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ARGUMENT

Introduction. Greece the legitimate parent of the Art. – Summary of the local and political causes. Conjectures on the mechanic process of the Art. Period of preparation – Polygnotus – essential style – Apollodorus – characteristic style. Period of establishment – Zeuxis, Parrhasius, Timanthes. Period of refinement – Eupompus Apelles, Aristides, Euphranor.

FIRST LECTURE

The difficulties of the task prescribed to me, if they do not preponderate are at least equal to the honour of the situation. If, to discourse on any topic with truth, precision, and clearness, before a mixed or fortuitous audience, before men neither initiated in the subject, nor rendered minutely attentive by expectation, be no easy task, how much more arduous must it be to speak systematically on an art, before a select assembly, composed of Professors whose life has been divided between theory and practice, of Critics whose taste has been refined by contemplation and comparison, and of Students, who, bent on the same pursuit, look for the best and always most compendious method of mastering the principles, to arrive at its emoluments and honours. Your lecturer is to instruct them in the principles of 'composition; to form their taste for design and colouring; to strengthen their judgment; to point out to them the beauties and imperfections of celebrated works of art; and the particular excellencies and defects of great masters; and finally, to lead them into the readiest and most efficacious paths of study.'3 If, Gentlemen, these directions presuppose in the student a sufficient stock of elementary knowledge, an expertness in the rudiments, not mere wishes but a peremptory will of improvement, and judgment with docility; how much more do they imply in the person selected to address them – knowledge founded on theory, substantiated and matured by practice, a mass of select and well digested materials, perspicuity of method and command of words, imagination to place things in such views as they are not commonly seen in, presence of mind, and that resolution, the result of conscious vigour, which, in daring to correct errors, cannot be easily discountenanced. – As conditions like these would discourage abilities far superior to mine, my hopes of approbation, moderate as they are, must in a great measure depend on that indulgence which may grant to my will what it would refuse to my powers.

Before I proceed to the history of Style itself, it seems to be necessary that we should agree about the terms which denote its object and perpetually recur in treating of it; that my vocabulary of technic expression should not clash with the dictionary of my audience; mine is nearly that of your late president. I shall confine myself at present to a few of the most important; the words nature, beauty, grace, taste, copy, imitation, genius, talent. Thus, by nature I understand the general and permanent principles of visible objects, not disfigured by accident, or distempered by disease, not modified by fashion or local habits. Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object. On beauty I do not mean to perplex you or myself with abstract ideas, and the romantic reveries of platonic philosophy, or to inquire whether it be the result of a simple or complex principle. As a local idea, beauty is a despotic princess, and subject to the anarchies of despotism, enthroned to-day, dethroned to-morrow. The beauty we acknowledge is that harmonious whole of the human frame, that unison of parts to one end, which enchants us; the result of the standard set by the great masters of our art, the ancients, and confirmed by the submissive verdict of modern imitation. By grace I mean that artless balance of motion and repose sprung from character, founded on propriety, which neither falls short of the demands nor overleaps the modesty of nature. Applied to execution, it means that dexterous power which hides the means by which it was attained, the difficulties it has conquered. When we say taste, we mean not crudely the knowledge of what is right in art: taste estimates the degrees of excellence, and by comparison proceeds from justness to refinement. Our language, or rather those who use it, generally confound, when speaking of the art, copy with imitation, though essentially different in operation and meaning. Precision of eye and obedience of hand are the requisites of the former, without the least pretence to choice, what to select, what to reject; whilst choice directed by judgment or taste constitutes the essence of imitation, and alone can raise the most dexterous copyist to the noble rank of an artist. The imitation of the ancients was, essential, characteristic, ideal. The first cleared nature of accident, defect, excrescence; the second found the stamen which connects character with the central form; the third raised the whole and the parts to the highest degree of unison. Of genius I shall speak with reserve, for no word has been more indiscriminately confounded; by genius I mean that power which enlarges the circle of human knowledge, which discovers new materials of nature, or combines the known with novelty, whilst talent arranges, cultivates, polishes the discoveries of genius.

Guided by these preliminaries we now approach that happy coast, where, from an arbitrary hieroglyph, the palliative of ignorance, from a tool of despotism, or a ponderous monument of eternal sleep, art emerged into life, motion, and liberty; where situation, climate, national character, religion, manners and government conspired to raise it on that permanent basis, which after the ruins of the fabric itself, still subsists and bids defiance to the ravages of time; as uniform in the principle as various in its applications, the art of the Greeks possessed in itself and propagated, like its chief object Man, the germs of immortality.

I shall not detail here the reasons and the coincidence of fortunate circumstances which raised the Greeks to be the arbiters of form.4 The standard they erected, the cannon they framed, fell not from Heaven: but as they fancied themselves of divine origin, and Religion was the first mover of their art, it followed that they should endeavour to invest their authors with the most perfect form; and as Man possesses that exclusively, they were led to a complete and intellectual study of its elements and constitution; this, with their climate, which allowed that form to grow, and to show itself to the greatest advantage; with their civil and political institutions, which established and encouraged exercises and manners best calculated to develope its powers; and above all that simplicity of their end, that uniformity of pursuit which in all its derivations retraced the great principle from which it sprang, and like a central stamen drew it out into one immense connected web of congenial imitation; these, I say, are the reasons why the Greeks carried the art to a height which no subsequent time or race has been able to rival or even to approach.

Great as these advantages were, it is not to be supposed that Nature deviated from her gradual progress in the developement of human faculties, in favour of the Greeks. Greek Art had her infancy, but the Graces rocked the cradle, and Love taught her to speak. If ever legend deserved our belief, the amorous tale of the Corinthian maid, who traced the shade of her departing lover by the secret lamp, appeals to our sympathy, to grant it; and leads us at the same time to some observations on the first mechanical essays of Painting, and that linear method which, though passed nearly unnoticed by Winkelmann, seems to have continued as the basis of execution, even when the instrument for which it was chiefly adapted had long been laid aside.

The etymology of the word used by the Greeks to express Painting being the same with that which they employ for Writing, makes the similarity of tool, materials, method, almost certain. The tool was a style or pen of wood or metal; the materials a board, or a levigated plane of wood, metal, stone, or some prepared compound; the method, letters or lines.

The first essays of the art were Skiagrams, simple outlines of a shade, similar to those which have been introduced to vulgar use by the students and parasites of Physiognomy, under the name of Silhouettes; without any other addition of character or feature but what the profile of the object, thus delineated could afford.

The next step of the art was the Monogram, outlines of figures without light or shade, but with some addition of the parts within the outline, and from that to the Monochrom, or paintings of a single colour on a plane or tablet, primed with white, and then covered with what they called punic wax, first amalgamated with a tough resinous pigment, generally of a red, sometimes dark brown, or black colour. In, or rather through this thin inky ground, the outlines were traced with a firm but pliant style, which they called Cestrum; if the traced line happened to be incorrect or wrong, it was gently effaced with the finger or with a sponge, and easily replaced by a fresh one. When the whole design was settled, and no farther alteration intended, it was suffered to dry, was covered, to make it permanent, with a brown encaustic varnish, the lights were worked over again, and rendered more brilliant with a point still more delicate, according to the gradual advance from mere outlines to some indications, and at last to masses of light and shade, and from those to the superinduction of different colours, or the invention of the Polychrom, which by the addition of the pencil to the style, raised the mezzotinto or stained drawing to a legitimate picture, and at length produced that vaunted harmony, the magic scale of Grecian colour.5

If this conjecture, for it is not more, on the process of linear painting, formed on the evidence and comparison of passages always unconnected, and frequently contradictory, be founded in fact, the rapturous astonishment at the supposed momentaneous production of the Herculanean dancers and the figures on the earthern vases of the ancients, will cease; or rather, we shall no longer suffer ourselves to be deluded by palpable impossibility of execution: on a ground of levigated lime or on potters ware, no velocity or certainty attainable by human hands can conduct a full pencil with that degree of evenness equal from beginning to end with which we see those figures executed, or if it could, would ever be able to fix the line on the glassy surface without its flowing: to make the appearances we see, possible, we must have recourse to the linear process that has been described, and transfer our admiration, to the perseverance, the correctness of principle, the elegance of taste that conducted the artist's hand, without presuming to arm it with contradictory powers: the figures he drew and we admire, are not the magic produce of a winged pencil, they are the result of gradual improvement, exquisitely finished monochroms.

How long the pencil continued only to assist, when it began to engross and when it at last entirely supplanted the cestrum, cannot in the perplexity of accidental report be ascertained. Apollodorus in the 93d Olymp. and Zeuxis in the 94th, are said to have used it with freedom and with power. The battle of the Lapithæ and the Centaurs, which according to Pausanias, Parrhasius painted on the shield of the Minerva of Phidias, to be chased by Mys, could be nothing but a monochrom, and was probably designed with the cestrum, as an instrument of greater accuracy.6 Apelles and Protogenes, nearly a century afterwards, drew their contested lines with the pencil; and that alone, as delicacy and evanescent subtlety were the characteristic of those lines, may give an idea of their mechanic excellence. And yet in their time the diagraphic process,7 which is the very same with the linear one we have described, made a part of liberal education. And Pausias of Sicyon, the contemporary of Apelles, and perhaps the greatest master of composition amongst the ancients, when employed to repair the decayed pictures of Polygnotus at Thespiæ, was adjudged by general opinion to have egregiously failed in the attempt, because he had substituted the pencil to the cestrum, and entered a contest of superiority with weapons not his own.

Here it might seem in its place to say something on the Encaustic method used by the ancients; were it not a subject by ambiguity of expression and conjectural dispute so involved in obscurity that a true account of its process must be despaired of: the most probable idea we can form of it is, that it bore some resemblance to our oil-painting, and that the name was adopted to denote the use of materials, inflammable or prepared by fire, the supposed durability of which, whether applied hot or cold, authorised the terms ἐνεκαυσε and inussit.

The first great name of that epoch of the preparatory period when facts appear to overbalance conjecture, is that of Polygnotus of Thasos, who painted the poecile at Athens, and the lesche or public hall at Delphi. Of these works, but chiefly of the two large pictures at Delphi, which represented scenes subsequent to the eversion of Troy, and Ulysses consulting the spirit of Tiresias in Hades, Pausanias8 gives a minute and circumstantial detail; by which we are led to surmise, that what is now called composition was totally wanting in them as a whole: for he begins his description at one end of the picture, and finishes it at the opposite extremity, a senseless method if we suppose that a central group, or a principal figure to which the rest were in a certain degree subordinate, attracted the eye; it appears as plain that they had no perspective, the series of figures on the second or middle ground being described as placed above those on the foreground, and the figures in the distance above the whole: the honest method too which the painter chose of annexing to many of his figures, their names in writing, savours much of the infancy of painting. – We should however be cautious to impute solely to ignorance or imbecility, what might rest on the firm base of permanent principle. The genius of Polygnotus was more than that of any other artist before or after, Phidias perhaps alone excepted, a public genius, his works monumental works, and these very pictures the votive offerings of the Gnidians. The art at that summit, when exerting its powers to record the feats, consecrate the acts, perpetuate the rites, propagate the religion, or to disseminate the peculiar doctrines of a nation, heedless of the rules prescribed to inferior excellence and humbler pursuits, returns to its elements, leaps strict possibility, combines remote causes with present effects, connects local distance and unites separate moments. – Simplicity, parallelism, apposition, take place of variety, contrast, and composition. – Such was the Lesche painted by Polygnotus; and if we consider the variety of powers that distinguished many of the parts, we must incline to ascribe the primitive arrangement of the whole rather to the artist's choice and lofty simplicity, than want of comprehension: nature had endowed him with that rectitude of taste which in the individuum discovers the stamen of the genus, hence his style of design was essential with glimpses of grandeur9 and ideal beauty. Polygnotus, says Aristotle, improves the model. His invention reached the conception of undescribed being, in the dæmon Eurynomus; filled the chasm of description in Theseus and Pirithous, in Ariadne and Phædra; and improved its terrors in the spectre of Tityus; whilst colour to assist it, became in his hand an organ of expression; such was the prophetic glow which still crimsoned the cheeks of his Cassandra in the time of Lucian.10 The improvements in painting which Pliny ascribes to him, of having dressed the heads of his females in variegated veils and bandeaus, and robed them in lucid drapery, of having gently opened the lips, given a glimpse of the teeth, and lessened the former monotony of face, such improvements, I say, were surely the most trifling part of a power to which the age of Apelles and that of Quintilian paid equal homage: nor can it add much to our esteem for him, to be told by Pliny that there existed, in the portico of Pompey, a picture of his with the figure of a warrior in an attitude so ambiguous as to make it a question whether he were ascending or descending. Such a figure could only be the offspring of mental or technic imbecility, even if it resembled the celebrated one of a Diomede carrying off the palladium with one and holding a sword in the other hand, on the intaglio inscribed, I think, with the name of Dioscorides.

With this simplicity of manner and materials the art seems to have proceeded from Polygnotus, Aglaophon, Phidias, Panænus, Colotes, and Evenor, the father of Parrhasius, during a period of more or less disputed Olympiads, to the appearance of Apollodorus the Athenian, who applied the essential principles of Polygnotus to the delineation of the species, by investigating the leading forms that discriminate the various classes of human qualities and passions. The acuteness of his taste led him to discover that as all men were connected by one general form, so they were separated each by some predominant power, which fixed character and bound them to a class: that in proportion as this specific power partook of individual peculiarities, the farther it was removed from a share in that harmonious system which constitutes nature, and consists in a due balance of all its parts; thence he drew his line of imitation, and personified the central form of the class, to which his object belonged; and to which the rest of its qualities administered without being absorbed: agility was not suffered to destroy firmness, solidity, or weight; nor strength and weight agility; elegance did not degenerate to effeminacy, or grandeur swell to hugeness; such were his principles of style: his expression extended them to the mind, if we may judge from the two subjects mentioned by Pliny, in which he seems to have personified the characters of devotion and impiety; that, in the adoring figure of a priest, perhaps of Chryses, expanding his gratitude at the shrine of the God whose arrows avenged his wrongs and restored his daughter: and this, in the figure of Ajax wrecked, and from the sea-swept rock hurling defiance unto the murky sky. As neither of these subjects can present themselves to a painter's mind without a contrast of the most awful and terrific tones of colour, magic of light and shade, and unlimited command over the tools of art, we may with Pliny and with Plutarch consider Apollodorus as the first assertor of the pencil's honours, as the first colourist of his age, and the man who opened the gates of art which the Heracleot Zeuxis entered.11

From the essential style of Polygnotus and the specific discrimination of Apollodorus, Zeuxis, by comparison of what belonged to the genus and what to the class, framed at last that ideal form, which in his opinion, constituted the supreme degree of human beauty, or in other words, embodied possibility, by uniting the various but homogeneous powers scattered among many, in one object, to one end. Such a system, if it originated in genius, was the considerate result of taste refined by the unremitting perseverance with which he observed, consulted, compared, selected the congenial but scattered forms of nature. Our ideas are the offspring of our senses, we are not more able to create the form of a being, we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence, and he alone can comprehend what one degree of beauty wants to become equal to another, and at last superlative. He who thinks the pretty handsome, will think the handsome a beauty, and fancy he has met an ideal form in a merely handsome one, whilst he who has compared beauty with beauty, will at last improve form upon form to a perfect image; this was the method of Zeuxis, and this he learnt from Homer, whose mode of ideal composition, according to Quintilian, he considered as his model. Each individual of Homer forms a class, expresses and is circumscribed by one quality of heroic power; Achilles alone unites their various but congenial energies. The grace of Nireus, the dignity of Agamemnon, the impetuosity of Hector, the magnitude, the steady prowess of the great, the velocity of the lesser Ajax, the perseverance of Ulysses, the intrepidity of Diomede, are emanations of energy that reunite in one splendid centre fixed in Achilles. This standard of the unison of homogeneous powers exhibited in successive action by the poet, the painter, invigorated no doubt by the contemplation of the works of Phidias, transferred to his own art and substantiated by form, when he selected the congenial beauties of Croton to compose a perfect female. Like Phidias too, he appears to have been less pathetic than sublime, and even in his female forms more ample and august than elegant or captivating: his principle was epic, and this Aristotle either considered not or did not comprehend, when he refuses him the expression of character in action and feature: Jupiter on his throne encircled by the celestial synod, and Helen, the arbitress of Troy, contained probably the principal elements of his style; but he could trace the mother's agitation in Alcmena, and in Penelope the pangs of wedded love.

On those powers of his invention which Lucian relates in the memoir inscribed with the name of Zeuxis, I shall reserve my observations for a fitter moment. Of his colour we know little, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that it emulated the beauties and the grandeur of his design; and that he extended light and shade to masses, may be implied from his peculiar method of painting monochroms on a black ground, adding the lights in white.12

The correctness of Parrhasius succeeded to the genius of Zeuxis. He circumscribed his ample style, and by subtle examination of outline established that standard of divine and heroic form which raised him to the authority of a legislator from whose decisions there was no appeal. He gave to the divine and heroic character in painting, what Polycletus had given to the human in sculpture, by his Doryphorus, a canon of proportion. Phidias had discovered in the nod of the Homeric Jupiter the characteristic of majesty, inclination of the head: this hinted to him a higher elevation of the neck behind, a bolder protrusion of the front, and the increased perpendicular of the profile. To this conception Parrhasius fixed a maximum; that point from which descends the ultimate line of celestial beauty, the angle within which moves what is inferior, beyond which what is portentous. From the head conclude to the proportions of the neck, the limbs, the extremities; from the father to the race of gods; all, the sons of one, Zeus; derived from one source of tradition, Homer; formed by one artist, Phidias: on him measured and decided by Parrhasius. In the simplicity of this principle, adhered to by the succeeding periods, lies the uninterrupted progress and the unattainable superiority of Grecian art. With this prerogative, which evidently implies a profound as well as general knowledge of the parts, how are we to reconcile the criticism passed on the intermediate parts of his forms as inferior to their outline? or how could Winkelmann, in contradiction with his own principles, explain it, by a want of anatomic knowledge?13 how is it possible to suppose that he who decided his outline with such intelligence that it appeared ambient, and pronounced the parts that escaped the eye, should have been uninformed of its contents? let us rather suppose that the defect ascribed to the intermediate forms of his bodies, if such a fault there was, consisted in an affectation of smoothness bordering on insipidity, in something effeminately voluptuous, which absorbed their character and the idea of elastic vigour; and this Euphranor seems to have hinted at, when in comparing his own Theseus with that of Parrhasius, he pronounced the Ionian's to have fed on roses, his own on flesh:14 emasculate softness was not, in his opinion, the proper companion of the contour, or flowery freshness of colour an adequate substitute for the sterner tints of heroic form.

None of the ancients seem to have united or wished to combine as man and artist, more qualities seemingly incompatible than Parrhasius. – The volubility and ostentatious insolence of an Asiatic with Athenian simplicity and urbanity of manners; punctilious correctness with blandishments of handling and luxurious colour, and with sublime and pathetic conception, a fancy libidinously sportive.15 If he was not the inventor, he surely was the greatest master of allegory, supposing that he really embodied by signs universally comprehended that image of the Athenian ΔΗΜΟΣ or people, which was to combine and to express at once its contradictory qualities. Perhaps he traced the jarring branches to their source, the aboriginal moral principle of the Athenian character, which he made intuitive. This supposition alone can shed a dawn of possibility on what else appears impossible. We know that the personification of the Athenian Δημος was an object of sculpture, and that its images by Lyson and Leochares16 were publicly set up; but there is no clue to decide whether they preceded or followed the conceit of Parrhasius. It was repeated by Aristolaus, the son of Pausias.

The decided forms of Parrhasius, Timanthes the Cythnian, his competitor for fame, attempted to inspire with mind and to animate with passions. No picture of antiquity is more celebrated than his immolation of Iphigenia in Aulis, painted, as Quintilian informs us, in contest with Colotes of Teos, a painter and sculptor from the school of Phidias; crowned with victory at its rival exhibition, and since, the theme of unlimited praise from the orators and historians of antiquity, though the solidity or justice of their praise relatively to our art, has been questioned by modern criticism. On this subject, which not only contains the gradations of affection from the most remote to the closest link of humanity, but appears to me to offer the fairest specimen of the limits which the theory of the ancients had prescribed to the expression of pathos, I think it my duty the more circumstantially to expatiate, as the censure passed on the method of Timanthes, has been sanctioned by the highest authority in matters of art, that of your late President, in his eighth discourse at the delivery of the academic prize for the best picture painted from this very subject.

How did Timanthes treat it? Iphigenia, the victim ordained by the oracle to be offered for the success of the Greek expedition against Troy, was represented standing ready for immolation at the altar, the priest, the instruments of death at her side; and around her, an assembly of the most important agents or witnesses of the terrible solemnity, from Ulysses, who had disengaged her from the embraces of her mother at Mycenæ, to her nearest male relations, her uncle Menelaus, and her own father, Agamemnon. Timanthes, say Pliny and Quintilian with surprising similarity of phrase, when, in gradation he had consumed every image of grief within the reach of art, from the unhappy priest, to the deeper grief of Ulysses, and from that to the pangs of kindred sympathy in Menelaus, unable to express with dignity the father's woe, threw a veil, or if you will, a mantle over his face. – This mantle, the pivot of objection, indiscriminately borrowed, as might easily be supposed, by all the concurrents for the prize, gave rise to the following series of criticisms:

"Before I conclude, I cannot avoid making one observation on the pictures now before us. I have observed, that every candidate has copied the celebrated invention of Timanthes in hiding the face of Agamemnon in his mantle; indeed such lavish encomiums have been bestowed on this thought, and that too by men of the highest character in critical knowledge, – Cicero, Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, and Pliny, – and have been since re-echoed by almost every modern that has written on the Arts, that your adopting it can neither be wondered at, nor blamed. It appears now to be so much connected with the subject, that the spectator would perhaps be disappointed in not finding united in the picture what he always united in his mind, and considered as indispensably belonging to the subject. But it may be observed, that those who praise this circumstance were not painters. They use it as an illustration only of their own art; it served their purpose, and it was certainly not their business to enter into the objections that lie against it in another Art. I fear we have but very scanty means of exciting those powers over the imagination, which make so very considerable and refined a part of poetry. It is a doubt with me, whether we should even make the attempt. The chief, if not the only occasion which the painter has for this artifice, is, when the subject is improper to be more fully represented, either for the sake of decency, or to avoid what would be disagreeable to be seen; and this is not to raise or increase the passions, which is the reason that is given for this practice, but on the contrary to diminish their effect.

"Mr. Falconet has observed, in a note on this passage in his translation of Pliny, that the circumstance of covering the face of Agamemnon was probably not in consequence of any fine imagination of the painter, – which he considers as a discovery of the critics, – but merely copied from the description of the sacrifice, as it is found in Euripides.

"The words from which the picture is supposed to be taken, are these: Agamemnon saw Iphigenia advance towards the fatal altar; he groaned, he turned aside his head, he shed tears, and covered his face with his robe.

"Falconet does not at all acquiesce in the praise that is bestowed on Timanthes; not only because it is not his invention, but because he thinks meanly of this trick of concealing, except in instances of blood, where the objects would be too horrible to be seen; but, says he, 'in an afflicted Father, in a King, in Agamemnon, you, who are a painter, conceal from me the most interesting circumstance, and then put me off with sophistry and a veil. You are (he adds) a feeble painter, without resources: you do not know even those of your Art. I care not what veil it is, whether closed hands, arms raised, or any other action that conceals from me the countenance of the Hero. You think of veiling Agamemnon; you have unveiled your own ignorance.'

"To what Falconet has said, we may add, that supposing this method of leaving the expression of grief to the imagination, to be, as it was thought to be, the invention of the painter, and that it deserves all the praise that has been given it, still it is a trick that will serve but once; whoever does it a second time, will not only want novelty, but be justly suspected of using artifice to evade difficulties.

"If difficulties overcome make a great part of the merit of Art, difficulties evaded can deserve but little commendation."

To this string of animadversions, I subjoin with diffidence the following observations:

The subject of Timanthes was the immolation of Iphigenia; Iphigenia was the principal figure, and her form, her resignation, or her anguish the painter's principal task; the figure of Agamemnon, however important, is merely accessory, and no more necessary to make the subject a completely tragic one, than that of Clytemnestra the mother, no more than that of Priam, to impress us with sympathy at the death of Polyxena. It is therefore a misnomer of the French critic, to call Agamemnon 'the hero' of the subject.

Neither the French nor the English critic appears to me to have comprehended the real motive of Timanthes, as contained in the words, 'decere, pro dignitate, and digne,' in the passages of Tully, Quintilian, and Pliny;17 they ascribe to impotence what was the forbearance of judgment; Timanthes felt like a father: he did not hide the face of Agamemnon, because it was beyond the power of his art, not because it was beyond the possibility, but because it was beyond the dignity of expression, because the inspiring feature of paternal affection at that moment, and the action which of necessity must have accompanied it, would either have destroyed the grandeur of the character and the solemnity of the scene, or subjected the painter with the majority of his judges to the imputation of insensibility. He must either have represented him in tears, or convulsed at the flash of the raised dagger, forgetting the chief in the father, or shown him absorbed by despair, and in that state of stupefaction, which levels all features and deadens expression; he might indeed have chosen a fourth mode, he might have exhibited him fainting and palsied in the arms of his attendants, and by this confusion of male and female character, merited the applause of every theatre at Paris. But Timanthes had too true a sense of nature to expose a father's feelings or to tear a passion to rags; nor had the Greeks yet learnt of Rome to steel the face. If he made Agamemnon bear his calamity as a man, he made him also feel it as a man. It became the leader of Greece to sanction the ceremony with his presence, it did not become the father to see his daughter beneath the dagger's point: the same nature that threw a real mantle over the face of Timoleon, when he assisted at the punishment of his brother, taught Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, propriety of expression was his aim.

The critic grants that the expedient of Timanthes may be allowed in 'instances of blood,' the supported aspect of which would change a scene of commiseration and terror into one of abomination and horror, which ought for ever to be excluded from the province of art, of poetry as well as painting: and would not the face of Agamemnon, uncovered, have had this effect? was not the scene he must have witnessed a scene of blood? and whose blood was to be shed? that of his own daughter – and what daughter? young, beautiful, helpless, innocent, resigned, – the very idea of resignation in such a victim, must either have acted irresistibly to procure her relief, or thrown a veil over a father's face. A man who is determined to sport wit at the expence of heart alone could call such an expedient ridiculous – 'as ridiculous,' Mr. Falconet continues, 'as a poet would be, who in a pathetic situation, instead of satisfying my expectation, to rid himself of the business, should say, that the sentiments of his hero are so far above whatever can be said on the occasion, that he shall say nothing.' And has not Homer, though he does not tell us this, acted upon a similar principle? has he not, when Ulysses addresses Ajax in Hades, in the most pathetic and conciliatory manner, instead of furnishing him with an answer, made him remain in indignant silence during the address, then turn his step and stalk away? has not the universal voice of genuine criticism with Longinus told us, and if it had not, would not Nature's own voice tell us, that that silence was characteristic, that it precluded, included, and soaring above all answer, consigned Ulysses for ever to a sense of inferiority? Nor is it necessary to render such criticism contemptible to mention the silence of Dido in Virgil, or the Niobe of Æschylus, who was introduced veiled, and continued mute during her presence on the stage.

But in hiding Agamemnon's face, Timanthes loses the honour of invention, as he is merely the imitator of Euripides, who did it before him?18 I am not prepared with chronologic proofs to decide whether Euripides or Timanthes, who were contemporaries, about the period of the Peloponnesian war, fell first on this expedient; though the silence of Pliny and Quintilian on that head, seems to be in favour of the painter, neither of whom could be ignorant of the celebrated drama of Euripides, and would not willingly have suffered the honour of this master-stroke of an art they were so much better acquainted with than painting, to be transferred to another from its real author, had the poet's claim been prior: nor shall I urge that the picture of Timanthes was crowned with victory by those who were in daily habits of assisting at the dramas of Euripides, without having their verdict impeached by Colotes or his friends, who would not have failed to avail themselves of so flagrant a proof of inferiority as the want of invention, in the work of his rival: – I shall only ask, what is invention? if it be the combination of the most important moment of a fact with the most varied effects of the reigning passion on the characters introduced – the invention of Timanthes consisted in showing, by the gradation of that passion in the faces of the assistant mourners, the reason why that of the principal one, was hid. This he performed, and this the poet, whether prior or subsequent, did not and could not do, but left it with a silent appeal to our own mind and fancy.

In presuming to differ on the propriety of this mode of expression in the picture of Timanthes from the respectable authority I have quoted, I am far from a wish to invalidate the equally pertinent and acute remarks made on the danger of its imitation, though I am decidedly of opinion that it is strictly within the limits of our art. If it be a 'trick,' it is certainly one that 'has served more than once.' We find it adopted to express the grief of a beautiful female figure on a basso-relievo formerly in the palace Valle at Rome, and preserved in the Admiranda of S. Bartoli; it is used, though with his own originality, by Michael Angelo in the figure of Abijam, to mark unutterable woe; Raphael, to show that he thought it the best possible mode of expressing remorse and the deepest sense of repentance, borrowed it in the expulsion from Paradise, without any alteration, from Masaccio; and like him, turned Adam out with both his hands before his face. And how has he represented Moses at the burning bush, to express the astonished awe of human in the visible presence of divine nature? by a double repetition of the same expedient; once in the ceiling of a Stanza, and again in the loggia of the Vatican, with both his hands before his face, or rather with his face immersed in his hands. As we cannot suspect in the master of expression the unworthy motive of making use of this mode merely to avoid a difficulty, or to denote the insupportable splendour of the vision, which was so far from being the case, that, according to the sacred record, Moses stepped out of his way to examine the ineffectual blaze: we must conclude that Nature herself dictated to him this method as superior to all he could express by features; and that he recognized the same dictate in Masaccio, who can no more be supposed to have been acquainted with the precedent of Timanthes, than Shakspeare with that of Euripides, when he made Macduff draw his hat over his face.

Masaccio and Raphael proceeded on the principle, Gherard Lairesse copied only the image of Timanthes, and has perhaps incurred by it the charge of what Longinus calls parenthyrsos, in the ill-timed application of supreme pathos, to an inadequate call. Agamemnon is introduced covering his face with his mantle, at the death of Polyxena, the captive daughter of Priam, sacrificed to the manes of Achilles, her betrothed lover, treacherously slain in the midst of the nuptial ceremony, by her brother Paris. The death of Polyxena, whose charms had been productive of the greatest disaster that could befall the Grecian army, could not perhaps provoke in its leader emotions similar to those which he felt at that of his own daughter: it must however be owned that the figure of the chief is equally dignified and pathetic; and that, by the introduction of the spectre of Achilles at the immolation of the damsel to his manes, the artist's fancy has in some degree atoned for the want of discrimination in the professor.

Such were the artists, who, according to the most corresponding data, formed the style of that second period, which fixed the end and established the limits of art, on whose firm basis arose the luxuriant fabric of the third or the period of refinement, which added grace and polish to the forms it could not surpass; amenity or truth to the tones it could not invigorate; magic and imperceptible transition to the abrupt division of masses; gave depth and roundness to composition; at the breast of Nature herself caught the passions as they rose, and familiarized expression: The period of Apelles, Protogenes, Aristides, Euphranor, Pausias, the pupils of Pamphilus and his master Eupompus, whose authority obtained what had not been granted to his great predecessor and countryman Polycletus, the new establishment of the school of Sicyon.19

The leading principle of Eupompus may be traced in the advice which he gave to Lysippus (as preserved by Pliny), whom, when consulted on a standard of imitation, he directed to the contemplation of human variety in the multitude of the characters that were passing by, with the axiom, 'that Nature herself was to be imitated, not an artist.' Excellence, said Eupompus, is thy aim, such excellence as that of Phidias and Polycletus; but it is not obtained by the servile imitation of works, however perfect, without mounting to the principle which raised them to that height; that principle apply to thy purpose, there fix thy aim. He who, with the same freedom of access to Nature as another man, contents himself to approach her only through his medium, has resigned his birth-right and originality together; his master's manner will be his style. If Phidias and Polycletus have discovered the substance and established the permanent principle of the human frame, they have not exhausted the variety of human appearances and human character; if they have abstracted the forms of majesty and those of beauty, Nature, compared with their works, will point out a grace that has been left for thee; if they have pre-occupied man as he is, be thine to give him that air with which he actually appears.20

Such was the advice of Eupompus: less lofty, less ambitious than what the departed epoch of genius would have dictated, but better suited to the times, and better to his pupil's mind. When the spirit of liberty forsook the public, grandeur had left the private mind of Greece: subdued by Philip, the gods of Athens and Olympia had migrated to Pella, and Alexander was become the representative of Jupiter; still those who had lost the substance fondled the shadow of liberty; rhetoric mimicked the thunders of oratory, sophistry and metaphysic debate that philosophy, which had guided life, and the grand taste that had dictated to art the monumental style, invested gods with human form and raised individuals to heroes, began to give way to refinements in appreciating the degrees of elegance or of resemblance in imitation: the advice of Eupompus however, far from implying the abolition of the old system, recalled his pupil to the examen of the great principle on which it had established its excellence, and to the resources which its inexhaustible variety offered for new combinations.

That Lysippus considered it in that light, his devotion to the Doryphorus of Polycletus, known even to Tully, sufficiently proved. That figure which comprised the pure proportions of juvenile vigour, furnished the readiest application for those additional refinements of variety, character, and fleshy charms, that made the base of his invention: its symmetry directing his researches amid the insidious play of accidental charms, and the claims of inherent grace, never suffered imitation to deviate into incorrectness; whilst its squareness and elemental beauty melted in more familiar forms on the eye, and from an object of cold admiration became the glowing one of sympathy. Such was probably the method formed by Lysippus on the advice of Eupompus, more perplexed than explained by the superficial extract and the rapid phrase of Pliny.

From the statuary's we may form our idea of the painter's method. The doctrine of Eupompus was adopted by Pamphilus the Amphipolitan, the most scientific artist of his time, and by him communicated to Apelles of Cos, or as Lucian will have it, of Ephesus,21 his pupil; in whom, if we believe tradition, Nature exhibited, once, a specimen what her union with education and circumstances could produce. The name of Apelles in Pliny is the synonyme of unrivalled and unattainable excellence, but the enumeration of his works points out the modification which we ought to apply to that superiority; it neither comprises exclusive sublimity of invention, the most acute discrimination of character, the widest sphere of comprehension, the most judicious and best balanced composition, nor the deepest pathos of expression: his great prerogative consisted more in the unison than in the extent of his powers; he knew better what he could do, what ought to be done, at what point he could arrive, and what lay beyond his reach, than any other artist. Grace of conception and refinement of taste were his elements, and went hand in hand with grace of execution and taste in finish; powerful and seldom possessed singly, irresistible when united: that he built both on the firm basis of the former system, not on its subversion, his well-known contest of lines with Protogenes, not a legendary tale, but a well-attested fact, irrefragably proves: what those lines were, drawn with nearly miraculous subtlety in different colours, one upon the other or rather within each other, it would be equally unavailing and useless to inquire; but the corollaries we may deduce from the contest, are obviously these, that the schools of Greece recognized all one elemental principle: that acuteness and fidelity of eye and obedience of hand form precision; precision, proportion; proportion, beauty: that it is the 'little more or less,' imperceptible to vulgar eyes, which constitutes grace and establishes the superiority of one artist over another: that the knowledge of the degrees of things, or taste, presupposes a perfect knowledge of the things themselves: that colour, grace, and taste are ornaments not substitutes of form, expression and character, and when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid faults.

Such were the principles on which Apelles formed his Venus, or rather the personification of Female Grace, the wonder of art, the despair of artists: whose outline baffled every attempt at emendation, whilst imitation shrunk from the purity, the force, the brilliancy, the evanescent gradations of her tints.22

The refinements of the art were by Aristides of Thebes applied to the mind. The passions which tradition had organized for Timanthes, Aristides caught as they rose from the breast or escaped from the lips of Nature herself; his volume was man, his scene society: he drew the subtle discriminations of mind in every stage of life, the whispers, the simple cry of passion and its most complex accents. Such, as history informs us, was the suppliant whose voice you seemed to hear, such his sick man's half-extinguished eye and labouring breast, such Byblis expiring in the pangs of love, and above all, the half-slain mother shuddering lest the eager babe should suck the blood from her palsied nipple. This picture was probably at Thebes when Alexander sacked that town; what his feelings were when he saw it, we may guess from his sending it to Pella. Its expression, poised between the anguish of maternal affection and the pangs of death, gives to commiseration an image, which neither the infant piteously caressing his slain mother in the group of Epigonus,23 nor the absorbed feature of the Niobe, nor the struggle of the Laocoon, excites. Timanthes had marked the limits that discriminate terror from the excess of horror; Aristides drew the line that separates it from disgust. His subject is one of those that touch the ambiguous line of a squeamish sense. – Taste and smell, as sources of tragic emotion, and in consequence of their power, commanding gesture, seem scarcely admissible in art or on the theatre, because their extremes are nearer allied to disgust, and loathsome or risible ideas, than to terror. The prophetic trance of Cassandra, who scents the prepared murder of Agamemnon at the threshold of the ominous hall; the desperate moan of Macbeth's queen on seeing the visionary spot still uneffaced infect her hand, – are images snatched from the lap of terror, – but soon would cease to be so, were the artist or the actress to inforce the dreadful hint with indiscreet expression or gesture. This, completely understood by Aristides, was as completely missed by his imitators, Raphael24 in the Morbetto, and Poussin in his plague of the Philistines. In the group of Aristides, our sympathy is immediately interested by the mother, still alive, though mortally wounded, helpless, beautiful, and forgetting herself in the anguish for her child, whose situation still suffers hope to mingle with our fears; he is only approaching the nipple of the mother. In the group of Raphael, the mother dead of the plague, herself an object of apathy, becomes one of disgust, by the action of the man, who bending over her, at his utmost reach of arm, with one hand removes the child from the breast, whilst the other, applied to his nostrils, bars the effluvia of death. Our feelings alienated from the mother, come too late even for the child, who, by his languor, already betrays the mortal symptoms of the poison he imbibed at the parent corpse. It is curious to observe the permutation of ideas which takes place, as imitation is removed from the sources of nature: Poussin, not content with adopting the group of Raphael, once more repeats the loathsome attitude in the same scene; he forgot, in his eagerness to render the idea of contagion still more intuitive, that he was averting our feelings with ideas of disgust.

The refinements of expression were carried still farther by the disciple of Aristides, Euphranor the Isthmian, who excelled equally as painter and statuary, if we may form our judgment from the Theseus he opposed to that of Parrhasius, and the bronze figure of Alexander Paris, in whom, says Pliny,25 the umpire of the goddesses, the lover of Helen, and yet the murder of Achilles might be traced. This account, which is evidently a quotation of Pliny's, and not the assumed verdict of a connoisseur, has been translated with an emphasis it does not admit of, to prove that an attempt to express different qualities or passions at once in the same object, must naturally tend to obliterate the effect of each. 'Pliny,' says our critic, 'observes, that in a statue of Paris by Euphranor, you might discover at the same time three different characters: the dignity of a judge of the goddesses, the lover of Helen, and the conqueror of Achilles. A statue in which you endeavour to unite stately dignity, youthful elegance, and stern valour, must surely possess none of these to any eminent degree.' The paraphrase, it is first to be observed, lends itself the mixtures to Pliny it disapproves of; we look in vain for the coalition of 'stately dignity, stern valour, and youthful elegance,' in the Paris he describes: the murderer of Achilles was not his conqueror. But may not dignity, elegance, and valour, or any other not irreconcilable qualities, be visible at once in a figure without destroying the primary feature of its character, or impairing its expression? Let us appeal to the Apollo. Is he not a figure of character and expression, and does he not possess all three in a supreme degree? Will it imply mediocrity of conception or confusion of character, if we were to say that his countenance, attitude, and form combines divine majesty, enchanting grace, and lofty indignation? Yet not all three, one ideal whole irradiated the mind of the artist who conceived the divine semblance. He gave, no doubt, the preference of expression to the action in which the god is engaged, or rather, from the accomplishment of which he recedes with lofty and contemptuous ease. – This was the first impression which he meant to make upon us: but what contemplation stops here? what hinders us when we consider the beauty of these features, the harmony of these forms, to find in them the abstract of all his other qualities, to roam over the whole history of his atchievements? we see him enter the celestial synod, and all the gods rise at his august appearance;26 we see him sweep the plain after Daphne; precede Hector with the ægis and disperse the Greeks; strike Patroclus with his palm and decide his destiny. – And is the figure frigid because its great idea is inexhaustible? might we not say the same of the infant Hercules of Zeuxis or of Reynolds? Did not the idea of the man inspire the hand that framed the mighty child? his magnitude, his crushing grasp, his energy of will, are only the germ, the prelude of the power that rid the earth of monsters, and which our mind pursues. Such was no doubt the Paris of Euphranor: he made his character so pregnant, that those who knew his history might trace in it the origin of all his future feats, though first impressed by the expression allotted to the predominant quality and moment. The acute inspector, the elegant umpire of female form receiving the contested pledge with a dignified pause, or with enamoured eagerness presenting it to the arbitress of his destiny, was probably the predominant idea of the figure; whilst the deserter of Oenone, the seducer of Helen, the subtle archer, that future murderer of Achilles, lurked under the insidious eyebrow, and in the penetrating glance of beauty's chosen minion. Such appeared to me the character and expression of the sitting Paris in the voluptuous Phrygian dress, formerly in the cortile of the palace Altheims, at Rome. A figure nearly colossal, which many of you may remember, and a faint idea of whom may be gathered from the print among those in the collection published of the Museum Clementinum. A work, in my opinion, of the highest style and worthy of Euphranor, though I shall not venture to call it a repetition in marble of his bronze.

From these observations on the collateral and unsolicited beauties which must branch out from the primary expression of every great idea, it will not, I hope, be suspected, that I mean to invalidate the necessity of its unity, or to be the advocate of pedantic subdivision. All such division diminishes, all such mixtures impair the simplicity and clearness of expression: in the group of the Laocoon, the frigid ecstasies of German criticism have discovered pity like a vapour swimming on the father's eyes; he is seen to suppress in the groan for his children the shriek for himself, – his nostrils are drawn upward to express indignation at unworthy sufferings, whilst he is said at the same time to implore celestial help. To these are added the winged effects of the serpent-poison, the writhings of the body, the spasms of the extremities: to the miraculous organization of such expression, Agesander, the sculptor of the Laocoon, was too wise to lay claim. 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.