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to be reached only by Love.

catch the sound; there is no pure passion that can be understood or §16. Ideal form painted except by pureness of heart; the foul or blunt feeling will see itself in everything, and set down blasphemies; it will see Baalzebub in the casting out of devils; it will find its God of flies in every alabaster box of precious ointment. The indignation of zeal toward God it will take for anger against man; faith and veneration it will miss, as not comprehending; charity it will turn into lust; compassion into pride; every virtue it will go over against, like Shimei, casting dust. But the right Christian mind will, in like manner, find its own image wherever it exists; it will seek for what it loves, and draw it out of all dens and caves, and it will believe in its being, often when it cannot see it, and always turn away his eyes from beholding vanity; and so it will lie lovingly over all the faults and rough places of the human heart, as the snow from heaven does over the hard, and black, and broken mountain rocks, following their forms truly, and yet catching light for them to make them fair, and that must be a steep and unkindly crag indeed which it cannot cover.

principles de

Now of this spirit there will always be little enough in the world, § 17. Practical and it cannot be given nor taught by men, and so it is of little use ducible. to insist on it farther; only I may note some practical points respecting the ideal treatment of human form, which may be of some use. There is not the face, I have said, which the painter may not make ideal if he choose; but that subtle feeling which shall find out all of good that there is in any given countenance is not, except by concern for other things than art, to be acquired. But certain broad indications of evil there are which the bluntest feeling may perceive, and which the habit of distinguishing and casting out would both ennoble the schools of art, and lead, in time, to greater acuteness of perception with respect to the less explicable characters of soul beauty.

Those signs of evil which are commonly most manifest on the § 18. Expressions chiefly dehuman features are roughly divisible into these four kinds; the signs structive of of pride, of sensuality, of fear, and of cruelty. Any one of which Ideal Character. will destroy the ideal character of the countenance and body.

Now of these, the first, pride, is perhaps the most destructive of all the four, seeing it is the undermost and original vice of all: and it is base also from the necessary foolishness of it, because at its best, when grounded on a just estimation of our own elevation

1st. Pride.

ture ancient and modern.

or superiority above certain others, it cannot but imply that our eyes look downward only, and have never been raised above our own measure; for there is not the man so lofty in his standing nor capacity but he must be humble in thinking of the cloud habitation and far sight of the angelic intelligences above him; and in perceiving what infinity there is of things he cannot know, nor even reach unto, as it stands compared with that little body of things he can reach, and of which nevertheless he can altogether understand not one; not to speak of that wicked and fond attributing of such excellency as he may have to himself, and thinking of it as his own getting, which is the real essence and criminality of Pride; nor of those viler forms of it, founded on false estimation of things beneath us and irrational contemning of them; but, taken at its best, it is still base to that degree that there is no grandeur of feature which it cannot destroy and make despicable, so that the first step towards the ennobling of any face is the ridding it of its vanity; to which § 19. Portrai- aim there cannot be anything more contrary than that principle of portraiture which prevails with us in these days, whose end seems to be the expression of vanity throughout, in face and in all circumstances of accompaniment; tending constantly to insolence of attitude, and levity and haughtiness of expression, and worked out farther in mean accompaniments of worldly splendour and possession; together with hints or proclamations of what the person has done or supposes himself to have done, which, if known, it is gratuitous in the portrait to exhibit, and, if unknown, it is insolent in the portrait to proclaim : whence has arisen such a school of portraiture as must make the people of the nineteenth century the shame of their descendants, and the butt of all time. To which practices are to be opposed both the glorious severity of Holbein, and the mighty and simple modesty of Raffaelle, Titian, Giorgione, and Tintoret, with whom armour does not constitute the warrior, neither silk the dame. And from what feeling the dignity of that portraiture arose is best traceable at Venice, where we find their victorious doges painted neither in the toil of battle nor the triumph of return; nor set forth with thrones and curtains of state, but kneeling always crownless, and returning thanks to God for his help; or as priests interceding for the nation in its affliction. But this feeling and its results

have been so well traced by Rio, that I need not speak of it farther.

That second destroyer of Ideal form, the appearance of sensual § 20. Secondly, Sensuality. character, though not less fatal in its operation on modern art, is more difficult to trace, owing to its peculiar subtlety. For it is not possible to say by what minute differences the right conception of the human form is separated from that which is luscious and foul: for the root of all is in the love and seeking of the painter, who, if of impure and feeble mind, will cover all that he touches with clay staining, as Bandinelli puts a scent of common flesh about his marble Christ, and as many, whom I will not here name, among moderns; but if of mighty mind or pure, may pass through all places of foulness, and none will stay upon him, as Michael Angelo; or he will baptize all things and wash them with pure water, as our own Stothard. Now, so far as this power is dependent on the seeking of the artist, and is only to be seen in the work of good and spiritually-minded men, it is vain to attempt to teach or illustrate it; neither is it here the place to show how it belongs to the representation of the mental image of things, instead of things themselves, of which we are to speak in treating of the imagination; but thus much may here be noted of broad, practical principle, that § 21. How conthe purity of flesh painting depends, in very considerable measure, purity of on the intensity and warmth of its colour. For if it be opaque, and colour. clay cold, and devoid of all the radiance and life of flesh, the lines of its true beauty, being severe and firm, will become so hard in the loss of the glow and gradation by which nature illustrates them, that the painter will be compelled to sacrifice them for a luscious fulness and roundness, in order to give the conception of flesh; which, being done, destroys ideality of form as of colour, and gives all over to lasciviousness of surface; showing also that the painter sought for this, and this only, since otherwise he had not taken a subject in which he knew himself compelled to surrender all sources of dignity. Whereas right splendour of colour both bears out a nobler severity of form, and is in itself purifying and cleansing, like fire; furnishing also to the painter an excuse for the choice of his subject, seeing that he may be supposed as not having painted it but in the admiDe la Poesie Chretienne. Forme de l' Art. Chap. VIII.

nected with im

ration of its abstract glory of colour and form, and with no unworthy § 22. And pre- seeking. But the mere power of perfect and glowing colour will, vented by its splendour. in some sort, redeem even a debased tendency of mind itself, as eminently the case with Titian, who, though often treating base subjects, or elevated subjects basely, as in the disgusting Magdalen of the Pitti Palace, and that of the Barberigo at Venice, yet redeems all by his glory of hue, so that he cannot paint altogether coarsely: and with Giorgione, who had more imaginative intellect, the sense of nudity is utterly lost, and there is no need nor desire of concealment any more, but his naked figures move among the trees like Or by fiery pillars, and lie on the grass like flakes of sunshine.' With

§ 23. severity of drawing.

the religious painters, on the other hand, such nudity as they were compelled to treat is redeemed as much by severity of form and hardness of line as by colour, so that generally their draped figures are preferable But they, with Michael Angelo and most of the Venetians, form a great group, pure in sight and aim, between which and all other schools by which the nude has been treated, there is a gulf fixed, and all the rest, compared with them, seem striving how best to illustrate Spenser's stanza in its second clause

$ 24. Degrees Of these last,

of Descent in this

reggio, and Guido.

:

"Of all God's works, which doe this worlde adorn,

There is no one more faire, and excellent

Than is man's body both for power and forme

Whiles it is kept in sober government.

But none than it more foul and indecent

Distempered through misrule and passions bace."

however, with whom ideality is lost, there are some respect worthier than others, according to that measure of colour they reach, Rubens, Cor- and power they possess. Much may be forgiven to Rubens; less, as I think, to Correggio, who has more of inherent sensuality, wrought out with attractive and luscious refinement, and that alike in all subjects; as in the Madonna of the Incoronazione, over the high altar of San Giovanni at Parma, of which the head and upper portion of the figure, now preserved in the library, might serve as a model of attitude and expression to a ballet figurante :2 and again in the lascivious St. Catherine of the Giorno, and in the Charioted Diana,

1 As in the noble Louvre picture.

2 The Madonna turns her back to Christ, and bends her head over her shoulder to receive the crown, the arms being folded with studied grace over the bosom.

dern Art.

(both at Parma), not to name any of his works of aim more definitely evil. Beneath which again will fall the works devoid alike of art and decency, as that Susannah of Guido, in our own gallery; and so we may descend to the absolute clay of the moderns, excepting always Etty; only noticing in all how much of what is evil and base in subject or tendency, is redeemed by what is pure and right in hue; so that I do not assert that the purpose and object of many of the grander painters of the nude, as of Titian for instance, was always elevated, but only that we, who cannot paint the lamp of fire within the earthen pitcher, must take other weapons in our left hands. And it is to be noted also, that, in climates where the § 25. And Mobody can be more openly and frequently visited by sun and weather, the nude both comes to be regarded in a way more grand and pure, as necessarily awakening no ideas of base kind (as pre-eminently with the Greeks), and also from that exposure receives a firmness and sunny elasticity very different from the silky softness of the clothed nations of the north, where every model necessarily looks as if accidentally undressed; and hence, from the very fear and doubt with which we approach the nude, it becomes expressive of evil; and for that daring frankness of the old men, which seldom missed of human grandeur, even when it failed of holy feeling, we have substituted a mean, carpeted, gauze-veiled, mincing sensuality of curls and crisping-pins, out of which, I believe, nothing can come but moral enervation and mental paralysis.

tinguished from

Respecting those two other vices of the human form, the expressions 26. Thirdly, of fear and ferocity, there is less to be noted, as they only occasionally fear. The latter Ferocity and enter into the conception of character; only it is most necessary to how to be dismake careful distinction between the conception of power, destruc- Awe. tiveness, or majesty, in matter, influence, or agent, and the actual Fear of any of these; for it is possible to conceive of terribleness, without being in a position obnoxious to the danger of it, and so without fear; and the feeling arising from this contemplation of dreadfulness, ourselves being in safety, as of a stormy sea from the shore, is properly termed awe, and is a most noble passion; whereas Fear, mortal and extreme, may be felt respecting things ignoble, as the falling from a window, and without any conception of terribleness or majesty in the thing, or the accident dreaded; and even when Fear

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