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seventeenth century (one only of the old mosaics remains, or did remain till lately, over the northern door, but it is probably by this time torn down by some of the Venetian committees of taste); and also I would have the old portions of the interior ceiling, or of the mosaics of Murano and Torcello, and the glorious Cimabue mosaic of Pisa, and the roof of the Baptistery at Parma (that of the Florence Baptistery is a bad example, owing to its crude whites and complicated mosaic of small forms), all of which are as barbarous as they can well be, in a certain sense, but mighty in their barbarism, compared with any architectural decorations whatsoever, consisting of professedly perfect animal forms, from the vile frescoes of Federigo Zuccaro at Florence to the ceiling of the Sistine: and again compare the professedly perfect sculpture of Milan Cathedral with the statues of the porches of Chartres ; only be it always observed that it is not rudeness and ignorance of art, § 15. Exception but intellectually awful abstraction that I would uphold: and also be it superimposed noted that in all ornament, which takes place in the general effect merely as so much fretted stone, in capitals and other pieces of minute detail, the forms may be, and perhaps ought to be, elaborately imitative; and in this respect again the capitals of St. Mark's church, and at the Doge's palace at Venice, may be an example to the architects of all the world, in their boundless inventiveness, unfailing elegance, and elaborate finish; there is more mind poured out in turning a single angle of that church than would serve to build a modern cathedral.1

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So far, then, of the abstraction proper to architecture, and to $ 16. Abstrac symbolical uses, of which I shall have occasion to speak hereafter at from imperfeclength, referring to it only at present as one of the operations of rials. imagination contemplative; other abstractions there are which are necessarily consequent on the imperfection of materials, as of the hair

I have not brought forward any instances of the imaginative power in architecture, as my object is not at present to exhibit its operation in all matter, but only to define its essence; but it may be well to note, in our own new houses of Parliament, how far a building approved by a committee of Taste may proceed without manifesting either imagination or composition: it remains to be seen how far the towers may redeem it; and I allude to it at present unwillingly, and only in the desire of influencing, so far as I may, those who have the power to prevent the adoption of a design for a bridge to take place of Westminster, which was exhibited in 1844 at the Royal Academy, professing to be in harmony with the new building, but which was fit only to carry a railroad over a canal.

in sculpture, which is necessarily treated in masses that are in no sort imitative, but only stand for hair, and have the grace, flow, and feeling of it without the texture or division: and other abstractions there are in which the form of one thing is fancifully indicated in the matter of another; as in phantoms and cloud shapes, the use of which, in mighty hands, is often most impressive, as in the cloudy charioted Apollo of Nicolo Poussin in our own gallery, which the reader may oppose to the substantial Apollo, in Wilson's Niobe; and again the phantom vignette of Turner already noticed; only such operations of the imagination are to be held of lower kind and dangerous consequence if frequently trusted in; for those painters only have the right imaginative power who can set the supernatural form before us fleshed and boned like ourselves.1 Other abstractions occur, frequently, of things which have much accidental variety of form; as of waves, on § 17. Abstrac- Greek sculptures in successive volutes, and of clouds often in supporttions of things capable of ing volumes in the sacred pictures; but these I do not look upon are not imagi- as results of imagination at all, but mere signs and letters; and whenever a very highly imaginative mind touches them, it always realizes as far as may be. Even Titian is content to use, at the top of his St. Pietro Martire, the conventional, round, opaque cloud, which cuts his trees open like an axe; but Tintoret, in his picture of the Golden Calf, though compelled to represent the Sinai under conventional form, in order that the receiving of the tables might be seen at the top of it, yet so soon as it is possible to give more truth, he takes a grand fold of horizontal cloud straight from the flanks of the Alps, and shows the forests of the mountains through its misty volume,

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§ 18. Yet some-like sea-weed through deep sea. Nevertheless when the realization is impossible, bold symbolism is of the highest value, and in religious art, as we shall presently see, even necessary, as of the rays of light in the Titian woodcut of St. Francis; and sometimes the attention is directed by some such strange form to the meaning of the image, which may be missed if it remains in its natural purity, (as, I suppose, few, in looking at the Cephalus and Procris of Turner, note the sympathy of those faint rays that are just drawing back and

Comp. Ch. V. § 5.

2 All the clouds of Tintoret are sublime; the worst that I know in art are Correggio's, especially in the Madonna della Scudella, and Dome of Parma.

dying between the trunks of the far off forest, with the ebbing life of the nymph; unless, indeed, they happen to recollect the same sympathy marked by Shelley in the Alastor); but the imagination is not shown in any such modifications; however, in some cases they may be valuable, and I note them merely in consequence of their peculiar use in religious art, presently to be examined.

ration. Its laws

The last mode we have here to note in which the imagination § 19. Exaggeregardant may be expressed in art is exaggeration, of which, as it and limits. is the vice of all bad artists, and may be constantly resorted to with- First, in scale out any warrant of imagination, it is necessary to note strictly the tion. admissible limits.

one.

In the first place, a colossal statue is necessarily no more an exaggeration of what it represents than a miniature is a diminution; it need not be a representation of a giant, but a representation, on a large scale, of a man; only it is to be observed, that as any plane intersecting the cone of rays between us and the object, must receive an image smaller than the object, a small image is rationally and completely expressive of a larger one; but not a large of a small Hence I think that all statues above the Elgin standard, or that of Michael Angelo's Night and Morning, are, in a measure, taken by the eye for representations of giants, and I think them always disagreeable. The amount of exaggeration admitted by Michael Angelo is valuable because it separates the emblematic from the human form, and gives greater freedom to the grand lines of the frame; for notice of his scientific system of increase of size I may refer the reader to Sir Charles Bell's remarks on the statues of the Medici chapel; but there is one circumstance which Sir Charles has not noticed, and in the interpretation of which, therefore, it is likely I may be myself wrong: that the extremities are singularly small in proportion to the limbs, by which means there is an expression given of strength and activity greater than in the ordinary human type, which appears to me to be an allowance for that alteration in proportion necessitated by increase of size, which has been spoken of in Chap. VI. of the first section, § 10., note; not but that Michael Angelo always makes the extremities comparatively small, but smallest, comparatively, in his largest works; so I think, from the size of the head, it may be conjectured respecting the Theseus of the Elgins.

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§ 20. Secondly. Of things cap

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Such adaptations are not necessary when the exaggerated image is spectral for as the laws of matter in that case can have no operation, we may expand the form as far as we choose, only let careful distinction be made between the size of the thing represented, and the scale of the representation. The canvass on which Sir T. Lawrence has stretched his Satan in the schools of the Royal Academy is a mere concession to inability. He might have made him look more gigantic in one of a foot square.

Another kind of exaggeration is of things whose size is variable able of variety to a size or degree greater than that usual with them, as in waves and mountains; and there are hardly any limits to this exaggeration so long as the laws which nature observes in her increase be observed. Thus, for instance, the form and polished surface of a breaking ripple three inches high, are not representative of either the form or the surface of the surf of a storm, nodding ten feet above the beach; neither would the cutting ripple of a breeze upon a lake, if simply exaggerated, represent the forms of Atlantic surges; but as nature increases her bulk, she diminishes the angles of ascent, and increases her divisions; and if we would represent surges of size greater than ever existed, which it is lawful to do, we must carry out these operations to still greater extent. Thus Turner, in his picture of the Slave Ship, divides the whole sea into two masses of enormous swell, and conceals the horizon by a gradual slope of only two or three degrees. This is intellectual exaggeration. In the Academy exhibition of 1843, there was, in one of the smaller rooms, a black picture of a storm, in which there appeared on the near sea, just about to be overwhelmed by a breaker curling right over it, an object at first sight liable to be taken for a walnut shell, but which, on close examination, proved to be a ship with mast and sail. This is childish exaggeration, because it is impossible, by the laws of matter and motion, that such a breaker should ever exist. Again in mountains, we have repeatedly observed the necessary building up and multitudinous division of the higher peaks, and the smallness of the slopes by which they usually rise. We may, therefore, build up the mountain as high as we please, but we must do it in nature's way, and not in impossible peaks and precipices; not that but a daring feature is admissible here and there, as the Mat

terhorn is admitted by nature; but we must not compose a picture out of such exceptions; we may use them, but they must be as exceptions exhibited. I shall have much to say, when we come to treat of the sublime, of the various modes of treating mountain form; so that at present I shall only point to an unfortunate instance of inexcusable and effectless exaggeration in the distance of Turner's vignette to Milton (the Temptation on the Mountain), and desire the reader to compare it with legitimate exaggeration, in his vignette to the second part of Jacqueline, in Rogers's poems.

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Another kind of exaggeration is necessary to retain the characteristic § 21. Thirdly, necessary in impressions of nature on reduced scale; it is not possible, for instance, expression to give the leafage of trees in its proper proportion, on a small scale, characteristic without entirely losing their grace of form and curvature; of this the minished scale. best proof is found in the Calotype or Daguerreotype, which fail in foliage, not only because the green rays are ineffective, but because on the small scale of the image, the reduced leaves lose their organization, and look like moss attached to sticks. In order to retain, therefore, their character of flexibility, the painter is often compelled to increase the proportionate size of the leaves, and to arrange them in generic masses. Of this treatment compare the grand examples throughout the Liber Studiorum. That it is by such means only that the ideal character of objects is to be preserved, has been observed in the 13th chapter of the first section. In all these cases exaggeration is only lawful as the sole means of arriving at truth of impression when strict fidelity is out of the question.

Other modes of exaggeration there are, on which I shall not at present farther insist, the proper place for their discussion being in treating of the sublime; and these which I have at present instanced are enough to establish the point at issue, respecting imaginative verity, inasmuch as we find that exaggeration itself, if imaginative, is referred to principles of truth, and of actual being.

tulation.

We have now, I think, reviewed the various modes in which § 22. Recapiimagination contemplative may be exhibited in art, and arrived at all necessary certainties respecting the essence of the Faculty: which we have found in its three functions, Associative of Truth, Penetrative of Truth, and Contemplative of Truth; and having no dealings nor

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