PAINTING.

Painting is the art of conveying thought by the imitation of things through the medium of form and colour, light and shadow. Colour, and light and shadow, can by themselves do little more than excite sensations of harmony and sentiment, independently of action, passion, or story; but if founded upon form, thoughts become clear, expressions of passion intelligible, and actions, gestures, and motions of the human frame defined and decided. Form therefore is the basis of painting, sculpture, architecture, and design of every description.

Any school of painting, therefore, which is established upon a principle different from this, or which makes the subordinate parts of colour, light, and shadow the principal law of its practice instead of a component part, is in opposition to the most celebrated schools in the world; for the most eminent both in Greece and in Italy, were indebted for their celebrity and renown to the strict observance of the doctrine here enunciated. In Greece, the schools of Sicyon, Corinth, Athens and Rhodes, and in Italy, those of Pisa, Florence, Rome, and Bologna, were the most important, the most useful, and the most intellectual; and in all these form constituted the great and fundamental law of their practice. But in Venice, colour took the lead; it predominated too in Holland and Flanders; and it has always reigned, to the sacrifice of common sense, in Britain. Yet for sound and philosophical views of art, as a vehicle of passion or of moral national influence, neither of these schools can be referred to, with the same conviction or confidence with which all nations can refer to the former great sources of sense, principle, and genius.

In what country Painting first originated, is nearly as difficult to discover, as it is to find a country where it never existed at all. Design, the basis of painting, must have begun with the very first instrument of necessity which man required. The origin of any art, science, or discovery, is not so much owing to the particular accident which happened to the individual concerned, as to the intellectual adaptation of that individual to receive impressions of a peculiar nature from the particular circumstance which occurred. Thus whether Music was invented by the man, who, listening to the sound of an anvil, instantly composed notes; or whether Painting was discovered by the lovely girl, who, watching the shadow of her lover, as he sat silent at the prospect of parting, traced it upon the wall as a memento of their mutual affection; whether it originated with Philocles in Egypt, or Cleanthes in Corinth, or long before Egypt or Greece were habitable; tie principle is the same. Without an inherent susceptibility to the impressions of sound, in preference to all other impressions, in the man, or an inherent susceptibility to the impressions of form equally intense in the girl, the intellectual faculties of either would have never been excited to compose notes, or to define figures. The art originated with the first man who was born with such acute sensibility to the beauty of form, colour, and light and shadow, as to be impelled to convey his thoughts by positive imitation.

When the Spaniards landed in South America, the mode by which the natives conveyed intelligence of their arrival to king Montezuma was by painting the clothes of the strangers, their looks, their dress, and their ships. This certainly must have been the most ancient, because the most simple and obvious mode in the world of conveyin gthought, after oral communication. But independently of all theory, there cannot be a doubt of the extreme antiquity of painting. The walls of Babylon were painted after nature with different species of animals, hunting expeditions, and combats. Simiramis w∙as represented on horseback striking a leopard with a dart, and her husband Ninus wounding a lion. “And I went in and saw, and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, pourtrayed on the wall round about” (Ezek. viii. 18.) “She saw men pourtrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans pourtrayed in vermilion, girded with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look at, after the manner of the Babylonians and Chaldeans” (chap, xxiii. 14, 15.) It is inferred from a passage of Diodorus Siculus, that these figures were painted first on the brick before burning, and then vitrified by fire.^[1. Barry’s Lectures. ] But before this was done, experience must have been acquired of the liability to decay of painting upon external walls; and considering, too, that great statues were erected in Babylon, the arts must have existed amongst the Babylonians long before the period here referred to.

But a great revolution has taken place in our ideas on this subject, from the decyphering of hieroglyphics, and we are now assured of the extreme antiquity of art, in ages hitherto deemed almost entirely fabulous. From Asiatic art we have been accustomed to turn to that of the Egyptians; but it is no longer considered as a matter of speculation that the Ethiopians preceded the latter in knowledge, and that from this ancient people the Egyptians received gradually a knowledge of art. The course of civilisation probably descended from Ethiopia to Egypt; and yet we have evidence of the existence ofEgyptian painting and sculpture more than eighteen centuries before Christ, and even then the arts were in the highest condition that the Egyptian school ever attained. From the most ancient records of the Jewish and Greek historians, in which Egyptian and Ethiopian monarchs are mentioned, and their actions narrated, we can now turn to corresponding traces of their existence and exploits commemorated upon the durable materials of the temples, tombs, and palaces which still remain. When therefore it is found that this method of interpreting hieroglyphics has proved to be correct, in all that we know of the Caesars and the Ptolemies, or see casually alluded to respecting the Pharaohs,we have no right at all to dispute the truth of the same mode of interpretation when it indicates a still higher antiquity, though we have not the means of confirming it by collateral reference. Eighty miles above Dongola, Lord Pitidhoe discovered the remains of a magnificent city, which he conceives to have been the capital of Tirhakah mentioned in the Bible; and amongst these ruins he observed two nobly executed lions, specimens of Ethiopian skill. On the shoulders of one is the name of Amenoph III., who was called Memnon by Greek historians. The style and execution of these great works are evidence of the talent of this people.^[2. Now in the Bristol Museum. ] It is now certain that as early as the nineteenth century before Christ, the walls and temples of Thebes w ere decorated with paintings and sculpture, commemorating personal and historical events; and certainly in comparing the designs on these temples with those of a later period, we must conclude that the Egyptian school of painting never exceeded their merit.^[3. See last vol. of Sculpture, (Dilletantig ]

The conclusion to be drawn is, that at this time the Egyptian[7:16:694] priesthood had not interfered with art or artists; but that the painters were left freely to commemorate the great actions of their employers, to study nature, and to do as they liked. Many of these actions are delineated in a natural manner, and there is a great deal of dignity in the figure of the hero; the sea fights are also well grouped, and there are many of the Trajan-column figures, and not more gross perspective is visible. The colour is a mere illumination, and the composition as a whole infantine; but there is proportion, and not absolute ignorance of the component parts.^[4. See the French national work on Egypt. ] After this period, art became a mere tool in the hands of the priests; and as the law compelled the son to follow the profession of his father, it may be supposed that painting degenerated into the mere fac-simile of prescribed forms of gods, godesses, and men, and that in the time of the Ptolemies it was little better than an illuminated hieroglyphic.

The Egyptians appear to have done every thing with reference to form. Their painting was at best but coloured sculpture. They seem to have been aware of the mortality of colours, and to have said, “As colours must go, let us cut out the designs in stone, so that at least form may remain in our granite sculpture, and defy every thing but the convulsion of the earth.” First the designer drew the outline in red, then the master artist corrected it, then the sculptor cut it, then the painter coloured it, gods blue, goddesses yellow, men red, and draperies green and black; and such is the extreme dryness of the climate, that a traveller says, he saw in Nubia, a bas-relief half cut, with the red outline left for the rest, and that he wetted his finger and put it up, and immediately obliterated a part of the red chalk.

The Egyptians would seem to have been a severe people, as hard as their own granite.^[5. Odyss. lib. xvii. v. 448. ] They had an awfuï feeling of respect for the wisdom of their ancestors; they hated reform; no physician dared to prescribe a new medicine, and no painter dared to invent a new thought. Plato says, that the pictures of his day in Egypt were just the same as from ages immemorial;^[6. De Legibus, lib. 2. ] and, according to Winkelman, another cause of their inferiority in painting, was the little estimation in which painters were held, and their extreme ignorance. Not a single painter of eminence has reached us, and but one sculptor, viz. Memnon, author of three statues at the entrance of the great temple at Thebes. In the knowledge of the figure it is impossible they could be great; for there is proof that they dared not touch the dead body for dissection, and even the embalmers risked their lives from the hatred of the populace.

Winkelman divides Egyptian design into three periods: First, from the earliest times to the conquest of Cambyses; secondly, from the conquest of Cambyses to the subjugation of the Persian and the establishment of the Greek dynasty in Egypt; and, thirdly, from that period to the time of Hadrian.^[7. Wink. lib. ii. chap. 2. ] When the paintings at Thebes were executed is not known. But they were upon the walls at the expulsion of the Shepherd Kings,^[8. See 2d vol. of Ancient Sculpture, (Dilletanti.) ] and this was the first period of their art, and before Moses. The Egyptians never, in either art, reached the power of making men, as Aristotle said of Polygnotus, better than they were; in other words, they ne ver attained the true ideal beauty, founded on nature, yet above it. Their figures are' debased transcripts of what they had about them, and therefore, so far authentic as to character. The Egyptian female heads are far from displeasing; they have a sleepy voluptuous eye,^[9. See Description de l’Egypte, tom. i. plates. ] a full andpleasant mouth, high cheek bones, dark brows, and there is something by no means disagreeable in the silent lazy look of their expression. But the very want of ideal beauty gives an assurance that the figures are Egyptian nature, and that every habit, public, private, civil and religious, is laid open to us, by the wonderfül discoveries of Belzoni and his followers: it is almost as impossible now for an artist to be incorrect in painting an Egyptian subject, as it would be to err in painting a British one. In a tomb laid open by Belzoni, the characters of the procession were admirably distinguished; the Jew, the Egyptian, the Negro, and the Chaldaean, were aslittle liable to be confoundedas if they had been before us. In their sculpture, however, there is more of science than in their painting. Sculpture was practised by the priesthood, and sculptors were called sacred stonecutters. The great head of Memnon in the British Museum, is beautifully cut, the nose and mouth especially; and, considering its remote antiquity, it is really a great wonder.

Upon the whole, it is impossible to believe that the art of painting, amongst other nations, owed much to the Egyptians; they had no colour, and no light and shadow, but only some form, some expression, and some character. The groups of the ruins of Elythia shew a great deal of nature and simplicity; the animals are varied, and the cows are lowing and gamboling; yet it is after all but childish work, and as the paintings at Thebes are the best, those of Elythia have not much to boast of.

Whether the Greeks owe their beginnings to Egypt, is more than doubtful, from the simple fact of the early Greek painters using no blue, whilst it was the constant practice of Egyptian painters to use blue in every thing.^[10. Col. Leake says there is a remnant of blue on the temple of Theseus; but that may be as applied to architecture. The question is, whether the great painters used it in their art. Pliny says no, and Quintilian confirms him by applying to them the expression simples color. No colour is simplex where pure bine is used. ] Athens was founded by an Egyptian colony, and painters might be amongst the emigrants, as well as masons and sculptors; yet in the early state of things, painters were not an article of necessity, and it is problematical if in this alleged emigration, there were any persons of that class. The beginning of art was the same in all nations. They might improve each other; but we do not believe that painting was ever originally brought into one nation by another, or that there ever existed any, where it has not always been more or Iessknown from the remotest period of their history.

After Ethiopian, and Egyptian art, that of the Hebrew people must next be examined. That they had sculptors and chasers, is evident; but it is not so certain that painting was practised. Though the cunning work of the curtains in Exodus means tapestry,andfor any cunningwork of the kind, designs coloured must have been executed; yet there is no proof in any part of the Bible that paintingas an art was ever practised by them; and even the designs alluded to, were exclusively applied for the purposes of religion. “Moreover, thou shaft make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen, with blue, and purple, and scarlet; with cherubim of cunning work shaft thou make them.” (Exodus xxvi.1.) “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, See, I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all manner of workmanship” (Exod. xxxi. 1—5.) Yet when Solomon wanted artists, he sent to Tyre, which is presumptive evidence of a deficiency of skill at Jerusalem. No allusion is made to the existence of the art of painting amongst the Hebrews; yet it is hardly possible to suppose a people working in stone, and silver, and gold, and timber, designing and weaving a cunning work of cherubims on curtains and borders[7:16:695] for garments, and having been so long amongst the Egyptians, to have been ignorant of painting; but it is the opinion of one of the greatest living authorities in the church, that the representation of any object by painting was not permitted to the Hebrews.

With respect to the painting of the Phoenicians, Persians, Indians, and Chinese, it was in the earliest ages, and has ever since been, miserable and wretched. Although the Indians and Persians have always been celebrated for their tapestry, yet it is more for the excellence of the material than the purity of their designs. You may know a tiger from an elephant, though scarcely from a monkey, in their tapestry, shawls, and carpets; but in their utter ignorance of the naked figure, their long, barbarous, and cumbersome garments, and their want of science, are so grossly palpable, that they have never been, and never will be, referred to by any nation as authority in design. In their coins, however, the ancient Phoenicians shewed moré knowledge of the form than the Persians, the Chinese, or the Indians.

From the painting of these Eastern nations, we may now justifiably approach a people, whose origin, history, and science, have puzzled historians more than perhaps the Atlantides themselves. Who the Etruscans were nobody knows; but all agree that they were not aborigines, and this is establishing something. Yet it can scarcely be questioned that in their most remote, as well as their more refined periods, they were indebted for their arts, their language, and their religion, principally to the Grecians. The time when the Etruscans had commercial relations with Egypt and Greece, is hardly known;^[11. B.C∙ 1556. ] but as their early style of art is a little Egyptian and their subjects Grecian, they were no doubt connected with both, even before the Greeks had settled in Italy. It is not yet decided where they came from, and who they were, and if one consults all who have written on the subject from Herodotus to Μ. Raoul-Rochette, he is likely to be as open to a new theory as when he began. Their early works prove nothing. These are like the early works of almost all barbarous nations. The gods of the Etruscans are, in point of art, the gods of the Peruvians, the Sandwich Islanders, or the Esquimaux. Idols are idols, in early nations all over the world; and the bandy-legged Apollos, squinting Pans, and Dii indigencies, sixteen heads high, of this mysterious people, would do as well for any of the gods of the South Seas, as the early barbarians of the Mediterranean.^[12. See Gorius. ] When commerce brought them in contact with Greece and Egypt, traces of the art of both nations become apparent; but this is no evidence that they came exclusively from one nation or from the other.

Winkelman is a person of great genius, and always touches art as if he saw the whole ground. He divides Etruscan art into three epochs, Heyne into five;^[13. See Heyne’s Notes on Winkelman, vol. i. ] he goes to leading points, Heyne enters into details. The first epoch was gross; the second exhibited traces of Greek or Pelasgic art; the third had a taint of Aegyptian; the fourth was better; the fifth produced ideal beauty and Greek mythology; and this completes the period till decay. Campania was colonized 801 B.c.; but the Eubaeans had founded Cuma 1550 B.c. This neighbourhood brought the Etruscans in contact with Greek art, when about the ninth or eleventh Olympiad Greek colonies were established in Sicily; and the intercourse being reciprocal and complete, it cannot be wondered, that the more ignorant of the two nations became fascinated and inoculated by the superior one, and thus rendered Etruscan sofike Greek art, that it has ever since produced doubt and confusion.

According to Pliny, the arrival of Demaratus with Cleanthes from Corinth, first brought art into Etruria about 650 B.c.; yet, he says, there were beautiful pictures at Ardea and Lanuvium, which were older than Rome, and Rome was founded 754 b c. Heyne says, that before Rome was built, casting of metal, sculpture, and painting existed in Etruria anterior to any connection of the Etruscans with Greece; according to Winkelman the Etruscans were advanced in art before the Greeks, and it was a tradition of the remote ages, that Daedalus flying from Minos settled in Etruria and first sowed the seeds of design. When Etruria became a Roman province, Marcus Flavius Flaccus besieged Volsinium, the etymological meaning of which is, “The town of artists,” and brought away two thousand statues from that city alone. An able writer, in the “Newcastle Transactions” contends, that it is doubtful if the Etruscans had any art before the arrival of the Greeks.^[14. This is a most able article, and the reader is referred to it for more extensive information on the Etruscans. ] 4, No historian of this nation has reached us; their inscriptions are not yet thoroughly decyphered; and as the Romans destroyed every monument of surrounding nations, there is no fixing their antiquity. It is clear, however, that painting flourished in Italy before it did in Greece; such at least is the opinion of Tiraboschi.^[15. δ Storia della Lelteratura ltaliana. ] Pliny says nothing about it before the 18th Olympiad in Greece, whereas in the 16th there were paintings in the above towns in Italy, and works too shewing great refinement; which the Romans admired in their days of splendour, and which their emperors wished to remove, surrounded as they were by the finest productions of Grecian art. Their civil and religious rites not being the same as the Egyptians, and there being no traces of embalming, it may thence be concluded that they were not of Egyptian origin.

All hopes of discovering any of their paintings, any important work which should give us evidence of their talents in art, were given up, till in 1760 Pacciaudi discovered at Tarquinia, tombs decorated with designs; and in 1837 fac-similés of pictural decorations of other tombs were exhibited in London, with the monumental statues themselves, and in parts were extremely beautiful in taste, design, expression, and drapery. The extremities were correctly and sweetly drawn; and the expression and character of the head, which were very interesting, would not have disgraced any period of Greek or Italian design, though they would not have honoured the finest. It is impossible to judge of the colour of the Etruscan school from these specimens, or from the vases called Etruscan. Fresco, stucco, or distemper are adapted neither for depth nor for tone; oil or encaustic is the only vehicle fit for harmony, and oil or encaustic was never practised by them. With respect to the painted vases called Etruscan, because they are found in Etruria, we might just as well assert, if one discovered in the middle of Yorkshire, a mass of china, that it must be of English manufacture because it was found in Yorkshire. After the Greeks had settled in the south, their vases might be and no doubt were an article of commerce; of course they were imitated, but surely the design and origin are wholly Grecian, whatever the Etruscans might after long intercourse do in the way of imitation. The principles of design and proportion in these beautiful productions, are the same as in the finest works of Greek sculpture, with an occasional but trifling variation. Raffaelle himself couldnot have exceeded the purity of form expressed by line, in drapery or figure. In the finest vases the artists seem to have been perfect masters of the figure, and to have gone right round with the stylus, till the contour of the part was completely expressed. Nor is there any thing wonderful in this, considering the manner in which Greek artists and manufacturers began, proceeded, and concluded their studies. According to Plato, a perfect mastery of the forms [7:16:696] of man and animal was the basis of all instruction in design.

We have thus brought down the history of the art to a period, when our information, though imperfect, is more certain; but we can never sufficiently estimate the loss of all the ancient treatises on art, though we ought to be very grateful for what we possess in Plato and Aristotle, Pliny and Quintilian, and other ancient writers, Greek and Roman, down to the middle ages, and till the subject was taken up by Vasari and Lanzi.
^[16. See a beautiful passage De Legibus, lib. ii. p. 669—If every scholar would mark and transcribe every passage relating to art, a code might soon be made out. ]
The continued existence of this glorious art, can always be proved, more or less subject of course, like every thing human, to those alternations of splendour and calamity, triumph and misfortune, which are the lot of every thing here below.

The superiority of the Greeks in art is always attributed to the secondary causes of climate and government, forgetting the one important requisite, without which the influence of the most genial climate, or the patronage of the most perfect government could avail little; we mean natural and inherent genius. If the Athenians, the Rhodians, the Corinthians, and the Sicyonians owed their excellence in art to the climate, why did not the same climate produce equal perfection in the Spartans and Arcadians? If climate be the secret, why are not all people under the same latitude equally gifted and equally refined? Climate may be more or less favourable to intellectual development, but is never the cause of its existence. Government may elicit genius by fostering and reward, but can never create it. All the lamentation about the climate of England, Scotland, or Flanders, did not prevent Hogarth’s appearance in the first, Wilkie’s in the second, or Rubens’ in the last of these countries; nor could all the beauty of climate in Greece or Italy, ever have made Mengs a Raffaellc, or David the Titian of modern times. It would be absurd to deny altogether the influence of climate in the extremes. It is not impossible but that genius might melt to indolence under the line, or freeze to apathy within the arctic circle; but even genius there would assert its superiority in something or in some way. What we contend for is, that Winkelman’s theory of limiting the gifts of God, intellectual or corporeal, to latitude or longitude, is not borne out by facts, the great test of all theoretical principles.

The Greeks were idolaters, and their love of beauty was a principle of their religion. The more beautiful a face or form could be rendered in painting or sculpture, the better chance had the artist of the blessing of the gods here, and their immortal rewards hereafter. As beauty was so much prized by this highly-endowed people, those who were gifted with it became ambitious of making it known to great artists, and by them to the world. Artists fixed the fame of beauty in man or woman, and even children who gave promise of being beautiful were allowed to contest for a prize, and the child who won it had a statue erected to him. Many people were complimented by being named from the beauty of any particular part, and Winkelman quotes an instance, where one was called Xapiroβλeφapos that is, “having eyelids where the graces sat.” There were games instituted near the river Alphaeus, where prizes were adjudged to the most beautiful; andtheLacedaemonian women in their bed-rooms kept continually before their eyes the finest statues. Still, this admiration of beauty was but a secondary cause; for though the Lacedaemonians showed this love of beauty, they did not produce great artists. The Greeks had a strong sensibility to beauty and an intense acuteness of understanding. Every artist was a philosopher, and every philosopher relished art, and understood it. The artists began by the study of geometry and of form; they analyzed the peculiarities of the form of man, by contrasting it with that of the brutes, and they settled the principles of beauty in that form and figure. The philosophers recommended to all classes the study of art, as a refined mode of elevating their perception of beauty; and the government seconded the recommendation of the philosophers. The priests found the religious feeling rendered more acute by painting and sculpture; and the authorities discovered, that the emotions of patriotism were doubled by the commemoration of great national events, in temples and in public halls. Now, add climate as adapted for such productions and their preservation, and genius, the gift of God, as the first cause, and no one surely need wonder that all these causes mutually acting on each other produced the miracles of perfection in art,which the world has gazed at ever since with an incredulous and bewildered astonishment.

The passion for the beautiful in poetry, painting, music, and nature, led them to abhor the bloody amusements of the Romans. To contest for glory by pictures, poems, or music, to race for the prize of swiftness, or wrestle for the crown of strength, were the innocent and delightftd objects of their Olympic games; and during those noble commemorations, war ceased, and all Greece assembled in happiness and joy. Even the harsh Spartans signed a truce of fifty days with the Messenians, that they might keep a fete in honour of Hyacinthus. The greatest men disdained not these contests. Plato appeared amongst the wrestlers at Corinth, and Pythagoras carried off the prize at Elis. What must have been the effect of all this upon a people of strong susceptibilities and of high natural genius?

Consider the respect which must have been paid to great artists, when such a man as Socrates pronounced them the only wise men. Aesop took the greatest pleasure in lounging in their painting-rooms; Marcus Aurelius took lessons in philosophy from an artist, and always said that the latter first taught him to distinguish the true from the false; and when Paulus Aemilius sent to the Athenians for one of their ablest philosophers to educate his children, they selected Metrodorus the painter, and, let it be remembered, that amongst the children placed under his care, was one of the Scipios. What musthave been the effect on the rising youth ofGreece when the Amphictyonie council decreed that Polygnotus, their greatest monumental painter, should be maintained at the public expense wherever he went, as a mark of the national admiration for his greatest work, the Hall at Delphi. The glory and the fortune of a great painter did not depend, as now, upon the caprice of individuals; he was the property of the nation; he was employed by countries and by cities; and his rewards were considered as a just portion of the national expenditure. The educated and the high-born were brought up with a conviction of the propriety and justice of this principle; and when they became members of the government, considered this as useful a method of public expenditure, as squandering thousands on matters merely diplomatic, or in vain shows, mummings, and pageants. And such will yet be the system of our own country, when the people become fully instructed, and are made sensible of the moral and commercial influence of painting.

When we reflect upon the money spent in England by the government, and the consequences which so often attend that expenditure, and when we find in Greece the different results of the same interference on the part of the state, and that the works there produced have been canons of beauty to the world ever since; it is natural to inquire, what was the system by means of which genius was so successfully rewarded? The secondary causes must have been, the competence of the tribunals to which poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, historians, wrestlers, boxers, and philosophers with such confidence appealed. It must have been the taste and [7:16:697]knowledge of the members which composed the judgmentboards, and their sincere conviction of the importance of their office. One has only to sift for a moment the nature of their greatest tribunal, that of the Olympian games; one has only to reflect on the deep feeling, the solemn sincerity, the awful piety of their conviction,that what they had to do involved the future prospects of the rising youth of Greece, and that on their moral honesty depended the glory of their country, and that of its painters, sculptors, architects, philosophers, poets, and heroes. Before proceeding to detail the rise and progress of Greek art, and Greek artists, as the painting of every nation is connected with its civil, religious, and scientific institutions, (though more must always depend on highly-gifted individual effort to advance the knowledge of mankind, than any given assemblage of inferior individuals ;) a rapid examination of the principles which guided the decision of one of their most important tribunals, composed of the greatest men the world has seen, ought to form a portion of every history of the art.

Aristotle in his Politics, ^[17. Lib. viii. c. 31. ] as quoted by Mr. Hamilton in his pamphlet on the Houses of Parliament, observes: “All were taught γρaμμaτa or literature, gymnastics, and music, and many την γραφικήν, or the art of design, as being abundantly useful for the purposes of life, but mainly because it enables us to appreciate the merits of distinguished artists, and carries us to the contemplation of real beauty ; as letters, which are the elements of calculation, terminate in the contemplation of truth.” A people thus educated, to understand the basis of beauty in art, and to believe that their decisions, when they became judges of genius, involved their own intellectual taste and repute, and who gave their decisions in the presence of kings, philosophers, and people, were as little likely to be biassed by unjust predeliction as human nature could be; though, of course, in the corrupt times of Nero and the emperors, great abuses took place. But in the Marathonian period, if ever partiality was banished from human honours, it was banished from the Olympic games, in those immortal days of glory and patriotism. At this extraordinary assemblage, kings entered the lists, and nations respected the judgment, or if they refused to abide by the decision of a just tribunal, they were excluded by vote till they paid the fine and acknowledged their error. And what was the result? The highest honours were obtained in these contests, because every one gifted in art, poetry, music, or physical strength, knew that if he deserved the olive-crown, no partiatily, no nephew of the judge’s sister, or first cousin of the judge’s wife, would deprive him of his due. Every being did his best, and if that best failed, he had a consoling conscious conviction that he had been honourably, and honestly, and nobly beaten by a better. It is astonishing, if once entire confidence existbetween judge and competitor, to what a degree this confidence affects both; what a spring it gives to mind and body, and how honestly every thing is done: And if confidence be, from repeated experience, withheld, it is vronderful how half the faculties of the mind, and the powers of the body and soul, sink under the impression. Napoleon used to say, “that if the moral feeling of an army was in favour of a campaign, it was equal to 40,000 men.” If moral confidence be lost in such cases, disgust is generated, and apathy, indifference, and failure are the result.

In order to understand the Greek character thoroughly, the system of excitement that was worked on, and the materials that were used to rouse the energies of competitors, it will conduce to the understanding of the secondary causes of their perfection, if the nature of the Olympic games be examined.^[18. See West’s Pindar j ] They are universally acknowledged to have subsisted before the rise of chronological dates and records; and the record of the Olympic conquerors after their restoration, is the first known chronological date. Pausanias says they were cele brated every five years, that is, they were celebrated on the fifth year after the fourth had passed; and Sir Isaac Newton is of opinion that they were originally instituted in celebration of victories. Why the Olympic games had always the preference, there is no knowing; but the grand statue of Jupiter at Elis, must no doubt have had considerable influence.

The privilege of presiding at the Olympic games was attended with such dignity and power, that the Eleans who had been in possession of it from the earliest times, were more than once obliged to maintain their right by force of arms. After various disputes about the number of presidents or hellenadicks, they remained at the original number of ten; and Pausanias says, that for ten months preceding the games, they dwelt together in a house appointed for them, and called from them, hellanodiceum. By the most scrupulous attention, they did every thing to qualify themselves for being deservedly the judges of all Greece ; to which end they were patiently instructed by officers called guardians of the laws, and they attended every day in the gymnasium, upon the preparatory exercises of all those who were admitted as candidates, and who entered their names also ten months before, and exercised during apart, not the whole, of this time, in preparing themselves for the combat. Being exposed to the severest scrutiny, the judges had by these means frequent opportunities of trying the skill of the combatants, and also of exercisingtheir own judgment; and both prepared themselves for the praise or censure of an awful tribunal, and a numerous assembly, whose censure could only be escaped by the most exact impartiality on the part of the judges, and the most sincere and earnest efforts for superiority on that of the competitors. In addition, the judges swore a solemn oath before the statue of Jupiter, upon their finishing the examination, to act according to the strictest equitiy; and to all these precautions against human frailty, liberty of appeal to the senate at Elis was allowed to any one who felt aggrieved. The judges had also the power of excommunicating whole nations. Once an Athenian found guilty of corruption was fined, and refused to pay. The Athenians sanctioned his refusal, and were instantly excluded from all the games, till they repented and paid the penalty. When the Lacedaemonians were impertinent, other nations took up arms, andcompelledthemto submission. Suchpowerhadawonder-ful effect on all the nations of Greece.

As the time approached, the candidates were rigorously examined as to their virtuous descent, and their own moral life; and when they passed in public review down the stadium, a herald demanded with a loud voice, “Is there any one who can accuse this man of any crime? is he a robber? is he a slave? is he wicked or in any way depraved?” Themistocles once stood up at the ceremony and objected to Hiero, king of Syracuse, because he was a tyrant, a name odious to the democracies of Greece; and there could not be a stronger evidence of their utter detestation of the name, than refusing to admit a king to contend because he was a tyrant; thus placing him upon a level with a slave, who could not by law be admitted. The candidates having passed in public review with honour, were then sworn, that they had done all which was required by law; and marching to the stadium, attended by their friends, connexions, and families, who encouraged them to do their best, and appealed to the gods to smile on their exertions, they were left for the fight. And being thus thought worthy of the contest, even defeat was considered by them as an evidence of their honour. The olive crowns and palm branches were placed before their eyes on beautiful tripods, to excite their utmost exertions, and when victorious it was announced by proclamation; they were crowned by the heralds, and then led along, preceded by trumpets, their names being shouted aloud throughout the vast assembly; and on [7:16:698]their return to their native city, they entered through a breach in the wall, drawn in a chariot. And such was the high feeling engendered by these judicious excitements, that even Alexander himself was refused permission to contend, because he was a barbarian, nor was he allowed until he had proved his ancient descent at Argolis.^[19. See Notes on West’s Pindar. ] In the republic of the fine arts,” says the catalogue to the designs for a National Gallery, “competition is the great source of excellence; but so to frame institutions, and invite competition as to secure all the attainable talent, and so to form a tribunal as to derive all benefit for the public, and to do justice to the competitor, have been matters of great difficulty in all ages and all countries.”

The whole history of ancient art shews the estimation in which the unsophisticated judgment of the public was held. Aristotle^[20. De RepMicâ, iii. c. 7. ] says, “The multitude is the surest judge of the productions of art ;” “If you do not get the applause of the public,” says some one else, “what celebrity can you attain ?” and Cicero^[21. De Oratore, c. 49. ] makes the public the supreme judge. Thus then, no one ought to wonder at the perfection of Greek genius in every thing, stimulated as it was by these secondary causes, and the one acting upon the other, in a climate adapted in every way for comfort, for health, and for convenience. The Greeks were men like ourselves, not larger as their arms prove, and not handsomer, for there exist as fine forms in either sex, in Great Britain, as ever graced the atelier of Zeuxis; indeed Cicero complains of the plainness of the Athenians. When genius and secondary causes unite, as they sometimes do, then such men as Pericles and Alexander, and Polygnotus, Zeuxis, and Apelles, are the result; for all the Olympic games, and Greek tribunals, could never have made Hudson Apelles, nor Caligula the benevolent Howard. “If any thing were wanting,” says Flaxman, “to convince us of the high estimation painting was held in by the Greeks, the facts alone, viz. that Plato studied it, and Socrates was a sculptor by profession, are enough. But nothing is wanting.”

In ancient painting, we certainly owe more to Pliny than to any other author; though in point of exquisite tact for hitting at once the characters of the great geniuses in art, he is not to be compared to Quintilian. There is more discriminationin theshort account Quintilian gives of thepaint-ers and sculptors, than in all the delightful connoisseur chit-chat for which Pliny must ever be the leading favourite. Yet certainly his gossip and anecdotes are sometimes underrated by learned critics; for in two instances of gossip, about the partridges and grapes of Zeuxis and Protogenes, and the contest of Apelles and Protogenes very deep principles of Greek form and Greek imitation may be settled. Painting is said by Pliny to have existed before the foundation of Rome in Italy, as illustrated by designs on the walls at Ardea, Lanuvium, and Coere. This is always mentioned with a sort of doubt by antiquarians, who suspect that to the arrival of Demaratus from Corinth, the father of Tarquin, king of Rome, Italy owes her first knowledge of painting; but it has been shewn that this cannot be so, if pictures were executed in Italy before Rome was founded. Pliny sneers at the Egyptians for boasting of the antiquity of their painting; whereas the Greeks equally deserve asneer for believing that they had invented design.

The Greeks painted tabular pictures on wood, and mural pictures on walls. The materials were either encaustic or wax painting, and distemper or glue-painting. In encaustic on wood, they painted with a metal point called stylus ; in distemper they painted with brushes, and in encaustic on walls they also used brushes. Tabular pictures were prepared with a ground of wax, and the composition was drawn in with a stylus or point as we draw upon an etching ground with a needle. At a sale of antiquities in London there was a regular Greek tablet with a wax ground, a stylus attached to it as boys hang slate-pencils to their slates, and a sentence of Greek actually half-cut. The word γpaφω being used for painting, design, or writing, makes the instrument the same in either case. This tablet was like a slate; the middle had been planed smooth, and the frame was left round it. The progress of the Greeks is very interesting, and shews how the mind gradually advances to the imitation of reality, and rests impatiently on mere outline, as a representation of nature. After a certain time, the early artists, when they had drawn an outline, ventured to colour it inside with black. This mode of imitation was called σκιaγpaφta, and the paintings σκιaγpaμμaτa, or skiagrams, from σκιa shade, and γpaφω to draw. Our black profiles and whole figures seen in shop windows, are the skiagrams of the ancient Greeks. This was hailed as a great step, and the painter who could fill up a face or a figure with black was regarded as a man eminent in art. After a little came the genius with more extended views, who invented the μονόγραμμα or monogram from μovoς only, and γpaφω, to draw; that is, to define by line only, an outline without a shade. Next came the man who had the nerve to try a positive colour. Pliny has preserved his name, Cleophantus of Corinth; he ground up a red brick,^[22. Testa, ut ferunt, trita, Plin. lib. xxxv. ] and therefore the Greeks claimed the invention of colour, although the Chaldaeans had painted men red on the walls of Babylon, and so had the Egyptians on their tombs, nearly a thousand years before them. This discovery was called μονόχρωμα, or monochrom, singlecoloured from μovos alone and χpωμa colour, and this was their first attempt at imitating flesh.^[23. Movoχζωμ ϰτ vr diCtUΠI. ibid. ] Next came the white ground (the gesso of the Italians and lime and plaster of the Egyptians) covered with wax. From one colour, naturally enough came the others; for if brick produced red, earths, burned or natural, would produce other colours, and polychrom, from πoλυs many, and χpωμa colour, was formed.

The art having now discovered its materials, soon advanced steadily and gloriously to excellence. “How long the brush assisted only the cestrum, and when it superseded it,” says Fuseli,^[24. Fuzeli, Lecture first- ] “cannot be ascertained; it cannot be proved, that it ever entirely superseded it, and there is every reason to believe they were always combined.” It has been contested that painting was not known in Homer’s time, because he speaks not of art; but what would be said of any man who argued that painting was not known in Milton’s time, because he did not speak of it. Homer speaks oipainting ships, and Milton alludes to “the paintedstoaς ’ ' but colouring and design must have been known from the shield of Achilles, and the tapestries of Helen and Andromache, if the walls of Thebes and those of Babylon, had not settled the question. Troy was taken 1184 before Christ; but painting flourished in Egypt 1900 years before our era, that is, 716 years before Troy was taken, and 993 years before the era of Homer.

The nature of distemper and encaustic painting amongst the Greeks involves one or two questions interesting to artists. Their distemper was our tempera, and consisted in dissolving colour in water, and mixing it with glue; and though in Pliny, glue is only mentioned once, and that in conjunction with (tectores) plasterers, it is evidently to be inferred from the brushes used in its practice, that tempera intensely varnished was the general practice of the fabulous painters, and encaustics the exception. On all encaustic pictures, the Greeks put (∈vεκαυσ∈v) “burnt in ;” and what justified them in doing so? Merely the general application of fire to melt wax, or a particular mode of practice. Was the cestrum or stylus heated, whilst finishing the work, after the wax had been laid on? or was any actual [7:16:699]heat applied to amalgamate the colour in the conclusion, which justified such a term? or was the wax actually melted and used whilst boiling? Pliny says, that there were certain colours which would not stand without varnish; and that after they were laid on walls and dry, they were varnished with a mixture of warm punie wax and oil. Every Greek artist had his chafing-dish or κaυτnpiov ; and when the varnish was dry, it was heated by fire from the chafing-dish “usque ad sudorem,” until it sweated, when it was rubbed with wax candies, and polished with white napkins. This method the Greeks called καvσ ι s ^[25. It is clear ús&tfire was always an important part in an encaustic painting, because Philiscus painted a painter’s room (atelier) with a little boy blowing the fire. Pliny, xxxv∙ ] or the burning mode; and why might it not be applied as well to encaustic pictures, when finished either on wood, copper, walls, or stone, thus harmonizing and judiciously amalgamating fierce execution or distinct touches, and authorising the word ἐ vεκαυσεv being put after the artist’s name?

All the artists in Europe know well how often they use a vehicle^[26. Vehicle, as distinct from varnish, means the liquid you paint with; varnish, the liquid you put over the work, when done, to preserve it. ] for avarnish, and a varnish for a vehicle in practice; and hence it is too absurd to doubt for a moment, that any Greek painter who had once used oil and wax as a varnish, would not use it as a vehicle at the first opportunity. Pliny infers, that “ceris pingere,” to paint with waxes (coloured) and “picturam inurere,” to burn in the picture, were the same methods, “There were anciently,” he adds, “two methods, one cera, with wax, and another on ivory with a cestrum; then came a third, boiling the wax and painting ships at once with it, which was a lasting mode, so that neither sea, wind, nor sun destroyed it.” It appears from another passage, that the ships were painted in the same way^[27. “Cerae tinguntur iisdem coloribus, ad eas picturas, quae inuruntur; alieno parietibus genere, sed classibus familiari." ] as pictures which were burnt in. “Waxes are tinted with these colours for pictures which are burnt in; a different manner of painting from that employed on walls, but like that (of waxes tinted) employed for painting ships.” Were tinted waxes applied hot? From this it may be inferred that they were.

Encaustic painting may be divided into four methods: 1st, mixing the colours with wax, and thinning them at the moment of painting with a liquid; 2d, placing wax in colours on the ivory, distinctly like mosaic, and uniting them by working them over with a heated cestrum; 3d, boiling the wax and using it hot; and, 4thly, softening the whole picture after completion, by heating it with a chaffing-dish or cauterium. Both Pliny and Vitruvius describe this last method of varnishing; and it is curious to contrast their relative descriptions. Pliny is rapid, careless, general, desultory, as if talking at a party; Vitruvius, accurate, mathematical, careful, and architectural, as if every word was a brick, that must be poised and balanced. Pliny says you must liquefy punic wax with oil,^[28. That Reynolds introduced wax into British art from this passage, there is no doubt. ] and rub it with a candle and napkins. Vitruvius says, after your wall is dry and smooth, liquefy punie wax, paulo, a little by fire, then temper it with oil. In Pliny the paulo is left out, and so is the fire; but Vitruvius guides you to the degree, which is every thing in the practice of the art of painting. The paulo, therefore, is invaluable; do not boil, but heat your wax, then liquefy it, then varnish, then when dry heat it with a chaffing-dish and rub it smooth. To artists this practice is beautiful, and though oil-painting was supposed to be unknown to the Greeks, this was very near the point, and if used by Polygnotus at Delphi or Thespiae, would have justified the term burnt in, without the use of the cestrum.

It is not settled by Pliny who first discovered encaustic painting; it is not known, he says, whether Aristides may have invented it, or Praxiteles completed it. But there existed on the walls encaustic paintings by the old painters Polygnotus and Nicanor; Lysippus at Aegina put his name to his tabular works with εWκαυσεv; Pamphilus the great master of Pausias, did not practice it exclusively; and Pausias was the first in this art. Pausias, Pliny adds, repaired the walls of Thespiae, painted by Polygnotus, but being obliged to use the brush, failed, because he handled an instrument which he was not accustomed to. It appears, however, that the walls of Thespiae were painted in encaustic by Polygnotus, and with the brush; or Pausias, thegreatest en caustic pain ter, wouldnot have been employed to repair them, nor would he have gone out of the way to use the brush, if Polygnotus had used the cestrum. But Pausias failed, because the brush was not his instrument; therefore encaustic on walls was not worked with the cestrum, as it was on tablets, and the burning in on tablets was not of the same nature as that on walls. That the brush and the cestrum were totally different in practice there is no doubt; but that there was ever a time when the brush was not used in painting is absurd; and Pliny is evidently wrong in saying it was the last method.

It stands to reason that to paint ships was the earliest necessity of navigation. Theark was pitched inside and outside (Gen.vii. 14). Pitch melted is in fact like wax or oil; and how was it to be equally spread over so vast a surface except by brushes? In fact, amongst the Egyptian antiquities imported of late years, brushes have been abundant. Thus the Greeks painted on walls, wood, stone, ivory, copper, and canvass; on walls it was mural painting, and on either of the other materials, tabular painting. ^[29. At this moment there is a dispute raging in France and Germany whether tabular painting was or was not the principal practice of the ancients, and whether mural painting was ever practised to any great extent. Letronnesays cloth was not used anciently to paint on, and that Pliny thinks the man mad who painted Nero on cloth one hundred and twenty feet high; but the madness insinuated does not apply to the cloth or canvass, but to the absurdity of a portrait one hundred and twenty feet high in cloth. Why should canvass be only once used in antiquity, and never before or after till the middle ages? Is this likely? As a curious specimen of the blind violence of party, the friends of one of the combatants, Letronne, have written him from Athens, that in the temple of Theseus they have discovered by candle-light round the upper part of the wall, actual contours of the works of Polygnotus cut in on the plaster with the cestrum, the colours having been picked out by the early Christians; thus proving that Letronne is decidedly right as to his theory of painting on walls. Yet would it be believed, that the friends of his opponent, Raoul-Rochette, have also written him that they do not see a single contour cut in, but that they have discovered a sinkingin of the plaster as if fitted to receive tabular works which were let into the walls; and thus the theory of Raoul-Rochette, viz. that pictures were scarcely ever painted on walls, but nearly always on wood, is right, whilst the former gentlemen assert that there arc contours on the walls. But the theory of Μ. Letronne is also right; for the ancients painted on walls as well as wood; and though Pliny says that the greatest glory was obtained by easel pictures, he affirms that there were also pictures on walls, because in giving one of his reasons for preferring tabular pictures, he says pictures on walls cannot be saved in case of fire, (ex incendiis rapi non possunt J, and that he prefers tabular pictures. If pictures had not been painted on walls as well as on wood, how could he have illustrated his preference? ]

There is another question which remains to be settled before touching on the great artists and their works: Did the Greeks paint in fresco? The belief has been that they did. Vasari affirms it; but Letronne certainly establishes the suspicion that they did not, except in a few ornamental parts of architecture, and that stucco was more in practice. In fresco the colours are placed on wet mortar, and become a part of it. In stucco the colours do not become a part, and can be separated. Certain colours are destroyed by contact with lime, and yet those colours which fresco would have ruined, are always found on ancient painted walls.
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Letronne says, that there does not exist a well authenticated evidence of fresco, except as mere ornament in ceilings.

Having thus laid before the reader the different modes of Greek practice, without which no subsequent account of their arts or artists would have been intelligible, it is time to say something of the artists themselves, who practised these various modes of imitating nature. Of their different methods, their white grounds descended to them from the eastern nations, and have come to us through the middle ages. Some of their colours we use now, and for some we have substitutes as good. If their principles were as easily attainable as their colours, we should have very little to desire.

In the earliest state of Greek art, Philocles from Egypt, and Cleanthes from Corinth, were the inventors of outline, and Ardices from Corinth, and Telephanes from Sicyon, the first who put it in practice, without any colour. To this early period may be applied the accusation of Aelian,^[30. Aelian, lib. x. chap. xii. ] that the artists were obliged to write underneath their wretched illustrations, “This is a bull, this is a horse, this is a tree.” The next were single-colour painters, or monochromatists, as Hygiomon and others. Now the sexes began to be distinguished, when Cimon theCleonean had energy to attempt the imitation of every thing. He it was who invented foreshortening, and drawing things at an angle.^[31. Catagrapha invenit, hoc est, obliquas imagines et varie formare voltus, respicientesque, suspicientes vel despicientes. Fuzelisays catagrapha means profiles ; but how could he invent profiles when profiles are the characteristics of the earliest art? At first all art is profile; but Cimon was a reformer. To draw downwards he invented oblique views, and varied the views of the head and face, looking behind, looking up, and looking down. Fuzeli says catagrapha means profile; but profiles are not oblique representations but sections of the figure and face, in the same sense as architectural sections, that is, equal halves. The “obliquae imagines,” are angular views, seeing things at an angle; the passage is directly illustrated by the circumstances, that he made his heads looking behind, &c.; and how can a head looking behind be a profile ì In some places it may mean so; in Pausanias, κaτa in radical meaning is downwards, as if the eye looked at the top of the head to the feet, which is fore-shortening. ] He it was who had courage to vary the characters and forms of heads, to make them looking up, looking down, and looking behind; he articulated his joints, shewed the veins and muscles, and gave undulation and folds to his draperies. Panaenus, Phidias’s brother, painted the shield of Minerva at Elis, and also the battle of Marathon; and so much had the knowledge of colour and art advanced, that portraits of the great leaders, Miltiades, Callimachus, and Cynegyras, on the part of the Greeks, and of Datis and Artaphernes, on that of the barbarians, were introduced, and known by the spectators. It was at this period that the glorious contests for victory in art were begun at Corinth and Delphi; and Panaenus was conquered by Timagoras of Chalcis, who commemorated his victory by a poem; “though I doubt not,”says Pliny, “there is some chronological error.”

The Greek national and monumental painter Polygnotus, flourished at this period or before it. He seems to have been really a great man, and to have possessed a mighty soul. He was born in Thasos, an island in theAEgean Sea; and his works seem all to have been national, votive offerings of cities and his country. He was worthy of the finest period of Greece, and met his noble patrons by a suitable return; he was one of those beings who are born for the time or beyond it, and of whom the time is in want, or for whom it is not enough advanced. He first clothed lovely women in light and floating draperies, adorned their beautiful heads with rich turbans, and thus advanced the art immensely. In expression of face he ventured to make the mouth of beauty smile, and thus softened, by shewing the teeth, the ancient rigidity of his predecessors. He painted gratuitously the Hall at Delphi, and the Porticoat Athens, called ∏oικ ∣ λη, thus offering a contrast to Mico who was paid. Such conduct was immediately judged worthy to be commemorated by the highest authority in Greece, the Amphictyonie Council, who ordered that Polygnotus should henceforth be maintained at the expence of Greece. Pliny has certainly not said enough of Polygnotus, whose great work at Delphi, described by Pausanias, proves him to have had colour in a high degree, imagination in the highest, and all which, according to Aristotle, forms the most important requisite in the language of painting. His work at Delphi was executed by order of the Cnidians, who had a treasure there, and had also built a stadium. Besides this building, they employed Polygnotus to adorn the great Hall, leaving him the choice of subjects; and as Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, was murdered and had a tomb near the spot, these subjects related to the Trojan war.

It is supposed that because Pausanias describes one thing as above another, composition was little known, and that there were several subjects in one plane. But any one might describe the Cartoons at Hampton Court in the same way, and make a reader, who had never seen them, believe that one figure was above another, and several subjects too. Might not one say, “Above Pythagoras in Raffaelle’s School of Athens, is Alcibiades listening to Socrates ;” but because they are above one another, that is no proof that they do not retire. Aristotle settles his high rank better than Pliny or Quintilian. “Polygnotus,” says he, “made men óeííer than they are, Pauson worse than they are, and Dionysius die same as they are.”^[32. Aristotle, Poetics. ] Polygnotus, therefore, expressed the leading points of the species man, and cleared the accidental from the superfluous. Cimabue did not do this, nor Mas-saccio, nor Giotto; but Raffaelle and Michel Angelo did; and when this is done, in painting or sculpture, the component parts of art must be equally advanced. Besides, when did Polygnotus flourish? Between the 84th and 90th Olympiad. The Parthenon must have been built; the beauties of Phidias’s immortal hand must have been executed, such as we see them in the Theseus, Ilyssus, metopes and friese of the Elgin marbles. And could any painter be a Goth in composition, when such knowledge of the art is visible in these perfect wonders? Polygnotus put the names to many of his figures; Annibale Caracci put “genus unde Latinum* to Venus and Anchises; Raffaelle gilded his glories; but what argument is that against the genius of either? The power of Polygnotus in painting the daemon Eurynome, with a skin the colour of a blue-bottle fly, shews the truth of his imagination, as well as his power of observation and imitation. Polygnotus was a great genius, worthy of his age; and the “simplex color,” applied by Quintilian to his works, only proves the purity of his taste in using it.^[33. Hardouin’s Pliny, lib. xii. c∙ 10, p. 893. Clari Pictores fuisse dicuntur Polygnotus, atque Aglaophon; quorum simplex color tam sui studiosus adhuc habet,” etc. Now the simplex color of Polygnotus and Aglaophon was not one colour, like monochrome, but modesty in the arrangement of the three colours, red, yellow, and black, without blue. How then could the monochrom apply to Polygnotus, whose works at Thespiae, Delphi, and the Poikile at Athens, were painted in all the variety these three colours could produce, and not confined to one colour ’ ]

Simplicity is not barbarism, any more than gorgeousness is true taste. About the 90th Olympiad the light began to dawn and to give promise of a glorious sunrise. Aglaophon, Cephissodonus, Phrylus, and Evenor, the father of Parrhasius, and preceptor of the greatest painters, appeared. These were all celebrated in their day; but one of the most important reformers was Apollodorus the Athenian, who flourished in the 93d Olympiad. He was the first, according to [7:16:701]Pliny, whoexpresscdthe¾t>ec⅛s,∙ and he was also the firstwho did honour to the glory of the pencil. But, after Phidias, Pa-naenus, Mico, and Polygnotus, one is inclined to question whether he was the first who expressed the species. Phidias, in the opinion of the ancients, was the greatest artist in sculpture. Plato says that Phidias was “skilled in beauty ;” but to be skilful in beauty, argues the power of expressing the species, and a perfect knowledge of the construction; for beauty is the last operation, and is based upon the first. How then Apollodorus could have expressed the species better than Phidias or Polygnotus, it would perhaps have puzzled Pliny to explain. However, let us take what the gods have spared, and be grateful. “His, is the adoring priest,” says Pliny, “and Ajax defying the lightning at Pergamus; nor was any tablet worth looking at before.” That may be. The previous works were monumental, national, or mural, painted with brushes, and bold in execution. Tabular painting may have been a more delicate workmanship; but it is not to be compared with the true epic, any more than the highly-wrought easel pictures of Raffaelle, are to be compared with his frescos.

“The doors,” says Pliny, “that Apollodorus had opened, Zeuxis boldly marched through, about the 95th Olympiad; daring every thing the pencil could do, and carrying it to the greatest glory.” Some place him in the 89th Olympiad; but this is a mistake. Demophilus or Naseas was his master. Apollodorus became envious of Zeuxis, because the latter improved upon the style he had introduced, and wrote a lampoon. Zeuxis became very rich, grew very haughty, and always appeared at the Olympic games in a purple robe, with his name in gold letters on the border. So high was his opinion of his own pictures, that, thinking no money could equal their value, he gave them away. From this feeling, he presented an Alemena to the Agrigentines, and a Pan to Archelaus; he also painted a Penelope, in which her moral beauty of character was visible, and an athlete, so much to his own delight, that he wrote underneath, “It is easier to criticise than to execute.” His great works were Jupiter and all the gods, and Hercules strangling the serpents. He was censured for large heads and violent markings, but otherwise he was strictly correct. Pliny varies his history with current stories, and we can almost get at the principles of Greek art from them aswellasfromtheaccountoftheartitself. Current stories and proverbs should never be disregarded; for, if not true, they may be taken as inventions characteristic of the parties, or they would never have been believed. The Agrigentines, says Pliny, ordered a picture for a temple of Juno Lucinia, and they allowed the painter to select the finest girls as models. Cicero^[34. De Invent, lib. 2. chap. χ. ] says it was the Crotoniates who employed him; and as Zeuxis always studied nature, the most beautiful girls were ordered by government to come to him, and having selected five, he then painted his Helen. Zeuxis made his sketches in black and white (pinxit et monochromata ex albo) or of a single colour heightened by white. His contemporaries and rivals were Timanthes, Androcydes, Eupompus, and Parrhasius. The contest of the last with Zeuxis, in which the one deceived the birds by grapes, and Parrhasius Zeuxis himself by his curtain, contains the great principle of Greek art, viz. That the most perfect imitation of reality was not incompatible with the highest style. Antiquaries are disposed to laugh at these stories as beneath the dignity of belief; but artists know well enough, that, so far from being unworthy of credit, all the stories of Pliny and Aelian tend more or less to illustrate a principle. Zeuxis painted a boy and grapes, and the birds flew at the fruit; but his rival observed that, if the boy had been equal to the grapes, the birds would have been frightened. Zeuxis was a great painter and discovered the principles of light and shadow.

After Zeuxis came Parrhasius, “liquidis ille coloribus,”^[35. Horace. ] who was born at Ephesus, andcelebratedfor great excellence. He first gave correct proportions to painting; airs to the head, elegance to the hair, and beauty to the countenance. By the acknowledgment of all artists, the manner in which he lost the contours of his forms, was exquisite. Many people can execute the parts of which the middle of things is composed; but few can finish the boundaries of objects as if the substance was round, and did not end with the contour which defined it; thus giving one an idea as if something was concealed, and exciting the imagination to conceive what the eye did not see. This excellence Xenocrates, and Antigonus, who wrote on painting, conceded to Parrhasius; and not this excellence alone, but also many others. The best idea than can be given to the moderns of the works of Parrhasius, is by referring them to the pictures of Corregio, of which this is the great excellence. Parrhasius appears also to have had the same defect; for he softened the centres of his figures, and gave them too much pulpiness for the heroic. There remained, in Pliny’s time, sketches of subjects, and of hands and feet, from which artists learned a great deal. He contrived in a picture to paint the people of Athens, and to give a true idea of their variable character; humble yet vain-glorious, timid yet ferocious ;—and all these contrasts he expressed with great power. But Parrhasius disgraced his genius by yielding to what Johnson calls “the frigid villany of studied lewdness,” and sacrificed his noble art to pander to the beastly appetites of the debauched; in fact, Tiberius kept one of his licentious pictures in his bed-room, namely, that of Meleager and Atalanta. But whatever may have been the habits of antiquity, and however indecencies may have been connected with religion, it is clear the greatest men did not approve of such prostitution of talent. Aristotle censures the practice, and warns tutors to guard their pupils from such corruptions.

Timanthes followed, the great painter of the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Aulis. No picture had more reputation for touching art and delicacy than this. After exhausting expression in all the principal agents, the artist covered the face of the father, not daring to trust his hand to attempt imitation, and leaving every spectator to imagine an agony of his own. As Euripides has the same incident, Fuzeli thinks the honour of being the first inventor is due to Timanthes. In the death of Germanicus, Poussin hid the face of his wife. Timanthes seems to have been ingenious in his inventions; to give the idea of great size to a sleeping Cyclops, he introduced two satyrs trying to span his thumb. Pliny adds, that there was a head painted by him in the Temple of Peace at Rome, and which was a perfect specimen of art.

Euxenides taught Aristides, the great master of expression, and Eupompus taught Pamphilus, who was the master of Apelles, a name synonymous with perfection in finish, but not for invention like Zeuxis, monumental commemorations like Polygnotus, composition like Amphion, or expression like Aristides. No; Apelles was the deity of tabular pictures, the greatest glory of the art in Pliny’s mind, but not in the minds of those who see beyond the range of a dining-parlour. Eupompus painted a victor with a palm branch in his hand; and-such was his influence in Greece, that he was allowed to divide painting into three schools, viz. the Ionian, Sicyonian, and Athenian. Pamphilus was a Macedonian, who combined literature with painting and made it a principle of tuition, that no man could be great in either who was not a mathematician; for he denied that without geometry art could be perfected. He taught nobody under a talent, which both Apelles and Melanthus paid. So great was the influence of this distinguished man, that first at Sicyon, and afterwards in all Greece, he got it established as a principle of education, that all clever boys should be taught on tablets the art of delineating, which is the foundation of [7:16:702]painting. He considered this art as the first that should be taught in a liberal education. Slaves were prohibited the exercise of design; which was an absurd law, because in literature it would have prevented Aesop or Terence from developing their genius. What right have any creatures, who are obliged to cat and sleep like the meanest slave, to pass a law to prohibit the exercise of any natural talent, if the Almighty has not disdained to think one worthy of being so gifted? The consequence of this was, that no slave ever distinguished himself in the arts.

About the 107th Olympiad, after Echion and Therami-chus, came the god of high finish and grace, Apelles. His style is always the precursor of decay. First came a race in art, amongst whom invention, expression, form, colour, and execution, in a series of pictures intended to illustrate a principle were enough, provided the principle was expressed. These were the monumeìttal geniuses. But when the art becomes national and glorious, the noble and the opulent become ambitious to share the glory with their country; and the art sinks to the humble office of adorning apartments. As is the demand, such will be the supply; and the genius of a country is thus turnedfromnationalobjects and public commemorations to private sympathies and domestic pleasures. At this period of Greek taste appeared Apelles; refined, accomplished, delicate, devoting his whole soul to single perfections equally adapted for a temple or a palace, and patronised equally by his sovereign and the people. Educated by Pamphilus, he was grounded to the very foundation, and consequently drew, as Burke says to Barry, with “the last degree of perfection.” Apelles, Aristides, Nichomachus, and Protogenes, were the most distinguished artists of Alexander’s time.

Apelles wrote copiously on his art, and explained its principles. His treatises were extant in Pliny’s time, and even in that of Suidas,^[36. About the year 1100 of our era. ] who speaks of them; and as they were probably illustrated with designs, the loss is much to be deplored. Beauty was the leading feature of his style, as well as of that of the greatest painters of the same period. In grace he defied competition; and this explains the secret of his triumph. “I know when to leave off,” said he, “which is a great art; Protogenes does not. Over-working is injurious.” He was a very generous man, and acknowledged when others were superior to him; observing that Amphion^[37. Junius Cde Pictura Veterum j only finds Amphion mentioned twice in ancient authors, and it is hence supposed that Echion would be a better reading. ] was a better composer, and Asclepiadorus more correct in proportion. Amongst all the stories of Pliny, the most delightful is that of Apelles and Protogenes, which seems to be an authentic fact; and even if it were not, it would illustrate the principles of Grecian art. Protogenes lived at Rhodes and Apelles sailed to see him. Having landed, he called, and found the artist “not at home.” Being shewn by an old woman into his painting-room, he found a tablet with its wax ground ready for a picture, and taking up a brush, drew an exquisite line in colour down the tablet. Protogenes having returned, was shewn what had happened; and, contemplating the beauty of the form, he said it must be Apelles, as nobody else could draw so perfect a work. He then took the brush and drew another still more refined, saying, if the stranger call again, shew him this, and say that that is what he is seeking. Apelles returned, and blushing to see himself outdone, again took a brush and drew a third, leaving nothing to be exceeded in refinement, (nullum relinquens amplius subtilitati locum.) Protogenes when he saw this immediately sought his visitor, saying that he could carry the line no further. The tablet with these lines upon it, was considered by all the Greek artists as a miracle of drawing. After the death of Apelles and Protogenes, and the conquest of the Romans, it was preserved in the palace of the Caesars on the Palatine hill, where it was seen by Pliny containing nothing but three fleeting lines, (1res lineas effugientes) and yet superior to all that was to be found in the finest works. Unfortunately it was burned at the destruction of the palace.

Now comes the question, what were these lines which could thus speak to artists who had never seen each other, the common language of a common code of law for design. “ Secuit lineas η does not mean actually to cut the lines in two, but in the technical idiom of English artists, to strike a line. It was not the metal cestrum, but the hair brush, and therefore cut in this sense could not have been meant. To cut with a brush means to design with an air of power. Three lines varied in shape would mean nothing, if nothing was expressed; but if some known contour of the body was taken in repose, three variations of its position without alteration would be as much as could be expected in the contour. Suppose that Apelles drew a line from the clavicle A to the pubis B of a body in profile, shaping all the parts as he went correctly like fig. 1. Next, suppose that Protogenes having come in saw the line, and knew that in finely-formed men, the stomach, from great exercise and temperate living, becomes small; the contour would curve in at C, so that that portion of the rectus muscle would retire, as in many of the Greek statues. He would then take the same contour, draw it again on the wax tablet, and make this variation. Again, suppose that Apelles returned and on seeing himself vanquished, took the brush and drew the same contour, allowing the variation of Protogenes, but remembering that in powerful men, the pyramidalis D, fig. 3, arising from the pubis and going into die rectus, makes another and the last variation. Then Protogenes returning, and seeing that nothing more could be done unless the body was altered in position, he would acknowledge the line to be completed.

In Conduci’s Five Dialogues, it is stated that Michel Ange!o thought it must have been a contour of some part of the body. Now. this singular contest would be felt by all artists as one of the greatest utility. It would be wondered at by connoisseurs, and would illustrate a great principle; namely, that a knowledge of construction was die basis of correct design and the foundation of all beauty.

It was the continual practice of this eminent man to do something every day, whatever happened; and hence the proverb, “No day without a line.” If artists were to write [7:16:703]this over their painting-room doors, it would not be without advantage. Rubens rose at four, and was in his painting till five in the afternoon, with occasional variations. All the greatest men of antiquity and of modern art, have been the most diligent and the most industrious. And here is the most celebrated of the tabular painters of antiquity afraid to let a day pass without the use of the pencil. Apelles used also to hide himself behind his works to hear the remarks of the public. This deference to the public voice evinced by sculptors, painters, and statesmen, is a beautiful proof of the sense and understanding of the time. Nothing was done in defiance of public taste, but every thing in conformity to its dictates; and though this does and often did lead to great injustice in political matters, in art the maxim is infallible.

Apelles of Cous excited envy enough, and notwithstanding his graceful manners, his tender heart, and his accomplished mind, when driven by stress of weather into Alexandria, die courtiers of Ptolemy, hating his superiority, and fearing his probable fortune, sent him a pretended invitation to sup with the king. Apelles went; the king felt astonished at the liberty, and sending to demand explanation, discovered the imposition. On inquiring if Apelles knew the person who had given him the invitation, he immediately sketched his face on the wall, and the king recognised the culprit. Courts, kings, and people can only; udge of results. The infinite number of repeated acts, the nulla dies sine linea, the failures, the recoveries, the musings, the thinkings, that had taken place with the “cestrum cum lumine,” they had not witnessed; therefore, knowing their utter incapacity to do as Apelles did, they concluded that he was a wonder, and he of course became a favourite. As an evidence of that peculiar tact by which such men are sure to please kings and nobility, namely, by the power of seizing the most agreeable expression of any sitter’s face, however ugly, and rendering his very defects a cause of elegant concealment; he painted Antigonus, who had lost one eye, in profile, concealed his defective eye, and made him as graceful as if he were Alexander. This was the great secret of his fortunes, as it was that of Titian’s, Vandyke’s and Reynold’s; and though not to be compared in point of taste or knowledge of the art, this was also the secret of the popularity of Lawrence, mere portrait painter as he was, and nothing more.

Polygnotus, Pausias, Aristides, Timanthes, Zeuxis, Parrhasius, Pamphilus, Euphranor, and Timomachus did not so completely gratify the vanity of their contemporaries, and were not such personal favourites as Apelles; for there is no gratitude equal to the gratitude of being successfully painted. Kings bow to the unknown power of having their momentary expressions observed, seized, transferred, and fixed for ages, and whilst colours and canvass last, carried on, for the admiration of a distant age, when the existing one is past and forgotten. What can equal the gratitude of a woman to have her beauty preserved, whilst she is in her bloom, for the admiration of her children when age has shrivelled her form, or misfortune destroyed her happiness? The world may be elevated, excited, roused, by the commemoration of the great deeds of ancestors or heroes; but no sympathy is ever excited, and no personal vanities are ever so happily gratified by any class of painters, as by the great portrait-painter. The degree of imagination required is not of that irresistible kind which forces him to leave the model before him, using it only to realise his own burning conceptions, so that all likeness of the individual is lost; he requires no more than to retain in his mind the best expression of the individual before him to identify it upon canvass. But it must be exactly like, or it is nothing. After the likeness is completed, the sitter will have no objection to the highest degree of embellishment. There the great portrait-painter shews the degree of fancy wanted, and he that embellishes most, without losing resemblance, will be the most welcomed, as Apelles was, by the world.

To put Apelles in comparison with Polygnotus is out of the question. Highly-wrought individual figures, little more than portraits of beautiful nature, cannot rank so high in the judgment, though they may in the delicate sympathies of the world. But that single terrific conception of the demon Eurynome, for which no prototype in nature could be found, that momentary blush which crimsoned his Cassandra,^[38. Lucian. ] Aristotle’s praise that he made men better than they were, and Plato’s ranking him with Phidias, settles the question of his greatness; and as a portrait expression must be seen before it can be done, and must be like or it is nothing, there is an end of the highest quality of human genius, invention. Indeed, whatever the vanity of the world may be inclined to feel, the greatest portrait painter is but an inferior artist.

The age of Polygnotus and Phidias was the meridian age of Greek art; and that of Apelles was the setting glory. From the latter period it sunk gradually as if nature had been exhausted by the previous effort. Such ages have never since been seen; such perfection had never been realized before, and never will be again; for in order to become such sculptors and painters, men must also become idolaters. But to return and conclude the notice of Apelles, this courtfavourite of antiquity. Notwithstanding the education of Alexander by Aristotle, notwithstanding that h γραφική was a portion of his education, Alexander was little more than a glorious barbarian in art. He talked so absurdly in the paintingroom of Apelles, that the artist was obliged to request that his majesty would be cautious, lest the boys should laugh as they ground their colours. Apelles may be considered as the Titian of Greek art, with the addition of all that vast knowledge of form, which every painter and every school was obliged to master. But the disposition to perfect single figures, and the acknowledgment that others exceeded him in composition, clearly point out the extent of his fertility. Though Pliny describes many beautiful pictures, his greatest are single figures. His Venus Anadyomene was the most celebrated of all his works; but being painted upon wood, it was destroyed by insects in the time of Augustus. He began another, and having completed it as far as the bosom, died; but although the contours were completed for finishing, nobody would venture to touch it, such was the extreme veneration entertained for him. By this description we seethe nature of the Greek process; first, the ground, then the drawing in, next the impasto preparation, and then the completion part by part. He had got the picture finished as far as the bosom; and therefore to finish highly by degrees was his system. He was not deficient in expression, for he painted persons dying with great power. His imitation must have been perfect, for his painted horses are said tohave made real horses neigh; and his colour must have been exquisite, for he glazed like the Venetian school. Pliny mentions him as one of those who painted with four colours; but this is a mistake; for it was in the age of Polygnotus that blue was not used. From a passage in Cicero,^[39. Brutus, c∙ 18. ] it appears that that age was famous for “form and contour;” whereas, according to the same writer, all things were perfect in the works of Protogenes, Nichomachus, Echion, and Apelles.

Pliny is therefore right in saying that pictures which constituted the opulence of towns, were painted with four colours only; but he is not as clear as usual in regard to the period to which this observation applies. Quintilian, calling the colour of Polygnotus “simplex color,” seems to indicate the absence of blue ; whilst red, yellow, black, and white did not produce such gorgeous splendour as in the age of Apelles. Thus Quintilian, as well as Cicero, collaterally proves Pliny to be in part right. It is extraordinary that Reynolds did not [7:16:704]allude to the absence of blue in the enumeration of Pliny. Great depth, fine tone, simplicity, and modesty, can be obtained without blue, but never that tremendous magnificence produced by the contrast of the deep and awful azures of Titian. Though Polygnotus did notuseblue, his black was made from vine-stalks and wine-lees.^[40. See Pliny, lib. xxxv. The sea in the Venus Anadyomene is quoted as a proof that blue must have been used. But where is there any blue in Vandervelde? We do not think that a picture exists with blue in his sea. ] which render black more blue than the ivory black of Apelles, which was discovered by him, and is used to this hour in Europe. There were several of the same name, but Apelles Cous distinguishes the great Apelles, as Aristides Thebanus does the great Aristides.

After this long account of the courtly, accomplished, and highly-wrought Apelles, there may be something interesting to allude to Aristides the “great master of expression,” as Fuseli calls him. He was the first who painted deep human emotions, fierce passions, and distressing perturbations; but he was hard in colour, says Pliny, and not so harmonious as Apelles, probably like Raffaelle, the great Italian master of expression, in comparison with Titian. His finest picture was that of a mother dying from a wound which she had received in the sacking of her native city. Her infant was trying to reach the nipple with its boneless gums, whilst the mother, faint and exhausted, appeared struggling to save it from sucking, lest blood might mingle with its nourishment; a tender and affecting thought. Alexander was so touched by this picture at Thebes, when the city was taken, that he sent it to Pella.^[41. Raffaelle imitated this in his plague, where a fine youth is putting away an infant from a dying mother’s bosom; but the utter wan of taste in making the boy hold his nose for fear of infection, renders the sentiment not pathetic but at once disgusting and ridiculous. ]

Protogenes was another of the great men of this time. It is indeed extraordinary to reflect how genius in art and literature seems always to come in clusters in every country. He was born at a small town on the coast of Asia Minor, subject to the Rhodians; and he got his living till he was fifty years old, in great poverty, painting beautiful ornaments for the prows of ships. He was not a man of fertile invention, and spent years over single works, which induced Apelles to say that he never knew when he had finished. His celebrated work was Talissus, which occupied him seven years. Titian took eight to paint the Pietro Martyre, and seven to finish the Last Supper for Charles V.;^[42. See, in Ridolpbi, Titian’s letter to the emperor. ] and yet in Titian’s works there is no appearance of over diligence. Pliny says he painted his pictures four times over, so that if one picture was destroyed another might be ready. Nothing shews so completely the exact degree of knowledge which Pliny had of art as this absurd conclusion from an admirable practice. Protogenes proceeded with his works as Titian did, by stages ; and each stage was a separate impasto of colour, which helped the next till completed. Of this artist the story is told of his flinging his sponge at a dog’s mouth in a rage, because he had vainly tried to hit breath coming out of it, and by that accident succeeding; a circumstance which shews that it was tempera painting, for a sponge would not have done for wax. Such a habit of daily application had Protogenes, that when Demetrius besieged Rhodes, he would not leave his painting-room, but proceeded daily in his studies amidst the noise of battering rams and catapultae. The king came often to visit him; and that part of the town where he worked was spared, and the picture thus finished was said to have been done at the point of the sword. Protogenes painted the mother of Aristotle; and the philosopher urged him to execute the battles of Alexander; but he was not a man of rapid conception or fertile invention for a series, and could not be moved.

It is curious to reflect, that all the great painters painted portraits; which proves that they thought it essential to that truth which was the foundation of their ideal beauty. Indeed, every great painter should paint a portrait a month ; and if, like the Greeks, he has always nature for his works, he never can degenerate into manner.

Of the other painters, Asclepiodorus was celebrated forpro-portion; Nicoachus for rapidity of hand, and Theon for wild conceptions, “quas Graeci vocant φαντασίας.” Pliny places Theon amongst the herd, whilst Quintilian and Aelian place him amongst the illustrious, where he ought to be. He painted a single warrior dashing forward on the spectators; and collecting the public, he kept the picture behind a curtain, when in the midst of a blast of trumpets, the curtain was dropped, and the wonderful figure terrified the people. He also painted Orestes, distracted and insane, and proved himself a great and wild inventor. The three remaining great men of the fine period, were Pausias, Euphranor, and Timomachus. No passage has excited so much discussion as the well known one in Pliny, where he says, “nulla gloria artificum est, nisi qui tabulas pinxer e,” as if hemeant that the only glory in art consisted in tabular pictures, “πίνακες,” on wood, and that there was but little in monumental and mural efforts. Pliny, however, does not here contrast the tabular pictures of Apelles with the mural paintings of Polygnotus, but with the works of one Ludius, a Roman, a mere ornamental landscape-painter upon walls, like our Bond Street paper painters. This was much the fashion in Pliny’s time, which he laments; and many examples of the same species may now be seen in Pompeii.

Having thus described the fancies and caprices by which the art had been degraded, Pliny turns to the highly beautiful tabular works of Apelles, and observes naturally enough; “This is not the thing; the glory of art and of artists consists in the Venus of Apelles, the mother of Aristides, the Ialysus of Protogenes, and not in this mechanical whim, which is not the glory and the end of painting.” This, perhaps, is the explanation which he would give if he were alive and able to answer us. Is it not unjust then to take up such ground as Μ. Raoul-Rochette has done in France, and Payne Knight in England, and infer that there was no real glory in any other mode of painting? The ancients estimated mural painting at Delphi, as the Italians do in the Vatican. But they did not undervalue tabular painting, small pictures, encaustic, landscapes, or humour; they painted in every style and they excelled in all.

Pliny now proceeds to the encaustic painters, of whom Pausias and Euphranor appear to have been the greatest. Pausias was a master of foreshortening, as we learn from Pliny’s description of a bull which he painted in front and projecting beyond the tablet. After Pausias came the Isthmian Euphranor, who wrote on symmetry and colour, painted great and small works, and delineated statues and animals. He said of his Theseus, that “it was real flesh, whilst that of Parrhasius had fed on roses.” Then came Nicias who painted women beautifully, understood light and shadow, and was another pillar of art. Metrodorus was both a philosopher and a painter; and when the victorious Paulus desired Perseus to send him a philosopher to educate his children, and a painter to arrange his triumph, Metrodorus was despatched as a person capable of executing both tasks. Timomachus is the last of this splendid list whom it is necessary to mention. He died, like Apelles, leaving an important work unfinished.

Such were the most illustrious men of the three finest periods of Greek painting. The first period of Greek art was that before Pericles; the second, or that of Pericles himself, was the finest, the highest, and the purest in painting, sculpture, and architecture; the third was the epoch [7:16:705]of Alexander, the most refined, but prophetic of the corruption followed; then came the subjugation of the Romans, when the noblest works of the Greeks were seized as tribute, or matters of right, and Italy was inundated by the productions of Greek talent.

This influx of foreign productions entirely suffocated native Italian genius. Greek productions became matters of property; and dealerssprungup who manufactured originals to supply the market of the rich collector. Galleries were formed to produce genius, which had sprung up from national demand without a single gallery or a single collection of any works, except the productions of their native soil. The most celebrated works were copied and re-copied by the Greeks in all parts of the Mediterranean. Horace alludes to this; and there can be no doubt whatever that the effect was to render all native attempts of the Romans and Etruscans no longer available. For not one great artist is named during the whole period of progressive decay from the Caesars to Constantine; and the Romans or Latins never produced any talent worth consideration till the revival of art in Italy, after so many ages, in the fifteenth century. Then, the same principle operating, and the church and state demanding art as an assistant, outpoured an abundance of native talent, because there was a vent, as there had been before, in Greece, Egypt, and Chaldaea; and the genius of Rome, Florence, Pisa, and Venice, vindicated their long suppressed claims to originality. Amongst the illustrious Romans, Julius Caesar seems to have been a magnificent collector; but whether, like Napoleon, he was also a magnificent patron of the talent of his time is not known. He bought Greek pictures, and presented them to Roman temples; but one work of native art, produced by native patronage, is more honour both to patron and to artist than a gallery of foreign pictures be they ever so divine.

Upon the whole, before tracing art from its decay to its revival, we cannot but acknowledge as evident, that a period of dearth in genius has generally succeeded in the world to one of prolific production. In painting and sculpture, secondary causes, such as the nature of the government, or the circumstances of the two arts being required for political purposes, may considerably facilitate the development of genius. But it is not so with the poet. He can give vent to his immortal thoughts in poverty or wretchedness, independently of the taste of the times, or the patronage of the state. Milton, in obscurityandblindness, wrote Paradise Lost; and Savage, in poverty and wretchedness, composed his Bastard in the streets, begging bits of paper as he walked, when he had more thoughts than his mind could contain, and thus, as effectually preserved them as if he had been bred in a palace, or had sheets of the finest hot-pressed to receive his lucubrations.^[43. See Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, art. Savage. ]

After the conquest of Greece, and the removal of art and artists to Rome, the genius of painting seems to have left the world. The Roman school of painting and sculpture is scarcely worth a single thought. In the last years of the republic the art sunk rapidly. Augustus tried to revive it; but though the pupils and descendants of the illustrious dead attempted to second his views, and though the writings of Apelles, Euphranor, and Pamphilus, were all in existence, and their principles known and acted upon, genius was nowhere to be found. That divine spark with its attendant whisper, unseen but not unheard, which ever attends the gifted who are born for great objects, whether it supported Columbus amidst the storms of the Atlantic, Alexander as he plunged into Asia, Napoleon as he rushed into Italy, Wellington at Waterloo, Michel Angelo when he painted the Sistine Chapel, Raffaelle when he entered the Vatican, or Phidias when he adorned the Parthenon; that supernatural, incomprehensible something, which inspires hope, “when the whole world seems adverse to desert,” was gone from the earth like the glory which had blazed in the temple. All that the savage, splendid, imperial Romans could do, all the honours and riches they had to confer, were bestowed in vain. Architecture suited their savage vastness of mind better than painting; therefore architecture flourished, and Augustus was said “to have found Rome thatched, and left it marbled.”

Not Babylon Nor great Alcairo, such magnificence Equalled in all their glories, to enshrine Belus or Serapis^[44. In this beautiful passage, the immortal author has made the penult syllable of Seraρis short, whereas it is in reality long, Serãpis; an error which could scarcely have been expected in one who was a great scholar as well as a great poet. ] their gods, or seat Their kings, when Egypt with Assyria strove In wealth and luxury.

Claudius built a superb aqueduct, and Nero burned^[45. Tacitus does not seem altogether to believe it. ] and rebuilt a golden palace; but he could not replace the lines of Apelles and Protogenes, or the miracles of Timanthes and Aristides, which perished in the conflagration. Galba, Otho, and Vetellius were hurried through life and empire too rapidly for art; whilst Vespasian and Titus bewildered the Romans with their Cyclopean masses. Hadrian, himself an artist, endeavoured to recover art by indiscriminately encouraging Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans; “but such a medley of principle as their works displayed,” says Agincourt,^[46. Agincourt, Histoire de l’Art, torn· i. ] “hastened the decay of art, and rendered the emperor hopeless of reviving it.” The art thus went floundering on until Dioclesian, with all the gorgeous splendour of ⅛n eastern monarch, mingled together Roman, Greek, and oriental art, and corrupting all taste led to its extinction. It was between the reign of Commodus and that of Constantine, that those causes were generated which undermined the empire, and brought art, science, and literature into the chasm. Of forty emperors who, from the second to the fourth century had struggled for the diadem and obtained it, twenty had been murdered by the army and the people. “Ainsi” says Montesquieu “comme lagrandeur de la république, fut fatale au gouvernement républicain, la grandeur de l’empire le fut à la vie des empéreurs.”^[47. Décadence des Romains. ] Constantine’s removal of the seat of empire did not so much begin the destruction of art as complete it; for previous causes, domestic and political, had been preparing the ruin for centuries before.

Agincourt thinks that as far as art is concerned, too much has been attributed to this removal of the empire. But yet the first epoch of what may be called modern art in opposition to ancient, must date from the introduction of Christianity as a state religion, when the whole moral feelings of Greek and Romans took another turn in painting and sculpture. Although Constantine only grafted Christianity on Paganism, and founded more Catholicism than Christianity, by meeting and uniting the prejudices of both Pagans and Christians; yet surely if genius could ever be created by patronage, the age of Constantine, and those of Charlemagne, and Louis XIV. ought to have rivalled those of Pericles and Julius. Such was the rage for splendour in this reign, that the quarries of Phrygian marble and of the isle of Proconnesus, were almost destroyed to furnish palaces for the emperor, his sons, and his ministers. Temples, palaces, forums, triumphal arches, colossal statues, an hippodrome, and eight public baths were built and adorned at once; and in addition, splendid commissions were given to the painters for pictures of Christ, the Virgin, the prophets, and the apostles. Rome, Naples, Capua, Antioch, Tyre, Jerusalem, and even Bethlehem, felt the effects of this mag [7:16:706]nificent employment; but what were the results to painting? Nothing, absolutely nothing, to guide anybody except the antiquary; and if any evidence were wanting to show that the genius and the patron must exist together, or the result will be nothing, the end of Constantine’s splendour would abundantly supply it.

The moral character of ancient Greece was gone; the instinct of public glory was passed; their olive crowns, the adequate reward of talent on a great principle, were sneered at; and “Lucian,” (as the author of the Discours Historique observes) “had already ridiculed this tribunal,” which had listened with rapture to Herodotus, and crowned Aëtion for a fine picture, and which in its days of Marathonian glory, had done more than ever was done before or since in rousing human effort, mental and bodily, to its highest pitch of excellence. Luxury, indolence, vice, fanaticism, cant, sophistry, intrigue, and imposture, had supplanted the pure aspirations of patriotism and glory. “The great and the opulent,” says Pliny and Vitruvius, “were fonder of gold and glitter than purity of design or pathos of expression, or perfection of form; overwhelmed with colours from all the countries of the earth, with double the advantages of Polygnotus, and Zeuxis, and Aristides,” who painted with four only, “nulla nobilis pictura est.” Of course, this is always the end, when the moral and national importance of painting is undervalued. When native art is despised, and spurious foreign productions are preferred; when connoisseurs of what is past abound, and connoisseurs of what is passing exist not; when painting is considered as a bauble or s a bit of furniture, and painters share dignity with upholsterers and gilders, what wonder if “nulla pictwr<T is the cry?

Gold and vermillion being thus introduced upon the walls of palaces and preferred to beautiful art, in came arabesques. Claudius had before introduced Indian patterns and mosaic pictures, which had hitherto been kept for pavements, till Commodus, for the sake of a new sensation, had a portrait in his palace of Piscennius Niger,^[48. Spartian, In Vita Pise. Nig. cap. 6. ] painted in mosaic, which may be considered as the first picture of this description. When painting was in this staggering condition, Justinian gave it a final blow by ordering encaustic and distemper designs, as vulgar, to be banished from ceilings and walls, and mosaic, marble, and gold, to be preferred. Though mosaic was perhaps one of the means of preserving art and of introducing it into Italy, yet it should only be used in pavements, or to preserve the works of great masters. The anti-pagan zeal of the early Christians is well known. They used to put ropes round the necks of Apollos and Venuses to try them publicly, like criminals, find them guilty, and pound them to dust. But human nature is always the same. A thousand years afterwards a similar scene was acted in Scotland by John Knox and the reformers, nor had England escaped the fury of iconoclasm. Eusebius^[49. Montesq. Décadence des Romains, 133. ] informs us that in the empire whole towns rose and destroyed the temples in which they had just worshipped. The air echoed with the noise of hammers, the crashing of pediments, the breaking of pillars, and the shouts of a maddened and frenzied populace. The finest works of Phidias, Scopas, Polycletus, and Praxiteles, and all that was left of Polygnotus, Apelles, Zeuxis, or Euphranor, were demolished or burned, like wretches who had infected religion, and their ashes were danced on with fanatical exultation. Sogreat indeed had been the destruction, that when Arcadius and Honorius issued a fresh edict to go on destroying, they added, as well they might, “Si qua etiam nunc in templis fanisque consistent, “If anypictures or statues are still left.” During this frenzy was introduced into art, painting without nature, and after producing a race of monsters down to Golzius and Spranger, there began the cant of “nature putting an artist out.” What Zeuxis did not dare to do, what Apelles never thought of, what Phidias never permitted to be mentioned in his school, a parcel of painters brought into practice by the very mysticism of their impossible theories. Man was corrupt, being born in sin and vicious in practice; to take him asa model therefore when painting holy subjects, was to act under the influence of Satan. Man was banished, and so was woman, and nature in every thing; till at last all painters painted in one way, and in came manner into the great art of nature, and like a “leperous distillment” stained her garment and poisoned her beauty. Yet th e traditional maxims of the ancient fathers, on beauty and art, give one a very good idea of what were the maxims of the finer Pagan periods. “Art is nothing but an imitation of nature,” says St-Athanasius, (Crat. contr. Gent. c. xviii. p. 18.) “Ancient artists sought to surpass each other by faithful imitation,” (Arnob. Advers. Gent, lib vi. fol. 68) “Nature is the archetype, art the image; every image has a model, and painters imitate what they see,” (Theodoret.) “Imitation is the merit of painting; be not seduced by ah illusion,” (St. Clement.) “When begging the people not to be seduced by pictures and statues as if they were gods, tell them that pictures and statues are imitations of nature, and therefore cannot be gods.” These maxims of the fourth century had clearly descended from a nobler era. Besides the treatises of Apelles, Euphranor, and Pamphilus, were all in existence, and were read by the educated and accomplished; and we sec how skilfully the fathers of the church tried to save fine works from destruction, by assuring the people that they were mere imitations of life, for such was the principle of artists. Are not these quotations then collateral evidences of the practice of the Greeks, if we had known nothing of the girls of Crotona sitting to Zeuxis?

But Christianity was at first the ruin of art, by making purity of heart every thing, and physical ugliness, or deformity, nothing; by teaching that as all beautiful works of art were remnants of idolatry, they ought to be destroyed; and by inculcating that mankind being corrupt and born in sin, no Christian painter ought to look at the naked figure whilst he was painting it. Add to these prejudices, the predilection of eastern notions for gold and silver, the preference of eastern dresses to the simplicity of Greek clothing, the controversies which took place as to whether our Saviour was ugly or handsome, and the vehemence with which Pagans and Christians both entered into them; and no one can wonder at the state into which painting declined.

The division of opinion about the person of Christ, and the dread of the early Fathers to expose the cross to Pagans, who, familiar with golden-locked Apollosand perfumed Venuses, could not comprehend that suffering and majestic pains were founded upon a higher philosophy, so embarrassed the painters, that to avoid collision they painted Christ as an allegory thus lingering with their Greek feelings about the form of beauty and of grace. It must be interesting to all readers thus to trace the progress of feehng relating to the head of Christ.^[50. St. Augustin declares that in his time no faces of Christ or the Virgin were known, and that no pictures were painted of them before the council of Ephesus; y et there are seven reported originals, four of which are by St. Luke’s own hand, now in Rome. ] In thefourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, beauty and youth still predominated; and he is painted youthful and handsome, crushing the lion under his feet, or as a young shepherd with his flock. With allegory the beauty of our Saviour ended, whilst the Fathers of the church, like the priests of Egypt, interfered, and issued an edict ordering him to be represented in agony on the cross. But here the order was evaded. The Greeks still struggled for the beautiful, and as if it were the never-dying principle of their souls, painted our blessed Saviour dying upon the cross, but smiling with triumphant glory as if re [7:16:707]joicing in his sacrifice. In whatever the Greeks were compelled to do, beauty seemed still to be the basis of their art. By degrees, however, the poor descendants of Apelles and Polygnotus finding no employment except on the conditions prescribed, the person of Christ became gradually degraded in art; and at the separation of the Latin church, to paint him ugly, bloody and agonized, was the settled principle of representation, and has more or less influenced his representation ever since. There seems to be some doubt as to the extent of the devastation committed by the Goths. Alaric staid butthree days in Rome, and Attila had himself painted inone of his Milan palaces seated on a throne, and receiving the homage of a Roman emperor.^[51. Suidas. ] Theodoric seems to have had a very good feeling for art. He laments, in a letter to Symmachus, the ruins of works of genius, begs their preservation, and concludes with observing that Rome has still a population of statues with herds of bronze horses. The expulsion of the Goths and the invasion of the Lombards, again afflicted the art; but it had found its way into France, and the churches of Paris, Tours, Bordeaux and Clermont, were ornamented by native painters.

Though the popes had begun to adorn the churches, and art in the earliest times had been kept alive with considerable talent in the catacombs in Rome; though Europe had been astonished by the splendour of the ecclesiastical patronage of painters; yet the next great epoch after Constantine originates in the efforts of the illustrious Charlemagne. He formed the plan of renovating art, science and literature; and he would have accomplished his object, if the genius of the age had been worthy of the emperor. The ancient practice of painting churches, kept alive by previous popes, he confirmed by a law; and agents every year visited the provinces to see that the law was observed. If a royal church was to bepainted, the bishops and abbots were responsible. If, in the midst of a campaign, an order was issued for a church, one to paint the walls was included; and no church was considered as finished till that was done, the object of the emperor being to obliterate the remembrance of the splendid altars of the Pagans, by still more magnificent Christian ornaments. “Repair your church,” says the archbishop of Treves; “you know the decision of the emperor.”

Two monkish painters of the time are celebrated; and France and Britain began even at this early period, to take an interest in the arts. Biscop, abbot of Weremouth, had brought pictures from Italy. Charlemagne had invited king Offfa to protect painting, with but little effect; yet though the walls of English churches were whitewashed, the English began to adorn the ceilings and the windows, and hung tapestry upon the walls.^[52. William of Malmsbury. ]

In Spain, the Arabians had introduced their art, such as it could be, under the prohibition of Mahommed; and miniatures or manuscripts were so eagerly bought all over Europe, that the artists"in France, Germany and Italy, devoted themselves to this production; though here again it was acknowledged by all, that they were beaten by the Greeks. In spite of all this, the art continued to decay; and at the second Council of Nice the members gave evidence of the state to which monks and bishops had reduced it. “How can painters be blamed?” say they; “the painter invents nothing. Invention and composition belong to the Fathers;^[53. Concil. Nie. iî. act. vi. tom. iv. ed. 1714. ] the art alone is the painters’.” Inadvertently, too, the emperor injured the art by altering the dress of his cavalry and foot. The women as usual followed the example, and having relinquished the pure taste of the Greeks, dress has in consequence become an annual novelty and change. The Paladin and his horse were covered with iron and mail; angles and straight lines predominated; the naked form was more than ever concealed, and the artist deprived of his materials.

Though the art suffered at the death of Charlemagne, yet it was kept alive by monks and by bishops. At Rome, at Palermo, and at Milan, religious painters preserved it from decay; they sprung up all over Europe, and even St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, is spoken of as a skilfùl painter and maker of instruments.

It is curious, after all that has been written about oil painting, and the discovery mnde by John Van Eyk, to find a writer of this period called Eraclius, in a treatise on painting, speaking of oil painting: “De omnibus coloribus cum oleo distemperatis.” Another monk wrote? treatise, in which he says, “he will tell the world how the Greeks mixed their colours.” Now, as according to Suidas, the writings of Apelles and Euphranor, were in existence in the tenth century, and these people lived before that time, there is reason to believe that they were aware of oil painting having been practised in ancient Greece, and that subsequent discoveries were but different revivals.

Whilst the art feebly struggled on in the west, the court of Constantine Porphyrogenitus was the rendezvous of artists, and in 997 St. Mark was built at Venice by Greeks. In contrasting Greek with Roman art at this time, the Greek is still superior. The Greek composition did not want dignity, whilst in the Roman, all sound principle seemed dead. The most ignorant Greeks shewed taste in their draperies, and their heads have character, and in the arrangement of hair, they remind one of the Panathenaic procession; whilst the Romans, with their large heads and long limbs, evince a gross ignorance of beauty.

In the tenth century, tapestry for a time superseded painting; though in Germany, France, Italy and England, many painters flourished. In England, historical commemorations were in fashion, and the Duchess of Northumberland adorned Ely Cathedral with a series of pictures illustrating the deeds of her distinguished lord.^[54. Strutt. ] When William the Conqueror came, he introduced a new style of architecture; but both at York and Canterbury, paintings then adorned the walls. In 1013, a head of Christ was executed in mosaic, and is still considered as the wonder of the middle ages.

After so many vicissitudes of fortune, painting now began to shew symptoms of revival. Frescos had been executed in Rome in498,and in795; and there wasahead of Christ painted in St. John Lateran, and still to be there seen, which gave evidence of great feeling. But the grand impulse was given in the year 1066, when St. Didier sent for Greek artists to adorn Monte Casino at Subiaco. The example was followed. Pisa, Venice, Amalfi, Genoa, and Milan, all municipal corporations rivalled each other; and when Pisa sent to Greece to collect as many splendid remains of art as could be obtained to adorn the dome of the city, Buschetto, a celebrated Greek architect, was engaged to superintend their embarcation, to accompany them during the voyage, and to land them safely for the purchasers. Buschetto was received with so much enthusiasm, that he founded a school of sculpture, which existed for two hundred years; and ultimately out of this very Greek school, came the great artist Nicoo Pisano, the head of the Italico-Pisan school. From this moment art, after having sunk to the lowest barbarism, went on improving till the taking of Constantinople by Mahommed II., an event which scattered the Greeks collected at that court all over Europe. Hundreds went to Italy as painters, sculptors, chasers, and mosaic painters; and by their struggles for existence, inoculated Italian artists with some remnant of their taste for beauty, decayed as it was. Cimabue was their pupil, and Giotto was his. The Catholic church wanted artists, and genius again began to shew itself. One man of genius appeared after another, till Michel Angelo, [7:16:708]Leonardo, Raffaelle, Titian, and Corregio, were the glorious results And though it cannot be denied that the high aspirations of Christianity, by placing every thing human on its proper level on earth, in comparison with eternal happiness, had justly prostrated the splendid beauty of Pagan art, by exposing its idolatrous tendencies; though the sufferings, and the agonies of its founder and its martyrs had revived its pathos with higher objects than mere beauty of form or face, and saved painting and sculpture from extinction; yet it must be acknowledged, that the beauty of Christian art has never rivalled the indisputable perfection of the Pagans. To their enthusiastic overestimate of the religious value of physical, as emblematic of moral beauty, is their perfection attributable; but if it can only be revived by some similar delusion, the result will in our opinion more than atone for any thing that seems doubtful or questionable in the principle.

The most eminent pictures of the middle ages, setting aside the cemeteries or catacombs, which cannot legitimately be referred to the middle ages, but to the earliest ages of Christianity, are to be found in Rome. The greatest works of the middle ages are the series of Popes, begun in the fifth century, and continued down to the present time. The next, which was executed in the year 1011, is the painting of the church of St. Urbano, where some of the Acts of the Apostles are represented on the walls. Though the mosaics of St. Mark’s, executed by Greeks, were earlier, and kept art alive, yet, according to Lanzi, nothing in reality appeared which gave symptoms of the approach of any thing extraordinary, till about the thirteenth century; and this revolution of style was entirely owing to sculpture.

The glory of this art belongs partly to the Tuscans, the legitimate descendants of the ancient Etruscans, but most especially to the Pisans, who first had the courage to burst the yoke which Greek art in its fallen state had imposed upon them, and to go at once to the antique; and this glory belongs to Nicoo Pisano, a pupil of the school originally founded by the Greek Buschetto. There were in Pisa several ancient sarcophagi, but especially one, containing the body of Beatrice, mother of the Countess Matilda, with a bas-relief in good style, which served as the model of Nicoo; on this he formed his style, in which there is something of the antique, especially in his heads and draperies. Many artists who had not done so before, immediately devoted themselves to sculpture; and Nicoo Pisano must be considered as the first Italian, who opened the eyes of his contemporaries to the true principle of using the antique, that is, keeping nature in view at the moment of practice. In 1231 he cut an urn in Bologna, whence he was called “Nicoo of the urn and he produced two stories of the last judgment at Orvieto, and another work at Pisa, which convinced the world that he was born to found an epoch. He executed other great works, and was really the head of the illustrious school which produced Orcagna, Donatelo, and the famous Lorenzo Ghiberti, who made the beautiful bronze doors of which Michel Angelo said, that they were worthy to be the gates of paradise.

Many other eminent men came from his school. All Italy was more or less affected by Pisano’s genius; and though a sculptor, his effect on design was so great, that he must be considered as having had a material influence on painting. Painting remained behind sculpture, and even mosaic; and Vasari exaggerates the effect of Cimabue’s appearance in the year 1240; for Lanzi proves that there were Pisan painters of talent before that period, and that the early art does not in the first instance owe so much to the Florentines as Vasari has asserted. At Assisi there is a crucifixion by Guinta Pisano, who, according to an inscription, learned his art from the Greeks in 1210. This was before Cimabue; but Lanzi says that the work is not inferior to Cimabue, and in drapery, colour, light, and shadow, composition and expression, very like the contemporary Greeks. Guinta disappeared and died, nobody knows where or how. Guido di Sienna was another name of this early period. In the Louvre there were some exquisite heads of angels with gilt glories, full of beauty and expression, executed by this artist. Then followed Margaritone, who painted on canvass covered with size and plaster for a ground; which the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, had done long before his time.

During the time that the neighbouring cities had founded a new style, Florence had no painters; but when the authorities called in some Greeks in 1250, it is asserted that there was a painter called Bartolomeo. Vasari wishes of course to infer that Cimabue was the first Italian painter who gave the impulse; but Lanzi proves the contrary. Although there is no city we owe so much to as Florence, yet the Florentines ought not to be allowed to deprive their old enemies of the honour of having produced earlier painters, besides Pisano.

Cimabue, who was both architect and painter, was honourably descended. That he might have been the scholar of Guinta is probable, because the Italians knew more than the Greeks of that time; but there is every reason to believe that he learnt of those Greeks who had been called to Florence, and whom, according to Vasari, he stood whole days, when a boy, watching as they painted in Santa Maria Novella. From this moment indeed may be dated the excitement which impelled him to become a painter. At Assisi his genius seems to have been put forth with most power. Lanzi concludes the notice of him by saying, that Cimabue was the Michel Angelo, and Giotto the Raffàelle of his age. In the Louvre there were one or two large examples of Virgins, staring and Gothic, and which the French, still more Gothic, were absolutelyrepainting.^[55. The writer of this article, who saw a Frenchman solidly repainting a large picture of Cimabue in the private rooms of the Louvre, where he was admitted by Denon, asked the Frenchman who it was by; “Monsieur,” said he, “je ne suis pas peintre, je suis restaurateur.” ] Vigorous in his colour, and colossal but ill-proportioned in his figures, Cimabue first gave indications of attempting something new in painting; indeed, his watching the Greeks all day is so like an infatuated youth, that it bears truth on the face of it. Florence was often in commotion when his works appeared; and although he was not actually the oldest painter, he was the first of that series which ended in Raffaelle. His style was meagre, his drapery sharp, and his colour a species of illumination; but though he had no light and shadow or perspective, he was a great man for his time; and in some of his heads there are both character and expression.

Men of genius assist to call forth men of genius. In the neighbourhood of Florence, Cimabue accidentally found a youth tending sheep, and trying to draw one upon a slate. After some conversation with the boy, finding the youth ambitious to become an artist, he consulted his father, took him immediately under his own tuition, and advanced him rapidly. Cimabue was amply repaid for his generous conduct, as the innocent youth was Giotto, afterwards one of the great men of the time. No man can judge of Giotto’s genius in England, because fragments of single heads or bits of altar pieces, are no fair criteria of a genius like his. His series of pictures in the Campo Santo are admirable, if allowance be made for the taste and simplicity of the age; but there are manyactions and positions of Giotto, as fine as can be conceived, and which other artists by aggrandising in form, have rendered models of imitation. He was the friend of Dante, and painted the portrait of the great poet. He seems to have been a facetious and amiable man as well as a genius, and was indisputably the greatest painter till Massacio. He [7:16:709]went about Italy scattering seeds every where, and when the Papal See was moved to Avignon, he went with the court. Giotto was the greatest of the Florentine school∙ He was the father of painting, as Boccaceio was the father of literature. He was sought for at Ravenna, and at all the great towns of Italy, and was patronised by all the first families. He was an object of study and admiration, until the time of Raffaelle, and that of the Caraccis, and is so even at the present time. There are in Giotto instances of pathos and expression, which would do honour to any period. Thus the greater part of the merit belongs to the Florentines, but not the whole. Giotto died in 1336, when painters had increased immensely. In 1290, the first society of artists in Venice was established, under the protection of St. Luke. They were not academies, but associations of artists, composed of engravers, painters, sculptors, and orefici. Their object was to advance design in all arts; and had they always continued to act on this honest and simple principle, we should not now have had to lament in Europe a race who are synonymous with every thing weak, ∏ιannered, and absurd in art.

The next distinguished artist was Buffalmaeo. Although totally independent of Giotto, he was also intimate with Boccaecio. He was very capricious, and worked only when he liked, yet he was inferior to no one. He painted the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and Creation of the World in the Campo Santo; in fact, the Campo Santo seems to have been a receptacle for all the distinguished geniuses as they appeared in that age. In it there are things as fine in conception as were ever imagined; and the foundation of some ofRaffaelle’s best compositions in the Vatican may be there found. Vasari’s life of Buffalmaco is exceedingly entertaining, as indeed all his lives are.

The two Oreagnas, Andrea and Bernardo, were the next artists of this early school. Andrea, painted the Judgment and the Inferno, in the Campo Santo. He was full of invention, but not equal to the Giotto school, though he first gave evidence of perspective. Lanzi thinks that the art did not advance so quickly after Giotto’s death as it ought to have done. Taddeo Gaddi, his best pupil, was to him what Julio Romano was to Raffaelle∙ Vasari, who saw his pictures in good condition, says, that he excelled his master in fleshiness and colour. Agnolo Gaddi the son of Taddeo, was a humble imitator of Giotto and his father, and had as his pupil Ceronino Cininni, whose treatise on the mechanical preparations of the art is very valuable. Fortunate would it have been had the treatises of Apelles and Euphranor also reached us.

Pisa now began to decline, and the Florentines took possession of that city in 1406. Hated and detested by their conquerors, the spirit of the citizens sunk into the greatest depression; the artists left the city, and the school entirely decayed. The Florentines now rose in the ascendant. The Medici began to appear. Cosimo, the father of his country and the protector of genius, gave fresh energy to art, science, and public affairs. Lorenzo followed, and their house became the refuge and resort of all who were celebrated in painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture, and philosophy. Masaccio, the two Piselli, the two Lippi, Binozzo, Sandro, and Ghirlandaio, received from the Medici protection and employment. The pictures of the time have perpetual portraits of the Medici. The citizens became animated with the. same spirit; freseoes covered the churches, and smaller works filled the houses. Up sprung, too, that host of painters, marble-cutters, bronze-casters, and chasers, by which the principles of design passed from Pisa to Florence; and out blazed before the world Donatello, Brunellesehi, Ghiberti. The most exquisite productions of sculpture, marble, and bronze followed. The youth became inoculated; sound design became the first necessity of manufacture; and though the finest works of Italy at this or any period cannot be compared to the finest works of Greece, yet a good style of design was established, but unequal to those refined forms of beauty, so palpable in the merest fragments of the works of the school of Phidias, which have all the look of life without any of its vulgarities, all the essential details, without a single superfluous one. This cannot be said of the naked figures of the period in question, or of any period of Italian art, not even of the art of Michel Angelo and Raffaelle. There was a want which Greek forms only supplied; there was an absence of refinement, and a want of something which the Greeks possessed. Michel Angelo and Raffaelle were educated without system. There was no school in Italy like the schools of Sicyon and Rhodes, Athens, and Corinth, where all the hidden secrets of perfect form were taught, that is, the seeret of beauty. Michel Angelo and Raffaelle owed their greatness to their own genius; and their art died with them. There has been nothing in the world like the art of Phidias, except the poetry of Shakespeare. The intellectual powers and perceptive senses of the Greeks must have been several degrees more refined than those of all preceding or subsequent nations.

The followers of Giotto had advanced the art from infancy: in colour, composition, and expression; but in perspective, and light and shadow, they left it as they found it. Uccello had given symptoms of perspective, and Massolino da Pani-cale of light and shadow, until the appearance of Masso di S. Giovanni, a youth so immersed in study, so utterly absorbed in his divine art, that he neglected dress, health, food, sleep, and seemed only to be conscious of life when he touched a pencil. For this entire neglect of the humanities and comforts of life, the Italians, whose satirical turn is ever apparent, added accio to Masso, (accio affixed to any word exciting associations of dirt or ugliness,) so that Massaeezo meant a dirty and neglectful man. Neglectful as he was, however, he was the immediate precursor of Raffaelle; and all the great subsequent painters studied him. Raffaelle borrowed from him Paul in Elymas, the Adam and the Eve in the Loggia, and other entire figures. Like Apollodorus, he opened the doors; and Raffaelle having passed through, never forgot his obligations. Ghiberti and Donatello formed his style; from Brunalesehi he learnt proportion; and though the finest antiques were not known in his time, he improvedhimself by studying suchas were in existence. The airs of his heads are Raffaellesque, says Mengs; yet, would it not be more just to say, that Raftaelle’s heads are Mas-saciesque ? Raffaelle died the favourite of a court, loved, lamented, and in competence. Massaceio so excited the envy of his inferiors, that it is suspected he was poisoned at the age of twenty-eight, before he had fairly taken his ground. Surely, then, when Massaecio is praised for what must have been his own, it is not quite fair to term his excellence, that of a man who came after him, and perhaps owed it to him. His works are at S. Ambrogio, and del Carmine in Florence, and St. Catherine in Rome. His heads are full of character, his drapery is beautifully composed, and his composition is unaffected, but his knowledge of the naked form is feeble and vulgar. Some of the heads of del Carmine are full of character like Holbein, with the same look of rigidity in expression; but he was a true genius, benefiting by his predecessors, going beyond them, and enabling those who studied him to carry the art to the highest point it ever reached in Italy. Pietro Perrugino, Leonardo, Raffaelle, and Michel Angelo, all studied and all were benefited by him. In the Palazzo Pitti there is a portrait of a young man who looks alive.

After several names of great merit, we reach one who advanced towards the great era; we mean Domenicho Ghirlandaio, the master of Michel Angelo, a circumstance which alone is a passport to immortality. Fuseli says, that he was the first Florentine who added truth to composition by truth of perspective. The abolition of gold fringes in drapery may [7:16:710]be dated from him; though bis historical figures are little more than portraits well-selected. The last important name of the first epoch of Italian art was that of Luca Signorelli, who had glimpses of real grandeur. His dome at Òrvieto, where he painted the Last Judgment, has bold fore-shortening, with absurdities of an earlier date mixed up in it; but Michel Angelo adopted many of his ideas, as well as Dante’s; and certainly the absurd assertion that he “disdained to look abroad for foreign help,”^[56. Reynold’s note. ] is successfully refuted by this fact.

One can see how gradually art sunk after its decay into Gothicism; how gradually it advanced again to nature and common sense, and from common sense to elevation. During this first period the approaches to ideal beauty, imperfect as it was in Italian art, were gradual, and would have been longer in coming had not the discovery of the Apollo, and other ancient works, opened the eyes of all the great men living, and a spring taken place from Perrugino, Ghirlandaio, and the Bellinis, which was soon visible in the works of Raf∙∙ faelle and Michel Angelo. Leonardo seems not to have been smitten by the ancients to the same degree as the other two were. There is less obligation to any nation in him; and unquestionably few as are left of the effusions of his genius, they are more original than the Vatican or Sistine Chapel. What was there in the world to put us in mind of the Standard struggle or Last Supper of Da Vinci?

But before proceeding, it may be as well to allude to the question of oil painting. It was long a supposition that Van Êyk discovered it, and that it was not known before; whereas, it was used in England in 1230, long before the time of Van Eyk. Cennino Cennini wrote a treatise on the technical practice of the Italian painters; he was a pupil of Agnolo Gaddi, who was a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi, who was a pupil of Giotto, who was a pupil of Cimabue, who was a pupil of the Greeks. There can be no question that from the mixture of oil with punic wax^[57. Pliny, lib. xxxv∙ Cera punica cum oleo liquefacta. ] as a varnish, the use of oil was known to the ancient Greeks, and that it was carried on to the tenth century, when the monk Theophilus^[58. Lib. i. c∙ 18. Accipe semen lini et exsicca illud in sartagine super ignem sine aqua, &c. Again, “cum hoc oleo tere minium, super lapidem;" and again, “accipe colores quos impone volvens, texens eos diligenter cum oleo lini." fDe omni Scientia Artis Pingendi.) ] wrote his treatise. He positively describes how to mix the colour with oil instead of water, and how to boil the oil; and then we can prove its existence by actual documents in the rolls of the Exchequer in England (1239), and by the 23d of Henry III., wherein the king issues an order to “our treasurer Odo the goldsmith and his son, to be paid 117 shillings for oil, varnish, and colors bought, and for pictures made in the chamber of our Queen at Westminster,”^[59. Rot. Claus. 23d Henry III. Walpole’s Works, vol. iii. p. 16. ] nearly two hundred years before Van Eyk. There can be no doubt that oil painting has never been unknown, even to the Egyptians; it has been forgotten and revived, but none of the periods of revivals are entitled to the honour of discovery. « Chaque nation a ses avantages, et ses désavantages,” said a Frenchman to us, whilst shrugging his shoulders as a spout of water from a roof drenched him to the skin in Paris; and “Ogni nazione ha le sue virtù, ha i suoi vizi,” says Lanzi. Every nation which confesses its vices, is sure to have justice done to its virtues. There is no Italian school, however good, which has not its errors, and none which has not its excellencies as well as its mistakes.

Florence was distinguished for fresco more than for oil painting. The Florentine style of design, in its best days, was always peculiar; the figures were long in proportion, their feet were small, and so were their knees; there was always a look, in Florentine design, as if the muscles of the body were suffering from a temporary knotted cramp; they were, in design, too circular, too elliptical, or too angular, and never seemed to have hit the exact medium between all three, like Phidias. Their colour was not rich, like the Venetians; their draperies clung too closely to the limb as if they were wet; they made an ostentatious display of the limb underneath; in fact their system degenerated into manner, and beauty seems not to have been a primary object in the Florentine school, any more than in that of their ancestors the Etruscans. At Fountainbleau, though the designs of Primaticcio were full of talent, yet they gave a very good idea of the excess of the Florentine manner.^[60. In 1814, the writer saw the remains. There was a naked youth over one of the gateways, which had all the peculiarities of this school. ] The two great luminaries of Florence were Da Vinci and Michel Angelo. Da Vinci was less of a mannerist than the other great man. He was, in fact, the link between the meagreness of the first period of design, and the vulgar swing of the second.

Leonardo was born in 1452. He was a natural son, and had all the eccentricity, sloth and fire, weakness and energy, idleness and diligence of that class. A poet, a musician, a mathematician, an hydraulist, a mechanic, a modeller, and a painter; he excelled in all. Keen, eager,minute, searching and indefatigable, handsome in face, beautiful in person, tall in figure, athletic and skilled in manly exercises, a graceful dancer, a splendid horseman, and an harmonious singer; he equally delighted the people, infatuated the women, and bewitched the sovereign. And yet with all this vast power, the gift of his Creator, he was so deficient in concentration of mind, that he seemed to have no power of collecting its rays sufficiently long to make discoveries in any thing. He was the scholar of Verocchio, by whom he was infected with a lazy love of design in preference to the vigorous energy of using the brush. He passionately loved geometry, horses, and soldiers; and in his horses he never left nature like Raffaelle, Julio Romano, or Michel Angelo, but gave them their natural characteristics of fleshy nostrils and projecting eyes.

His two greatest works are his Last Supper, and his Battle of the Standard. The beautiful humility of Christ, the tender amiability of St. John, the powerful expressions of all the apostles waving to and fro in their attitudes, as if disturbed in their feelings, by the remark of Christ, that “one of them should betray him,” prove the extent of his genius, and the depth of his perceptions. But even here, the bane of his existence, that disposition to experiment, has ruined the work, more from the consequences of his own preparations, than either time or damp. Such men are never regarded as steady lights by posterity; painting was only a portion of his occupations, and not the end of his life. One quarter of the lives of such men is spent in experiments; another quarter in putting them in practice; a third in lamenting their failure; and the last amidst the bitterest remorse, devoting themselves to their real pursuit, to satisfy the cravings of conscience and the reproach of the world. What has Leonardo left us in all hiε-Various pursuits to compensate us for the loss which accrued to painting? Geometry was as much a caprice of his extraordinary mind, as any other science. What has he left us in poetry, which poets could look up to? What in mechanics, that Watt could have founded on? What in music, that would have benefitted Mozart? What in hydraulics, that would improve our shares in canals? The genius that composed such works as the Standard and Last Supper,,need not to have shrunk from competition with Michel Angelo, young as he was. There is no doubt the world is always delighted to pull down an established artist by pushing up a younger rival in his face; but if you become irritable, and desert your [7:16:711]country from disgust, men only laugh; wnereas the sound principle is, Laugh at the world, stay in your country, and work harder than ever.

The fact is, that such men as Leonardo are great geniuses, but not the greatest. The evidence of superior genius is the power of intellectual concentration. Such powers had Newton, Milton, Bacou, Locke, Watt, Michel Angelo, Napoleon, Raffaelle, Titian, Rubens, Vandyke, and our own Reynolds. Such men only are examples, and not beacons; such men only are blessings to their species. As a specimen of his extraordinary caprice of character, his want of perseverance, and his notions of the most elaborate finish were at least equal; he took four years in painting one face, and then said it was not done. His children are exquisite; but his women have an air of modesty to conceal meritrici-ousness, and his oil-works are far from models of excellence, the over-wrought finish being hard. There is always in his expressions an air as if they were set in enamel, and could not relax. The picture, in our national gallery, of Christ and the Doctors, is a celebrated work; but why should Christ, who disputed with the doctors at twelve years of age, be larger in person and head than the doctors who are sixty? And why should Christ be like a woman in men’s clothes, and look out of the picture, and talk with his fingers to the spectators, instead of being, as he was, a fine boy of twelve years old, handsome, intellectual and angelic? We should like to have heard Leonardo’s reasons, if he had any, for such an apparent absurdity.

In design, and tempera or fresco-painting, Da Vinci was great; but in oil pictures he is false in taste, petty in execution, and unskilful in backgrounds. By his depth of light and shade, and also of colour, which gave an impulse to all Italian art, he had a sense of beauty which greater steadiness might have brought out to perfection. But when a man flies off from painting to make a lion, which will walk by machinery, to meet the king of France who approached Milan, to stand upon his hind legs without human help, to open his own belly, and show the kingofFrance his arms inside it, what could be expectedfrom his talents, great as they were? Nowhere does his character show itself more conspicuously than in his treatise on painting; in fact it is not a treatise, but a collection of separate disjointed thoughts, like the recipes of a cookery book. It is very easy to put down your thoughts as they occur without arrangement; but the difficulty is, to collect them for the illustration of a principle like Fuseli or Reynolds. Every man can put down separate thoughts, but every man has not the power so to arrange them as to throw light upon an art. Leonardo dissected and drew finely; but there was a meagre commonmodel style in his figures, a want of perfect construction, as if men had never worn clothes. On the whole, this illustrious man cannot be referred to as the head of an epoch. He was a component part of it, but not like Michel Angelo or Raffaelle the great engineer. What he did in painting made one lament that he had not done more. “An artist,” says Reynolds in his letter to Barry, “should bring his mind to bear on painting, from the moment he rises till he goes to bed; and if his mind be calm and undisturbed by other objects, he will find it quite enough to fill up life, if it was longer than it is.”

No man could be more opposite to Leonardo, than his great successor Michel Angelo, patient, laborious, virtuous and indefatigable, painter, architect and sculptor; he left a work in each art that advanced the rank of his country. To turn to such a character, is a relief and a blessing. In him the aspiring youth contemplates the result of conduct totally the reverse of that we have been considering. Solitary, and highly gifted, despising the subterfuges of society, he lived alone; and in addition to his genius he was a great moral being. Brought up by the liberality of Lorenzo de Medici, admitted freely at his table with the illustrious men of the day, Michel Angelo had every advantage in early education. He came, too, when he was wanted; when ancient literature and ancient art were breaking through the obscurity which had overwhelmed them, and the discovery of printing was scattering their beauties throughout Europe. Men’s minds were roused up with wonder and delight at every fresh discovery. Painting, architecture, poetry, and science were hailed with a gusto which nothing can account for but the misery of the ages that had passed.

Michel Angelo, after his day’s study in the gardens which Lorenzo had opened for the youth of Florence, retired to the coins, cameos, and fragments of the palace. With his acuteness, energy, and perception, it is not wonderful that he soon perceived the inferiority of the forms of his master, in comparison with the full beauty of the form, the result of perfect construction in the antique. He corrected with his boyish hand the narrow meagreness of Ghirlandio; and announced, thus early, that self-will and vigorous decision, which enabled him subsequently to accomplish whatever he undertook. Here was the germ of that mighty power which placed the Pantheon in the air, as he predicted and realized in the dome of St. Peter’s. Here was the embryo fearlessness, that brought him through the vast ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in fresco, though when he began it, he had never painted in fresco before. Michel Angelo was one of those rare beings who are wanted when they come, and have opportunities put in their way adequate to develope the powers with which they are gifted. Julius II. was as wonderful a man as Michel Angelo; and they mutually inspired each other. What Julius willed, Michel Angelo was as ready to perform; and what the inspirations of Michel Angelo’s genius suggested, the vigorous pope, whose fine old venerable head a helmet would have suited better than a tiara, had comprehension to value. They were both fierce, both self-willed, both proud and haughty, both independent and ungovernable. If Julius wished what Michel Angelo was in no humour to do, he would not do it; and if Michel Angelo wanted to execute, on sound principles of art, what the aged pontiff did not comprehend, he would do it, in spite of denunciations of banishment, or threats of displeasure. They were made for each other, they understood each other, and they were attached to each other; they quarrelled, became friends, and quarrelled again. “When will the ceiling be finished ?” said Julius, as he trod on the scaffolding with a stamp that made the boards tremble, after climbing to the top, where the great artist lay on his back on a mattress, hard at work, painting with vigour. “When I can,” said Michel Angelo, irritated at the interruption. “When thou canst,” thundered out the pope; “Art thou minded to be hanged ?”

This was the man for Michel Angelo. Conscious of his age, conscious that death followed him wherever he went, he began, proceeded with, and finished all he undertook, as if he had not an hour to live. By his perpetual watching, he hurried Michel Angelo through the ceiling of the chapel in twenty months, a time by no means equal to that which ought to have been devoted to it. The hurry is visible in the fierce, rapid execution; and that which was entirely owing to the impetuosity of his old patron, has been attributed as a merit and a principle to the great painter. Such is the infatuation of praise when a man is really great. Of this astonishing work, it seems that enough can never be said; though language has been exhausted to do it justice. Fuseli was the first who cleared up the mystery of the composition, in a style that places the commentator on a level with the inventor. “It exhibits,” he says, “the origin, the progress, and the final dispensation of theocracy.” But Fuseli’s character of Michel Angelo is overdone. It is an effort to express the deepest feelings in the strongest language; and in all such efforts the language invariably becomes inflated and turgid.
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In comparing this illustrious sovereign of modern design with Phidias, or the Greeks generally in the naked figure, he must unquestionably yield to them the palm. Michel Angelo often perplexed his limbs with useless anatomy; it must not be denied, and cannot be refuted, that he did not always clear the accidental from the superfluous. If the principle be a sound one, namely, “that any two parts of a body bearing comparison must keep a consistency throughout, similar in essence and similar in development,” then is Michel Angelo grossly inconsistent; because if the spine of the ilium in front be covered fully by the muscles around it, so ought the spine of the scapula behind to be equally covered. If the former be, and the latter be not, then the figure is inharmonious and inconsistent, and what Phidias would never have tolerated. Now the figure of Michel Angelo’s Christ standing with a cross, has the spine of the scapula prominent and bony, and all the muscles shrinking from it, the characteristics of a thin man; whilst the spine of the ilium of the same figure in front, is entirely covered by the muscles around it, the marks of a muscular and fleshy man. What authority had Michel Angelo in nature or antiquity for sucli inconsistency? These are the excesses which bring dissection into contempt, and which induce anatomists to doubt whether the Greeks dissected or not, because they were never guilty of such absurdities, and because they had too much self-control to make that an end of art which was but a means of the perfection of art. And yet Vasari calls it “mirabilissima.” This figure and the Lazarus in Piombo’s, as well as several figures in the Last Judgment, are justifiable grounds for asserting he was not equal to the Greeks in the naked figure; though in the conception and arrangement of a vast whole to illustrate a grand principle, he approaches but does not surpass the Parthenon in its glories. In the form he must not be compared to the Greeks; gigantic as he is, he was decidedly inferior.

Μ ichel Angelo’s line is by no means “uniformly grand ;” and his women maybe “moulds of generation,” but certainly not of love. His infants may “teem with the man,” but they have nothing of the infant. His men may be a “race of giants,” but they are brutal in expression, fierce in action, and distorted in position. It is useless in a rapid and general view of art to go over ground which has been so often gone over before; to talk about the prophets and sibyls, after three hundred years’ enthusiasm, is worse than useless. Europe knows the awful grandeur of one or two of them, looking like beings to whom God has spoken, and who have never since ceased meditating on the awful voice.

The style of Michel Angelo has been called the style of the gods; but if majesty without pretension, humility without feebleness, power without exertion, and an awful presence without vulgar assumption, be the characteristics of a god, what figure of Michel Angelo’s deserves that appellation? Is it in the bullying defiance of Moses? the twisted tortures of Jonah? the cramped agonies of the sleeping Adam? or the galvanized violence of the ornamental figures at the tombs? It must be admitted, that the Pensoso∙Duca is majestic and silent ;. but this is an exception, not an habitual characteristic. “Michel Angelo’s mind,” says Reynolds, “was so original that he disdained to look abroad for foreign help.” Disdained! Why there is not a prophet, a sibyl, or a naked figure in the whole chapel where the torso cannot be traced. And what are the works of both Michel Angelo and Raffaelle, but improved completions of all that their predecessors had done for a thousand years in barbarism and obscurity? Shakespeare’s plots are all borrowed; Lady Macbeth is not his own; that hideous expression “know Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” is Hollingshed’s. But what of that? It is the new thoughts he puts into them, which give him claim to the sympathy of the world. Phidias and Raffaelle have one great and decided beauty in their works; their figures, whether in action or expression, always look as the unconscious agents of an impulsion they cannot help. You are never drawn aside from what they are doing by any appearance in them, as if they wished to make you consider how very grand they were, or how very gracefully they were moving. They seem impelled by something they cannot controul; their heads, hands, feet, and bodies immediately put themselves into positions the best adapted to execute the intentions wanted; whereas often in Michel Angelo, and always in his imitators, there is a consciousness as it were in his arms and limbs, which destroys all idea, as if his figures were the unconscious agents of an impulsion they could not help, and which acted by means of the will on the muscular system.

It is an inherent principle of life never to disturb itself for grace, or for any other object either in action or repose, not immediately the natural consequence of the impulsion which moved the body. Style in design is a result and not a cause. Whatever object is represented in painting or sculpture, the intentions of God in its bodily formation should be ascertained; the means which God has bestowed on it to enable it to execute its only will or gratify its own instincts, should be investigated; and then the aberrations produced by time, accident or disease, or other causes, will be clearly known, so that he who takes upon himself to represent any object in painting, will be able to distinguish accident from essence, and shew the object in its essential properties of body as God first created it. The external form in that body will then be essential, and the result of its completion in art will be style in design. There are certain inherent principles of our common nature to which all bodies must yield, viz. that compression and extension must have different effects, and so must repose and action. If a great artist represents a figure and makes its parts the same in either case, he must be ignorant of nature or above its simplicity. No doubt, the conception of an idea may be so grand, the beauty of a character may be so angelic, the pathos of an expression may be so deep, that errors or inadequacy in the mode of representation may be overlooked or forgiven; but in order to bring the art to the perfection to which the Greeks brought it, there must be nothing to forgive or to overlook. An idea or conception being the nobler part of the art, we may, in our common conviction of human frailty, overlook any inadequacy in the means of imitation; but the very admission proves there must be something to be overlooked and something which, we have a notion, has not been adequately represented.

An art the modes of which to convey thoughts, being the imitation essentially of natural objects, ought surely to have the imitation perfect, because the imperfection of the means has always detracted from the impressions of the thought. Poets are not endured if their grammar is bad, or their language defective; and why should drawing, form, colour, or light, shadow, and surface, the grammar of art, be excused more than the poets’? Because the simplest imitation is at once recognised as the imitation of the prototype, why should facility of imitation be any excuse for defect? Ah, but its the grand style. Yes, the grand style of Europe for the last three hundred years; but was it the grand style of the Greeks? Certainly not; their grand style was nature elevated not violated, with none of her inherent bases of life altered a hair’s point, none of her essential details omitted, and none of her essential principles overwhelmed by useless detail.

When you see an outline like iron, that is the grand style. When hands were twisted, heads distorted, one leg up, and the other so far removed from the body, that yon may question if it will return, that is the grand style. All this absurdity originated with Michel Angelo; and though he is not answerable for the excedes of his admirers, there must be [7:16:713]something erroneous if every imitator has led to such extravagance from Goltzius downwards. Michel Angelo was a tremendous genius, and his effect on the art was vital; but he did not like the Greeks suffer the unalterable principles of life to keep in check his anatomical knowledge. This was an error, because we can imagine no beings, and no world where malleable matter is not influenced by the common principles of the solar system, or where any creatures comnosed of bones, muscles, tendons, and skin, must not yield to the laws which God instituted for their government when he created them.

Thus Michel Angelo often overstepped the modesty of truth, and gave a swaggering air to his figures. Every figure of his looks as if he was insulted and preparing to return a blow. If they sleep they seem as if they would kick; if they move when they are awake, they seem as if all their muscles were cracking. We allude particularly to the naked figures; Jeremiah and the Duke are exceptions, but they are only exceptions. Fuseli observed that Michel Angelo was the salt of art; but it would have been more just to have-called him the pepper, because very little indeed will do for a seasoning. In poetry of sentiment the Medici tombs would perhaps have competed with Phidias; for Michel Angelo being a painter as well as Phidias, he combined in his sculpture a knowledge of effect. In selection of subject and daring execution of hand, perhaps the Sistine Chapel might equal the great works of painting amongst the ancients; butin naked representations it cannot be compared to it. The Elgin marbles had not then enlightened the world. The due subordination of all science to nature had not then been so exquisitely seen; the due combination of life without meanness, and of abstraction without losing sight of life, were not so apparent in the great works of ancient art which were found before thisperiod. Had Michel Angelo seen the Theseus and Ilyssus, Jupiter’s breast and horse’s head, he would have felt the difference between the muscular swing of a blacksmith, and a hero naturally born powerful, without his muscles being distorted by manual labour; and that a hero might be elevated and yet simple, fleshy without fatness, and muscular without being skinny. Michel Angelo has been called the Deity of design; but he was rather the Devil. One can imagine the consternation of Phidias and his pupils, if suddenly at Athens the galvanized figures of the tombs had been let down through the roof, whilst they were preparing the Olympian Jupiter, with his quiet, solemn, steady, thinking, peaceful, awful look.

Reynolds says he prepared the way for the sweeping outline of Rubens; but how many thousands has he ruined? What is the excellence of the Last Judgment? Is there any evidence of power in arranging a whole, like Rubens, Titian, or Tintoretto? Is there any application of any principle of our nature by the due combination of variety and repose? Is it not a mass of separate groups, vulgar in design, academic in action, and demoniac in expression? Is the Christ worthy of Goltzius? Surely it would have disgraced him, and then what devils! Are these the fallen angels of heaven? they are the legitimate offspring of hell. Are these the beings whose glory was obscured, not extinguished? whose majestic forms existed, though in ruin? whose beauty was only disturbed by passions, not destroyed? who were the same grand, heroic, terrific beings as ever, but scathed by lightning, singed by fire, dingy from darkness, lacerated by thunder, their splendour sparkling through the horrid obscurity, in which they meditated revenge? To give them mouths like wolves, ears like asses, oses like pug-dogs, and tails like monkeys, with feet clo-en and misshapen, was not to represent a fallen angel, but s. deformed monster. Though evil, they were beautiful.

“Their forms had not yet lost AU their original brightness.”

“What matter where, if still I be the same?” says Satan. Could such a sentiment have ever been uttered by the wretch who is dragging a figure down to the bottomless pit, in a way delicacy forbids one even to think of, much more to write or to paint? Michel Angelo’s demons would not only torture the damned, but feed upon their bodies.

It is clear, however, that there was a time when he was not so exaggerated. The holy Family, in sculpture, brought by Sir George Beaumont from Italy, is playful, natural, simple, and beautiful; it is in fact a divine work. Perhaps the violence of Julius in hurrying him through the Sistine Chapel, and the necessity of painting with tremendous exaggeration, on so large a space, got his hand into a fierce power that it never lost. Painting on grand ceilings is like talking in large theatres. He never entirely finished any thing; he left no grand pupils, like Raffaelle; he assisted the humble, but never instructed the gifted. The figure of Lazarus in our national picture, especially the' hand and thumb that press the shoulder of the attendant on the left side, is certainly by him; and if it be compared to the timid painting of the Christ, the spectator will be convinced of it. In fine, Michel Angelo was a great genius; but let the students of Europe be assured that his style has been grossly overrated; let them banish his works from their eyes, and substitute the Theseus and Ilyssus, and the real grand natural style of Phidias will soon exclude the Satanic Etruscan, and violent anatomical distortions of Michel Angelo. He may be and was a giant in art; but Raffaelle was an angel, and Phidias a god.

The next Florentine of power was the monk Bartolomeo. He studied under Rosselli, and Leonardo aroused and excited him; he was grand in colour, light and shadow, and execution, surface, and character. In the Louvre there were works worthy of any hand, any competitor, or any genius. He had the honour of advancing Raffaelle; he invented the long figure, and made the proper use of it; he never put drapery on it till he had drawn the naked figure first, so that the naked parts affected the forms of his folds; he had great depth, grandeur, and a certain wildness of air; he drew finely, and his tones were solemn and elevated. Wilkie speaks with the highest enthusiasm of his Assumption of the Virgin. It is impossible not to feel the deepest interest in Bartolomeo, and not to be astonished that he did not found a school, and head an epoch. Such things, however, are never done by the mere influence of talent; the character of the man is principally though not wholly the cause. He painted a S. Sebastiano, which was so beautiful, that it became a favourite of Italian ladies. He was ordered to adorn the great hall of council at Florence, as Da Vinci and Michel Angelo had done before; but as if a fatality attended that hall, he died without going further than the designs. This is curious. Da Vinci designed the Standard struggle; Michel Angelo the group of soldiers alarmed by the trumpet, and dressing themselves; and now Bartolomeo began his designs, and died in 1517, without completing them. Bartolomeo was a great artist. His method was first to draw the naked figure, then clothe it, then paint the whole picture in light and shade in oil, and then tone and colour, guided by the tremendous depth of his first impasto painting.

Andrea Del Santo is another name enthusiastically overrated by Vasari. He might be called Andrea senza errori; but what genius “senza errori,” ever enchanted the world? Give us the vigour of Michel Angelo, with all his violence, the dash of Tintoretto with all his caprice, the colour of Titian with his want of drawing at first, the sweetness of Corregio with his namby-pamby men. the composition of Rubens with his flabby women, the expression of Raffaelle with his hardness of effect; but spare us from that poet, painter, musician, or moral character, who is so perfect that he must be admired without the gusto of finding fault; above all, spare us from the Grandisons of art. Andrea was [7:16:714]one of those to whom talent is more applicable than genius; whatever excellence he attained, he would have never attained to that degree, but for the existence of his superiors. The greater part of the works attributed to him in England, are copies by his pupils which he retouched.

After these great men, it would be useless to detail the decay of the Florentine school; it yielded to the circumstances of the time, and the misfortunes of the Medici. The continual political squabbles turned men’s minds from artas in ancient Greece; but the great want of course was the want of genius, which no efforts have since been able to rear. Though the style of the Florentine school was not so pure as that of the Roman, it led the way in a noble manner, and kept side by side with it; they benefitted each other. Leonardo gave an impulse to art; and though from the caprice of his character, he did not complete the impulse he had given, and was more the cause of greatness in others, than the man who established his own, yet the art is indebted to this highly-gifted man, who had an effect on Georgione, Bartolomeo, Raffaelle, and Michel Angelo himself; and gratitudeis due to his genius. This great school was brought to utter ruin by what Lanzi calls the Cortoneschi, or pupils of Cortona, where art had degenerated into mechanism, and thoughtless, endless, and sprawling groups. The descendants of the Medici breed had more disposition than power to patronise, till Leopold reigned in 1765. The academy was renovated in 1785, and once more in 1804; but these renovations end in nothing. The great men were passed without these conventional distinctions; the little ones who came after, live only by their embellishment. Boys are educated to draw tolerably well, to colour with tolerable harmony, to invent tolerably insipidly, to become intolerable painters, accomplished academicians, to die, be buried, and decay; and thus leave room for another race as intolerably imbecile in art, as their illustrious performers before them. It is quite absurd to read in Lanzi, always at the end of the epochs of a school, « Decadenza dell’ arte, e fondazione deW academia per avivυarla ;” “decay of art, and foundation of an academy, to give it life.” But after a few galvanic twitches it stretches out its feeble legs, gasps with an expiring quickness, gives a trembling of its eyelids, which it opens once more, stares with a fixed look, sighs deeply, and drops its jaw for ever. Then come the vain efforts to restore circulation, then thede-lusive assurances that it is still living; then doctors and nurses dress up its helpless head with laurel, and put some abracadabra on its cold breast; but all won’t do for it’s gone and there is no hope. Such have been the results of the academies. Genius fled at their foundation, and left them useless bodies without soul, life, or circulation. The sovereigns of Europe will at last find out that no academies should go further than schools; and till they do, the end of art will be forgotten, in a vain contemptible struggle for its conventional distinctions.

The three leading lights of art as schools, are the Florentine, the Roman, and the Venetian. The Parman must in spite of all the beauty of Corregio, be considered as the beginning of corruption. The other schools, the Modenese, the Cremonese, the Ferarrese, Genoese, and the Piedmontese, are but different branches.

The glory of Italian art is Raffaelle. Had he been born in Greece, and qualified by a Greek education, he would have been as great in painting as Phidias was in sculpture; but the education of all the Italian artists was imperfect, and they seemed to be grounding themselves, (even Raffaelle himself,) on the meagre style of the early painters. The discovery of ancient statues in some degree opened their eyes, but they were not, like the ancients, gradually prepared for such perfection, nor was Raffaelle himself ever skilled in those perfect principles of beauty, as applied to the naked figure, which distinguished the Greeks. Wonderful, amiable, and gentle creature as he was, the reverse of Michel Angelo in every way, he proved himself decidedly the inferior man. In all his endless inventions, a single repetition of himself, even in the folds of a drapery, is not to be found; he was not like Titian, an exquisite colourist, but his colour is always agreeable, though not distinguished for light and shade; and his groups are never obtrusive, though not remarkable for aerial perspective. Every object keeps itsplace; though no face of his can compete with the beauty of the ancients, his women always enchant; his great power was character and expression, and telling a story by human passions and actions; in these he was unrivalled in modern art, and not surpassed by the ancients. His father being a painter, he was bred up in the art; and his master Perrugino, was a great man in his way, though somewhat of a Goth. In style, therefore, Raffaelle lost time with him; but could he have gone in early life to such a school as Sicyon, there is no knowing to what a pitch of perfection he might have carried the art. His latter excellence is entirely owing to his own sense, based on the antique; for most of what he learnt from Perrugino he had afterwards to unlearn. He entered the Vatican at twenty-five, and died at thirty-seven. What then must have been his diligence, his devotion, and his genius. In any history of painting, at this time of day, to talk of the subjects of the Vatican, or the Madonnas, so often copied, so often engraved, so often seen, so often praised, would be trespassing on the temper of the reader. His character, as well as that of his art, was the very converse of Michel Angelo. Michel Angelo envied his equals, was kind to his inferiors, and always insulting to his superiors; whilst Raffaelle was kind to all, and the idol of the society in which he moved. Michel Angelo associated with no men but admirers. The consequence was that his life was written by his flatterers Condivi and Vasari, a great portion, perhaps, delicately insinuated by himself; and, as might be expected, they have sacrificed Raffaelle to the Dagon of their idolatry. Vasari insinuated that Raffaelle was greatly indebted to Michel Angelo; and Reynolds following Vasari and Condivi, goes farther than either, asserting that Raffaelle owed his existence to Michel Angelo. Was there ever such gratuitous assumption? If it means any thing, it means that but for Michel Angelo, his genius would never have been developed. Is such an absurdity worthy of Reynold’s understanding? Surely not, and in fact it can be made clear that Raffaelle did not owe his existence to Michel Angelo. If he owed any thing to that great artist, he owed the corruption of his own pure style. After the Capella Sistina was opened, Raffaelle, bit like every body else by its heavy, cumbrous, vulgar, broad, and circular design, immediately tried it; but it did not suit his beautiful nature any more than it would have suited the elliptical beauty of the heroic forms of Greece.

What does Reynolds mean when he says, that “Raffaelle had more taste and fancy, Michel Angelo more genius and imagination ?” If genius be nothing more than the ordinary faculties of men carried to a greater pitch of intensity than ordinary men possess them, wherein had Michel Angelo more genius than Raffaelle? Their geniuses were both equal; but the road which each took for the exercise of his genius was different. Raffaelle excelled in expressing the passions; Michel Angelo in sublimity of character, independently of all passion and emotion. Though the materials of Raffaelle’s art are generally borrowed, are they more so than Michel Angelo’s? Is not Michel Angelo as much indebted to Luca Signorelli and the Campo Santo, for his choice of subjects in the Sistine, as Raffaelle is in the Vatican? This does not invalidate their genius; whilst their predecessors were the root, the stem, the leaves, and the bud, they were the full blown flower. Michel Angelo was a great genius, and so was Raffaelle; but each owed his genius to a power totally independent of the other. Their geniuses were equal, their temperaments different. Raffaelle was at the mercy of pleasure; Michel Angelo disdained it: [7:16:715]Raffaelle was made for society; Michel Angelo despised it. In Raffaelle’s works there is a geniality of soul with which every man’s and woman’s heart beats in sympathy; whilst we have no sympathy with the characters of Michel Angelo who overwhelms our imaginations, but never touches our hearts. We arc awed by his Sibyls, but we could never think of loving them; and his demons are surely unworthy of the fiery solitudes of hell. How could Ariosto say of him,

“Michel, piu che mortel, Angel divino and then herd up Raffaelle with Sebastian and inferior men; Michel Angelo was perhaps the more moral man of the two, but not the greater painter.

Vasari and Condivi would never have been allowed to publish their falsehoods, as Lanzi says, had Raffaelle been living; but where were Julio Romano, Luca Penni, and Polidoro, whom Raffaelle had raised from a mason’s boy to a great painter? Where were they? where were his “dear pupils ?” “Let no man,” says Johnson, “look for influence beyond his grave.” Vasari asserts that Michel Angelo, in flying to Florence, when he quarrelled with Pope Julius II., left the keys of the Sistine Chapel, which he was then painting, to Bramante, Raffaelle’s uncle, who dishonourably let in Raffaelle; and that the latter, on seeing the grand design of the prophets, changed his whole style. This absurdity was current in Europe for two hundred and fifty years, till Lanzi, with his usual acuteness, opened the eyes of the world. Would any one believe, that when Michel Angelo fled to Florence, it was in 1506, years before Raffaelle ever entered Rome, and four or five before the chapel was ever begun or painted? It may be presumed that Raffaelle did not surreptitiously derive any advantage from works four years before they were conceived or painted; and we conceive that Bramante could not give Raffaelle the keys to open a door which was never locked, especially as Michel Angelo did not leave any keys, if ever he left them at all, till four years after the time Vasari dates as the period. The prophet Esaias which Vasari says shewed an alteration of style in consequence of the stolen views of works which were not in existence, was painted one or two years before Michel Angelo touched this very chapel. So much for Vasari’s sacrifice of Raffaelle to the great Dagon of his idolatry; and so much for Reynold’s absurd and unthinking assertion, that “but for Michel Angelo, Raffaelle would never have existed.” Vasari’s is a delightful book, and all his principles of art are sound, for they are the result of conversations with the greatest men; he was most intimate with Michel Angelo, and Titian, and all the great artists of the day, and constantly in their painting-rooms, at their tables, and in their society.

In the first years of Raffaelle, his feeling was so completely Perrugino’s, that it was almost impossible to distinguish their works; though there is a difference in feeling, and that difference is in favour of the pupil. In the Louvre were three of his early works of cabinet size. The Annunciation was one of these; and more grace, innocence, or sweetness, were never put on canvass. Raffaelle’s pencil seemed always to melt when he approached a woman or an angel. What an age of genius this was, and how nearly all the great men seemed to come together. Da Vinci was born in 1452, Bartolomeo in 1469, Michel Angelo in 1474, Titian in 1480, and Raffaelle in 1483.

In a rapid and concise history of art to detail the inferior names, who gradually by little and little, conduce to the ultimate expansion of genius, is impossible. A historian of this description has only time for leading points, or headlands in the voyage; he has not leisure to dive into every little cape, bay, and projection, which by degrees, push the mainland into the ocean. The older painters of the Roman school will not add much to the interest of the art; and a fair estimation of Raffaelle and his glorious school, is much more likely to benefit the student, and instruct the general reader. It is not, on the whole, morally just; but many eminent men become thus swallowed up in the blaze of their successors. As Shakespeare nearly deadens all feeling for previous excellence, so does Raffaelle, though Shakespeare, Michel Angelo, Raffaelle, and Titian were all indebted to their predecessors.

If Julius was adapted for Michel Angelo, Leo X. was peculiarly so for Raffaelle; though Mengs says that the honours and indulgences he received from Leo, made him luxurious and idle, and that he was not so industrious as during the short reign of his first patron Julius. Yet his rapid advance from the first picture he painted in the Vatican, to the Heliodorus, is extraordinary; and, as according to Vasari, he sent artists to draw for him in Greece, there is no doubt that he had a sketch of the pediment of the Parthenon, before it was blown up, and that the Heliodorus is but a skilful adaptation of the Ilyssns. He was so much overwhelmed by employment and honours, that his latter works in the Vatican were wholly placed in the hands of his pupils, and carried on with the spirit of a manufactory. He was then appointed architect to St. Peter’s at the death of St. Gallo, which distracted his thoughts. Incessant application, and incessant thinking of course weakened his delicate frame, nor did the capricious and harrassing attendances on such a court increase his strength; added to which the maddening love of women for one so highly gifted and so handsome, his own devoted passion for Fornarina, and the endless demands on his brain, brought him to the grave at thirty-seven, absolutely borne down, like Byron, by excitement of every description, nervous, bodily and mental. This is the way with the world; they kill a favourite by kindness, and an offender by cruelty.

In some life of him an attempt was made to prove that he caught cold by hurrying from his work to the palace at the Pope’s order, and standing while in a profuse perspiration in a draught. But thatis no refutation of the previous causes; the question is, what prepared him to be killed by such a cause? Incessant work and dissipation; no painter can do both. Of course princes must be obeyed at any expense; they seem to feel little for their dependants, as if in revenge for being themselves deprived of so many enjoyments by ceremony and etiquette. Napoleon used to take great delight in never suffering old German maids of honour with fifty quarters in their arms to sit in his presence.

His last work, according to Mengs, was his Transfiguration in oil, a work deficient in masterly execution, and having a laboured look of smoothness. In drapery, in character, and in expression it was fine; but in the Louvre it looked small. By the side of Corregio, it seemed hard; by that of Titian, raw; by that of Tintoretto, tame; and the Christ’s head was not equal to Corregio’s at the National Gallery. It was not an example to hold forth to a young man as faultless. The Cartoons at Hampton are finer in point of execution alone; they arc his finest works for all the requisites of art. He was not restrained by designing for tapestry; his genius was put forth with a Venetian power of brush; and there are heads equal to any, especially the frightened woman’s head in the Ananias, in these wonderful works.

In beauty he was far inferior to the Greeks; in form he could not approach them; in composition he was perfect; in expression, deep; and in telling a story, without a rival. Taking into consideration all the great men in modern art, this young man, not highly educated like Rubens, must be placed on the throne, till one arises who shall have what he had not, in addition to his own perfections; and that young man will probably arise in Britain. He was an extraordinary creature; modest, timid, and amiable; affectionate to his equals, and gentle to the highly-born, his premature death gave a shock to Rome, which those only [7:16:716]can estimate, who know the depth of Italian sensibilities. But did he die too young? Not at all. He might have decayed, or he might have become more luxurious and more neglectful. No man dies too young who dies with all the sympathies of the world unexhausted about him. The - ∕w- ror FaphaeUs is the best species of fury that can seize a young student. He has no manner, no affection, no vice, no grand style; all is simple, natural, and unaffected. His women are creatures of gentleness and love, though none are perfectly handsome. Perhaps he was more adapted for the characteristic heads of apostles than the naked forms of Greece; in fact he was a great Christian painter, and seemed born to extend the influence of Christianity by his art.

His father being a painter, he began early of course, and at sixteen, had painted a picture at Castello, the composition of which was in advance of the age. At seventeen he painted another of the Virgin and child. In the Sacristy, at Sienna, he assisted Pinturichio with designs; in 1504, he went to Florence, where Michel Angelo and Da Vinci were making a great noise with their cartoons for the hall; he studied both, and improved his perspective and colour, in connexion with Bartolomeo. When Bramante, his uncle, who was architect to the Pope, advised his Holiness to send for Raffaelle, the pope consented; and in April 1508, Raffaelle entered Rome, and was admitted into the Vatican.

From the continual occupations of Raffaelle in his art from boyhood upwards, he could not have had a classical education to any great extent. He knew a little Latin, as all Catholics did; but he was intimate with Bembo, Castiglione, Ariosto, and Aretino; and these men must have helped him in historical or philosophical knowledge, or moral allegory, for the completion of his great works. Raffaelle left a noble school; and as soon as grief for the loss of their master had subsided, his pupils set about completing the works he left unfinished. The battle of Constantine was done by Julio Romano and Perino del Vaga. As Raffaelle lay in state, the Transfiguration was placed at the head of his coffin.

Julio Romano was the most eminent of his pupils. With vast poetry of mind, he did things in a style of execution, which renders him the purest poet in his art. His sun setting, and moon rising over our heads, in the Palazzo del T, is nowhere equalled or approached. Though he put forth his genius at Mantua, he was a Roman in practice, and to Raffaelle owed theelements of his art. His colour was crude and his execution harsh; yet no one can fail to see in his works, the real poetry of painting. Polidoro was another great man of the same school. He was originally a mason’s boy, and used to prepare the walls for fresco; but he got interested in seeing the young men at work, tried to drav⅛ himself, and Raffaelle having assisted him, he became an eminent painter.

It is interesting to reflect on the affection with which Raffaelle was surrounded. He never went to court without being attended by fifty gallant artists. Little must he have made others feel his superiority; and for once a man of genius seems to have made envy smile. Though there is an instinct in the world, the moment a man of genius appears, yet it depends upon himself whether he is received as a blessing or an annoyance. Mankind will assault the man who attempts to command by superiority, instead of leading by cour - tesy; but they will hail him let his superiority be what it may, who seems willing to help his inferiors with kindness, or supply their want of knowledge, as if they were doing him a favour to listen. The whole of this is based on goodness of heart, tender sympathies, and a consciousness without the appearance of conceit.

The glory seems to have gone from the Eternal City after Raffaclle’s death. In 1527, Rome was stormed and taken by foreign soldiers. The savages bivouacked in the Vatican, and injured the frescoes by their smoking and fires. Se bastian del Piombo attempted to repair them after the soldiers were gone; and Titian, when in Rome, not knowing Sebastian, actually asked him who had been spoiling those beautiful heads? The art went on sinking rapidly till 1595. Raffaelle had been dead seventy-five years; Giorgione, eighty-four; Corregio, sixty; Michel Angelo, thirty; and Titian, nineteen. When the usual apprehensions of getting on a lee-shore seized the patrons and the artists, and the usual signal of distress was hoisted, Muziano, a pupil of Titian, founded St. Luke’s Academy in order to raise a new batch of Raffaelles and Corregios, and save the noble vessel. The only man who since dazzled for a moment, was Michel Angelo Caravaggio. He had great and original talent, though founded on common nature, without any abstract notion of form, any conception of beauty of women, or any refinementin anything. With a sledge-hammer for a pencil, he seemed resolved to batter down all opposition; and by fierce extremes of light and shade, bearded men, dead Christs, and Transteverine beggars for apostles, he founded a school, got a character, and raised a name, which cannot be forgotten in the art of Europe.

Lanzi seems to class in the Roman school every body who practised there for the last three hundred years, but that is not fair. On this principle, all the Flemings, Dutch, Germans, Russians, Spaniards, and English, may be of the school, because they studied there; and Rubens, Vandyke, Velasquez, the Caracci and their pupils, as well as our Reynolds, were, on the same principle, of the Roman school. About the seventeenth century, this eminent school, in spite of the academy of St. Luke, went on declining. Birth, destruction, and reproduction seems to be the principle of every thing physical, but not of moral or mental powers. Lanzi attributes this decay to any cause but the right one; namely, the absence of genius, the great primary cause, and which no academy can ever supply.

Cortona, Bernini, and Sacchi,were the heroes of this day; and at a later period appeared Carlo Maratta. Raffaelle became to him a substitute for nature; though in 1689, he gave sufficient tone to art, to induce Clement XI. to employ him. But here, as well as elsewhere, genius was wanting. Carlo was as heavy as the lumbering folds of his own drapery; and so insipid are his large pictures, that it is a question whether they did not generate in Europe a contempt for large scripture subjects, which has lasted ever since. However, imbecility had not done spawning; and in a faint struggle for offspring against nature, out came Pompio Battone, and Raphael Mengs. To complete the farce, academies began to be founded in France and in the rest of Europe; and Pompio Battone, and Raphael Mengs may be looked upon as a very fair sample of what academies can produce, have produced, and will probably produce to the end of time. Mengs was every thing but a man of genius. He was a bad painter and a deep critic; and his predicting that we had not the works which the ancients esteemed the most, was verified, in a most astonishing manner, by the discovery of the Elgin marbles. The prediction does honour to the sagacity of Mengs. Thus end two great schools of form, conception, expression and composition; the Florentine and the Roman. But of these the Roman was unquestionably the greater.

We now come to the Venetian, a great school of colour, light and shadow, impasto, and execution, completing the imitation of reality; and in summing up the character of Italian and Greek art, we shall see that these components of imitation, each of which characterised an Italian school, were combined in all schools, as a necessary requisite in the perfection of Grecian imitation.

The most ancient work of Venetian art known, is in Verona, in the cellar of a monastery, (Santi Nazario a Celso). It is inaccessible to the public, but can be seen in the woodcuts of Dionisi. In the part which formed the oratorio of the faithful, has been painted the mystery of redemption; it is a [7:16:717]work of 1070, when the Doge Silvo invited Grecian mosaic painters to adorn St. Mark; men who though rude in art, could nevertheless paint. Thus commenced the art in Venice, whither, after Constantinople was taken by the Venetians in 1204, Greek painters and sculptors, as well as orefici, flocked in crowds.

In the thirteenth century, painters had increased so much, that a company was formed, like the English constituent body to which Hogarth belonged, and laws and constitutions were made. Things were proceeding in this train when Giotto, returning from Avignon, painted at Verona and Padua. Nothing of his, however, is left in Verona; but at Padua the remains of his works are still quite fresh in fresco, and full of grace and vigour. Such was the early beginning of this great school, in which it will be seen that Greeks, as usual, had the first hand. Various names sprung up in this period, but the Bellinis are the most important. One of them was engaged by Mahommed II. and by his talents upheld the honour of the Venetian name; another was the master of Titian and Giorgione, two of the greatest names of the Venetian school.

Giorgione was a great genius; and his execution was entirely above vulgar prejudices. He saw and seized the leadingpoints of leading objects, and hit them with a touch and an impasto, of which he had no previous example even in Leonardo. His breadth and tone were beautiful; and he first opened the eyes of Titian to the superior value of breadth and touch, as compared with over-wrought labour and smooth finish. Giorgione died inthevigourofhislife, to the greatloss of the art; for there is no knowing how much farther he would have carried his principles, or how successfully he would have disputed the crown with Titian. Lord Carlisle has asmall picture by this eminent man, of a youth buckling on the armour of a knight, which is exquisite in tone, brilliancy, depth, and feeling; and had he not been cut off by the plague, there is no knowing how far he might have gone. He certainly first opened Titian’s eyes to the value of breadth, and that comprehension of mind required to seize the leading characteristics of objects by a touch, leaving the atmosphere to finish at a given distance. After his death, Titian was without a rival. This great painter began, of course, like all Venetians, to paint directly from nature, without having previously dissected or drawn; nor was he sensible of this error of the Venetian school, till coming to Rome and seeing the works of Michel Angelo, Raffaelle, and the antique, he, like a great genius, set about remedying his deficiency; and the perfection of this union of form and colour is seen in his greatest work, Pietro Martyre, any attempt to move which from Venice, the Venetian senate decreed should be punished with death. This picture occupied him eight years; and eight years were well spent in such a production. The terrific gasping energy of the assassin, who has cut down the monk; the awful prostration of the monk, wounded, and imploring heaven; the flight of his companion, striding away in terror, with his dark mantle against a blue sky; the towering and waving trees, the entrance, as it were, to a dreadful forest; the embrowned tone of the whole picture, with its dark azure and evening sky, the distant mountains below, and splendid glory above, contrasting with the gloomy horrors of the murder; its perfect, though not refined drawing, its sublime expression, dreadful light and shadow, and exquisite colour; all united, render this the most perfect picture in Italian art. Why does not one perfect work entitle a man to rank as highly as a series of imperfect works, like the Capella Sistina? The answer is, because there is greater range of capacity shewn in a series of conceptions to illustrate a theory, than in the completion of one work alone, although all the component parts may be perfect; and Raffaelle, and Michel Angelo, will ever rank higher than Titian, as Polygnotus will rank higher than Protogenes or Apelles. Prolific thinking, is surely of more value than intensity of imitation, though intensity of imitation must be added to realize the idea of a perfect painter.

Titian began in the style of his master Bellini, with the most minute finish; a capital basis for future practice, if a man have comprehension to know when to leave it, as Titian did. To shew the young artist that it is never too late to improve, let him compare the Bacchus and Ariadne in our National Gallery, when he could not draw finely, with the Pietro Martyre when he could. In modern art, he was the only painter who hit the characteristic of flesh. Every great painter’s flesh is paint; Titian’s had real circulation of blood under the skin. On comparing the Ganymede, in our National Gallery, fine as it came from Titian’s pencil, with the Theodosius by Vandyke, which is close to it, as fine a specimen of Vandyke’s fire of brush as can be seen, the heavy leathern look of Vandyke’s colour excited astonishment. In the flesh of Ganymede, colour, oil, brush, and canvass, were all entirely forgotten; it quivered, it moved with the action of the limbs. In Vandyke, the materials of art are uppermost; you think of them, you wonder at the touch, you forget the subject, the expressions as it were scenting of the painter’s room and the easel. And so you do with all the Flemings, but never with Titian. Though we have fine Titians in England, the Dianabeing at Lord Egerton’s, and a head at the Duke of Sutherland’s; yet it must be confessed, that the Louvre possesses Titians more perfect, especially the entombing of Christ. In Josephine’s collection at Malmaison, there were a Venus and Cupid, as perfect as our Ganymede, and not injured by restoring., the fatal propensity of the French. In Titian whenever you see the blues sober and in harmony, the picture is uninjured; whenever you see them harsh and too brilliant, they have been rubbed, and the last tone has been taken off.

In colour, he was never equalled; in execution of the brush, he wasquite perfect; and in character and expression of portrait he was like Reynolds elevated and sublime; but the dullness which portrait, if perpetually practised, engenders in the capacity to idealise and elevate, rendered his conception of poetical characters defective. Nothing can exceed his Aretino, his senators, and his popes; nothing can exceed Sir Joshua’s Lord Heathfield and Mrs. Siddons; but nothing can be meaner than some of Titian’s attempts, like Raffaelle, at high poetical expression, except some of Reynold’s heads in the Beaufort. The nerve and beauty of the colour in Diana and Acteon are so touching, that one can almost fancy one hears the water ripple and the leaves wave. Glazing was the great feature in his tone, as it was in that of Apelles; and there is no perfect colour without it.

The first requisite in fine colour is the ground or preparation spread over the canvass to receive the colours. It is either of a nature to absorb the oil, or to resist the absorption. If it resist the absorption of the oil out of the colour put on it, it is an oil-ground; if it absorb the oil, it is a water-ground. And it has long been an interesting question, whether the Venetians used an oil-ground or an absorbent ground; whether, like the Greeks, they worked in tempera, and varnished out, or whether they judiciously mingled both oil and tempera together. One would tlfink that Vasari, fiving as he did with all the great painters, could not be ignorant of their various methods of practice. In 1567 or 1568, he called on Titian, saw him, staid with him, was in his painting-room, and must have talked on art, and perhaps dined or supped with him.^[61. All the greet painters seemed to prefer supper· In Tichozzi, Titian seems to have been a sociable man, and there are extracts from Titian’s and Aretino’s letters, alluding to pheasants, and presents of birds for the next supper. ] But Vasari distinctly says, in a sort of recipe-introduction to his lives, (edition 1568) “that the ground on wood was gesso, plaster of Paris; that [7:16:718]then they mixed three colours, white, yellow, and amber, and spread them equally over the white ground; and that after tracing their eartoons, they painted their pictures.” A more abominable ground never was mixed; to those who have an organ of colour it is an absolute emetic; and though it might have been Vasari’s and the Florentines’ ground, it never could have been endured by the eye of a Venetian. “This was the method,” says Vasari, “for pictures on wood; but when canvass became the fashion, gesso being likely to eraek in ceiling, they made a ground of flour (farina), white lead, and nut-oil, after the canvass had been smoothed by size.”^[62. This is Vasari’s account, pp. 51, 52, 53, Firenze, volume i. 1568. ]

Nowwhenthis was published, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese were alive and all at work; and it is but common sense to conclude, that had it been false, they would have contradieted it. Vasari concludes with saying, “So are painted all the great works in St. Mark’s Place, Venice.” In that place was the Miraele of the Slave, by Tintoretto, afterwards seen by every body in the Louvre. Lanzi says,thatthe Venetians preferred canvass, but that at first they painted in tempera, and then came oil-painting, which the Venetians first adopted. On the arrival of the Bacehus and Ariadne in England, a little bit chipped off at the corner showed the ground underneath to be of the purest white. Now, if a white ground is absorbent, it sucks the oil out of the oil colours, and becomes the colour of oil. Sir Humphry Davy said to the author of this article in 1823, that in process of time oils become varnishes; and it is not impossible that the white ground of Titian may have been absorbent, and though it had sucked out the oil in the course of three hundred years, it may have recovered its original whiteness. The author’s experience extends only to thirty years, and in that period an absorbent ground which sucked out oil has never recovered its whiteness.

But, if the Venetians painted first in tempera upon the white ground, and finished in oil, the tempera intervening between the last painting and the ground would preserve the ground white; and as Titian’s method of proceeding was gradual and progressive in successive layers, like that of Protogenes, so that each layer became a help to the succeeding one, there is no reason to doubt that tempera might have been the first impasto. In parts of the Pietro Martyre, there certainly was the erude look of tempera preparation, softened by a glaze, especially about the projecting leg of the assassin. That the basis of Venetian pictures was a white ground, there can be no doubt; like the intonaeos of Apelles, and the plaster-grounds of the painted mummycoffins of Egypt. Tintoretto and Bassano used dark grounds to save trouble; but they are ruinous. They come through the thin half-tints of the picture, and render it distinct masses of dark and light, like most of the Lombard school. Many of the works of Paul Veronese, who painted one hundred years before, were in perfect preservation in the Louvre, whilst a number of the Lombard pictures were gone. The white ground was the “luce de dentro” of the Italians, “the light within.” Upon this beautiful white ground they placed their colours purely and erudely, and then by spreading thin transparent tones, took down the rawness, without losing the force of the tint. This was the practice of the Greeks, and is also the present practice of the British school. When Ciconara, the president of the Venetian academy, was in England, he remarked to the author on the singular faet, that the British was the only school of colour left in the world, though our climate was the worst; and such was the state of Venice some years since, that an English consul could get nobody to paint the king’s arms for him, and being the son of a painter, he was actually obliged to paint them himself.

As an example íbr the student, Titian is perfect. His execution never attracts by itself alone, but as the vehicle of the object it imitates. In colour he is never gaudy, never black in light and shadow, never forced or affected, and in drawing, latterly, grand. In composition he was not so perfect nor so fertile as Raffaelle; but in the imitation of flesh, no other artist in the world, except Apelles perhaps, could rival him. As a painter of portrait and landscape, no one has surpassed him. He did not grace his senatorial heads with the beauty of the backgrounds of Reynolds or Vandyke; but the absence of all gaiety behind the heads, perhaps added to the sublimity of their expression. It is curious to read in Boschini’s little work, that young Palma, who had it from old Palma, a pupil of Titian, told him that Titian very often finished with his thumb. Palma distinctly says, that he has seen Titian put on with his thumb and fingers masses of colour which gave life to a picture.

In a word, neither of the great Italian schools showed the sense of the ancients. The Romans omitted colour and imitation from sheer accident; the Venetians drawing and form; and Reynolds, without going into the causes of these mutual deficiencies, laid it down as a principle, that colour and reality were incompatible with high art; whereas, when each school found out its deficieney, each endeavoured to • correct its peculiar defect.

The giant of Titian’s school was Tintoretto, who gave such early indications of self-will and genius, that Titian, mean and jealous, turned him out of the house. Raffaelle would not have done this; he did not turn out Julio Romano. But Tintoretto was not to be crushed by the bad passions of his envious master; and took it very properly as an evidence of his talent. And what did Titian get by his paltry meanness? Nothing but pity. Tintoretto, young as he was, immediately formed a plan of his own, for combining the drawing of Michel Angelo with the colour of Titian. He devoted the day to the one, and manyparts of manynights, and often whole ones, to the other. In a few years, the result was the Miraele of the Slave and the Crucifixion. Although the execution of Tintoretto looked daring and impudent by the side of the modest, senatorial dignity of Titian, yet there was a grand, defined dash about it. The original sketch of the Miraele of the Slave, is in the possession of Rogers the poet, and is a very fine thing. Every body speaks of the Crucifixion as a wonderful instance of pow er. But in colour it is lurid and awful; in expression, character, and delicacy of feeling, discordant and offensive. His pictures seem to be a mass of fore-shortenings, affected twistings, dashing darks, and splashing lights, with a hundred horsepower of execution; bearded heads, Venetian armour, silks, satins, angels, horses, architecture, dogs, water, and brawny-armed and buteher-legged gondoliers, without pathos, passion, or refinement. He used to put little models in boxes, and light them in different holes, for effect. Like all Italians, he was accustomed to model and hang up his models by threads for fore-shortening. His style of form was a mixture of the pulpiness of the Venetian, and the long, ano-tomical, bony look of the Florentine school. He cannot be depended upon for correctness of proportions, but he was a grand and daring genius; and his conduct, when oppressed by Titian, should ever be held up as an example for the aspiring youth, when trodden upon by his elders.

Whilst Tintoretto was astonishing the Venetians by his daring, which made even Titian tremble, Paul Veronese, the other great contemporary, was mildly pursuing his azure and beautiful course. Of a nature the reverse of Tintoretto, and not equal to him in sublimity or terror of conception, he yet gave equal evidence of being run away with by his brush. Ceilings, canvass, halls, walls, and palaces, were so many proofs of his power. His greatest work is at Paris. It is the Marriage of Cana, a wonderful instance of executive power; [7:16:719]but here all story, sentiment, and pathos, are buried in the noise, bustle, eating, drinking, and fiddling of a Venetian city feast. Paul Veronese was certainly the most corrupt painter of the time.

After these great men, the art began to decay; and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto gave symptoms of a conventional mode, which, when taken up by inferior men, hastened its ruin. Down to the presentage, with the exception of two or three mannerists, no name occurs worthy of eminence or selection. Cannaletti was a genius in his way. Sebastian Ricci, and Marco Ricci, were much employed in England to disfigure ceilings and palaces by wholesale, with gods and goddesses, in subjects allegorical, poetical, mythological, and nonsensical, to understand which it required pages of explanation, and to see which a nine-feet telescope by Dolland. Montague, Burlington, and Bulstrode houses, are signs of the infatuation of the English nobility at that time; an infatuation, however, which shewed a disposition to employ art as it had been employed in Italy, and if the genius had been equal to the opportunity, the result would have been different.

The next school of any importance is the Lombard school, which comprehends the Mantuan, the Modenese, the Cremonese, and the Milanese. Andrea Monteguais the hero of the Mantuan school, and Vasari says, that his master-pieces are the tempera designs which we have at Hampton Court. They are fine things; Rubens used them; and they are a mine of costume, though the forms have too much the look of the model. Julio Romano’s great work is at Mantua, yet he must be considered as a Roman. It was, as Lanzi says, the greatest effort of the last style before Leonardo da Vinci introduced a new one, which overturned the Gothic. After Julio Romano, the art decayed, and then of course came the old story, “Una accademia per awivarla.” This academy has been splendidly kept up by Austria, and, as usual, has not produced a single man of great genius, in three hundred years.

Contiguous to the Modenese school is the Parman; and now we come to the most unaccountable and delightful of all painters, Corregio. When it had been determined to ornament the great cupola of St. John, Corregio, though then a young man, was selected to paint it; and, like Raffaelle, his genius expanded with the opportunity. After Raffaelle, Titian, Michel Angelo, Da Vinci, and Bartolomeo, who would have thought that anotherstyle, independentof either, and unlike any thing else in the world, could have burst out? But so it was. Of all the painters that ever lived in the world, there is no accounting for Corregio. Unlike Greeks, Romans, and Italians, ont he came into the world, in colour, drawing, light and shadow, composition, expression, and form, like nature, and unlike every body else, who ever studied nature at all. Michel Angelo, Raffaelle, Titian, we can trace; we see upon whom they were grafted, when they budded and burst forth. But who is Corregio? Nobody is certain. One swears he was poor, another that he was well off; another says he died in consequence of a fever which he caught by carrying all his money in copper, the price of a picture; another protests it was no such thing. Meng’s account is the best, and Vasari’s mostly without authority.

There is no certainty that his portrait is in existence; in fact there is as much dispute aboutit as there is about Shakespeare’s; and here are his beautiful works, his Notte, his Catherine, his Christ in the Garden, his Magdalene, his Venus and Mercury, and his EcceHomo in the National Gallery, the only head of Christ in the world. This head of Christ ought to be reverenced as the identification of the character, as much as the head of Jupiter by Phidias was in the Pagan world. There is no Christ’s head by Raffaelle which at all approaches it, either in the Transfiguration or in any other work; and the head by Leonardo da Vinci in the gallery cannot be endured after it. Of all painters, he astonishes one the most. If any fault is to be found with him, his men have a touch too effeminate. His colour is exquisite;'his light and shadow are enchanting, but his forms defective; his composition is simple and infantine; his expression unimpassioned, but sweetness itself; and when sorrow or suffering was to be represented, who ever did it more tenderly than Corregio? Let any man who doubts this, dwell for a moment on the gentle suffering, and the feminine yet manly beauty of the Christ above mentioned. It is the very Christ who commanded by submission; without weakness beautiful, without effeminancy tender; without taint the personification of love. His hands, his shoulders, his beard, his hair, belong to that divine being who vanquished sin, by yielding to torture. It does not seem painted, but as it were spread upon the canvass by an angel’s breath. His men look as innocent as girls; his women as guileless as infants; and his infants as if they had just come from the skies.

In the cupola at Parma, the great wonder is the foreshortening; and in the mouths of the vulgar this is technical perfection; whereas there is nothing more purely mechanical, nothing in fact you can so easily teach. One single smile of Corregio’s angels, one touching look of Raffaelle’s apostles, the sentiment of the Duke de Lorenzo by Michel Angelo, one crimson tone by Titian, are worth all the foreshortening on earth. The greatest excellencies of Signorelli, Buonarotti, and Corregio, are said to be their foreshortenings; whereas the greatest excellencies of Buonarotti and Corregio are not their fore-shortening at all.

In spite of the perfections of this wonderful man, he founded as it were the decay, “le commencement de la fin.” His breadth in fresco produced Lanfranco, Cortona, and Giordano, who covered Italian palaces with the sweeping brush of our patent chimney-cleansers, beginning it in the morning, finishing it by the evening, standing on the floor, and disdaining a scaffold, previous study, or previous thinking; and others came who bedaubed the palaces of Europe with clouds like feather-beds, cornucopias and Jupiters, till one’s brain aches in thinking of them.

Reynolds was immensely indebted to Corregio; for Rembrandt and Corregio are certainly the bases of his style. One of the most beautiful works in the Louvre was the Marriage of St. Catherine, which when once seen haunts us in after life in dreams. In a word, Corregio was an angel that passing this earth in its flight, drooped its wings and dropped upon it, to give us a foretaste of the smiles which welcome a happy spirit in a purer sphere.

Parmegiano is the next important name in this school, who grafted the grace of Corregio on the affectations of Michel Angelo. His greatest work is in our National Gallery; the Vision of St. Jerome. The Christ is a beautiful boy, but affected; the Virgin is Michel-Angelesque, having the glumdalclitch look of his Brobdignaggian women. St. John is finely drawn, but not unexceptionable; and the St. Jerome is sleeping in a position as if he had got into a cramp in the first part of the vision, and could not get out till it was over. It is raw in colour, skinned in construction, and spoils the composition altogether. His small pictures are beautiful but long in proportion. His fingers seem always to move to music; and his limbs to be conscious how gracefully they are disposed. He has often been a fatal example to the young. Nor is his Moses, whatever Gray may say of it, an instance of the sublime. The expression is mean, and the form overdone. Parmegiano died, like Raffaelle at the age of thirty-seven, when all that was expected of him had not been realised, and when, if he had lived longer, perhaps he would have done worse.

In 1570, the best Corregieschi were grown old or dead, and the school of Parma began to give way to that of Bologna, the truly great academical school. This was not an academy in the modern sense of the word; it was a school, and nothing but a school, without distinctions, and managed [7:16:720] by directors; and it is the only academy which has ever produced any genius. Dominichino, Guido, and other names of the second period, came between unrivalled excellence and approaching destruction, and stopped for a little time the decay of the art.

Of the Cremona school, there is no great name. In the Milanese school, Da Vinci seems the hero; he founded an academy which, according to Lanzi, was the first in Europe that reduced art to rules, the works of Leonardo being the canon. His great work is in the refectory. But fifty years afterwards Aramini says that it was spoiled; in 1642 Scannelli writes, that it was with difficulty made out; and Barry ultimately saw it destroyed by a restorer. When Eugene Beauharnois was viceroy of Italy, he drained the refectory and had it paved with tiles; and it is said in a report, that the colours began to revive. Da Vinci’s academy having produced no talent, Maria Theresa founded another, which, though full of casts of every description, has nevertheless proved equally unsuccessful.

The Caracei and their pupils were the last crop of genius which Italy threw up, and though they were second-rate, they came of the breed of the great who were no more. The style of Michel Angelo seems to have taken early root in Bologna, perhaps from his executing in that place the statue of Julius II. Giotto, in the first instance, excited emulation by flying about Italy; but he seems to have scattered everywhere the seeds of art, and Tibaldi, after having studied in Rome, certainly founded this style at Bologna. The first school formed was by Bagna Cavallo, and Primaticcio. It failed in 1564; upon which Primaticcio went to France, and Tibaldi to Spain, and the art was of course neglected.

The Caracci succeeded them and were extraordinary men; but what would they have done if Raffaelle, Michel Angelo, Titian, and Corregio had never lived? They saw nature only by the help of their great predecessors. Whatever the Caracci did had the appearance of labour; whilst whatever was done by their great predecessors, had an air as if there was something that no labour could attain. Ludovicohad more feeling than his brothers, and had the honour of being instructed by Tintoretto. They were the sons of a tailor, and founded an academy in their own house. Agostino principally engraved, and Annibale principally painted; but they each contributed instruction to the school in which were formed Dominichino, Guido, Lanfranco, Guercino, and Albano.

The greatest genius of the school was Guido; but he was envied by the Caracci; and even in this school the vices of an academy began to appear. We did not find Raffaelle sowing discord amongst his pupils by putting one against the other. Albano was opposed to Guido. Dominichino was an eminent but heavy genius; and his communion of St. Jerome is a fine thing though dull. There was a vulgar grandeur about Guereino, and an insipidity about Albano. The great work of Annibale Caracci is the Farnese gallery, which is excellent in every thing, but nerve and genius. Say what you will about the Caracci, there is a want in their art, which affects the pen of him who is attempting to do them justice. They lived together, did not marry, and were ill paid and ill-tempered; like all old bachelors they were discontented, they did not know why, and fidgety, they did not know for what; they envied the talents they were desirous of bringing forward, called the art their “wife,” and were never satisfied, living in a perpetual fret of teaching, and painting, and complaining. Annibale became dissipated and died early. It is an extraordinary feature in the moral character of the Italian artists, that the greater part did not marry, and hence came the cant “of the art being their wife,” with the natural consequence, that girls who had been models generally ended by being mistresses.

The Caracci kept up this affectation, they said the art was their “cara sposa and to all the confusion of a bachelor’s house, added the slang of a mere painter’s habits. At the dinner-table, crayon and paper were always at hand to catch attitudes, actions, and expressions, and groups; as if expressions and attitudes could not have been remembered in the solitude of the study, and kept till wanted with just as much effect as this vulgar intrusion on the usages of society. A great artist is always a man of the world; an inferior one a man of the palette. Raffaelle, Titian, Angelo, Rubens, and Reynolds, would have passed a twelvemonth in any society without being discovered to be artists; but the Caracei would have talked of tone and touching during the first half-hour. A genteel woman, accidentally travelling in a coach with three artists who were palette-mxn i expressed afterwards her wonder and suspicion as to the state of their intellects. For after the usual dead silence, one of them said, with an air of vast profundity: “How finely the white sheet in the hedge carries off the colour in the sky.” “And look at that old woman’s cloak taking up the brick-wall,” said another. “Yes,” said the oldest of the set, “how finely it was done yesterday by a red night-cap in a pretty bit of Sir George.” Johnson used to say, “Sir, we were reduced to talk of the weather.” But even the weather is preferable to this detestable affectation. Though the deepest principle of the ancients was the preservation of beauty in everything, they never sacrificed beauty to expression, but always combined the two; whereas Guido, by an eternal repetition of the expression of the Niobe in Christs and Virgins rendered the preservation of beauty at such an expense insipid. The beauty of the Helen and Paris was truly exquisite; but hundreds of Herodias’s daughters with St. John’s heads, “have a look,” as Lord Byron says, “of bread and butter.” His grace was the grace of theatres; his pencil light, airy, and beautiful, though rather careless than masterly. Dominichino, on the other hand, obedient, slow, and timid, imitated everybody and fell short of all. But Guercino was the most original of the school; his finest manner is his candlelight manner, yet still there is a vulgarity in his forms.

None of the Caracci or their school, had they been born at an earlier period, would have advanced the art one iota beyond their predecessors, so entirely dependent were they upon the great who had gone before. “Such was the state of art,” says Fuseli, “when the spirit of machinery destroyed what was yet left of meaning ;” when contrast and grouping meant composition and thinking, and a mass of rapid, thoughtless, empty, impudent frescos disgraced the walls, palaces, and churches of Italy. Pietro of Cortona and Luca Giordano are the heroes of this inundation of splashiness; and yet what artists they were! The decay which it announced, was the decay of the giant Italian fresco hand that still struggled to do its duty, whilst the head was fast approaching imbecility in thought. The meanest pupil of the meanest machinist would have swept the first-rate British artist that has ever yet existed into the earth, with his tiptoes and exhibition-glare.

Thus, with the Caracci and their school, ended the greatness of Italian art; nor has there been one single painter of such genius since, from Andrea Sacchi to Cammucini the present hero of the Romans. Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt turned it into a new channel in Flanders; Velasquez and Murillo kept it alive in Spain; Teniers, Ostadt, and Jan Steen preserved it from extinction in Holland; the Poussins, Claude, and Salvator, meanwhile revived it in Italy; whilst the old Gothic masters in Germany, with their colour, and most of them with great invention but in bad taste, were an absolute dung-hill of diamonds and pearls, which everybody has considered himself as having a right to plunder, not even excepting Raffaelle himself. Whilst the art was sunk to the lowest depths in Europe, Reynold’s in England broke forth with a brilliancy of colour which [7:16:721]has rendered it no longer a hopeless attempt to rival the gorgeousness of Venetian splendour. If ever there was a refutation of Reynold’s own theory, that “genius was the child of circumstances,” he was a living one; in spite of all circumstances, in spite of the utter want of all education as a painter, in spite of all the apathy of the nation, and the extinction of art in Europe, out he came with a vigour and beauty which have ever since defied rivalship in portrait and children.

The Germans are an extraordinary nation, but always more or less under the influence of a wrong taste. Their early painters are full of thought; and as a proof of what Raffaelle⅛ estimation of them must have heen, he adopted almost to the letter, in his famous Spasimo in Spain, Shoengaer’s magnificent composition of Christ bearing the cross. The hand leaning on the stone, with the momentary action of the drapery, is in Shoengaer. The brute pulling Christ, in an old German dress, Raffaelle has taken and improved; and he has also placed the Marys in the fore-ground which Shoengaer placed in the background; but the whole of the composition is Shoengaer’s, though Raffaelle of course has added to it his own perfections.

Albert Dürer is considered as the greatest man of the German school; but there is nothing which he has ever done that can compete, in expression and composition, with this fine production of Shoengaer’s. Fuzeli says, “Albert Dürer was a man of great ingenuity, but not of genius. His proportions of the human figure are on a comprehensive principle founded on nature, and the result of deep thinking.” He had sometimes a glimpse of the sublime, but it was only a glimpse. The expanded agony of Christ on the Mount of Olives, and the mystic conception of his figure of Melancholy, are thoughts of sublimity, though the expression of the latter is weakened by the rubbish he has thrown about her. His Knight, attended by Death and the Fiend, is more capricious than terrible; and his Adam and Eve are two common models shut up in a rocky dungeon. “If he approached genius in any part of his art, it was in colour; his colour went beyond his age, and as far excelled in truth, and breadth, and handling, the oil colour of Raffaelle, as Raffaelle excelled him in every other quality. I speak of his easel-pictures; his drapery is broad though much too angular, and rather snapt than folded. Albert is called the father of the German school, though he neither reared scholars nor was imitated by the German artists of his or the succeeding century. That the exportation of his works to Italy should have effected a temporary change in the principles of some Tuscans who had studied Michel Angelo, as Andrea del Sarto, and Jacopo da Ponto-rino, is a fact which proves that minds as well as bodies may be at certain times subject to epidemic influences.”

Lucas von Leyden was the Dutch caricature of Albert Dürer; and ere long the style of Michel Angelo was adopted in the same way as by Pelegrino Tibaldi, and being spread by the graver of Giorgio Mantuano, provoked those caravans of German, Dutch, and Flemish students, who, on their return from Italy, introduced at the courts of Prague and Munich, in Flanders and the Netherlands, that preposterous manner, that bloated excrescence of swampy brains, which in the form of man left nothing human, distorted action and gesture with insane affectation, and dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes, in the style of Golzius and Spranger. But though content to feed upon the husks of Tuscan design, they imbibed the colour of Venice, and spread the elements of that excellence which distinguished the succeeding schools of Flanders and of Holland. At this moment out blazed upon the world that giant of execution and brute violence of brush, and brilliant colour, and daring composition, Rubens; and another mysterious and extraordinary being, Rembrandt, who seemed born to confound all theory but that of innate genius, confirmed it for ever. Rubens gloried in the splendour of the rainbow, whilst Rembrandt enjoyed only the poetry and solemnity of twilight; when the evening star glittered, and the sun was down, then was the hour of his inspiration.

The scholar of Otho Venius, Rubens, imbibed from his master an emblematical taste; he spent eight years in Italy, hurried back at the death of his mother, and painted that wonder of art the Elevation of the Cross, before he was thirty. It is the perfection of a fearless hand and daring brush, conscious of its principle; and though the sweep of Michel Angelo’s contours, applied to butcher’s backs and coal-heaver’s legs, rather increased their vulgarity than added to their refinement, yet the dashing power of that astonishing picture, in spite of its Flemish, pallid, and ugly wretches for women, renders it the bloom of his powers. Rubens was a man of such general knowledge, that the Marquis of Spinosa said, that painting was his least qualification. He was ambassador to Spain and England, and adorned the banquetting ceiling at Whitehall, the centre portion forming an amazing picture. Educated classically, he carried classical feeling into every thing but his art; and after spouting Virgil with enthusiasm, he turned to his canvass and painted a Flemish butcher with bandy legs (if he happened to have such) for Aeneas. How extraordinary it is that, relishing as he did, Homer, Virgil, and Livy, he should give Dutch Helens, Flemish Junos, and German Diomeds, for classic art. His greatest work is the Luxembourg Gallery; and for once he hit a sweet female expression in the mother of Mary de’ Medicis, after accouch-ment. One of his finest pieces, the Rape of Proserpine, is at Blenheim, where the Arethusa, as a water nymph, is putting up her hand, with her back towards you. That a man who could occasionally paint with such delicacy, should so often disgust us with his flabby vulgarity, is not to be accounted for. He painted portrait finely, landscape sweetly, and animals with great power, except the lion, whose straight shaggy mane he always curled like the ancients, and lost its noble look. He was a great man, and painted wherever he went. He was diligent and religious; he rose at four, heard mass, and went to his painting-room, where, with little intermission, he painted till five; he then rode, and returned to his friends, many of them the most celebrated men of the day, who were assembled to meet him at supper; at eleven he retired, and again proceeded to work at day-break. It is interesting to contrast this virtuous course of so great aman, with the vulgar infidelity which alone distinguishes the most incompetent in the art; and it is impossible not to conclude, that those whom God has most endowed with gifts, are the most sensible of their own imperfections. Rubens was thrice married, and educated his children highly; one of them wrote a very learned work, De lato Clave, which shews research and learning.

No where did Rubens shine so effectually as in the Louvre. In all the world, perhaps, there never was such a splendid opportunity for studying to perfection the principles of the great men in the art, as was afforded in the Louvre in its full glory; and injurious as the formation of that collection had proved to the cities of Italy, yet Napoleon gave a dignity and an importance to the art, which it has not since lost, by making the productions of its great men subjects of treaty, and receiving them as equivalent to territory or treasure. There you rushed from the Romans to the Venetians, from the Flemings to the Spaniards, from Titian to Raffaelle, from Rembrandt to Rubens, and settled principles in half an hour, which it took others months, perhaps years, to accomplish. It cannot be denied, that in force of effect, Rubens bore down all opposition, from his breadth, brightness, and depth; and let every painter be assured, that if he keep these three qualities of effect, the leading qualities in the imitation of nature, he will defy rivalship in the contest of exhibition.
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Rembrandt, with all his magic, painting on too confined a principle, lost in power, and looked spotty and individual. Paul Veronese and Tintoretto had not that solidity, which is the characteristic of Rubens; Titian seemed above contest, and relying on his native majesty of colour, exhibited a senatorial repose, which gave to Rubens a look almost of impertinence; but still you could not keep your eyes off the seducer, and even if you turned your back, you kept peeping over your shoulder. Here all peculiarity suffered. The silvery beauty of Guido looked grey; the correctness of Raffaelle looked hard; Rembrandt failed most by the brightness of Rubens, the magic of Corregio, or the sunny splendour of Titian; and after wandering about for days, you decided that he suffered most who had most peculiarity. With all his grossness, want of beauty, and artificial style, Rubens’ brightness and breadth carried the day, as far as arresting the eye, and forcing you to look at him, hate as you might his vulgarity, and his Flemish women, and his Flanders breed of horses.

Rembrandt van Rhyn, was next to Rubens, in point of art, and more than equal to him in originality. Whether in portrait, landscape, or historical pictures large and small, he was like nobody; as wonderful asany, and sometimes superior to all. His bistre-drawings are exquisite, his etchings unrivalled; his colour, light and shadow, and surface, solemn, deep, and without example; but in the naked form, male or female, he was an Esquimaux, His notions of the delicate form of women, would have frightened an Arctic bear. Let the reader fancy a Billingsgate fish-woman, descending to a bath at a moment’s notice, with hideous feet, large knees and bony legs, a black eye, and a dirty night-cap,—and he will have a perfect idea of Rembrandt’s conception of female beauty. Though his historical pictures are often remarkable for pathos and expression, his characters are sometimes absolutely ridiculous. His Abrahams are Dutch old clothesmen; and yet his Jacob’s Dream is sublime beyond expression. Whatever he painted, he enriched; his surface was a mass of genius, and his colour a rainbow, darkened by the gloom of twilight. In portrait, sometimes, his dignity was equal to Titian; but the characters he painted were inferior.

These two wonderful men, each a perfect contrast to the other, revived art; Rubens on the principles of the Venetians, and Rembrandt in defiance of all principles. But the latter sacrificed too much to a peculiarity, and he was punished for it in the Louvre by the side of others.

Rubens produced Vandyke, Snyders, and Jordaens, and a whole host of pupils. Vandyke had more elegance, but not so much imagination; Jordaens more vulgarity, with equal power. Snyders was a mere animal painter, and he carried the touch necessary to execute the hairy skin of an animal, into every thing he did. Vandyke by his splendid portraits, certainly generated a love of art in England, which has never left us, after the destruction of historical painting at the Reformation.

Rembrandt had pupils, who were by no means equal to himself. David Teniers the elder was a pupil of Rubens. These two extraordinary men were certainly the founders of the Dutch school; and the great principles of their works were carried by David Teniers the younger, Jan Steen, Ostadt, and Cuyp, into smaller and more delicate productions. A man of the highest ambition and noblest views in art can study with the greatest benefit the dead fish and bunches of turnips, servant girls and drunken boors, for beauty of handling and effects in art. He who looks down on the excellencies of the Dutch school, does so from a narrowness of understanding, and not an enlargement of views; and if an historical painter can see nothing to learn in their little beautiful works, he will not learn much from the greater productions of Titian.

Directlyafter the Flemish comes the Spanish school, which, not so vulgar as the former, was equally unideal. The Spani ards painted the people about them for all sorts of subjects and all sorts of characters; and they are only more refined than the Flemings because the Spaniards are a more cultivated people. The long possession of the Moors prevented the Spaniards from advancing as soon as Italy. The great schools in Spain have been those of Madrid, Seville, and Valencia. In 1446 Antonio Rincon abandoned the Gothic of the European artists; in 1475 Gallegos was so like Albert Dürer, that he is suspected to have been a pupil; in the sixteenth century riches flowed in, patronage was liberal, and, what is most important of all, genius existed in Spain. Becerra de Baeza, pupil of Michel Angelo, painted in fresco, at Madrid, Salamanca, and Valladolid; and in the Trinità del Monte in Rome, there is also a picture of his. Various painters follow of course in all the schools, till the coming of the real hero of Spanish art.

Velasquez was born at Seville in 1599∙ He became a pupil of Herrera, and left Seville in 1522, to seek his fortune in the metropolis; where he succeeded so completely as a portrait painter, that he got to court, and having become acquainted with Rubens, often visited his painting-room. Rubens must have been of the greatest use to him. Velasquez therwisited Italy, but could not bear the Roman school after the Venetian. In masterly execution and life he surpassed Rubens and Vandyke. Of all the great painters, he seems to have despised the most the vulgar appetite for what is called finish, that is, polished smoothness. Everytouch from Velasquez is a calculated to express the leading points of the thing intended to convey it. Masterly beyond description, and delightful beyond belief, he conveyed the impressions of life as exquisitely as if his imitation breathed. But so utterly decayed is the present Spanish school, with its pompous academy, that Spaniards when asked how they can reconcile their hideous polish with the freedom of Velasquez, have answered that Velasquez was always in a hurry.

After Velasquez ranks Murillo, a man of a tenderer genius, but equally alive to life. He has the surface of Corregio and colour peculiarly his own; and he was what the Italians call a Naturaliste, indeed, the whole school was of that species. Like Rembrandt and Rubens, the heroes of history are always the countrymen of the Spanish painter. The Prodigal Son is one of the finest works in the Duke of Sutherland’s collection; it is beautiful in execution, light and shadow, and colour, but Spanish in character and expression. They never got beyond their model or their country; and this may in a great measure be owing to their masters havingbeen Venetians, though Tibaldiand Torrigiano had visited Spain. Murillo was an exquisite painter, and if he had been soundly educated like the Greeks, would have been as refined in character and form as he is now in colour and handling. He first got an insight into painting from Moya, a pupil of Vandyke. Having sold his pictures to hawkers for what they would bring, he saved money and went to Madrid, and, with the frankness of genius, at once introduced himself to Velasquez, who received him like another Raffaelle. After three years of continued kindness, he returned to Seville, founded an Academy, and for his great work of St. Antony at Padua, he received ten thousand reals. It is said that he covered more canvass than any body else; butafterthe acres of Rubens in the Louvre, that assertion is questionable. Velasquez and Murillo, of course, came like the rest, before academies. One now exists in Madrid, and no genius has appeared since its institution. It is quite ridiculous to see the same results all over the world; and it is still more ridiculous, to find the kings of Europe still continuing to found and embellish these useless establishments.

In France, throughout all the middle ages, the art of design was never extinct, either in mosaic, glass, tapestry, fresco, miniature, or tempera. Though the learned author of the “Discourse Historique” says, that the French were the first who presumed to personify the Almighty in the form of [7:16:723]man; yet nothing worth remembering occurred till thedeath of Leonardo, in the arms of Francis I. in 1518, and the employment of Primaticcio, Rosso, and Nicoo del Abbate. Jean Cousin in 1462, and Vouet in 1582, were the first French painters of any importance in this latter period. Simon Vouet, the younger, was the master of Le Sueur, Le Brun, Mignard, and Dufresnoy; he lived in 1600, and the best period of French art was from that time until 1665, the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV. They, as usual, founded an academy, ten years before Poussin’s death; and Coypel, Jouvenet, and Rigaud, were the produce of the institution; whilst Poussin, Le Sueur, and Le Brun, had flourished and obtained their reputation before it was founded. Van Loo and Boucher succeeded Jouvenet and Rigaud, and gave additional evidence of the utter incompetence of the academic system. About 1770, flourished Greuze, who began to evince a better taste, and was persecuted by the Royal Academy for his independence, till the Revolution of 1790 put an end for the time to all imposture. Down went the Royal Academy in an instant; and all the conventional distinctions in art, which are generallythe cloak of imbecillity, were fluttered off in the whirlwind. The people, long prevented from seeing fine works in the great galleries, now broke into these galleries with brutal exultation. Bloody and dreadful as were the consequences of the first burst of the French Revolution, one of its most beneficial effects consisted in throwing open all matters of art and science to the people. Naigeon, the conservator of the Luxembourg, said, in 1814, that nothing was opened to the people before the Revolution; and we ourselves in England are now enjoying our Museums, entirely in consequence of the effect produced upon Mr. Fox and the English, who visited Paris in the year 1802, and who were astonished at the noble frankness with which the Louvre was exposed.

The academy being swallowed up in the whirlpool of political revolution, the Institute supplied its place. Napoleon, on becoming first consul, sent immediately for David, who had been a furious republican during “le temps de la terreur ;” a man of great talent, but of abominable taste. Napoleon made him his court-painter, and gave such preponderance to his influence, that the detestable style of David became everywhere but in England the style of European art. Gros, Prudhom, Guérin, deviated from the rigidity of David’s style. Prudhom was a man of genius. Hideous as was the style of David, in fact painted Roman sculpture, it had some foundation in reason. This was, if possible, to bring the French back to classical art, after the flutter of Boucher, and the pomposity of Coypel; but, like all reformers, he went to excess.

The materials for assisting them are so deficient, that the greatest artists have arrived at any thing like an imitation of nature only by the greatest science and skill. It is much easier to paint a button and a chair, than a human face; therefore the great artists dwelt upon the face with all their dexterity, and touched off the button and chair with less anxiety and care. The French used to say, that theirs was the system of the ancient Greeks, and that it was our prejudice to disapprove of it. But before we have done, we shall show that it was not the system of the ancient Greeks; and as we pay all due deference to the Italians, Flemings, Dutch, Spaniards, and Greeks, and to their own Poussin and Claude, they have no right to accuse us of prejudice because we disapprove of David. We do not deny David’s talent, because it must have required talent to mislead the continent of Europe. In art David’s expression was taken from the theatre, and his actions were borrowed from the opera house; his forms were Roman and not Grecian, and his colour was hideous enough to produce ophthalmia. If he and his pictures, with all he ever designed, and all he ever invented, had not appeared in the world, or having appeared, had been utterly rooted out of it, the atmosphere would be purer. He is a plague-spot, a whitened leprosy in painting, that haunts the imagination with disgust. This he had the impudence to say of Rubens. But since the peace, and from the connection with England, a better school of colour has sprung up in France; and La Roche gives evidence of having in some degree got rid of the furniture look of David, though it still poisons a French pencil.

Horace Vernet is a distinguished name; indeed, he may be called the first light-infantry grenadier of European art. He paints a head in five minutes, a whole imperial family in ten minutes, and an historical picture in twenty; and he paints all three with talent and skill. Though the French are not yet sound in art, they are the best educated artists in Europe; and if the English would combine their own colour with the careful habits of French early study, and if each school could supply the deficiencies of the other, they would make out a very good school between them.

In thus suffering ourselves to be led away to the present state of the French school, we have omitted to do justice to the great men of former times; Poussin, Sebastian, Bourdon, and Le Sueur. Poussin is the hero of French art His Death of Germanicus is very fine, as a specimen of history; and his Polyphemus sitting on the top of a mountain, and playing his pipe, with his back towards you, is a pure specimen of the poetic. He studied the ancient Romans so much, that he became Roman in his faces, drapery, and figures; and in his naked forms, the common model is too apparent. His finest works are in England; but though distinguished for expression, there is always an antique heartlessness, as if copied from the masks of an ancient theatre.

Bourdon’s Return of the Ark is a high proof of his conception; and Le Sueur’s St. Bruno is pure in taste, but bad in colour. The Battles of Alexander by Le Brun show the latter to have been of the family of machinists. His colour is bronzed and disagreeable. Le Brun was a court-favourite, and his Greeks, as well as barbarians, have an air of the opera at Versailles. His composition is artificial; and he is not a fit example for youth. The only man who coloured with exquisite feeling was Watteau, whose touch and delicacy of tint may be studied with great profit by any artist.

In a word, it is extraordinary that the French as a nation, have never been right in art. Poussin was the only man who could have set them right, and they persecuted him so, that he settled in Rome. Claude Lorraine can hardly belong to them; and though Louis Philippe is now employing them by hundreds, nothing very eminent has yet proceeded from such encouragement.

The Germans are taking higher ground than any other nation, and are making rapid advances, particularly at Munich. They have begun again fresco painting; and the liberality of their king has rendered Munich the most flourishing city in Europe for arts and artists; but as Canova said when he was in England, there is very little grand art left in the world. It is extraordinary to reflect on the little original thinking that is to be found. This was more apparent in the Louvre than any where else; and one could not help being amused at seeing the way in which Rubens, who, like Michel Angelo, is supposed to have never looked out of himself, had plundered the old Gothic painters; the Fall of the Damned, by an old German, being the complete basis of the same subject by Rubens.

When incessant demands are made on the genius of a favourite, every aid to thinking is grasped at and improved. Raffaelle did this; so did Rubens; and even Reynolds used to have portfolios brought him to look over at breakfast, and select what would help him, saying, “It will save me the trouble of thinking.” This involves averyserious question in art. The utmost merit that can be allowed is that of skilful adaptation. “Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit” may be said of all these; and surelya good thought badly done is justifiable food for a superior mind to render it better.
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We come now to the British School, which, though the last founded in Europe, is inferior to none in variety of power.

There is no doubt that the art^[63. It is a curious fact, that the art seems to have been in an advanced state in England, while it is doubtful whether there was a painter in Florence in 12<i6. In 1250 the authorities in Florence sent for some Greeks because there was no painter; yet at that period in England, and long before, historical painting seemed quite the fashion amongst the upper classes. All the king’s rooms, as well as his chapel, were painted. In the 25th of Edward III. in the rolls of the Exchequer, 26th September 1351, there is a charge to “William of Pad-ryngton, for making twenty angels to stand in the tabernacles by task-work, at 6s. 8d. for each image, L.6, 13s. 4d.” In 1530, were begun the beautiful pictures and designs in St. Stephen’s Chapel; and it is curious to see, in all the accounts, the continual allusions to oil-painting. The artists employed must certainly have been men of distinguished talent, who bad the power of ordering inferior artists to assist them. The most celebrated of their number appears to have been Hugh de St. Alban’s, *1bo was appointed by the king as his principal painter. The following document, dated 18th March, 13Ó0, contains his appointment. “The king to all and singular, the sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs, officers, and his other lieges, as well within liberties as without, to whom be greeting, Know ye, that we have appointed our beloved Hugh de St. Alban’s, master of the painters assigned for the works to be executed in our chapel, at our palace at Westminster, to take and choose as many painters and other workmen as may be required for performing those works, in any places where it may seem expedient, either within liberties or without, in the counties of Kent, Middlesex, Essex, Surrey, and Sussex, and to cause those workmen to come to our palace aforesaid,, there to remain in our service, at our wages, as long as it may be necessary. And therefore we command you to be counselling and assisting this Hugh, and completing what has been stated, as often and in such manner as the said Hugh may require.” (See Britton’s West. Pαl∙ p. 170.) The illustrious Hugh seems to have been a designer; for in theb∞ks, (25 Edward III. April 30,) is the following entry, “to H. de St. Albans, ordering or designing the drawings for the painters, one day, Is.” ] would have advanced in Britain side by side with the continental nations, if we had continued Catholics; in fact, we were doing so, when Wickliffe’s opposition to the Catholic priests roused up the people to hate and detest every thing connected with their system. Painting of course came under this furious denunciation, and through successive ages went on till the period of the Reformation.

In Edward the Confessor’s time, there were executed bas-reliefs as good as any thing done at that time in Europe, and by no means deficient in grace, though disproportioned, and unskilful in composition. In one of these there is a king in bed, and leaning upon his hand; which in an improved style might be made a fine thing. In Alfred’s reign and before, York and Canterbury were adorned with pictures and tapestry; and in the tenth century, Ethelrida adorned Ely Cathedral with a series of historical pictures in memory of her famous husband Birthwood. As this is recorded, says Strutt, the practice must have existed before; and that it continued to exist and be the fashion down to the Edwards and Henrys, there is good evidence; for in the time of Henry III. mention is made of the immortal Master Walker’s painting in Westminster, the no less renowned John Thornton of Coventry, painter there, and the east window of York.^[64. See Carter’s Etchings. ] In the reign of Henry VIII. there was a chartered society of painters; and in the seventeenth of Elizabeth it was moved in the House by Sir G. Moore, “that a bill to redress certain grievances in painting be let sleep, and be referred to the Lord Mayor, as it concerned a controversy between painters andplaisterers f and Sir Stephen Jones stood up and desired that the Lord Mayor “might not be troubled, and it seemed to go against the painters.”

The painterswho complained that the plaisterers used their colours, and took the bread out of their mouths, go on to say, that in the nineteenth of Edward IV., that is in 1480, there were orders issued “for the use of oil and size" and that the “painters’ only mixture was o?7and size, which theplaisterers do now usurp and intrude upon.” In their petition they observe with the greatest simplicity: “Workmanship and skill is the gift of God, and not one in ten proveth a workman, and that those who cannot attain excellence must live by the baser part of the science.” They add that “painting on cloth is decayed ; that this art is a curious art, and requireth a good eye, and a stedfast hand, which the infirmity of age de-cayeth, and then painters go a-begging and then they conclude the petition to the House by this remarkable passage: “These walls thus curiously painted in former ages the images so perfectly done, do witness our forefatherd care in cherishing this art of painting" “This bill,” said Sir

Stephen Jones, “is very reasonable and fit to pass,” and so it did.^[65. See Sir W. Monson’s Account of the Acts of Elizabeth, 1632, British Museum. ]

The above extract, proves that in Elizabeth’s reign the historical attempts were alluded to, as belonging to former ages, viz. from the tenth century downwards; that the House of Commons praised the wisdom of those times in cherishing painting; and that this wisdom the Reformation had obviously discarded.

In 1538, Henry issued an order against the use of pictures and statues to impose on the people; yet pictures are called “bokes for unlearned people.” In 1542, in his letter to Cranmer, the king tries to restrain the destruction of pictures; but it was too late. In the reign of Edward IV. the Duke of Somerset fined and imprisoned all those who possessed pictures of religious subjects. To such excess had the fury of the people been excited, that the recorder of Salisbury, Mr. Henry Sherfield, was fined L.500, and imprisoned in the Fleet for not breaking a painted window in Salisbury Cathedral. Walpole says that one Bleese was employed at 2s. 6d. a-day to break windows at Croydon; and in Charles I.’s reign it was ordered,^[66. See Journals of the House, 23d July 1645. ] that all pictures having the second person of the Trinity should be burnt, and that all pictures having the Virgin should share the same fate. Cromwell stopped this barbarity, and it was owing to the self-will of this extraordinary man that the Cartoons of Raffaelle was bought in for L.300, at the sale of Charles’s effects.

Thus it is clear the art was stopped by the Reformation. In St. Stephen’s Chapel, before the alterations made some years since, there were figures painted on the walls, as excellent as any figures in the Campo Santo, and perhaps executed about the same period. In Elizabeth’s reign, as we have seen, historical art is referred to with sorrow in the House, as a thing past but which had existed; and in the same reign, says Hillier, “men induced by nature,” to pursue high art, “have been made poorer, like the most rare English drawers of story works." Now, Hillier would not have said this, if it had not been true that the drawers of story works were principally natives.

In Henry VII.’s time, Torrigiano, the same youth who had felled Michel Angelo to the ground in the gardens of Lorenzo and shattered his nose, was in England, and executed important works. In the time of Henry VIII., commissions for high art being over, Holbein devoted himself to court portrait-painting, though in the city he painted some large pictures. Rubens’ and Vandyke’s visit excited Dobson, a capital painter of a head; but although Oliver was distinguished as a miniature painter, and although there are designs at Oxford, by English painters, no one genius seemed to arise till after Lely and Kneller had succeeded Vandyke. Cooper was the first English painter employed in foreign courts as a miniature painter. Thornhill, a man of talent, [7:16:725]and a member of the House, forms the link between one race and another; and then sprung up Hogarth, Gainsborough, Wilson, West, and Barry. As usual, when Reynolds and Hogarth had for ever rescued Britain from all doubt as to her genius, without an academy of any description, a royal academy was founded to produce more genius, just as had been done all over Europe; and no man equal to Reynolds and Hogarth has since appeared.^[67. Wilkie was not produced at an academy, but at Graham’s school, Edinburgh. Now this school is an academy with all its pride, and nobody will come of it. ] After the academy was founded at Milan by Leonardo, no genius like his appeared. After that of St. Luke was founded at Rome, Raffaelle and all being dead, no one came forth. After an academy had been founded at Parma, Corregio being gone, nobody appeared. After a national academy was founded at Venice, and royally endowed, genius fled. The same thing happened in Ferrara, Modena, Florence, and Naples; and also in France, Spain, and England. Need further evidence be sought of the uselessness of such institutions?

In 1711, there existed a school, of which Kneller was the head, whilst Vertue the engraver drew in it. After 1724, Sir James Thornhill openedaschool in hisown home Covent Garden, and so did the Duke of Richmond at Whitehall Privy Gardens. Sir James proposed to Lord Halifax to found a royal academy, but without success. At Sir James’ death, the school was broken up, and the artists were again left without instruction; when, for the purpose of studying the living model, they hired a room in Greyhound Court, Arundel Street, and Michael Moses was the conductor of it. Here they were visited by Hogarth, who was so well pleased, that a union of the whole body took place, and they removed to Peter’s Court, St. Martin’s Lane. The number of members amounted to a hundred and forty-one, each paying an annual subscription. There was at the time a great deal of happy fellowship amongst the artists. Reynolds, who was a member, with Hogarth and others, adorned the Foundling Hospital; and the public were so interested, that thesociety thoughtthey might venture on a charter, which was obtained, and there wasestablishedby lawa governmentoftwenty-four directors, annually elected, including the president, by the whole body and out of it. An united exhibition having begun, (the constant source of irritation, for everyman cannot have his works in the best places,) squabbles arose; and the directors finding the benefit of being able to hang their own works and those of their friends in the best situations, intrigued to keep their places another year. This was foolishly granted; and every subsequent year finding themselves becominga match for the constituency, they kept their places for eight years, in defiance of law; so that at last it was found that the men elected to preserve order and law, had been the grossest violators of both. With the feelings of independent freemen, the constituencies resolved to endure this no longer; when, to prevent collision, it was agreed to refer the point to the Attorney-General, De Grey, both parties pledging themselves to abide by his decision. De Grey gave it against the directors, and these honourable men then refused to keep their word. The constituency met, and violently expelled sixteen of them; but before resigning, these gentlemen met secretly, and fearing exposure, tore out and destroyed the minutes from the 19th November 1764, to the 1 lth March 1765, and from the 17th of June 1765, to the 21st of March 1766. They then went to the king, George III., whom they persuaded that the chartered body was republican; and that there was no hope unless a royal academy was founded, with the number of members and voters limited to forty. The king, without inquiry, foolishly yielded to their cunning suggestions, and founded an academy with forty members; the other eight directors resigned directly, and the whole twenty-four were niadeR.A’s. Thus by this limited number were framed the present exclusive law and constitution, and all the obnoxious regulations passed, which had been checked by the sense of a constituency; and thus the art of England received a blow more fatal than at the Reformation, The weakness of the nation has been gratified to an excess by this interested assembly, to the ruin of their taste and judgment; high art has gone back, and is going back further every year, by the struggles of these men to keep up their monopoly, in defiance of the increasing intelligence of the people, which they fear, and which will yet be their utter destruction. In this affair Reynolds behaved with great meanness. He promised to stand by the constituency; yielded at the offer of a knighthood; was afterwards justly punished, by being compelled to resign; and foolishly complained of ingratitude which he had deserved.

In order that the state of art in Great Britain may be rightly understood,this authentic detail, taken from pamphlets published at the time, especially that of Sir Robert Strange,^[68. See Sir Robert Strange’sspamphlet, and another published in the year 1771, by Di vw⅛∏, St. Martin’s Lane, entitled “On the Conduct of the Royal Academicians,” ∏ι the British Museum. ] has been thought necessary; and it will not appear tedious, if it be considered that, for the sake of the art of our own country, it is but just that particulars should be ascertained. The effect of the academy has been pernicious. Imitating the example, all the eminent provincial towns have established exhibitions instead of schools; and every year the annual exhibition in the metropolis is repeated in the provinces, with but little addition to that which proved unsaleable in the London show. Hogarth opposed such a conclusion, and from the beginning predicted its effect, which has happened to the very letter; and when Reynolds began to perceive the truth, he acknowledged his error, and said to Sir George Beaumont, that “a party was gaining ground which would ruin the art.”^[69. This was told the author by Sir George; and has since been confirmed by his pamphlet, “Concise Vindication,” &c. in British Museum. ] If the detail of every other academy in Europe could be thus laid open, the same intrigues, the same despotism, the same injustice, and the same want of principle would be found at the bottom; and Europe w0uld no longer wonder that academies never have produced a Raffaelle.

The honest and straight forward constituency being thus left as it were unprotected by the king, it was soon deserted by the nobility and the public, and shortly escaped notice altogether; though such a man as Hogarth had improved his knowledge by drawing in its schools. The literary splendour with which Reynolds was surrounded, gave aglory to the Academy which it has. not yet lost; and thς genius of Reynolds spread a halo around it, which the artists still fancy they see, though it vanishedthe moment he expired. Reynoldswasreally a great artist; gorgeous in tone and colour, unimpeachable in composition, deep in light and shadow, beautiful in character, and the purest painter of children and women that ever lived in the art, Greek or Italian. His ignorance belonged to the period; his beauties were entirely his own; and though he overrated Michel Angelo, and has done injury to taste, by his sincere conviction that he was right, yet had he lived to see the Theseus or Ilyssus, he would have been equally candid in saying he was in error. Lord Heathfield is a portrait that need not fear any work of Titian’s for men, and Mrs. Parker, a tender, sweet picture of a woman, was never equalled in sentiment or delicacy by any work of the Venetian and Roman schools. Where, were children ever so completely hit as in the Infant Academy? who surpassed the propriety of his back-grounds as well as their splendour? His eye, or rather his organ for colour, was exquisite; nor is there in the whole of his works a heated and offensive tint. He did not combine essential detail and breadth so beautifully as [7:16:726]Titian; but place one of his finest portraits by the side of any picture of Titian’s, see them at the proper distance, and Reynolds would keep his station. Here, however, the praise must stop. Reynolds could have no more paintedPietro Martyre than he could have revived the martyr after he was dead. He was not so great a man as Titian, because he did not like him remedy his ignorance, when he found it out at a much earlier age. He was always talking of what he would do if he began the world again. Sir Joshua loved society; he was the deity of his coterie; he liked a glass of wine and a game at whist; and he never lost his temper because he was successful in the world, but the first time he was thwarted he got in a passion. Reynolds was a great genius in painting, but not a great man. He raised English art from the dust, and gave English artists an à-plomb in society which they never had before, and he first reduced the art to something like system by his discourses; but not having moral courage to resist the formation of an academy, which he could have done by his influence and his genius, he compromised the art, and was indirectly the means of throwing it off its balance, which it will yet take half a century more to remedy, as Hogarth predicted.

Ás an inventor, Hogarth is by far the greatest of the British school; although in aim and object, colour, surface, and all the requisites of a great painter, infinitely below Reynolds. It would be useless to detail the perfections of a man so admired all over the earth, and who will only cease to be a delight with its existence. It is astonishing how hereditary is the hatred of academies. The painters in revenge for Hogarth’s opposition, swore that he was no painter, and swear so to this hour. The absurdity of this criticism can be proved by the Marriage à la Mode, whilst the picture of the husband and wife after a rout, is as beautifully touched as any in that class of art can be. He has not the clearness of Teniers, nor the sharpness of Wilkie; his touch is blunt, and his colour deficient in richness; but you feel not the want whilst looking at him; and although his expressionis often caricature, yet in the above picture it is perfection. Hogarth unfortunately believedhimself infallible; buthiswretchedbeau-ty of Drury Lane for Pharaoh’s daughter at the Foundling, his miserable Sigismunda, and his Paul before Felix, we hope convinced him of his forte. If he was serious in these pictures, which we very much doubt, he deserved a strait waistcoat and a low diet as the only treatment for his hallucination.

Gainsborough was another painter of great genius in portraitand landscape; but Wilson was a greater. His touch and feeling were comprehensive, though too abstracted for the vulgar, who always like polish and to put uptheir fingers. He used to say to Sir George Beaumont, “When somebody is dead somebody’s pictures wili sell better.” From neglect he got into foolish habits of drinking and died librarian to the academy. A miserable dauber called Lambert was the fashion, and his character as a landscape painter was hit by poor Wilson. He said “his trees and foliage were eggs and spinach, and nothing more yet Lambert got hundreds when Wilson could hardly get shillings. But where are now the immortal Lambert’s works? Making fire-screens for garrets, whilst “somebody’s pictures” adorn the houses of the great. Gainsborough was a great portrait painter and ran Reynold’s hard. West’s Wolf and La Hogue are the triumph’s of his talent; but his great sacred subjects are inferior works. The writer of this observed to Canova in England, “Au moins, il compose bien.” “Monsieur,” replied the Italian, “il ne compose pas; il met des figures en groupe.” Hewasaskilfulmachinist; and though thereare bits of colour in his small works, rich and harmonious, his portraits are detestable, his handling unfeeling, his drawing meagre and common. He was deeply versed in nothing, though possessing great acquired knowledge of his art without being an educated man. With respect to his being the greatest man since the Caracci, with Rembrandt, Rubens, Vandyke, and Dominichino, Guido, and Guercino since, or a little after, the idea is ridiculous and absurd. The king hated Reynolds on account of his devotion to Burke and Fox, and puffed West from sheer irritability. The king said to Hopner, “Why does Reynold paint his trees red and yellow ? who ever saw trees that colour ?” Hopner, who said what he pleased, replied, “Then your majesty never saw trees in autumn.”

Romney, a second-rate man, had great patronage, whilst Barry, a man of great grasp of mind, had none whatever. Barry joined the Academy to oblige Reynolds, against his own convictions; was soon at issue with its selfish monopoly; opposed it; urged the propriety of devoting a portion of its funds to establish a school of colour; exasperated the intriguers by his fearless attacks; and was expelled of course as an obnoxious man, the king having been persuaded to sanction it, under the deadly hint that Barry was a radical. Barry was the protégé of Burke, and his Adelphi pictures, shewing the progress of society, though deficient in drawing, colour, and delicacy of touch, were the first work in England on the comprehensive principle of the ancients. Having neglected Burke’s repeated entreaties to dissect, he suffered the consequence. His forms at the Adelphi are such as can be got by general drawings from the antique, but there is no refined knowledge of construction in them.

As a man of genius, however, Barry is not to be compared to Henry Fuzeli, the friend of Reynolds and Lavater, and one of the most distinguished and accomplished men of his time. Fuzeli was undoubtedly the greatest genius of that day. His Milton gallery shewed a range of imagination equal to the poet’s; his Satan bridging Chaos, his Uriel watching Satan, his Shepherd’s Dream, his Fairies from Shakespeare, and his Ghost in Hamlet, announce him as having conceived, like Theon, φαvraotαj, and as being the greatest inventor in art since Julio Romano. But in the modes of conveying his thoughts by form, colour, light, and shadow, and above all, nature, he was a monster in design; his women are all strumpets, and his men all banditti, with the action of galvanized frogs, the dress of montebanks, and the hue of pestilential putridity. No man had the power like Fuzeli of rousing the dormant spirit of youth; and there issued from his inspirations a nucleus of painters, who have been thefirm-est supporters of the British school.

But Fuzeli, as a painter, must be a warning to all. Had he taken the trouble to convey his thoughts like the great masters, his pictures would have risen as time advanced; yet as time advances, his pictures, from having no hold on our feelings like the simplicity of nature, must sink. His conceptions however poetical, are not enough to satisfy the mind in an art, the elements of which are laid in lovely nature; and great as his genius was in fancy and conception, inventor as he was in art of fairies and ghosts, he will never be an object to imitate, but always to avoid by young men, who are more likely to lay hold of his defects than his beauties. The finest conception of a ghost that was ever painted, was the Ghost in Hamlet on the battlements. There it quivered with martial stride, pointing to a place of meeting with Hamlet; and round its vizored head was a halo of light that looked sulphureous, and made one feel as if one actually smelt hell,, burning, cindery, and suffocating. The dim moon glittered behind; the sea roared in the distance, as if agitated by the presence of a supernatural spirit; and the ghost looked at Hamlet, with eyes that glared like the light in the eyes of a lion, which is savagely growling over his bloody food. But still it was a German ghost, and not the ghost of Shakespeare. There was nothing in it to touch human sympathies combined with the infernal; there was nothing at all of “his sable, silvered beard,” or his countenance more “in sorrow than in anger ;” it was a fierce, demoniacal, armed fiend reeking from hell, who had not [7:16:727]yet expiated “the crimes done in his days ofnature,” to qualify himfor heaven. Hisnext finest works were the two fairypic-tures in the Shakespeare gallery, some diving into harebells, somesailing in Bottom’s shoe; but beautiful as they were, indeed the only fairies e ver pain ted, still your heart longed for nature in colour, form, action, and expression. Such an union had the Greeks, and no art in the world will be perfect until it appears again. These pictures are evidences of the highest conception of the fanciful and supernatural. His Lazar House is an evidence of his power of pathos; his Uriel and Satan of the poetical; his Puck putting on a girdle, of the humorous and mischievous. But when Fuzeli attempted the domestic, as in the illustrations of Cowper, his total want of nature stares one in the face, like the eyes of his own ghosts. Never were the consequences of disdaining the daily life before your eyes, or of affecting to be above it, so fatally developed as in this series of design; though in comparing with him another eminent artist, namely, Stothard, who, in sweetness and innocence, was his decided superior, Fuzeli surpassed him in elevation and reach of mind. In the pictures of Stothard, who painted equally well without life before him, there is not the same extravagance, yet there is almost equal want of nature in another way. Flaxman, Stothard, and Fuzeli, are the three legitimate designers of our school, and yet not one of them was perfect master of the figure.

Flaxman’s designs from the Iliad and the Greek tragedies are his finest works; and when first they appeared in Italy, they were denied to be the invention of an Englishman, as it was supposed to be impossible that any Englishman could have an imagination. But yet of some of these designs it really may be said, “Il n’y a qu’un pas du sublime au ridicule.” It is extremely difficult to say whether they are in the highest degree sublime or extremely absurd. In all attempts to express the passions, you will perceive extravagance; but in comparing him with Canova, in this part of the art, Canova must yield the palm as much as Flaxman was inferior in the perfection of working up a single and beautiful figure. Though this eminent man talks pompously of Greek form and anatomical knowledge, he in reality knew very little of either; and though there is a great deal of useful matter of fact in his lectures, yet on the whole they display a wretched poverty of thinking. His book of Anatomy for students is not deep enough on the separation of muscle, bone, and tendon, and can help a young man a very little way to correct notions. The value of Fuzeli’s and Opie’s lectures in comparison with Flaxman’s or Barry’s is evident; and the superiority of Reynolds to all, except Fuzeli in his lecture on Greek art, needs not to be dwelt on.

Stothard, as an inventor in composition, was equal to all, but as a painter, certainly inferior to all. In fact he could not paint; he had no identity of imitation; he did not and could not tell a story by human passions; and his style of design showed great ignorance of the constituent parts of the figure. But there was a beautiful and angelic spirit that breathed on every thing he did. He seems in early life to have dreamed of an angel, and to have passed the remainder of his days in trying to endow every figure he designed, with something of the sweetness that he had seen in his sleep. Peace to his mild and tender spirit. It was impossible to be in Stothard’s painting-room for ten minutes without being influenced by his angelic mind. He seemed to us always as if he had been born in the wrong planet. He had a son whose etchings from our ancient tombs are an honour to the country. He fell from a great height, in pursuing his designs from some tomb in a country church, and was killed. This ill-fated artist was in every respect worthy of his father.

Never were there four men so essentially different as West, Fuzeli, Flaxman, and Stothard. Fuzeli was undoubtedly the man of the largest capacity and the most acquired knowledge; West was an eminent artist in the second rank; Flaxman and Stothard were purer designers than either; Barry and Reynolds were before all the others. In Barry’s Adelphi there is a grasp of mind, as Johnson said; yet as a painter he was inferior to all. Though Fuzcli had more imagination and conception than Reynolds, though West put things together with more facility, and Flaxman and Stothard did w hat Reynolds could not do; yet as a sound, great, and practical artist, in which all the others were deficient, Reynold’s must be considered the head of the British school as a painter and handler of his brush.

Opie must not be omitted, nor Northcote his imitator and contemporary, both of them men of talent. Opic, a man of great and powerful genius, issued from Cornwall at once on the town. Northcote was six years with Reynolds; and his Arthur and Hubert, and Children in the Tower, are fair specimens of his talents. He was a malicious man, and tried to injure his greatest protector, Reynolds, and Dr. Mudge who introduced him, by allowing Hazlitt to print his (Northcote’s) Conversations. There never was a deeper scheme for malignant defamation. Northcote always said that he did not print them, and Hazlitt that he did not talk them; and each vented his spite on a mutual friend, and shifted the blame to the other. Reynolds was succeeded by West, and the art sunk to the lowest depth, containing only Sir Joshua’s humble imitators, when a genius broke forth, David Wilkie, who rendered our domestic school, the first in Europe; and the feeling for art has been rapidly advancing amongst the people ever since. This many circumstances unite to prove.

In consequence of the perpetual complaints from the great body of artists, the government granted a committee in 1836, to examine the cause of the superiority of France in manufacturing design, as well as the condition of high art, and to ascertain if the accusations against the Royal Academy were true or false. Never in the world were the consequences of a monopoly on the perceptions of respectable men so ludicrously developed. The president and body first denied the right of the House of Commons to examine them at all; and when the persuasions of their friends showed them their folly, their appearance before the committee presented a scene never to be forgotten in the history of English painting. On all questions of finance, they proved satisfactorily the honour of their transactions; but on all questions of art more was proved against them than ever had been suspected.^[70. See Report on Arts and Manufactures. In this Report the important subjects of Art and Manufacture are both considered; and no one, with any pretensions to taste, should be without it. ] Theresignation of Reynolds, and the expulsion of Barry; the loss of a million of money to the art on the Waterloo monument, in consequence of their not replying to Lord Castlereagh’s committee; their refusal to let the artists also support their exhibition, and have the same opportunities of fitting their works for the public as at the British Gallery; and, to crown all, their rendering the school of design lately established of no avail to the mechanic, by establishing a law, that the study of the figure is not necessary for his education, though it was proved that this study at the Lyons academy for mechanics, was the real cause of their superiority to us; are such indisputable evidence against their protestations of sincerity, that it has rendered the nobility and the nation more than suspicious of the truth of all the accusations which have been made against them.

In Scotland the art is in a promising condition, and the Scottish school in purer taste than the English. Living as [7:16:728]the artists do, in the most magnificent city in Europe, surrounded by a country pregnant with historical recollections, and guidcdbytheirown shrewd understandings, the school in Edinburgh will, before many years, take a very high rank in the art. But there is some cause to apprehend that it will be checked at its most critical period, from the usual cause, the foundation of the old curse of Europe, an academy. After having produced Runciman, Raeburn, Wilkie, and the other eminent men Scotland can boast of in art, they have been persuaded to found conventional distinctions, in favour of a select few; and, as elsewhere, the result will be the same. No Wilkie, no Runciman, no Raeburn will come from it; for the best men they now possess were eminent before it was thought of. The art has no business with any aristocracy of talent. Conventional distinctions, which are not hereditary, are laughable and absurd; and distinctions which are,ought to be reserved for high descent, heroic actions, landed property, or vast political genius. Such an aristocracy produces heart-burnings and injustice; for it places power in the hands of men, who are not amenable to justice for tyranny, and who cannot be reached by law, for calumny or insinuation. “Of all hatreds,” said the Edinburgh Review, “there are none to equal the hatreds weak men in power bear to the man of genius without it.” It is a curious evidence of the sagacity of the Scotch, that whilst the English portrait painters, since the death of Reynolds, were all placing kings and queens on their toes, from sheer ignorance of perspective, Raeburn, Wilkie, and Gordon have never made that mistake.

In a word, it is our decided and unprejudiced conviction, that the genius of the British people, will never have fair play or be soundly advanced, till the Royal Academy is removed, or effectually remodelled; and this will be effected either by the positive interference of the queen or the government, or by the rapidly increasing knowledge of the people. Ifthe capital and the provinces were freed from the predominence of those men; if the honours were abolished and the constituencies restored; if the whole national galleries were turned into a great school, with branch schools in the great towns; if the Cartoons were removed to London for the occasional sight of the people, as they might be inclined to drop in; and if a Native Gallery were arranged for the best productions to be purchased as they appeared, and the House of Lords adorned with a series of grand works referring to the British constitution; then would the govern ment do a real good to taste, refined pleasures, and design for manufactures, such as would entitle them to the everlasting gratitude of the nation.

On the other hand, if all the ancient boroughs of the land have been obliged to bend to the call for reform; if the crown itself has been obliged to yieldup the old House of Commons; if the salaries of pur great officers of state have been cut down without complaint; if pensions bestowed equally for merit or for vice, are to be rigorously sifted; if the queen herself has been obliged to permit her expenditure to be questioned; are a set of men without a lease of their House, or charter for their existence, without any one legal claim to be considered as a constitutional body—are they alone to brave the Commons and the Lords, are they alone to defy and deny reformation, taking their stand upon their utter insignificance? If so, it will be an anomaly in the character of'the British Legislature, which, in after times, will only be remembered as a proof of imbecility and folly, if not of something still worse than either.

We have now gone through the great leading schools of Italy, France, Germany, Flanders, Holland, Spain, and Britain, and we have taken those names only, which may be considered as leading an epoch; so that, in such a system, many eminent men must of necessity have been omitted. From the Petersburg, Copenhagen, Berlin, or Stockholm academies, no great genius except Thorwaldsen has yet appeared,

Was Italian art equal to Greek art? Certainly not. In the finest Italian there is a want of beauty in form and face, which Greek art could only supply. Poussin said, that Raffaelle was an angel in comparison with the moderns, but in comparison with the ancients he was an ass. Though this is vulgar, it is in our opinion true. The ancients combined the Venetian and Roman schools; they considered form, colour, light and shadow, surface, expression, and execution, as all equally component parts of imitation, and all necessary to perfect that imitation which was to be employed as an instrument to convey thought. They combined the drawing and the colouring of the two great Italian schools; as these illustrious schools tried to do when they found out their error, in pursuing one at the expense of the other.

Reynolds, from the defective practice of each school, laid it down that colour was incompatible with high art; and he also laid it down that the ancients could not be great painters in a whole, though they might be in a solo, from the pictures on the walls of Pompeii. We do not wonder at any man so concluding before the Elgin marbles arrived; but we do marvel at Reynolds taking the works in the private rooms of a provincial Roman city as; ustifiabl e grounds on which to estimate the extent of genius in Greek art at its finest period, five hundred years before. But after all, what are the pictures of Pompeii? Very probably the designs in Pompeii would rank about as high in ancient art, as the designs of our paper-stainers in Bond Street would in British art. The pictures at Pompeii are no more criteria of what the art of Apelles and Polygnotus really was, than any sculpture dug up there would be a criterion of what the art of Phidias was. Reynolds undervalues contemporary praise; but Quintilian, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Strabo, Polybius, and Pausanias, Valerius Maximus, Aelian, and Pliny, were not contemporary; and, therefore, the praises of Aristotle or of Plato who were, justify the enthusiasm of those who were not.

Since the works of Phidias arrived in England, we have positive evidence that the Greeks knew the great principles of composition and grouping, as applied to painting; because the metopes are instances of arrangement of line, that will do exactly in a picture, if the Laocoon had not shown it before. Having now seen the Elgin marbles, which the Greeks estimated as their finest work, and having foundall the enthusiasm of the ancients more than borne out, have we not a justifiable ground to argue from what we do see in one art, that what we do not see in another was equally excellent? Will any man, after seeing the Theseus and Ilyssus, doubt that the ivory Minerva and Olympian Jupiter were equally, if not more beautiful? Why should the ancient critics have faith placed in all their decisions except those on painting? Why should they lose their perspicacity of understanding only when they talked of this art? After Aristotle and Plato had admired the Minerva inside the Parthenon and the sculpture outside, they might admire the pictures; and nobody will deny them the power of making comparisons. Had the Elgin marbles and the old antique never been seen, would not the same sophistry have been put forth to question the merit of their sculpture as well as to deny that of their painting? “Nothing can be more perfect than Phidias,” says Cicero. “Youcannotpraisehimenough,” exclaims Pliny. “He made gods better than men,” says Quintilian. “He was skilful in beauty,” says Plato. You believe all this, because you cannot contradict it; but the moment Quintilian says, “Zeuxis discovered light and shade; Parrhasius was exquisite for subtlety of line; Apelles for grace; Theon for poetical conceptions, (φαντασίαν); Pamphilus for mathematical principle; Polygnotus for simplicity of epic arrangement in colour and form; Protogenesfor finish;”—when Pliny commends Aristides for expression, and Amphion for composition, and speaks of the grand assemblage of the gods by Zeuxis, as well as the single figures of Apelles, Reynolds [7:16:729]replies, “Admiration often proceeds from ignorance of higher excellence, I will not believe contemporaneous praise.” We answer, that admiration oftener proceeds from knowledge of superior excellence; that the most enthusiastic admirers of Greek painting were not contemporary; and that Reynolds’ conclusions against Greek art are founded upon data which are altogether erroneous.

Taking the Elgin marbles as a standard, we cannot but suppose that the finest great works of Greek art had the finest drawing, the most wonderful knowledge of form, the finest grouping, and the finest expression. To this may be added, colour from Pliny, light and shadow from Quintilian; perspective from Vitruvius; fore-shortening, dwelling on the leading points, like Vandyke, and touching off the inferior parts from Plutarch; and, what was never suspected, execution with the brush from Horace, on the leading principles of the Venetians. The French used to affirm, that David’s principle was the same as that of the Greeks, namely,obtruding on the attention all the superior parts, and neglecting the inferior ones. In Plutarch’s life of Alexander, at the very beginning, he describes to his readers his plan of writing his lives, and concludes with this extraordinary passage: “Like painters that paint portraits, who dwell on the face, caring little about the remaining parts.”^[71. ωσnep ουv όι ζωγράφοι τας ομοιότητας aπo του προσώπου, αναλαμβανουσιν, iλaχιςτa των λοιπών μαρων φροντίζοντας. ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΣ. ] His meaning is, that he would, like painters, dwell upon the leading points in the history of great men and lightly touch off the inferior parts. Could he have made such an allusion for the general reader, if this had not been the practice of the great Greek painters? Again, Horace says in the art of poetry,
Ut pictura poesis erit; quae si propius stes,
Te capiat magis; quaedam si longius abstes.

That is, some pictures are painted for a close, others for a distant inspection. The former, of course, are wrought up; but in the latter, the leading points are seized by a touch, leaving the atmosphere to unite. As to mere handling of the brush, this is conclusive,and shows that it was done on the same system as by Titian, Tintoretto, and Velasquez. Reynolds has quoted Pliny’s description of glazing,that is, spreading a thin transparent tint over the erude colours to bring them into harmony, which was the practice of the Venetians. Another passage completes the conviction: “Adjectus est splendor, alius hic quam lumen, quern quia inter hoc et umbram esset, appellaverunt tonon? (Lib. xxxv. c. 5.) “Now was added splendor, a different thing from light, and which splendor, because it was between light and dark, was called tone? To the mind of an artist this is exquisite in distinction; first, the colours on the tablet were fresh, unmixed, and raw; then was spread over a transparent glaze to take off the crudeness; then this erudeness being reduced, it was called splendor, glowing, rich, and deep, but different from light, which is cold and white; and this splendor the Greeks called tone, as both the Venetians and the British denominate it. But the circumstance of tone being the characteristic of any school, is proof of an age for colour.

As to their perspective, let any man consult Vitruvius, (lib. vii.). Agatharcus composed a treatise on the subject; and from this hint, Demoeritus and Anaxagoras wrote on perspective, explaining in what manner we should, in appearances agreeable to nature, from a central point make the lines to correspond with the eye and the direction of the visual rays, and render the scene a true representation of buildings, that those objects which are drawn on a perpendicular plane, may appear some retiring from the eye, and some advancing towards it. From a passage in Plato, it is clear, that the Greeks carried the illusions of theatrical per spective to a much greater extent than, in consequence of some bad landscape discovered in Herculanum, has been supposed.”^[72. Theatre of the Greeks, p. 262, 3d edition, Cambridge. ] That they foreshortened is clear, from Pliny’s description of a bull coming out of a picture frontways.

The inferences to be drawn from all this, are, first, from Plutarch and Horace, that the Greeks had execution like Titian and Vandyke; secondly, from Pliny, that they must have had fine colour, (lib. xxxv.); thirdly, from Quintilian, that the principles of light and shadow were understood, (lib. xii.); fourthly, from Vitruvius, (lib vii.), that they had sufficient perspective to make objects recede and advance; and fifthly, from the Elgin marbles, executed by and in the school of Phidias, who was first a painter, that they had expression, form, and composition. If the three most important can be proved, as they can, and colour, light and shadow, and execution, more than inferred; what right has an eminent English portrait-painter, grossly deficient as a painter of high art, to assert, that they could not be great in extensive compositions, because the painted walls of a provincial city gave no evidence of such excellence in their private houses? forgetting that these were executed five hundred years after the eras of Greek perfection, when Greece was a Roman province, when her cities had been sacked, and her art was talked of as a wonder that had passed away.

The principle laid down for high art has been, that the lower addresses the eye and the higher the mind, and that the 'union of the two was incompatible; whereas, the true principle surely is, that both styles address the mind through the eye, but in different ways; the lower walk making the imitation of the actual substance the great object of pleasure only; and the higher walk making imitation the means of conveying a beautiful thought, a fine expression, or a grand form with greater power. The imitation though more abstracted must not be less real or effective. Sir Joshua Reynolds affirmed, that the look of truth which fine colour, light and shadow, and reality gave, distracted the eye from the poetry of the conception or the depth of the expression. But it may be maintained, that in an art, the elements of which are laid in imitation, the beauty of an expression, the grace of a motion, and the sublimity of a conception, will be increased in proportion to the look of reality in the objects; and the practice of all the great Greek painters, and of Raffaelle and Titian in their latter works, (the Transfiguration, and Pietro Martyre), proves that they had come to the same conclusions. Yet Reynolds, with his usual sagacious policy, appears to waver lest he should be wrong. “There is no reason,” says he, “why the great painters might not have availed themselves with caution and selection of many excellencies in the Venetian, Flemish, and Dutch schools; there are some not in contradiction to any style, a happy disposition of light and shade, breadth in masses of colour, the union of these with their grounds, and the harmony arising from a due mixture of hot and cold tints, with many other excellencies which would surely not counteract the grand style.” And then he concludes that “a subdued attention to these excellencies must be added to complete a perfect painter.” This is all that is contended for. So far from these excellencies being incompatible with grandeur of style, they are essential to it, they are the elements and the basis of it, they cannot be left out, or if they are, the style is deficient, absurd, and not founded in nature. There is not the least doubt that the Greek painters considered the power of imitating natural objects by colour, and light and shadow, as necessary and requisite in preparatory study as drawing or composition; and the greatest painters in the grand style in ancient Greece, were [7:16:730] just as capable of imitating still life as the possessors of it now.

It may, therefore, be fairly deduced, that the Greeks possessed all parts of the art, and none particularly to the exclusion of others; that, therefore, all parts of the art, in due subordination, maybe considered as essential to an artist of the highest walk, as also in the more humble department; and that the system of Reynolds, which excludes identity and power of reality from judicious imitation of the objects painted, combining colour and light and shadow, as well as expression and form, is false , and should be exploded from all systems where art is considered as a matter of importance to the dignity or glory of a nation.
(q. Q. Q. Q.)