The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864

The moral meaning in a picture, and its fidelity to fact, may each serve as measure of its merit after it is done. They must each be there, for its aim is to express after its own fashion the reality that lurks in every particle of matter. But it is for the spectator to see them, not the artist, and it is talking at cross-purposes to make either the motive,—to preach morality to Art, or to require from the artist an inventory of the landscape. That five or ten million pines grow in a Swiss valley is no reason why every one of them should be drawn. No doubt every one of them has its reason for being there, and it is conceivable that an exhaustive final statement might require them all to be shown. But there are no final statements in this world, least of all in Art. There are many things besides pines in the valley, and more important, and they can be drawn meanwhile. Besides, if all the pines, why not every pebble and blade of grass?

The earnestness that attracts us in mediæval Art, the devout fervor of the earlier time and the veracity of the later, the deference of the painter to his theme, is profoundly interesting as history, but it was conditioned also by the limitations of that age. The mediæval mind was oppressed by a sense of the foreignness and profaneness of Nature. The world is God's work, and ruled by Him; but it is not His dwelling-place, but only His foot-stool. The Divine spirit penetrates into the world of matter at certain points and to a certain depth, does not possess and inhabit it now and here, but only elsewhere and at a future time, in heaven, and at the final Judgment; and meantime the Church and the State are to maintain His jurisdiction over this outlying province as well as they can. The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him down into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart. Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection of fragments from various worlds. The figures in their landscapes do not tread the earth as if they belonged there, but like actors upon a stage, tricked up for the occasion. The earth is a desert upon which stones have been laid and herbs stuck into the crevices. The trees are put together out of separate leaves and twigs, and the rocks and mountains inserted like posts. In the earliest specimens the figures themselves have the same piecemeal look: their members are not born together, but put together. We see just how far the soul extends into them,—sometimes only to the eyes, then to the rest of the features, afterwards to the limbs and extremities. Evidently the artist's conception left much outside of it, to be added by way of label or explanation. In the trees, the care is to give the well-known fruit, the acorn or the apple, not the character of the tree; for what is wanted is only an indication what tree is meant. The only tie between man and the material world is the use he makes of it, elaborating and turning it into something it was not. Hence the trim orderliness of the mediæval landscape. Dante shows no love of the woods or the mountains, but only dread and dislike, and draws his tropes from engineering, from shipyards, moats, embankments.

The mediæval conception is higher than the antique; it recognizes a reality beyond the immediate, but not yet that it is the reality of the immediate and present also. But Art must dislodge this phantom of a lower, profane reality, and accept its own visions as authentic and sufficient. The modern mind is in this sense less religious than the mediæval, that the antithesis of phenomenal and real is less present to it. But the pungency of this antithesis comes from an imperfect realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines of the ideal.

The complaints of want of earnestness, devoutness, in modern Art, are as short-sighted as Schiller's lament over the prosaic present, as a world bereft of the gods. It is a loss to which we can well resign ourselves, that we no longer see God throned on Olympus, or anywhere else outside of the world. It is no misfortune that the mind has recognized under these alien forms a spirit akin to itself, and therefore no longer gives bribes to Fate by setting up images to it. The deity it worships is thenceforth no longer powerless to exist, nor is there any existence out of him; it needs not, then, to provide a limbo for him in some sphere of abstraction. What has fled is not the divinity, but its false isolation, its delegation to a corner of the universe. Instead of the god with his whims, we have law universal, the rule of mind, to which matter is not hostile, but allied and affirmative. That the sun is no longer the chariot of Helios, but a gravitating fireball, is only the other side of the perception that it is mind embodied, not some unrelated entity for which a charioteer must be deputed.

We no longer worship groves and fountains, nor Madonnas and saints, and our Art accordingly can no longer have the fervency, since its objects have not the concreteness, that belonged to former times. But it is to be noticed that Art can be devout only in proportion as Religion is artistic,—that is, as matter, and not spirit, is the immediate object of worship. Art and Religion spring from the same root, but coincide only at the outset, as in fetichism, the worship of the Black Stone of the Caaba, or the wonder-working Madonnas of Italy. The fetich is at once image and god; the interest in the appearance is not distinct from the interest in the meaning. It needs neither to be beautiful nor to be understood. But as the sense springs up of a related mind in the idol, the two sides are separated. It is no longer this thing merely, but, on the one hand, spirit, above and beyond matter, and, on the other, the appearance, equally self-sufficing and supreme among earthly things, just because its reality is not here, but elsewhere,—appearance, therefore, as transcendent, or Beauty.

To every age the religion of the foregoing seems artificial, incumbered with forms, and its Art superstitious, over-scrupulous, biased by considerations that have nothing to do with Art. Hence religious reformers are mystics, enthusiasts: this is the look of Luther, even of the hard-headed Calvin, as seen from the Roman-Catholic side. Hence, also, every epoch of revolution in Art seems to the preceding like an irruption of frivolity and profanity. Christian Art would have seemed so to the ancients; the Realism of the fourteenth century must have seemed so to the Giotteschi and the Renaissance, to both. The term Pre-Raphaelitism, though it seems an odd collocation to bring together such men as Frà Angelico, Filippo Lippi, and Luca Signorelli, has so far an intelligible basis, that all this period, from Giotto to Raphael, amidst all diversities, is characterized throughout by a deference of Art to something extraneous. It is not beauty that Frà Angelico looks for, but holiness, or beauty as expressing this; it is not beauty that draws Filippo Lippi, but homely actuality. It is from this point of view that the Renaissance has been attacked as wanting in faith, earnestness, humility. The Renaissance had swallowed all formulas. Nothing was in itself sacred, but all other considerations were sacrificed to the appeal to the eye. But this, so far from proving any "faithlessness," shows, on the contrary, an entire faith in their Art, that it was able to accomplish what was required of it, and needed not to be bolstered up by anything external. Mr. Ruskin wants language to express his contempt for Claude, because, in a picture entitled "Moses at the Burning Bush," he paints only a graceful landscape, in which the Bush is rather inconspicuous. But Claude might well reply, that what he intended was not a history, nor a homily, but a picture; that the name was added for convenience' sake, as he might name his son, John, without meaning any comparisons with the Evangelist. It is no defect, but a merit, that it requires nothing else than itself to explain it.

Claude depicts "an unutilized earth," whence all traces of care, labor, sorrow, rapine, and want,—all that can suggest the perils and trials of life,—is removed. The buildings are palaces or picturesque ruins; the personages promenade at leisure, or only pretend to be doing something. All action and story, all individuality of persons, objects, and events, is merged in a pervading atmosphere of tranquil, sunny repose,—as of a holiday-afternoon. It may seem to us an idle lubberland, a paradise of do-nothings;—Mr. Ruskin sees in it only a "dim, stupid, serene, leguminous enjoyment." But whoever knows Rome will at least recognize in Claude's pictures some reflex of that enchantment that still hangs over the wondrous city, and draws to it generation after generation of pilgrims. In what does the mysterious charm consist? Is it not that the place seems set apart from the working-day world of selfish and warring interests? that here all manner of men, for once, lay aside their sordid occupations and their vulgar standards, to come together on the ground of a common humanity? It is easy to sneer at the Renaissance, but to understand it we must take it in its connection. The matters that interested that age seem now superfluous, the recreations of a holiday rather than the business of life. But coming from the dust and din of the fifteenth century, it looks differently. It was, in whatever dim or fantastic shape, a recognition of universal brotherhood,—of a common ground whereon all mankind could meet in peace and even sympathy, were it only for a picnic. In this villeggiatura of the human race the immediate aim is no very lofty one,—not truth, not duty, but to please or be pleased. But who is it that is to be pleased? Not the great of the earth, not the consecrated of the Church, not the men merely of this guild or this nation, but Man. It is the festival of the new saint, Humanus,—a joyful announcement that the ancient antagonism is not fundamental, but destined to be overcome.

This dreamy, half-sad, but friendly and soothing influence, that breathes from Claude's landscapes, is not the highest that Nature can inspire, but it is far better than to see in the earth only food, lodging, and a place to fight in, or even mere background and filling-in.

The builders of the Rhine-castles looked down the reaches of the river only to spy out their prey or their enemy; the monks in their quiet valleys looked out for their trout-stream and kitchen-garden, but any interest beyond that would have been heathenish and dangerous. Whilst to the ancients the earth had value only as enjoyable, inhabitable, the earlier Christian ages valued it only as uninhabitable, as a wilderness repelling society. In the earliest mediæval landscapes, the effort to represent a wilderness that is there only for the sake of the hermits leads to the curious contradiction of a populous hermitage, every part of it occupied by figures resolutely bent on being alone, and sedulously ignoring the others. Humboldt quotes from the early Fathers some glowing descriptions of natural scenery, but they turn always upon the seclusion from mankind, and upon the contrast between the grandeur of God's works and the littleness of ours. But in Claude we have the hint, however crude, of a relation as unsordid as this, but positive and direct,—the soul of the landscape speaking at once to the soul of man,—showing itself cognate, already friendly, and needing only to throw off the husk of opposition. The defect is not that he defers too much to the purely pictorial, that he postpones the facts or the story to beauty, but that he does not defer enough, that he does not sufficiently trust his own eyes, but by way of further assurance drags in architecture, ships, mythological or Scripture stories, not caring for them himself, but supposing the spectator cares, so that they remain unassimilated, a scum floating on the surface and obscuring the work. Here is the "want of faith" with which, if any, he is justly chargeable,—that beauty is not enough for him, but he must make it pleasing. Pleasingness implies a languid acceptance, in which the mind is spared the shock of fresh suggestion or incitement. We call the Venus de' Medici, for instance, a pleasing statue, but the Venus of Milo beautiful; because in the one we find in fuller measure only what was already accepted and agreeable, whilst in the other we feel the presence of an unexplored and formidable personality, provoking the endeavor to follow it out and guess at its range and extent.

This deference to the spectator marks the decline of Art from the supremacy of its position as the interpreter of religion to mankind. The work is no longer a revelation devoutly received by the artist and piously transmitted to a believing world; but he is a cultivated man, who gives what is agreeable to a cultivated society, where the Bible is treated with decorum, but all enthusiasm is reserved for Plato and Cicero. The earlier and greater men brought much of what they were from the fifteenth century, but even Raphael is too academic. It is not a Chinese deference to tradition, nor conformity to a fixed national taste, such as ruled Greek Art as by an organic necessity. One knows not whether to wonder most at the fancied need to attach to the work the stamp of classic authority, or at the levity with which the venerable forms of antiquity are treated. Nothing can be more superficial than this varnish of classicality. The names of Cicero, Brutus, Augustus were in all mouths; but the real character of these men, or of any others, or of the times they lived in, was very slightly realized. The classic architecture, with its cogent adaptation and sequence of parts, is cut up into theatre-scenery: its "members" are members no longer, but scraps to be stuck about at will. The gods and heroes of the ancient world have become the pageant of a holiday; even the sacred legends of the Church receive only an outward respect, and at last not even that. Claude wants a foreground-figure and puts in Æneas, Diana, or Moses, he cares little which, and he would hear, unmoved, Mr. Ruskin's eloquent denunciation of their utter unfitness for the assumed character, and the absurdity of the whole action of the piece.

But the Renaissance had its religion, too,—namely, Culture. The one "virtue," acknowledged on all hands, alike by busy merchants, soldiers, despots, women, the acquaintance with Greek and Roman literature and art, was not quite the idle dilettanteism it seems. Lorenzo de' Medici said, that, without the knowledge of the Platonic philosophy, it was hard to be a good citizen and Christian. Leo X. thought, "Nothing more excellent or more useful has been given by the Creator to mankind, if we except only the knowledge and true worship of Himself, than these studies, which not only lead to the ornament and guidance of human life, but are applicable and useful to every particular situation." That this culture was superficial, that it regarded only show and outside, is no reproach, but means only that it was not a mere galvanizing of dead bones, that a new spirit was masquerading in these garments. Had it been in earnest in its revival of the past, it would have been insignificant; its disregard of the substance, and care for the form alone, showed that the form was used only as a protest against the old forms. A provincial narrowness, even a slight air of vulgarity, was felt to attach to the teachings of the Church. Gentility had come to imply not only heathendom, ("gentilis est qui in Christum non credit,") but liberal breeding. The attraction of the classic culture, "the humanities," as it was well called, was just this cosmopolitan largeness, that it had no prejudices and prescribed no test, but was open to all kinds of merit and every manner of man. Goethe, who belongs in good part to the Renaissance, frequently exemplifies this feeling, perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in the account of his pilgrimage to the temple of Minerva at Assisi, which he lovingly describes, remarking, at the same time, that he passed with only aversion the Church of St. Francis, with its frescos by Cimabue, Giotto, and their followers, which no traveller of our day willingly misses or soon forgets, though the temple may probably occupy but a small space in his memory. "I made no doubt," says Goethe, "that all the heads there bore the same stamp as my Captain's,"—an Italian officer, more orthodox than enlightened, with whom he had been travelling.

In truth, however diverse in its first appearance, the Italian Renaissance was the counterpart of the German Reformation, and, like that, a declaration that God is not shut up in a corner of the universe, nor His revelation restricted in regard of time, place, or persons. The day was long past when the Church was synonymous with civilization. The Church-ideal of holiness had long since been laid aside; a new world had grown up, in which other aims and another spirit prevailed. Macchiavelli thought the Church had nothing to do with worldly affairs, could do nothing for the State or for freedom. And the Church thought so, too. If it was left out of the new order of things, it was because it had left itself out. "The world" was godless, pompa Diaboli; devotion to God implied devotion (of the world) to the Devil. But the world, thus cut adrift, found itself yet alive and vigorous, and began thenceforth to live its own life, leaving the "other world" to take care of itself. Salvation, whether for the State or the individual, it was felt must come from individual effort, and not be conferred as a stamp or visa from the Pope and the College of Cardinals. It was not Religion that was dead, but only the Church. The Church being petrified into a negation, Culture, the religion of the world, was necessarily negative to that, and for a time absorbed in the mere getting rid of obstructions. Sainthood had never been proposed even as an ideal for all mankind, but only as fuga sæculi, the avoidance of all connection with human affairs. Logically, it must lead to the completest isolation, and find its best exponent in Simeon Stylites. The new ideal of Culture must involve first of all the getting rid of isolation, natural and artificial. Its representatives are such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Leon-Battista Alberti, masters of all arts and sciences, travelled, well-bred, at home in the universe,—thoroughly accomplished men of the world, with senses and faculties in complete harmonious development. It is an age full of splendid figures; whatever growth there was in any country came now to its flowering-time.

The drawback is want of purpose. This splendor looks only to show; there is no universal aim, no motive except whim,—the whims of men of talent, or the whim of the crowd. For the approbation of the Church is substituted the applause of cultivated society, a wider convention, but conventional still. This is the frivolous side of the Renaissance, not its holding light the old traditions, but that for the traditions it rejected it had nothing but tradition to substitute. But if this declaration of independence was at first only a claim for license, not for liberty, this is only what was natural, and may be said of Protestantism as well. Protestantism, too, had its orthodoxy, and has not even yet quite realized that the private judgment whose rights it vindicated does not mean personal whim, and therefore is not fortified by the assent of any man or body of men, nor weakened by their dissent, but belongs alone to thought, which is necessarily individual, and at the same time of universal validity; whereas, personality is partial, belongs to the crowd, and to that part of the man which confounds him with the crowd. Were the private judgment indeed private, it would have no rights. Of what consequence the private judgments of a tribe of apes, or of Bushmen? This reference to the bystanders means only an appeal from the Church; it is at bottom a declaration that the truth is not a miraculous exception, a falsehood which for this particular occasion is called truth, but the substance of the universe, apparent everywhere, and to all that seek it. The perception must be its own evidence, it must be true for us, now and here. We have no right to blame the Renaissance painters for their love of show, for Art exists for show, and the due fulfilment of its purpose, bringing to the surface what was dimly indicated, must engage it the more thoroughly in the superficial aspect, and make all reference to a hidden ulterior meaning more and more a mere pretence. What was once Thought has now become form, color, surface; to make a mystery of it would be thoughtlessness or hypocrisy.

The shortcoming is not in the artists, but in Art. Painting shares the same fate as Sculpture: not only is the soul not a thing, it is not wholly an appearance, but combines with its appearing a constant protest against the finality of it. Not only is the body an inadequate manifestation, but what it manifests is itself progressive, and any conception of it restrictive and partial. Henceforth any representation of the human form must either pretend a mystery that is not felt, or, if inspired by a genuine interest, it must be of a lower kind, and must avoid of set purpose any undue exaltation of one part over another, as of the face over the limbs, and dwell rather upon harmony of lines and colors, wherein nothing shall be prominent at the expense of the rest, seeking to make up what is wanting in intensity, in inward meaning, by allusion, by an interest reflected from without, instead of the immediate and intuitive. We often feel, even in Raphael's pictures, that the aim is lower than, for instance, Frà Angelico's. But it is at least genuine, and what that saves us from we may see in some of Perugino's and Pinturicchio's altar-pieces, where spirituality means kicking heels, hollow cheeks, and a deadly-sweet smile. That Raphael, among all his Holy Families, painted only one Madonna di San Sisto, and that hastily, on trifling occasion, shows that it was a chance-hit rather than the normal fruit of his genius. The beauty that shines like celestial flame from the face of the divine child, and the transfigured humanity of the mother, are no denizens of earth, but fugitive radiances that tinge it for a moment and are gone. For once, the impossible is achieved; the figures hover, dreamlike, disconnected from all around, as if the canvas opened and showed, not what is upon it, but beyond it. But it is a casual success, not to be sought or expected. A wise instinct made the painter in general shun such direct, explicit statement, and rather treat the subject somewhat cavalierly than allow it to confront and confound him. The greater he is, and the more complete his development, the more he must dread whatever makes his Art secondary or superfluous. Whatever force we give to the reproach of want of elevation, etc., the only impossible theme is the unartistic.

But before we give heed to any such reproach we must beware of confounding the personality of the artist or the fashion of the time with the moving spirit in both. He works always—as Michel Angelo complained that he was painting the ceiling of the Sistine—over his own head, and blinded by his own paint. The purpose that we speak of is not his petty doings and intentions, but what he unintentionally accomplishes. It is the spiritual alone that interests; and if later Art seem, by comparison, wanting in spirituality, this is partly the effect of its juster appreciation, that rendered direct expression hopeless, but at the same time superfluous, by discovering the same import more accessible elsewhere, as the higher indirect meaning of all material things. Critics tell us that the charm of landscape is incomplete without the presence of man,—that there must always be some hint, at least, of human habitation or influence. Certainly it is always a human interest, it is not the timber and the water, that moves us, but the echo of a kindred mind. But in the "landscape and figures" it is hardly a human interest that we take in the figures. The "dull victims of pipe and mug" serve our turn perhaps better than the noblest mountaineers. It is not to them that we look for the spirit of the landscape,—rather anywhere else. It is the security of the perception that allows it to dispense with pointed demonstration, and to delight rather in obscurer intimations of its meaning.

The modern ideal is the Picturesque,—a beauty not detachable, belonging to the picture, to the composition, not to the component parts. It has no favorites; it is violated alike by the systematic glorification and the systematic depreciation of particular forms. The Apollo Belvedere would make as poor a figure in the foreground of a modern landscape as a fisherman in jack-boots and red nightcap on a pedestal in the Vatican. Claude's or Turner's figures may be absurd, when taken by themselves; but the absurdity consists in taking them by themselves. Turner, it is said, could draw figures well; Claude probably could not; (he is more likely to have tried;) but each must have felt that anything that should call attention to the figures would be worse than any bad drawing. Nicolas Poussin was well called "the learned"; for it is his learning, his study of the antique, of Raphael, of drapery and anatomy, that most appears in his landscapes and gives his figures their plastic emphasis. But this is no praise for a painter.

Of course the boundary-lines cannot be very exactly drawn; the genius of a Delaroche or a Millais will give interest to a figure-piece at whatever epoch. But such pictures as Etty's, or Page's Venus, where the beauty of the human body is the point of attraction, are flat anachronisms, and for this reason, not from any prudishness of the public, can never excite a hearty enthusiasm. From the sixteenth century downwards all pictures become more and more tableaux de genre,—the piece is not described by the nominal subject, but only the class to which it belongs, leaving its special character wholly undetermined. And in proportion as the action and the detail are dwelt upon, the more evident is it that the theme is only a pretence. Martyrdoms, when there was any fervency of faith in the martyrs, were very abstract. A hint of sword or wheel sufficed. The saints and the angels, as long as men believed in them, carried their witness in their faces, with only some conventional indication of their history. As soon as direct representation is aimed at and the event portrayed as an historical fact, it is proof enough that all direct interest is gone and nothing left but the technical problem. The martyrdoms are vulgar execution-scenes,—the angels, men sprawling upon clouds. Michel Angelo was a noble, devout man, but it is clear that the God he prayed to was not the God he painted.

This essential disparity between idea and representation is the weak side of Art, plastic and pictorial; but because it is essential it is not felt by the artist as defect. His genius urges him to all advance that is possible within the limits of his Art, but not to transcend it. It will be in vain to exhort him to unite the ancient piety to the modern knowledge. If he listen to the exhortation, he may be a good critic, but he is no painter. He must be absorbed in what he sees to the exclusion of everything else; impartiality is a virtue to all the world except him. There will always be a onesidedness; either the conception or the embodying of it halts, is only partially realized; some incompleteness, some mystery, some apparent want of coincidence between form and meaning is a necessity to the artist, and if he does not find it, he will invent it. Hence the embarrassment of some of the English Pre-Raphaelitists, particularly in dealing with the human form. They have no hesitation in pursuing into still further minuteness the literal delineation of inanimate objects, draperies, etc.; but they shrink from giving full life to their figures, not from a slavish adherence to their exemplars, but from a dread lest it should seem that what is shown is all that is meant. The early painters were thus naïve and distinct because of their limitations; they knew very well what they meant,—as, that the event took place out-of-doors, with the sun shining, the grass under-foot, an oak-tree here, a strawberry-vine there,—mere adjunct and by-play, not to be questioned as to the import of the piece: that the Church took care of. But who can say what a modern landscape means? The significance that in the older picture was as it were outside of it, presupposed, assured elsewhere, has now to be incorporated, verily present in every atom of soil and film of vapor. The realism of the modern picture must be infinitely more extended, for the meaning of it is that nothing is superfluous or insignificant. But with the reality that it lends to every particle of matter, it must introduce, at the same time, the protest that spirit makes against matter,—most distinct, indeed, in the human form and countenance, but nowhere absent. In its utmost explication there must be felt that there is yet more behind; its utmost distinctness must be everywhere indefinable, evanescent,—must proclaim that this parade of surface-appearance is not there for its own sake. This is what Mr. Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy": but there is nothing fallacious in it; it is solid truth, only under the guise of mystery. Turner said that Mr. Ruskin had put all sorts of meanings into his pictures that he knew nothing about. Of course, else they would never have got into the pictures. But this does not affect their validity, but means only that it is the imagination, not the intellect, that must apprehend them.