of Cimabue.

Buonamico di Cristofano, or Buffalmacco, of facetious memory, was the pupil of Taffi. His best works are lost, but from the remains it may be suspected that he owes at least as much to the tales of Boccaccio and Sacchetti, for the preservation of his name, as to his own powers. There still exists in Campo Santo at Pisa, a fresco of the Creation with a God Father five ells high, supporting Heaven and the elements; and three other stories of Adam, Noah and his Sons; a Crucifix, a Resurrection, and an Ascension. We must not look here for much symmetry of design or Giottesque elegance; his heads have little variety, and less beauty; sameness of features, a vulgar cast, and a gaping deformity of mouth, characterize his women; but now and then attention rests on the vivacity or physiognomy of some male countenance, especially that of Cain. Sometimes he snatches some movement from nature, such as that of the terrified man who flies from Calvary: he overflows in particoloured drapery, and delights in laboured ornaments of flowers and lace. A St. John the Baptist of his, yet existing, deserves to be mentioned as an instance of the utility of comparing works in painting and sculpture with contemporary coins, in order to ascertain their dates; for the same figure is exactly repeated on the Florentine scudo d'oro of that age. A jocular host of artists, scholars of this school, we pass over, as more important to the reader of the Decamerone and the Novelle, than to the student of art.

Lucca, about 1235, possessed Bonaventura Berlingieri, whose St. Francis still exists in the castle of Guiglia, near Modena, and is described as a work of considerable merit for its time: Margaritone of Arezzo, a pupil and follower of the Greeks, appears to have been several years anterior to Cimabue. He painted on canvass, and was the first, according to Vasari, who found the method of giving a more solid texture to pictures. Some crucifix of his is still seen at Arezzo, and another at Santa Croce in Florence, facing one of Cimabue. The style of both is antiquated, but not so different in merit to make us refuse a painter's name to Margaritone if we grant it to Cimabue.

Giovanni Cimabue,[45 - Born 1240, died 1300.] of noble lineage, was an architect and painter. He is considered as the father of Italian art, because with him legitimate history and a less interrupted series of dates, begin; because he succeeded better than his predecessors in disentangling himself from the shackles of Greek barbarity, and chiefly because he discovered and called forth the genius of Giotto. Vasari may be right in making him the scholar of those Greeks whom the Florentine Government had employed to paint the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but he errs in placing them in the Chapel Gondi, which, with the body of the church, was not erected till the subsequent century; he should have assigned them another chapel under the church, where time has discovered some vestiges of ancient painting. It seems, however, more probable, that Giunta Pisano gave Cimabue instruction, if it be ascertained, as Fiorillo asserts, that he worked in the great church of Assisi, 1253, when he was in his thirteenth year, and Giunta superintended the decorations of that fabric.

The pompous visit which Charles of Anjou paid to Cimabue in passing through Florence, sufficiently proves the celebrity he enjoyed, if it has not been sanctioned by the authority of Dante, who calls him the unrivalled champion of his day. Cimabue was then painting the Madonna with the Infant adored by six angels; the picture when finished was carried in procession from Borgo Allegro to Santa Maria Novella, and placed in the Chapel Rucellai, where it still exists. The heraldic arrangement of the figures, their physiognomic monotony, the exility of the detail and barbarous execution, contrast strangely with the elevation and novelty of the artist's conception. Cimabue lost the female and the mother in the Queen of Heaven. Insensible to the blandishments of beauty, fierce like the age in which he lived, he excelled in male, especially aged characters; these he impressed with something of a stern grandeur, not often surpassed since. Vast and comprehensive in his ideas, he seized on subjects of numerous composition, and expressed them in large proportions; those features of prophetic grandeur which surprise in his frescoes at the Dominicans and Santa Trinità of Florence, are still excelled by the features which he displayed in the upper church of Assisi – meteors of the age in which he lived. They still exist, nor is it easily conceived how works of so different style, against the testimony of Vasari, and the uniform tradition of five centuries, could, as they were of late, be ascribed to the more regulated hand and gentler spirit of Giotto.

Giotto's year of birth has been disputed; Vasari fixes it to 1276, Baldinucci to 1265. He was the son of a cottager at Vespignano, and bred to be a shepherd; but, a painter born, he amused himself from infancy with attempts to draw whatever object struck his fancy. A sheep which he had copied on a flat stone caught the eye of Cimabue, who was in the neighbourhood, happened to pass by, demanded him of his father, and carried him to Florence to instruct him; but he soon rivalled, and in a short time eclipsed his master by a grace and an amenity of execution which remained unequalled to the time of Masaccio.

For the rapidity of this progress, unless we were to ascribe it to inspiration, we must account from the happy coincidence of external advantages with the genius of the man. A period so obscure, admits of little more than conjecture, but there is no improbability in supposing that Giotto outstripped his master and the times by the same means which rendered Michael Agnolo so soon superior to Ghirlandaio, – modelling and the study of the antique. We know that he was a sculptor, and that his models still existed in the time of Lorenzo Ghiberti. Good originals he could find among the fragments of antiquity discovered before his time, and scattered over Florence and Rome: from what other source could he derive the character of his male heads, and that squareness of form so different from the exility and indecision of all contemporary styles? The few majestic natural folds of his draperies, and the composure and unaffected air of his figures, breathe the spirit of the antique. His very defects are the consequences of such a study. His manner has been charged with a kind of statuine precision (del statuino), unknown to other schools, and unknown to artists who do not form themselves on the antique.

If to these conjectures it be objected, that the want of uniformity, dryness of design, extremities either faulty or hid under a preposterous length of drapery, rather betray a nurseling of Pisa than a pupil of the ancients; it ought to be considered that uniformity is the result of settled principles; that he who had to remove the rubbish could not be expected to give the polish; that he who had to teach eyes to look, hands to move, and feet to stand, could not be supposed to make them do it with all the correctness, propriety or elegance, they were capable of; that a certain gymnophobia equally attends the infancy and the decrepitude of taste, and that the approbation of a public and an artist's flattery are always reciprocal.

And no artist commanded more of public favour than Giotto. Legislator of taste, not in Tuscany alone, but at Rome, Naples, Bologna, and the Venetian State, he excelled his master as much in celebrity as he had excelled him in grace and method. How soon he did this may be seen on comparing his earliest works at Assisi with those of his master in the same place. Genuine elements of composition, expressions inspired by Nature, accuracy of design, progressively appear. It is no hyperbole to affirm, that in certain characters no artist ever went nearer the source of expression than Giotto, and that in the maiden airs of untainted virginity none ever excelled, and perhaps, Raphael and Domenichino excepted, few ever approached him.

Though not the inventor, Giotto was the restorer of portrait-painting; resemblance, with character of face and attitude, date from him. He gave us Dante, Brunetto Latini, Corso Donato, &c. Mosaic was improved by him, and his powers in it shown by the celebrated Navicella, or boat of Saint Peter, in the portico of the Basilica at Rome; though restoration has transformed it to a work of shreds and patches, and reduced his claim on it to the mere name. Missal painting likewise owes him some gratitude; and in architecture the grand steeple of the Domo at Florence is the work of Giotto.