Ariadne Florentina: Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving

For instance; I said just now, "You see the sun's epaulets before the sun." Well, don't you, usually, as it rises? Do you not continually mistake a luminous cloud for it, or wonder where it is, behind one? Again, the face of the Apollo Belvedere is agitated by anxiety, passion, and pride. Is the sun's likely to be so, rising on the evil and the good? This Prince sits crowned and calm: look at the quiet fingers of the hand holding the scepter,—at the restraint of the reins merely by a depression of the wrist.

160. You have to look carefully for those fingers holding the scepter, because the hand—which a great anatomist would have made so exclusively interesting—is here confused with the ornamentation of the arm of the chariot on which it rests. But look what the ornamentation is;—fruit and leaves, abundant, in the mouth of a cornucopia. A quite vulgar and meaningless ornament in ordinary renaissance work. Is it so here, think you? Are not the leaves and fruits of earth in the Sun's hand?³⁹

You thought, perhaps, when I spoke just now of the action of the right hand, that less than a depression of the wrist would stop horses such as those. You fancy Botticelli drew them so, because he had never seen a horse; or because, able to draw fingers, he could not draw hoofs! How fine it would be to have, instead, a prancing four-in-hand, in the style of Piccadilly on the Derby-day, or at least horses like the real Greek horses of the Parthenon!

Yes; and if they had had real ground to trot on, the Florentine would have shown you he knew how they should trot. But these have to make their way up the hill-side of other lands. Look to the example in your standard series, Hermes Eriophoros. You will find his motion among clouds represented precisely in this laboring, failing, half-kneeling attitude of limb. These forms, toiling up through the rippled sands of heaven, are—not horses;—they are clouds themselves, like horses, but only a little like. Look how their hoofs lose themselves, buried in the ripples of cloud; it makes one think of the quicksands of Morecambe Bay.

And their tails—what extraordinary tufts of tails, ending in points! Yes; but do you not see, nearly joining with them, what is not a horse tail at all; but a flame of fire, kindled at Apollo's knee? All the rest of the radiance about him shoots from him. But this is rendered up to him. As the fruits of the earth are in one of his hands, its fire is in the other. And all the warmth, as well as all the light of it, are his.

We had a little natural philosophy, gentlemen, as well as theology, in Florence, once upon a time.

161. Natural philosophy, and also natural art, for in this the Greek reanimate was a nobler creature than the Greek who had died. His art had a wider force and warmer glow. I have told you that the first Greeks were distinguished from the barbarians by their simple humanity; the second Greeks—these Florentine Greeks reanimate—are human more strongly, more deeply, leaping from the Byzantine death at the call of Christ, "Loose him, and let him go." And there is upon them at once the joy of resurrection, and the solemnity of the grave.

VI.

Fairness of the Sea and Air.

In VENICE and ATHENS.

162. Of this resurrection of the Greek, and the form of the tomb he had been buried in "those four days," I have to give you some account in the last lecture. I will only to-day show you an illustration of it which brings us back to our immediate question as to the reasons why Northern art could not accept classicism. When, in the closing lecture of "Aratra Pentelici,"⁴⁰ I compared Florentine with Greek work, it was to point out to you the eager passions of the first as opposed to the formal legalism and proprieties of the other. Greek work, I told you, while truthful, was also restrained, and never but under majesty of law; while Gothic work was true, in the perfect law of Liberty or Franchise. And now I give you in facsimile (Plate VI.) the two Aphrodites thus compared—the Aphrodite Thalassia of the Tyrrhene seas, and the Aphrodite Urania of the Greek skies. You may not at first like the Tuscan best; and why she is the best, though both are noble, again I must defer explaining to next lecture. But now turn back to Bewick's Venus, and compare her with the Tuscan Venus of the Stars, (Plate II.); and then here, in Plate VI., with the Tuscan Venus of the Seas, and the Greek Venus of the Sky. Why is the English one vulgar? What is it, in the three others, which makes them, if not beautiful, at least refined?—every one of them 'designed' and drawn, indisputably, by a gentleman?

I never have been so puzzled by any subject of analysis as, for these ten years, I have been by this. Every answer I give, however plausible it seems at first, fails in some way, or in some cases. But there is the point for you, more definitely put, I think, than in any of my former books;—at present, for want of time, I must leave it to your own thoughts.

163. II. The second influence under which engraving developed itself, I said, was that of medicine and the physical sciences. Gentlemen, the most audacious, and the most valuable, statement which I have yet made to you on the subject of practical art, in these rooms, is that of the evil resulting from the study of anatomy. It is a statement so audacious, that not only for some time I dared not make it to you, but for ten years, at least, I dared not make it to myself. I saw, indeed, that whoever studied anatomy was in a measure injured by it; but I kept attributing the mischief to secondary causes. It can't be this drink itself that poisons them, I said always. This drink is medicinal and strengthening: I see that it kills them, but it must be because they drink it cold when they have been hot, or they take something else with it that changes it into poison. The drink itself must be good. Well, gentlemen, I found out the drink itself to be poison at last, by the breaking of my choicest Venice glass. I could not make out what it was that had killed Tintoret, and laid it long to the charge of chiaroscuro. It was only after my thorough study of his Paradise, in 1870, that I gave up this idea, finding the chiaroscuro, which I had thought exaggerated, was, in all original and undarkened passages, beautiful and most precious. And then at last I got hold of the true clue: "Il disegno di Michel Agnolo." And the moment I had dared to accuse that, it explained everything; and I saw that the betraying demons of Italian art, led on by Michael Angelo, had been, not pleasure, but knowledge; not indolence, but ambition; and not love, but horror.

164. But when first I ventured to tell you this, I did not know, myself, the fact of all most conclusive for its confirmation. It will take me a little while to put it before you in its total force, and I must first ask your attention to a minor point. In one of the smaller rooms of the Munich Gallery is Holbein's painting of St. Margaret and St. Elizabeth of Hungary,—standard of his early religious work. Here is a photograph from the St. Elizabeth; and, in the same frame, a French lithograph of it. I consider it one of the most important pieces of comparison I have arranged for you, showing you at a glance the difference between true and false sentiment. Of that difference, generally, we cannot speak to-day, but one special result of it you are to observe;—the omission, in the French drawing, of Holbein's daring representation of disease, which is one of the vital honors of the picture. Quite one of the chief strengths of St. Elizabeth, in the Roman Catholic view, was in the courage of her dealing with disease, chiefly leprosy. Now observe, I say Roman Catholic view, very earnestly just now; I am not at all sure that it is so in a Catholic view—that is to say, in an eternally Christian and Divine view. And this doubt, very nearly now a certainty, only came clearly into my mind the other day after many and many a year's meditation on it. I had read with great reverence all the beautiful stories about Christ's appearing as a leper, and the like; and had often pitied and rebuked myself alternately for my intense dislike and horror of disease. I am writing at this moment within fifty yards of the grave of St. Francis, and the story of the likeness of his feelings to mine had a little comforted me, and the tradition of his conquest of them again humiliated me; and I was thinking very gravely of this, and of the parallel instance of Bishop Hugo of Lincoln, always desiring to do service to the dead, as opposed to my own unmitigated and Louis-Quinze-like horror of funerals;—when by chance, in the cathedral of Palermo, a new light was thrown for me on the whole matter.

165. I was drawing the tomb of Frederick II., which is shut off by a grating from the body of the church; and I had, in general, quite an unusual degree of quiet and comfort at my work. But sometimes it was paralyzed by the unconscious interference of one of the men employed in some minor domestic services about the church. When he had nothing to do, he used to come and seat himself near my grating, not to look at my work, (the poor wretch had no eyes, to speak of,) nor in any way meaning to be troublesome; but there was his habitual seat. His nose had been carried off by the most loathsome of diseases; there were two vivid circles of scarlet round his eyes; and as he sat, he announced his presence every quarter of a minute (if otherwise I could have forgotten it) by a peculiarly disgusting, loud, and long expectoration. On the second or third day, just I had forced myself into some forgetfulness of him, and was hard at my work, I was startled from it again by the bursting out of a loud and cheerful conversation close to me; and on looking round, saw a lively young fledgling of a priest, seventeen or eighteen years old, in the most eager and spirited chat with the man in the chair. He talked, laughed, and spat, himself, companionably, in the merriest way, for a quarter of an hour; evidently without feeling the slightest disgust, or being made serious for an instant, by the aspect of the destroyed creature before him.

166. His own face was simply that of the ordinary vulgar type of thoughtless young Italians, rather beneath than above the usual standard; and I was certain, as I watched him, that he was not at all my superior, but very much my inferior, in the coolness with which he beheld what was to me so dreadful. I was positive that he could look this man in the face, precisely because he could not look, discerningly, at any beautiful or noble thing; and that the reason I dared not, was because I had, spiritually, as much better eyes than the priest, as, bodily, than his companion.

Having got so much of clear evidence given me on the matter, it was driven home for me a week later, as I landed on the quay of Naples. Almost the first thing that presented itself to me was the sign of a traveling theatrical company, displaying the principal scene of the drama to be enacted on their classical stage. Fresh from the theater of Taormina, I was curious to see the subject of the Neapolitan popular drama. It was the capture, by the police, of a man and his wife who lived by boiling children. One section of the police was coming in, armed to the teeth, through the passage; another section of the police, armed to the teeth, and with high feathers in its caps, was coming up through a trap-door. In fine dramatic unconsciousness to the last moment, like the clown in a pantomime, the child-boiler was represented as still industriously chopping up a child, pieces of which, ready for the pot, lay here and there on the table in the middle of the picture. The child-boiler's wife, however, just as she was taking the top off the pot to put the meat in, had caught a glimpse of the foremost policeman, and stopped, as much in rage as in consternation.

167. Now it is precisely the same feeling, or want of feeling, in the lower Italian (nor always in the lower classes only) which makes him demand the kind of subject for his secular drama; and the Crucifixion and Pietà for his religious drama. The only part of Christianity he can enjoy is its horror; and even the saint and saintess are not always denying themselves severely, either by the contemplation of torture, or the companionship with disease.

Nevertheless, we must be cautious, on the other hand, to allow full value to the endurance, by tender and delicate persons, of what is really loathsome or distressful to them in the service of others; and I think this picture of Holbein's indicative of the exact balance and rightness of his own mind in this matter, and therefore of his power to conceive a true saint also. He had to represent St. Catherine's chief effort;—he paints her ministering to the sick, and, among them, is a leper; and finding it thus his duty to paint leprosy, he courageously himself studies it from the life. Not to insist on its horror; but to assert it, to the needful point of fact, which he does with medical accuracy.

Now here is just a case in which science, in a subordinate degree, is really required for a spiritual and moral purpose. And you find Holbein does not shrink from it even in this extreme case in which it is most painful.

168. If, therefore, you do find him in other cases not using it, you may be sure he knew it to be unnecessary.

Now it may be disputable whether in order to draw a living Madonna, one needs to know how many ribs she has; but it would have seemed indisputable that in order to draw a skeleton, one must know how many ribs it has.

Holbein is par excellence the draughtsman of skeletons. His painted Dance of Death was, and his engraved Dance of Death is, principal of such things, without any comparison or denial. He draws skeleton after skeleton, in every possible gesture; but never so much as counts their ribs! He neither knows nor cares how many ribs a skeleton has. There are always enough to rattle.

Monstrous, you think, in impudence,—Holbein for his carelessness, and I for defending him! Nay, I triumph in him; nothing has ever more pleased me than this grand negligence. Nobody wants to know how many ribs a skeleton has, any more than how many bars a gridiron has, so long as the one can breathe, and the other broil; and still less, when the breath and the fire are both out.

169. But is it only of the bones, think you, that Holbein is careless?⁴¹ Nay, incredible though it may seem to you,—but, to me, explanatory at once of much of his excellence,—he did not know anatomy at all! I told you in my Preface,⁴² already quoted, Holbein studies the face first, the body secondarily; but I had no idea, myself, how completely he had refused the venomous science of his day. I showed you a dead Christ of his, long ago. Can you match it with your academy drawings, think you? And yet he did not, and would not, know anatomy. He would not; but Dürer would, and did:—went hotly into it—wrote books upon it, and upon 'proportions of the human body,' etc., etc., and all your modern recipes for painting flesh. How did his studies prosper his art?

People are always talking of his Knight and Death, and his Melancholia, as if those were his principal works. They are his characteristic ones, and show what he might have been without his anatomy; but they were mere by-play compared to his Greater Fortune, and Adam and Eve. Look at these. Here is his full energy displayed; here are both male and female forms drawn with perfect knowledge of their bones and muscles, and modes of action and digestion,—and I hope you are pleased.

But it is not anatomy only that Master Albert studies. He has a taste for optics also; and knows all about refraction and reflection. What with his knowledge of the skull inside, and the vitreous lens outside, if any man in the world is to draw an eye, here's the man to do it, surely! With a hand which can give lessons to John Bellini, and a care which would fain do all so that it can't be done better, and acquaintance with every crack in the cranium, and every humor in the lens,—if we can't draw an eye, we should just like to know who can! thinks Albert.

So having to engrave the portrait of Melanchthon, instead of looking at Melanchthon as ignorant Holbein would have been obliged to do,—wise Albert looks at the room window; and finds it has four cross-bars in it, and knows scientifically that the light on Melanchthon's eye must be a reflection of the window with its four bars—and engraves it so, accordingly; and who shall dare to say, now, it isn't like Melanchthon?

Unfortunately, however, it isn't, nor like any other person in his senses; but like a madman looking at somebody who disputes his hobby. While in this drawing of Holbein's, where a dim gray shadow leaves a mere crumb of white paper,—accidentally it seems, for all the fine scientific reflection,—behold, it is an eye indeed, and of a noble creature.

170. What is the reason? do you ask me; and is all the common teaching about generalization of details true, then?

No; not a syllable of it is true. Holbein is right, not because he draws more generally, but more truly, than Dürer. Dürer draws what he knows is there; but Holbein, only what he sees. And, as I have told you often before, the really scientific artist is he who not only asserts bravely what he does see, but confesses honestly what he does not. You must not draw all the hairs in an eyelash; not because it is sublime to generalize them, but because it is impossible to see them. How many hairs there are, a sign painter or anatomist may count; but how few of them you can see, it is only the utmost masters, Carpaccio, Tintoret, Reynolds, and Velasquez, who count, or know.

171. Such was the effect, then, of his science upon Dürer's ideal of beauty, and skill in portraiture. What effect had it on the temper and quantity of his work, as compared with poor ignorant Holbein's! You have only three portraits, by Dürer, of the great men of his time, and those bad ones; while he toils his soul out to draw the hoofs of satyrs, the bristles of swine, and the distorted aspects of base women and vicious men.

What, on the contrary, has ignorant Holbein done for you? Shakespeare and he divide between them, by word and look, the Story of England under Henry and Elizabeth.

172. Of the effect of science on the art of Mantegna and Marc Antonio, (far more deadly than on Dürer's,) I must tell you in a future lecture;—the effect of it on their minds, I must partly refer to now, in passing to the third head of my general statement—the influence of new Theology. For Dürer and Mantegna, chiefly because of their science, forfeited their place, not only as painters of men, but as servants of God. Neither of them has left one completely noble or completely didactic picture; while Holbein and Botticelli, in consummate pieces of art, led the way before the eyes of all men, to the purification of their Church and land.

173. III. But the need of reformation presented itself to these two men last named on entirely different terms.

To Holbein, when the word of the Catholic Church proved false, and its deeds bloody; when he saw it selling permission of sin in his native Augsburg, and strewing the ashes of its enemies on the pure Alpine waters of Constance, what refuge was there for him in more ancient religion? Shall he worship Thor again, and mourn over the death of Balder? He reads Nature in her desolate and narrow truth, and she teaches him the Triumph of Death.

But, for Botticelli, the grand gods are old, are immortal. The priests may have taught falsely the story of the Virgin;—did they not also lie, in the name of Artemis, at Ephesus;—in the name of Aphrodite, at Cyprus?—but shall, therefore, Chastity or Love be dead, or the full moon paler over Arno? Saints of Heaven and Gods of Earth!—shall these perish because vain men speak evil of them! Let us speak good forever, and grave, as on the rock, for ages to come, the glory of Beauty, and the triumph of Faith.

174. Holbein had bitterer task.

Of old, the one duty of the painter had been to exhibit the virtues of this life, and hopes of the life to come. Holbein had to show the vices of this life, and to obscure the hope of the future. "Yes, we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and fear all evil, for Thou art not with us, and Thy rod and Thy staff comfort us not." He does not choose this task. It is thrust upon him,—just as fatally as the burial of the dead is in a plague-struck city. These are the things he sees, and must speak. He will not become a better artist thereby; no drawing of supreme beauty, or beautiful things, will be possible to him. Yet we cannot say he ought to have done anything else, nor can we praise him specially in doing this. It is his fate; the fate of all the bravest in that day.

THE CHILD'S BEDTIME.

(Fig. 5) Facsimile from Holbein's woodcut.

175. For instance, there is no scene about which a shallow and feeble painter would have been more sure to adopt the commonplaces of the creed of his time than the death of a child,—chiefly, and most of all, the death of a country child,—a little thing fresh from the cottage and the field. Surely for such an one, angels will wait by its sick bed, and rejoice as they bear its soul away; and over its shroud flowers will be strewn, and the birds will sing by its grave. So your common sentimentalist would think, and paint. Holbein sees the facts, as they verily are, up to the point when vision ceases. He speaks, then, no more.

The country laborer's cottage—the rain coming through its roof, the clay crumbling from its partitions, the fire lighted with a few chips and sticks on a raised piece of the mud floor,—such dais as can be contrived, for use, not for honor. The damp wood sputters; the smoke, stopped by the roof, though the rain is not, coils round again, and down. But the mother can warm the child's supper of bread and milk so—holding the pan by the long handle; and on mud floor though it be, they are happy,—she, and her child, and its brother,—if only they could be left so. They shall not be left so: the young thing must leave them—will never need milk warmed for it any more. It would fain stay,—sees no angels—feels only an icy grip on its hand, and that it cannot stay. Those who loved it shriek and tear their hair in vain, amazed in grief. 'Oh, little one, must you lie out in the fields then, not even under this poor torn roof of thy mother's to-night?'

"HE THAT HATH EARS TO HEAR, LET HIM HEAR."

(Fig. 6) Facsimile from Holbein's woodcut.

176. Again: there was not in the old creed any subject more definitely and constantly insisted on than the death of a miser. He had been happy, the old preachers thought, till then: but his hour has come; and the black covetousness of hell is awake and watching; the sharp harpy claws will clutch his soul out of his mouth, and scatter his treasure for others. So the commonplace preacher and painter taught. Not so Holbein. The devil want to snatch his soul, indeed! Nay, he never had a soul, but of the devil's giving. His misery to begin on his death-bed! Nay, he had never an unmiserable hour of life. The fiend is with him now,—a paltry, abortive fiend, with no breath even to blow hot with. He supplies the hell-blast with a machine. It is winter, and the rich man has his furred cloak and cap, thick and heavy; the beggar, bare-headed to beseech him, skin and rags hanging about him together, touches his shoulder, but all in vain; there is other business in hand. More haggard than the beggar himself, wasted and palsied, the rich man counts with his fingers the gain of the years to come.

But of those years, infinite that are to be, Holbein says nothing. 'I know not; I see not. This only I see, on this very winter's day, the low pale stumbling-block at your feet, the altogether by you unseen and forgotten Death. You shall not pass him by on the other side; here is a fasting figure in skin and bone, at last, that will stop you; and for all the hidden treasures of earth, here is your spade: dig now, and find them.'

177. I have said that Holbein was condemned to teach these things. He was not happy in teaching them, nor thanked for teaching them. Nor was Botticelli for his lovelier teaching. But they both could do no otherwise. They lived in truth and steadfastness; and with both, in their marvelous design, veracity is the beginning of invention, and love its end.

I have but time to show you, in conclusion, how this affectionate self-forgetfulness protects Holbein from the chief calamity of the German temper, vanity, which is at the root of all Dürer's weakness. Here is a photograph of Holbein's portrait of Erasmus, and a fine proof of Dürer's. In Holbein's, the face leads everything; and the most lovely qualities of the face lead in that. The cloak and cap are perfectly painted, just because you look at them neither more nor less than you would have looked at the cloak in reality. You don't say, 'How brilliantly they are touched,' as you would with Rembrandt; nor 'How gracefully they are neglected,' as you would with Gainsborough; nor 'How exquisitely they are shaded,' as you would with Lionardo; nor 'How grandly they are composed,' as you would with Titian. You say only, 'Erasmus is surely there; and what a pleasant sight!' You don't think of Holbein at all. He has not even put in the minutest letter H, that I can see, to remind you of him. Drops his H's, I regret to say, often enough. 'My hand should be enough for you; what matters my name?' But now, look at Dürer's. The very first thing you see, and at any distance, is this great square tablet with

"The image of Erasmus, drawn from the life by Albert Dürer, 1526,"

and a great straddling a.d. besides. Then you see a cloak, and a table, and a pot, with flowers in it, and a heap of books with all their leaves and all their clasps, and all the little bits of leather gummed in to mark the places; and last of all you see Erasmus's face; and when you do see it, the most of it is wrinkles.

All egotism and insanity, this, gentlemen. Hard words to use; but not too hard to define the faults which rendered so much of Dürer's great genius abortive, and to this day paralyze, among the details of a lifeless and ambitious precision, the student, no less than the artist, of German blood. For too many an Erasmus, too many a Dürer, among them, the world is all cloak and clasp, instead of face or book; and the first object of their lives is to engrave their initials.

178. For us, in England, not even so much is at present to be hoped; and yet, singularly enough, it is more our modesty, unwisely submissive, than our vanity, which has destroyed our English school of engraving.

At the bottom of the pretty line engravings which used to represent, characteristically, our English skill, one saw always two inscriptions. At the left-hand corner, "Drawn by—so-and-so;" at the right-hand corner, "Engraved by—so-and-so." Only under the worst and cheapest plates—for the Stationers' Almanack, or the like—one saw sometimes, "Drawn and engraved by—so-and-so," which meant nothing more than that the publisher would not go to the expense of an artist, and that the engraver haggled through as he could. (One fortunate exception, gentlemen, you have in the old drawings for your Oxford Almanack, though the publishers, I have no doubt, even in that case, employed the cheapest artist they could find.⁴³) But in general, no engraver thought himself able to draw; and no artist thought it his business to engrave.

179. But the fact that this and the following lecture are on the subject of design in engraving, implies of course that in the work we have to examine, it was often the engraver himself who designed, and as often the artist who engraved.

And you will observe that the only engravings which bear imperishable value are, indeed, in this kind. It is true that, in wood-cutting, both Dürer and Holbein, as in our own days Leech and Tenniel, have workmen under them who can do all they want. But in metal cutting it is not so. For, as I have told you, in metal cutting, ultimate perfection of Line has to be reached; and it can be reached by none but a master's hand; nor by his, unless in the very moment and act of designing. Never, unless under the vivid first force of imagination and intellect, can the Line have its full value. And for this high reason, gentlemen, that paradox which perhaps seemed to you so daring, is nevertheless deeply and finally true, that while a woodcut may be laboriously finished, a grand engraving on metal must be comparatively incomplete. For it must be done, throughout, with the full fire of temper in it, visibly governing its lines, as the wind does the fibers of cloud.

180. The value hitherto attached to Rembrandt's etchings, and others imitating them, depends on a true instinct in the public mind for this virtue of line. But etching is an indolent and blundering method at the best; and I do not doubt that you will one day be grateful for the severe disciplines of drawing required in these schools, in that they will have enabled you to know what a line may be, driven by a master's chisel on silver or marble, following, and fostering as it follows, the instantaneous strength of his determined thought.