Henry Fuseli

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If finishing be to terminate all the parts of a performance in an equal degree, no artist ever finished his work. A great part of conception or execution is always sacrificed to some individual excellence which either he possesses or thinks he possesses. The colourist makes lines only the vehicle of colour; the designer subordinates hue to his line; the man of breadth or chiaroscuro overwhelms sometimes both, and the subject itself to produce effect. ”

“ Nature herself has set her barriers between age and age, between genius and genius, which no mortal overleaps; all attempts to raise to perfection at once, what can only be reared by a succession of epochs, must prove abhortive and nugatory: the very proposals of premiums, honours, and rewards to excite talent or rouse genius, prove of themselves that the age is unfavourable to Art; for, had it the patronage of the public, how could it want them? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The epoch of rules, of theories, poetics, criticisms in a nation, will add to their stock of authors in the same proportion as it diminishes their stock of genius: their productions will bear the stamp of study, not of nature; they will adopt, not generate; sentiment will supplant images, and narrative invention; words will be no longer the dress but the limbs of [104] composition, and feeble elegance will supply the want of nerves. ”

“ Siena claims him for her own; and if a charming whole, suavity of tint combined with force of chiaroscuro, be the principal characteristic of that school, no native has expressed it with equal evidence and felicity. This gaiety of tone and manner some have traced to the jovial turn of the man himself; as careless as gay, ever in pursuit of youth and beauty, though with an indiscretion that brands him with the stain tacked to his name, from a character so volatile and dissipated, that inequality of execution might be expected which marks his happiest effusions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Unpractised in colour to his twenty-sixth year, he attended solely to design, less to form beauty or trace characters [317] of delicacy, than to express robust and energetic ones: in such he often succeeded, but sometimes sunk to heaviness. His colour resembled his line, not soft and airy, but dense, cut into masses of chiaroscuro, and with a general tone of ashy hues, tints of sorrow, contrition, anguish, the favourite topics of his pencil. The frescoes of Calabrese at Modena, Naples, Malta, have a stamp of grandeur. ”

“ To raise the Arts to a conspicuous height may not perhaps be in our power; we shall have deserved well of posterity if we succeed in stemming their farther downfall, if we fix them on the solid base of principle. If it be out of our power to furnish the student's activity with adequate practice, we may contribute to form his theory; and Criticism founded on experiment, instructed by comparison, in possession of the labours of every epoch of Art, may spread the genuine elements of taste, and check the present torrent of affectation and insipidity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Danaë, of which we have seen duplicates, the head excepted, he seems to have painted from an antique female torso. But ideal beauty of face, if ever he conceived, he never has expressed; his beauty is equally remote from the idea of the Venus, the Niobe, and the best forms of Nature. The Magdalen, in the picture of St. Girolamo of Parma, is beholden for the charms of her face to chiaroscuro, and that incomparable hue and suavity of bloom which scarcely permit us to discover the defects of forms not much above the vulgar. ”

“ All, whether public or private, supported by patronage or individual contribution, were and are symptoms of Art in distress, monuments of public dereliction and decay of Taste. But they are at the same time the asylum of the student, the theatre of his exercises, the repositories of the materials, the archives of the documents of our art, whose principles their officers are bound now to maintain, and for the preservation of which they are responsible to posterity, undebauched by the flattery, heedless of the sneers, undismayed by the frown of their own time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Poetry, that supplies the real features and materials of expression when it inspires the thought, arrives at the full display of its powers long before its sisters have disentangled themselves from the impediments of infancy; and of these, Sculpture, whose aim is infinitely less complex, raises the vigorous fabric of forms, whilst Painting is still impotently struggling with the rudiments of line, perspective, keeping, chiaroscuro, colour; which to unite in an equal degree has hitherto been found above the lot of humanity. The imitators of Giotto were in this state of struggle ”

“ Of Correggio's numerous pretending imitators, Lodovico Carracci appears to be the only one who penetrated his principle. The axiom, that the less the traces appear of the means by which a work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of Nature, is not an axiom likely to spring from the infancy of art. The even colour, veiled splendour, the solemn twilight; that tone of devotion and cloistered meditation, which Lodovico Carracci spread over his works, could arise only from the contemplation of some preceding style, analogous to his own feelings and its comparison with Nature ”

“ Every artist has, or ought to have, a character or system of his own; if, instead of referring that to the test of nature, you judge him by your own packed notions, or arraign him at the tribunal of schools which he does not recognize—you degrade the dignity of art, and add another fool to the herd of Dilettanti. ”

“ If there be any solidity in the observation of Mengs on Correggio's first manner, as a mixture of Pietro Perugino's and Lionardo's style, and of course not very different from Raphael's, how comes it that in the works of his second and best manner all resemblance to either, and consequently to Raphael, disappears? The simplicity of Raphael's forms is little beholden to that contrast and those foreshortenings which are the element of Correggio's style. Raphael sacrificed all to the subject and expression; Correggio, in an artificial medium, sacrifices all to the air of things and harmony. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ In colour, little solicitous about the dictates of art, or the real hues of Nature, he created an ideal and arbitrary tone, which represented the air of things without diving into their substance, and, content with absolute dominion over the eye, left it to others to inform the mind. If his method was compendiary; none ever knew better how to improve an accident to a beauty, and give to the random strokes of haste the look of deliberate practice. ”

“ Condescension is not always delicate, and the indiscretions of simplicity sooner or later provoke the pride, contempt, and arrogance of superior powers. Giuliano, Granacci, and L'Indaco, experienced all three from Michael Angelo; they were among his conscripts for assisting in the frescoes of the Capella; but finding their pigmy capacities unequal to his colossal style, he not only, in lofty silence, destroyed what they had begun, but barring all access to the Chapel and himself, forced them to return, vainly grumbling, to Florence. ”

“ The imitation of Nature herself leads to style, that of the schools to manner.
Coroll.—The line of Michael Angelo is 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 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.
The design of Raphael is either historic or poetic. ”