Henry Fuseli

“ If Art be a complete system of invariable rules, he only is a master of Art who substantiates its precepts by equal uniformity of execution and taste; and till he arrives at that point, he can only be said to have seized more or less of its parts in making approaches to the whole, and to be indebted to "study" and not to "nature," if he put himself at last in possession of it.
Such was the progress of Raffaello; he arrived by degrees at style in design, by degrees at style in composition, by degrees at invention, expression, and at what appeared to him colour. ”

“ His figure is a class, it characterizes every beauty of virility verging on age; the prince, the priest, the father are visible, but absorbed in the man serve only to dignify the victim of one great expression; though poised by the artist, for us to apply the compass to the face of the Laocoon, is to measure the wave fluctuating in the storm: this tempestuous front, this contracted nose, the immersion of these eyes, and above all that long-drawn mouth, are, separate and united, seats of convulsion, features of nature struggling within the jaws of death. ”

“ In that sublime design of Michael Agnolo, where a figure is roused by a descending genius from his repose on a globe, on which he yet reclines, and with surprise discovers the phantoms of the passions which he courted, unmasked in wild confusion flitting round him, M. Agnolo was less ambitious to express the nature of a dream, or to bespeak our attention to its picturesque effect and powerful contrasts, than to impress us with the lesson, that all is vanity and life a farce, unless engaged by virtue and the pursuits of mind. ”

“ We contemplate the whole in its mass as an immense fabric reared for some noble purpose: on too near an approach, not perhaps of equal beauty, with parts left rough that might have been smoothed to neatness, and others only neat that might have been polished into elegance; blemishes that vanish at a proper distance: by uniform grandeur of style, the whole strikes with awe and delight, attracts now the eyes of the race who saw it rise, and, secure of duration from the firmness of its base and the solidity of its materials, will command the admiration of posterity. ”

“ What are we to infer from this unequal verdict of posterity? What, but what Cicero says, that time obliterates the conceits of opinion or fashion, and establishes the verdicts of Nature? The age of Julio and Leone demanded genius for its own sake, and found it—the age of Cosmo, Ferdinand, and Urban, demanded talents and dispatch to flatter their own vanity, and found them too; but Cosmo, Ferdinand, and Urban, are sunk in the same oblivion, or involved in the same censure with their tools—Julio and Leone continue to live with the permanent powers which they had called forth. ”

“ On these two, unseen to all else, Coriolanus, perplexed in the extreme, in an attitude of despair, his sword half drawn, as if to slay himself, fixes his scared eyes: who discovers not that he is in a trance, and in the female warrior recognises the tutelary genius of Rome, and her attendant Fortune, to terrify him into compliance? Shall we disgrace with the frigid conceit of an allegory the powerful invention which disclosed to the painter's eye the agitation in the Roman's breast and the proper moment for fiction? ”

“ We stand with awe before M. Angelo, and tremble at the height to which he elevates us—we embrace Raphael, and follow him wherever he leads us. Energy, with propriety of character and modest grace poise his line and determine his correctness. Perfect human beauty he has not represented; no face of Raphael’s is perfectly beautiful; no figure of his, in the abstract, possesses the proportions that could raise it to a standard of imitation: form to him was only a vehicle of character or pathos, and to those he adapted it in a mode and with a truth which leaves all attempts at emendation hopeless. ”

“ It is difficult to kill a sheep with dignity in a modern language, to flay and to prepare it for the table, detailing every circumstance of the process. Difficult also, without sinking below the level of poetry, to harness mules to a waggon, particularizing every article of their furniture, straps, rings, staples, and even the tying of the knots that kept all together. Homer, who writes always to the eye, with all his sublimity and grandeur, has the minuteness of a Flemish painter. ”

“ There is no compendious method of becoming great; the price of excellence is labour, and time that of immortality.
Colour, like Design, has two essential parts, Imitation and Style. It begins in glare, is caught by deception, emerges to imitation, is finished by style, and debauched by manner.
Glare is always the first feature of a savage or an infant taste. The timid or barbarous beginner, afraid of impairing the splendour by diminishing the mass, exults in the Egyptian glare which he spreads over a surface unbroken by tint and not relieved by shade. ”

“ How are we to reconcile the neglect which, disdaining to consult Nature, or to regulate a picture by cartoon or design, relied for the whole on practice and on chance, with the praise bestowed on Razzi's composition, the faces that speak, the breasts that palpitate, the torsos compared by some to the antique, by others to Michael Angelo, but by that indifference which often distinguishes the man of genius from the man of talent, him who possesses by Nature from him who acquires by art? ”

“ In spite of the most portentous deformity, and without considering the spell of his chiaroscuro, such were his powers of nature, such the grandeur, pathos, or simplicity of his composition, from the most elevated or extensive arrangement to the meanest and most homely, that the best cultivated eye, the purest sensibility, and the most refined taste dwell on them, equally enthralled. Shakspeare alone excepted, no one combined with so much transcendent excellence, so many, in all other men unpardonable faults—and reconciled us to them. ”

“ The Infant Christ of M. Agnolo is a superhuman conception, but as man and Redeemer with his cross, in the Minerva, he is a figure as mannered in form and attitude, as averting by stern severity; and, as the Judge of Mankind in the Last Judgment, he seems to me as unworthy of the artist's mind as of his master-hand. The Christs of Raphael, as infants, are seldom more than lovely children; as a man, the painter has poised His form between church tradition and the dignified mildness of his own character. ”

“ In an age of equal refinement and corruption of manners, when systems of education and seduction go hand in hand; when Religion itself compounds with fashion; when, in the pursuit of present enjoyment, all consideration of futurity vanishes, and the real object of life is lost—in such an age, every exertion confers a benefit on society which tends to impress Man with his destiny, to hold the mirror up to life, less indeed to discriminate its characters, than those situations which shew what all are born for, what all ought to act for, and what all must inevitably come to. ”

“ Look round all Europe—revolve the page of history from Osymandias to Pericles, from Pericles to Constantine—and say what age, what race stretched forth a stronger arm to raise the drooping genius of Art? Is it the public's fault if encouragement is turned into a job, and dispatch and quantity have supplanted excellence and quality, as objects of the artist's emulation?—And do you think that accidental and temporary encouragement can invalidate charges founded on permanent causes? What blew up the Art, will in its own surcease terminate its success. Art is not ephemeral ”