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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http: //books .google .com/I From the Fine Arts Library Fogg Art Museum Harvard University THE GRAMMAR OF PAINTING AND ENGRAVING. THE GRAMMAR W ov PAINTING AND ENGRAVING, TKANSLATKU KRilAI TIIK FRENCH OP BLANC'S GRAMMAIRE DBS ARTS DU D ESS IN . BY KATE NEWELL DOGGETT WITH THE ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK- PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON 1874 ffK iOdI.12-.^ t .1 c y , I .t ^ « > . > 1 > //: ^ ^'^(.:, /p ■• I • ' .( » / I "S Entered eooording to Act of CongreM, in the year 1873, by Katb N. Docsgbtt, In the OflSoe of the Librarian of Congress, at WasliiiHCtoo. riNjc ^.^'^'TS t • RIVKKSIUB, CAMBRIDGK : STKRBOTYPBD AND PKINTBD BY II. O. IIOUUIIIMN AND COMPANV. - TABLE OF CONTENTS. I Translator's Introduction xiii To THE Reader xv PAINTING. I. Painting is the art of expressing all the conceptions of tlie soul, by means of all the realities of nature, represented upon a smooth surface by their forms and colors i II. Without aiming either at utility or morality, painting is capable of elevating the soul of nations by the dignity of its representations, and of reforming the manners of men by its visible lessons • 7 III. Painting has limits that literal imitation may restrict, that fiction widens, but the mind alone can aggrandize 12 IV. Although painting is the expressive art, par excellence, it is not limited in character, it can unite expression to beauty in idealiz- ing its figures by style, by manifesting typical truth in living in- dividualities 18 V. Painting can elevate itself to the sublime, but by the invention of the painter rather than by the appliances peculiar to his art . 22 VI. Tlie methods peculiar to painting force themselves upon the artist as soon as he invents his subject and conceives the first image of it . . .25 VI TABLE OF CONTENTS. VII. The first means the painter uses to express his thought is arrange- ment 33 VIII. Although the painter who composes his picture ought certainly to be acquainted with the laws of perspective and submit to them, the observance of these laws allows sufficient play of senti- ment 48 IX. Coloring his sketch or limiting himself to outline in his composi- tion, the painter attains expression only in defining it by the drawing, the attitude, the gesture, or the movement of each fig- ure 68 X. When the composition is once decided upon, when the gestures and the movements are foreseen, tiie painter refers to the model to give verisimilitude to his ideal, and naturalness to the forms that must express it ' '97 XI. After having verified the forms he has chosen, the artist finishes by light and color the moral expression and the optical beauty of his thought 121 XII. Chiaro 'scuro, whose object is not only to put forms in relief, but to convey the sentiment the painter wishes to express, is subject to the requirements of moral beauty as well as to the laws of natural truth 126 XIII. Color being that which especially distinguishes painting from the other arts, it is indispensable to the painter to know its laws, so &r as these are essential and absolute . . • I4S Law of complementary colors 150 White and black 158 The optical mixture 161 The vibration of colors 164 Color of the light 165 • • TABLE OF CONTENTS. Vll XIV. The character of touch, that is the quality of the material execu- tion, is the painter's last means of expression . . . .170 XV. Certain conventionalities of painting vary and must vary according to the character of the work and the nature of the surface the artist has to cover 179 Fresco painting 180 Wax painting ' . 182 Painting in distemper 183 Ceilings and cupolas . . . 184 Oil painting 187 Pastel painting 190 Enamel painting 191 Guaches and aquarelles 194 Miniature 196 Painting upon glass . 199 Encaustic painting 199 XVI. Although the domain of the painter is co-extensive with Nature, there exists in his art a hierarchy founded upon the significance, relative or absolute, local or universal, of his works . . .201 XVII. The different kinds of painting belong to the lower or higher method, according as imitation or style plays in them the princi- pal r61e . . . 207 Landscape 209 Animals 218 Battles and hunting scenes 225 Portrait 229 ENGRAVING. I. Engraving is the art of tracing in intaglio upon metal, or in relief upon wood, a drawing from which impressions can be taken . 239 • • • VlU TABLE OF CONTENTS. II. The art of the engraver is bound by certain general laws, although there exist particular conventionalities for each of the different kinds of engraving 245 III. ENGRAVING ON COPPER. However important in the copperplate the choice and the treatment of the work maybe, the engraver should strive above everything, by correct and expressive drawing, to render the characteristics of the model he wishes to engrave 247 IV. AQUAFORTIS ENGRAVING. Engraving with aquafortis, when it is not a preparation for copper, ought generally to be executed without apparent regularity, with free strokes rarely crossed, which, never covering the whole plate, leave a r61e for the whiteness of the paper . 268 V. MEZZOTINT, AQUATINT. Mezzotints lacking firmness, the engraver must correct their soft- ness, and unless a vaporous effect is to be given, must bring out the lights with a firm, resolute hand 279 Aquatint' 283 Imitation of pencilling 284 VI. WOOD ENGRAVING. Engraving upon wood, incapable of producing the delicate shad- ings of copper plate, suits serious works, which by the terseness of their expression, lend grandeur even to works of small size . 286 TABLE OF CONTENTS. IX VII. ENGRAVING IN CAMEO. Engraving in Cameo. Engraving in colors 302 LITHOGRAPHY. Allied to engraving is Lithography ; the art of tracing upon stone a drawing from which impressions can be printed . . 309 Conclusion 313 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Chromatic Rose . . .Frontispiece. Figure d'expression AficAaei Angelo. ... 20 Voltaire's Staircase Paul Chenavard. ... 27 Example op Symmetrical Composition. Enthroned Virgin Giovanni Bellini, ... 35 A Balanced Composition. The School of Athens Raphael. ... 41 Example of Perspective 50 Example of Physical Perspective 56 Example of Foreshortening • 67 Sketch for an Entombment Raphael. ... 71 Attitude of Prophet Isaiah Michael Angelo. ...17 Attitude of Ahaz Michael Angelo. ... 78 Gestures from " The Last Supper ". . .Leonardo da Vinci. ... 81 The Sacrifice of Abraham Rembrandt. ... 87 Elymas struck with Blindness Raphael. ... 89 Movable Figures in Pieces 95 Study for the " Apollo of Parnassus " Raphael 108 Study FOR the " Virgin " of Francis the Yukst. Raphael.... 11$ The Virgin of Francis the First Raphael. ... 1 16 St. Michael Filippino LAppi 118 The Supper at Emmaus Rembrandt. ... 142 Diagram of Colors 154 Diagrams showing Complementary Colors 163 Neptune Giulio Romano.... iSs The Hut of the Big Tree Rembrandt. . . .211 Mercury and Argus Claude Lorraine. . . .215 Lion Barye. . . .219 Cow Paul Potter. ... 223 Xll LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Pacb Portrait op Bbrtin Ingres. . . .233 Portrait op Sir Thomas More HolMn, . . .235 Vignette 239 Italian Niello 242 Vignette 247 Triton Mantegna. . . .250 St. George Martin Schoen. . . .251 The Nativity. • • • Albert Durer, . . .253 Cleopatra Marc-Anthony. . . .257 Frying Fish Rembrandt. . . .271 A Peasant paying his Scot Ostade. . . .274 Combat prom the " Dance op Death " Holbein. . . .286 From the Lipe op the Virgin Albert DUrer. . . .289 Erasmus Holbein. . . .293 Subjects prom the << Dance op Death" Holbein.... vfj Vignette 321 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. The same motives that induced Charles Blanc to write his " Grammar of Painting and Engraving " led to its translation, — the wish to place in the hands of those who are groping for reasons for the love they feel for the beautiful, a book that should teach them the principles that underlie all works of art ; a book not voluminous enough to alarm, plain and lucid enough to instruct, sufficiently elevated in style to entertain. " For what delights can equal those That stir llie spirit's inner deeps. When one who loves but knows not, Reaps a truth from one who loves and knows." That Charles Blanc knows of what he writes, no one will doubt who follows his eloquent pages in the original. The translator hopes that faithful study and an honest endeavor to prcsciTe the " inexorable clear- ness " of the French idiom, will not so far have failed as to make him unwelcome in an English dress. The complaint of M. Blanc that the art-education of the young is so utterly neglected that later in life they are incapable of judging the works of sculptor or painter, is true here in a sense that cannot be true in France, where, at least in the large towns, the XIV TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. constant presence of the best creations of Grecian and Roman genius, either originals or well-executed copies, are helps to an education that is wholly want- ing to us. There is the greater need that we should learn from books how to judge of works of art, that we may intelligently enjoy them in other lands, and in- telligently choose from among them statues, pictures, prints, for the adorning of our houses, the pleasure of our friends, or the higher purpose of placing in galleries for the instruction and elevation of those who cannot journey far for mental and spiritual food. Histories of art, in all its varied forms of develop)-, ment, histories of all the schools that have sprung up in ancient and modern times, are numerous, as are treatises upon the different branches of the plas- tic arts, but what we especially need is the ABC of Art, and that, it is believed, we must learn, not from its history or its philosophy, but from its gram- mar. And so for this little book we would ask, as the author does for the original, the reader's patient and good-natured attention. TO THE READER. This book aims to instruct. It was written for those who have finished their scholastic studies, and who, at the moment of entering upon active life, de- sire to know its peaceful and poetic side. They are ignorant of the Art of that antiquity whose language they have learned, with whose heroic actions and thoughts they are familiar. But it is in the creations of the artist that the pure essence of the ancient philosophy is deposited ; in them it assumed a tangi- ble form ; in them breathe the gods of Virgil and of Homer, rendered visible by metamorphoses more as- tonishing and more charming than those of Ovid. The art-education of the young is completely null. The proud and brilliant laureate finishes his classical studies without getting the least tincture of it He knows the history of the ancient Greeks, their cap- tains, their orators, and their philosophers ; has read of their intestine quarrels and their grand Persian wars, but he knows neither their sublime ideas upon painting and statuary, nor their adorable marble gods and their divine temples. That public instruction is mute upon questions of Art is, doubtless, because of the predominance of XVI TO THE READER. certain ill understood ideas. Many chaste divinities whose presence elevates and purifies the soul, are re- garded as images enveloping the spirit of evil, and full of dangerous seductions. Hence the aversion of clerical institutions to the pagan arts, a sentiment that in our laic colleges is translated by silence. France, formerly renowned for the excellence of her judgment and the delicacy of her taste, and who has at this moment in her capital the most skilful artists in the world, is, in all that concerns a knowl- edge of Art, one of the most backward nations in Europe. In England, the books that treat of art and the beautiful, are known to every well-educated per- son. Ladies, old and young, have read, either in the originals or in the innumerable reviews that treat of them, the writings of Burke, Hume, Reid, Price, Ali- son, the ingenious " Analyses " of Hogarth, and the grave " Discourses " of Reynolds. In Germany, the most abstract ideas of Art are familiar to an im- mense number of students. This science of the beautiful, or rather this philosophy of the sentiment that Baumgarten called the aesthetic, is taught in all the German universities. The lofty speculations of Kant upon the sublime, the strophes of Schiller upon the ideal, the spirited sketches and the humor- ous paradoxes of Jean Paul, the ideas of Mendel- ssohn, the polemic between Lessing and Winckel- mann, the profound discourses of Schelling, the grand lessons of Hegel, all are understood and dis- cussed by innumerable adepts. At Geneva also, TO THE READER. XVli where there are teachers of aesthetics, the " Reflec- tions " of Toppfer and the " Studies " of Pictet are much better known than the eloquent and luminous pages of Lamennais and Cousin are in France. Here, on the contrary, where Art is living, enters everywhere, attracts and interests everybody, the ability to judge the works of the sculptor or painter seems completely foreign to our public. Official salons and private expositions are crowded with people without ideas, without information, and who, for want of rudimentary instruction, fall headlong into a sea of errors. Every day in the midst of this Paris that believes herself a new Athens, we see per- sons of distinction, naturalized Luculluses, million- aires, and wits, rush to the Hotel Drouot, as if to give a public spectacle of the most monstrous here- sies; to-day indulging a caprice that a thousand boobies will imitate to-mon-ow, running up to scan- dalous amounts the price of screens, chiffons, or dolls by a seventh-rate painter, when the great mas- ters, the august sovereigns of Art, are shamefully cheapened, and finally go out of the country unable to sustain competition with a pretty nothing of Wat- teau. Thus the France of the nineteenth century presents the incredible anomaly of an intellectual nation professing to adore Art, but knowing not its principles, its language, its history, its veritable dig- nity, its true grace. This comes from the education we receive at col- lege. Most young people at the beginning of their b xvm TO THE READER. career, attracted in manifold directions, neglect a study whose first elements have not been taught them. Some who might have had leisure for it hold aloof, from distrust of themselves, for want of proper initiation. The logic of things ought to fill this gap in public instruction. We must either proscribe an- tiquity altogether or remove the veil that covers the most beautiful works of her genius, works that are at the same time the noblest and most elevating. Such a reform would be more profitable to France than many battles, many conquests. We shall not be at the head of the nations till we shall have an- nexed to the domains of our intelligence the beauti- ful province in which flourish the gardens of the ideal. Here let me tell how the idea of the present book was suggested. At dinner one day with the digni- taries of one of the largest cities of France, conver- sation turned upon the Arts. All the guests spoke of them and well, but each intrenched himself be- hind his own personal views by virtue of the adage : •* On ne pent disputer des gouts." In vain I pro- tested against this false principle, saying that, even at table, it was inadmissible, and that a distinguished magistrate, the cXzssXc par excellence of gastronomy — Brillat Savarin, — would have been shocked at such blasphemy. The authority of even his great name was not respected, and the guests separated gayly, af- ter uttering heresies to make one shiver. But among the eminent men of the company, there was one TO THE READER. xix who, somewhat mortified that he had not the most elementally notions of art, asked if there were not some book in which those notions were presented in a form simple, clear, and brief. I replied that, no such book existed, that upon leaving college I should- have been only too happy to find such an one ; that many works had been written upon the beautiful, treatises without number upon architecture and painting, and volumes upon sculpture, but a work covering the ^whole subject, a lucid r&um6 of all ac- \ ceptcd ideas touching the arts of design, was yet to be conceived. Thus was suggested the thought of this book. Embraced at first with enthusiasm, then abandoned, resumed again with new courage, this thought has long germinated in my mind. The difficulties to be encountered were great, for not only must one ren- der a severe account of one s impressions and senti- ments, but he must express himself upon subjects rebellious to all analysis, in a language whose clear- ness is inexorable. It is possible to treat aesthetics under the serviceable veil of the German language, for a people whom the twilight enchants and which is endowed with the faculty of seeing clearly in the dark, but in France, in the midst of a nation of the Latin race, whose indigenous good sense is a perpet- ual irony against drcanici's, how was one to speak of the subjective and the non ego^ of the sublime dynant- ics^ and of all those things which, already sufficiently obscure, demand at least intelligible expressions, a / XX TO THE READER. clear form despoiled of all pedantry, exempt from all triviality. What would Voltaire tliink, what would he say, could he open certain books upon aesthetics published since his day ; if, for instance, he should read in Burke that " the effect 6i the sublime is to deobstruct the vessels, and that of the beautiful to relax the fibres of the body." Imagine what treas- ures of wit and good humor he would have added to his immortal pleasantry. To be clear, was the most difficult, as it was the most imperative duty. The time has passed in which writers can shut themselves up in a sort of Free- masonry, interdicted to the vulgar. Nowadays one must write and speak for the multitude, and if there be a study that should be made easy, is it not the study of beauty and grace ? If I have not shrunk before the difficulties of the task, it was because I was sustained by the love of beautiful things, and the pleasure of making them known, trusting to the good nature of the reader and hoping for his interested attention. The sculptor Puget was accustomed to say, " The marble trem- bles before me." Animated by a very different sen- timent, the author of this book would say, I trem- ble before the marble. THE GRAMMAR OP PAINTING AND ENGRAVING. I. Painting is the art of expressing all the conceptions of the soul, by means of all the realities of nature ; represented upon a smooth surface by their forms and colors. The offspring of a common cradle, Architecture, two arts issued one after the other from the maternal bosom, Sculpture and Painting. The latter in the beginning was nothing more than a coloration of the surfaces of the temple and its reliefs, a coloration symbolic rather than imitative. Later it detached itself from the walls; it became an independent art, living its own life, mobile and free. But even when completely emancipated it played only a secondary role. The art, par excellence^ of mythological an- tiquity was not, could not be, painting ; this we learn by induction, although time has spared us no ancient paintings except those of Pompeii which, in genius and culture, was a Grecian city. Under the empire 1 2 PAINTING. of mythology which referred all creation to man, and recognized in the gods only perfect men, ren- dered immortal by beauty, the favorite, the dominant art, must have been sculpture. Those beautiful re- alities,' the rivers, the mountains, the trees and the flowers, the infinite heaven, the immense sea, were represented only by human forms. The Earth was a woman crowned with towers ; the Ocean and its depths were figured by a boisterous god, followed by tritons and nereids ; its roaring was only the sound of marine shells blown by half-human monsters. The bark of the oak concealed the modest Ham- adryad, the green prairie was a couchant nymph, and Spring herself bore the name and tunic of a young girl. How could painting display its brilliancy and eloquence when Nature, which contains in itself the treasury of light, and in this treasury all the colors of the palette, was wanting to its representations ? What has happened ? By what evolution has painting taken the first place ? It is Christianity which has supplanted sculpture, by placing beauty of soul above that of the body. When a religion full of terror and impregnated with a melancholy poetry succeeded to the serenity of Paganism, the artist found aboye him only an invisible God ; before him troubled and mortal beings. Dethroned from his pedestal, man falls into the midst of the acci- dents, trials, and griefs of life. He is plunged again into the bosom of nature. He wears the costume of the times in which he lives, and, subject to the PAINTING. 3 influences of the sky under which he is born, and the • landscape that surrounds him, he receives their im- \y^ pressions, reflects their colors. The artist will neces- sarily represent the human figure by its peculiar, even accidental characteristics, for this painting will be the most fitting art, because it furnishes to ex- pression immense resources, air, space, perspective, landscape, light and shadow, color. In the domain of Pagan sculpture man was naked, tranquil, and beautiful. In the realm of Christian painting he will be troubled, modest, and clothed. Nakedness now makes him blush, the flesh is a shame to him, and beauty causes fear. Henceforth he will seek his pleasures in the moral world, he will need an expressive art, an art which to touch or charm him borrows all the images of creation. This art is painting. Aiming to express internal senti- ments, painting has not, like sculpture, need of the three dimensions. Faithful to its primitive purpose, ^ which was to decorate walls, it uses only smooth sur- \ faces, plane, concave, or convex ; for appearance suf- fices and must suffice. Why? Because if it were palpable it would become sculpture. The cubic / reality would take from the image its essentially / . spiritual character and shackle the flight of the soul.,'! Framed in real things, its expression would lack unity, would be contradicted by the changing spec- tacle of nature, by the ceaselessly varying light of the sun, and its factitious colors would grow pale, would fade out before those of the colorist, par ex- 4 PAINTING. celUnce. The statue, elevated sometimes upon a pedestal, sometimes upon the capital of a column, or isolated in its niche, which forms a foundation, an abiding place for it, has an independent and separate existence, is a world in itself. Monochrome, it forms a contrast with all the natural colorations which, far from injuring its unity, enhance it, render it more striking. The painter, on the contrary, having to represent not so much situations^ like sculpture, but actions^ and all the infinitely varied scenes that pass upon the stage of life, must choose suitable natural objects to surround his figures, must find means to characterize the landscape and to complete the ex- pression of it, that is to say, the light and the color. Color is in painting an essential, almost indispen- sable element, since having all Nature to represent, the painter cannot make her speak without borrow- ing her language. But here a profound distinction presents itself. Intelligent beings have a language represented by articulate sounds ; organized beings, like animals and vegetables, express themselves by cries or forms, con- tour, carriage. Inorganic nature has only the lan- guage of color. It is by color alone that a certain stone tells us it is a sapphire or an emerald. If the painter can by means of some features give us a clear idea of animals and vegetables, make us recog- nize at once a lion, a horse, a poplar, a rose, it is absolutely impossible, without the aid of color, to show us an emerald or a sapphire. Color, then, is PAINTING. 5 the peculiar characteristic of the lower forms of nature, while the drawing becomes the medium of ex- pression, more and more dominant, the higher we rise in the scale of being. Therefore painting can sometimes dispense with color, if, for example, the inorganic nature and the landscape are insignificant or useless in the scene represented. Thus we find verified, one by one, all the members of our definition, the one being only the corollary of the other. Painting, so oflen and for so long a time defined ''the imitation of nature," had been misunderstood in its essence, and reduced to the r&le filled by the colored photograph. The end has been confounded with the means. Such a definition could not be maintained after the birth of that science of senti- ment which we call aesthetics, after the day in which it became almost an art. .There is now not a single critic, not a single artist, who does not see in nature, not simply a model to imitate, but a theme for the interpretations of his mind. One considers it as a repertoire of pleasing or terrible objects, of gpraceful or imposing forms which will serve him to commu- nicate his emotions, his thoughts. Another com- pares nature to a piano, upon which each painter plays in turn the music that pleases him. But^ nobody would define painting as imitation, and con- 1 found thus the means with the end, the dictionary j with eloquence. If painting were simple imitation, its first duty 6 PAINTING. would be to paint objects in their true dimensions. Colossal figures as well as miniatures would be forbidden, for both are symbols rather than imita- tions, commemorative rather than imitative images. It would condemn the prophets of Michael Angelo as well as the little figures of Terburg and the diminutive pastures of Paul Potter, in which the cattle are no larger than the hand. Dwarfed or en- larged to this point such figures address themselves only to the imagination, forming no part of the real world. The mind alone renders them life-like. If it is true, for instance, that a man or an animal may appear as small as the hand when one perceives them at a great distance, it is also true that the eye sees them indistinctly, but the smaller the objects, the more exactly must they be painted, since they can only be seen near at hand, so that, while nature indicates distance by vagueness of form, the artist neutralizes distance by • precision of form. One readily accepts these agreeable fictions, persuaded that painting is not the pleonasm of reality, but the expression of souls by the imitation of things. Thus it is no longer art which revolves around nature, but nature that revolves around art as the earth around the sun. J II. Without aiming either at utility or morality, painting is capable of elevating the soul of nations by the dignity of its representations, AND OF REFORMING THE MANNERS OF MEN BY ITS VISIBLE LESSONS.. A Greek painter having represented, in one of his pictures, Palamedes put to death by his friends upon the perfidious denunciation of Ulysses, it is related of Alexander the Great, that every time he cast his eyes upon the picture, he trembled and turned pale, because it reminded him tliat he had caused the death of his friend Clitus. This story, which repeats itself every day in life in a thousand ways, makes comprehensible the force of the lessons that painting may contain. Without being either a missionary of ^ religion, a teacher of ethics, or a means of govern- ment, painting improves our morals, because it 1 touches us and can awake in us noble aspirations or salutary remorse. Its figures, in their eternal silence, speak more loudly and emphatically to us than could the living philosopher or moralist — men like ourselves. Their immobility sets our mind in motion. More persuasive than the painter who has created them, they lose the character of a human 8 PAINTING. work because they seem to live a loftier life and to belong to another, to an ideal world. The morality that painting teaches us is so much the more capti- vating because instead of being imposed upon us by the artist it is accepted by ourselves. The spectator respects and admires it, regarding it as his own work. Believing he has discovered it, he willingly submits to it, thinking to obey only his own thought. Thus painting purifies people by its mute elo- quence. Moreover, whatever may be the nature of its images, they always benefit the mind, at first because they address themselves to the mind and excite it, afterwards because in representing to us heroic actions or familiar things, they offer us a choice in life. ** In sculpture," says Joubert, " the expression is all on the surface ; in painting it ought to be within ; in this, beauty is in intaglio ; in relief in that." The philosopher writes his thought for those who can think as he does and who know how to read. The painter shows his thought to all who have eyes to see. That hidden and naked virgin — Truth — the artist finds without seeking. He puts a veil upon her, encourages her to please, proves to her that she is beautiful, and when he has repro- duced her image he makes us take her and he takes her himself for Beauty. In communicating to us what has been felt by others, and what perhaps we should never have felt ourselves, the painter gives new strength and com- pass to the soul. Who knows of how many impres- PAINTING. 9 sionsy fugitive in appearance, the morality of a man is composed, and upon what xlepend the gentleness of his manners, the correctness of his habits, the elevation of his thoughts ? If the painter represents acts of cruelty or injustice, he inspires us with horror. A certain scene in the Inquisition, in which Granet saw only the sombre effect of a dim light, will teach us toleration. A historical episode will tell us better than a book can do what we should admire, what hate. A painting in which one sees young negroes garroted, insulted, whipped, crowded into the hold of vessels, will bring about the abolition of slavery as surely and as quickly as the severest formulas of the law. " The Unhappy Family " of Prud'hon would move all the fibres of charity better than the hom- ilies of the preacher. In a picture, nay, in a simple lithograph without color, Charlet has expressed by the physiognomy and gestures of a child, better still than by the legend written below the print, this sen- timent of childish but exquisite delicacy : " Those to whom we give, we must not waken." A Greuze, a Chardin, without pedantry, counsel peace and hon- esty. Again, let a Dutch painter, a Slingelandt, a Metsu, represent to us, in a picture without figures, the preparations for a modest breakfast which awaits the master and mistress of the house, or only a cage of birds at a window, a bouquet of flowers in a vase, this simple subject has in painting not only a savor that the reality itself would not possess, but an un- expected signification, a moral value. Your thought lO PAINTING. is carried at once towards the delights of the house- hold, of family life. This little spectacle, individual though it be, answers to a general idea, and if it is presented by an artist who has been secretly moved or charmed by it, he will bring a whole world before the eyes of the imagination. You will feel the grace of private life, the ndiveti and tenderness of the domestic hearth, the interchange of affectionate epi- thets, all that the ancients understood by that touch- ing and profound word, house, domus. Retired within a dwelling that has ever some door open towards the ideal, the true artist has generally a morality quite superior to that of ordinary men. We meet at the galleys, in the prisons, on the benches of the assize court, individuals of all profes- sions. One never sees there an artist. " Doubtless the artist is the son of his epoch," says Schiller, in " Letters upon ^Esthetic Education," " but woe to him if he be also the disciple, the favorite of it. Let some beneficent divinity snatch the child early from the bosom of its mother, feed him upon the milk of a better age, and let him grow up and attain his ma- jority under the far-off sky of Greece. Grown to manhood, let him return, a foreigner, to the Present, not to delight it by his appearance, but rather, terri- ble as the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. It is true he will receive his materials from the present, but the form he will borrow from a nobler epoch, and even, outside of time, from the absolute, immutable unity of his own essence. Thence, issuing from the PAINTING. 1 1 pure ether of his celestial nature, flows the source of beauty, that the corruption of generations and ages never disturbs. His material, fancy may dishonor as it has ennobled, but the form, always chaste, es- capes its caprices. For long the Roman of the first century had bent the knee before his emperors, but the statues always stood upright, the . temples re- mained sacred in the eyes of those who jested at the gods, and the noble style of the edifices that sheltered a Nero or a Commodus protested against tlieir infamous, practices. When the human race loses its dignity, it is art which saves it. Truth con- tinues to live in the illusion, and the copy will one day serve to reestablish the model." It is because painting is burdened with no official instruction that she gently forms us anew, makes us better. The law is less obeyed because it enforces obedience, moral teachers less heeded because they command. Art knows how to persuade, knowing how to please. • « /" III. Painting has umits that literal imitation may restrict, that fiction widens, but the mind alone can elevate. Whatever may be the extent of its domain, and it is immense, painting has limits. These are not marked by a trenchant line, they insensibly rhelt Into each other and are lost in the other arts whose frontiers begin before its are reached. More exact than music, painting defines sentiments and thoughts by visible forms and colors, but it cannot, like music, transport us into the ethereal regions, the impene- trable worlds. Less ponderous than sculpture and less the slave of the material used, it addresses itself to the mind by simple semblances, conquers space by means of a fiction, but not having the three di- mensions of extension, cannot render beauty palpable to us, make it live in the midst of us, under the sun that enlightens us, and in the air that we breathe. Painting holds the middle place between sculpture that we can see and touch, and music that we can neither see nor touch. Limited to the presentation of a single action of life, and in that action to a single moment, the painter has, it is true, the liberty of choosing ; but PAINTING. 1 3 this liberty is not without limits, his choice is not unrestricted. If the limits of motion are infinitely broader for the painter than for the sculptor, he must avoid exaggerated, convulsive movements, as these offend the beholder in a representation that is to be lasting. The same is true of movements whose duration is offensive. It is unseemly to paint the portrait of a man bursting with laughter. The reason is apparent Laughter is accidental, and if admissible in a composition that suggests it, where it does not fill the entire picture, it is repugnant to us to see a play of the muscles so fleeting, forever characterize a face, and immortalize itself upon the canvas, to impose upon us forever its stereotyped and unvarying grimace. On the contrary, in the portrait of a sad woman or a melancholy poet, there is nothing to displease, because sadness is less trans- itory in life than the burst of laughter, and the one, more in harmony with the permanent state of the soul, leads us back to it gently and without effort, while the other draws us from it abruptly and often with violence. There is after all nothing sadder than to have ever present the image of extravagant gayety, imprinted on the portraits of those who have ceased to live or who will soon be among our an- cestors. Thus painting does not always express all it is capable of expressing, does not pass to the limits of its domain. Doubtless, paroxysms of passion are not forbidden to it, but it shows greater skill to 14 FAINTING. suggest than to paint them. Diderot, the most im- petuous and the boldest of critics, has. shown that painting becomes greater by imposing narrower limits upon itself, and that, instead of representing a tragic denouemeni, it is more fitting to announce it by indicating in the present action the moment that has preceded and that which is to follow. Suppose the painter wishes to represent the sacrifice of Iphi- genia, should he place before our eyes the gaping and bloody wound which the knife of the priest has ' just opened? No, horror would be changed to dis- gust. But if he appeals to us at the moment the tragedy is preparing, if he paints "the victimarius who approaches with the wide basin that is to receive the blood of Iphigenia," he -will thrill us with horror and delight, because the spectacle, as yet not being horrible, the horror of it will be imagined instead of seen. Each will conceive and feel it according to the constitution of his own mind. A remarkable thing, which, however, I believe 1 has not been noticed, is that the domain of paint- ' \ \ ing ends just where the illusion of the senses ought to begin. It is certainly not unexampled that a picture should deceive the eye, at . least for a moment. A Teniers, a Chardin, could paint a cake, a loaf of bread, oysters on the shell, in a way to excite the sensation of hunger. Velasquez has ' proven in his famous picture of the " Wine Drink- ers," and in that of the " Aguador," or water-carrier of FAINTING. 1 5 Seville, that he could imitate a glass of water or one of wine in a way to excite thirst, and, for a moment, deceive the eye. Nevertheless, if the painter's ambition rested there, if he sought such triumphs of deception, he would soon pass the limits of his art. Admit that, to increase the illu- sion, he may add a factitious light to the light of day, let him light up his picture artificially from before or behind by means of certain transparencies, the illusion would be heightened, and the imitation having reached its utmost limit, would perhaps for the moment produce a greater impression than the reality itself. But we are no longer in the field of painting. Optical and physical phenomena, mingled with the resources of art, have made of the picture a diorama. But what happens? This astonishing illusionf produces at last almost the effect of wax figures,' You see before you a real church, illuminated and filled with people, but they are motionless, and the church is silent as the desert. Or you are shown a real landscape, a Swiss view, over which your eye runs, which bristles with firs and rocks and is washed by a lake full of freshness, but this land- scape that passes through all the changes of light, from dawn till sunset, contains only dead figures, cattle that neither live nor move, and boats frozen in a lake of lead. • The greater the truth, the more ^ the falsehood betrays itself; the more deceitful the painting, the less it deceives us. . After a moment's 1 6 PAINTING. contemplation we comprehend nothing of this church in which priest and people seem to have been struck with paralysis; this resplendent choir in which no light shines, no shadow moves, we find unlifelike; impossible this Swiss landscape, in which, at all hours of the day, the figures are changed to statues, the animals glued to the ground. By a singular return of truth, the illusion which deceived us is precisely that which undeceives us. So true it is that man is powerless to imitate inimitable nature, and that in the art of the painter natural objects are introduced not to represent themselves but to represent a conception of the artist. So true is it, finally; that the semblance is a means of expression agreed upon rather than an absolutely imitative proceeding, since the last step in imitation is pre- cisely that in which it no longer signifies anything. . The role, then, that fiction plays in art is im- portant; but fortunately, fiction, instead of restricting the limits of art, enlarges, extends them. As upon the stage we have agreed to hear Cinna or Britan- nicus express themselves in French, so we allow the artist to paint upon his canvas a flying figure, or draw upon a vase in imitation of the Greeks, such or such figures incompatible with all illusion, all verisimilitude, as, for example, fauns and bac- chantes that walk on the air without support, whose pure silhouettes, full of natural grace, move, flattened on a monochrome background, without chiaro ^scuro and without relief. PAINTING. 17 Everybody knows the story, that has been re- peated to weariness, of the Greek painter who imitated a basket of grapes skillfully enough to deceive the birds. There is in this fable an es- sential and significant feature, a feature unnoticed, and that Lessing has recalled in the " Laocoon." The basket in the picture of Zeuxis was carried by a young boy. But the painter might have said : " I have spoiled my master-piece ; if I had executed the child as well as the grapes, the birds would not have come near the basket for fear of the boy." It was only a vain scruple of modesty ; one might have consoled Zeuxis by saying to him : Your figure painted with all possible truth would not have frightened the birds, because the eyes of animals see only what they see; man, on the con- trary, looking at a painting, fancies movement in immobility, reality in appearance. What his eye does not see, he perceives in the depths of that dark chamber we call imagination. Man alone has the privilege of being seduced, deceived by a secret connivance of his thought with that of the painter. Admirable illusion, which, without cheating the eye, gives change to the mind. Marvelous falsehood, which, by the complicity of our soul, moves us more forcibly than truth, like those dreams which are sometimes more sorrowful, sometimes more charming than life itself. IV. Although painting is the expressive art, par excellence, it is not limited in character, it can unite expression to beauty in idealizing its figures by style, that is to say by manifesting typical truth in living individuauties. There exists between expression and beauty an immense interval and even an apparent cdntra- diction. The interval is that which separates Christianity from antiquity. The contradiction con- sists in this, that pure beauty — I speak here of plastic beauty — does not readily harmonize with instantaneous changes of countenance, with the infinite variety of individual physiognomy, and with the endless mobility of the same physiognomy un- dergoing the innumerable impressions of life, and passing from serenity to terror, from gayety to sad- ness, from the grimaces of laughter to the con- tortions of grief. The stronger the expression, the more physical beauty is sacrificed to moral beauty. That is why pagan sculpture is so measured in its expression. Instead of concentrating it upon the face which it would have disfigured, the sculptor lets it per- meate the whole figure ; he puts it in the gesture. PAINTING. 19 which is the expression of the soul in movement, or in the attitude which is its expression in re- pose. The frightful cries uttered by Laocoon in the grasp of the serpents, the antique sculptor has reduced to sighs, that he might not disfigure the features of his hero; but the poet has reproduced these cries, clamorcs horrcndos^ and the painter can represent them, but he must restrain himself within certain limits if he wishes to choose the side of dignity and grandeur. He must idealize his figure by style. ■ What do these words signify? For the painter as for the sculptor, to give style to a figure, is to impress a typical character upon that which would only present an individual truth. Thus painting, when it aims at style, has a tendency to draw near to sculpture. But between the two arts there is a sensible difference. An animated expression that might be represented upon canvas would be shock- ing in marble. It is repugnant to the sculptor to express certain vices which by their baseness would make the face ugly; but the painter can depict them. Yet, to preserve the conditions of style, he must seek generic accents. If, for example, he wishes to paint a hypocrite, this hypocrite must have all the traits of hypocrisy, must appear to us, not as a Tartuffe, but as Tartuffe himself. Vile instincts, gross sensuality, lechery, drunken- ness, all that makes man like the brute, sculpture dared not represent in the human face; therefore antique genius sought in the depths of the water tritons and syrens, in the woods the goat-footed satyr, the sylvan faun and the centaur. Tlic great artists of antiquity would not mar the beauty of man by the signs of degrading passions, they con- tented themselves with sculpturing human vices in the precursors of humanity, in those beings not yet enfranchised from original bestiality, that were nevertheless respected, as savage ancestors, as the imperfect and mysterious gods of primitive nature. PAINTING. 2 1 But what sculpture refused to immortalize in marble or bronze, what she would not render pal- pable, the painter traces upon canvas, because instead of presenting tangible bodies, the canvas presents only impalpable images; instead of offer- ing us the thickness of things she offers only the mirage. Real, ugliness is forbidden to sculpture; apparent^ painting does not reject the ugly, be- cause it has a thousand means of mitigating its expression, of rendering it acceptable by the pres- tige of light and the language of color, by accom- panying circumstances, by the choice of accessories. When Raphael introduced deformity into a work of style, as in the famous cartoon, " The Cure of the Lame Man " at the gate of the temple, he redeems and elevates it by effacing the purely accidental features, which would but impoverish the composi- tion, to insist upon decisive, characteristic features. Seen on a grand scale, the deformities of nature! lose their miserable aspect, and may appear in the I ' loftiest representations of painting, whether trans- figured by the soul of the artist or used as a striking contrast to beauty itself. Style, then, in the art of the painter is not exactly what it is in the art of the sculptor. One adores beauty to such an extent as to fear expression, which he lessens; the other seeks expression, not even rejecting ugliness, which he idealizes. V. Painting can elevate itself to the subume, but by the invention of the artist rather than by the appliances peculiar to his art, If the sublime be, as it were, a view of the in- finite, it would seem that the arts of design, which are compelled to imprison every idea in a form, cannot be sublime. It may happen nevertheless that the painter, moved by thoughts to which he has given no form, strikes the soul as a thunder- bolt would the ear. It is then by virtue of the thought perceived but not formulated that the pic- ture becomes sublime. Examples are rare. With regard to the sublime, Rembrandt was the Shakespeare of painting. The Gospel several times inspired him with ideas which have been rendered by no contour and are indi- cated only by the impalpable expression of light. There is a hasty sketch by this great painter, in bistre, of "The Supper at Emmaus." The artist wished to translate the passage of Scripture, " Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he disappeared from before themr In the drawing of Rembrandt the figure of Christ is absent, and upon the seat from which he has just vanished, . PAINTING. 2 3 we see only a fantastic and mysterious light. Aston- ished, frightened at the disappearance of their guest and the appearance of this light, the two disciples devour with their eyes the vacant and illuminated seat where a moment before they touched the hand of a friend, heard his voice, and broke bread with him. Is not that a stroke of sublimity, that im- palpable light expressing at once a vanished God, an invisible God? Nicholas Poussin touched the sublime when he conceived one of his most celebrated pictures, " The Shepherds of Arcadia." In a wild, woody country, the sojourn of the happiness sung by the poets, shepherds walking with their loves have discovered under a thicket of trees a tomb, with this half effaced inscription, Et in Arcadia ego (I, too, lived in Arcadia). These words issuing from the tomb sadden their faces and the smiles die upon their lips. A young woman, nonchalantly leaning upon the shoulder of her lover, remains mute, pensive, and seems to listen to this salutation from the dead. The idea of death has also plunged into a reverie a youth who leans over the tomb, with bowed head, while the oldest shepherd points out with his finger the inscription he has just discovered. The land- scape that completes this quiet and silent picture shows reddened leaves upon the arid rocks, hillocks that are lost in the vague horizon, and afar off some- thing ill-defined is perceived that resembles the sea. The sublime in this picture is just that which one 24 PAINTING. does not see ; it is the thought that hovers over it, the unexpected emotion that fills the soul of the specta- tor, transported suddenly beyond the tomb, into the infinite unknown. Some words engraved upon mar- ble are here the only form, the only sign of the sub- lime. The painter remains, as it were, a stranger to the moral shock the philosopher has wished to im- press upon us. A greater painter than Poussin, \ Rembrandt was able, in some sort, to bring the sub- j lime within the appliances of his art in expressing it by light. It is moreover with poetry as with painting. The touches of genius of a Shakespeare, a Corneille, as well as the grand passages of Scripture, have no form, or have one in which art plays no r&le ; hence they can be translated into all the languages of the world. Emanating from the sentiment of the infi- nite, the sublime in painting could not be attached to a form, girdled by a contour. Whether it burst forth in the work of Rembrandt, or is divined in the picture of Poussin, the sublime is intangible as light, invisible as the soul. VI. The methods peculiar to painting force them- selves UPON THE ARTIST AS SOON AS HE INVENTS HIS SUBJECT, AND CONCEIVES THE FIRST IMAGE OF IT. The aim of the arts of design being to manifest the beautiful, to render it visible and palpable, the plastic or representative form is essential, peculiar to them. For painting, especially, the means are optical, because it translates sentiments and ideas upon a smooth surface, and its images, merely appearances, do not depend upon the touch, which is the sight of the body, but upon sight, which is the touch of the soul. To invent, for the painter, is to imaginey to bring before his eyes the persons and things that he evokes in his imagination, under the empire of a sentiment that animates him, or a thought that besets him. Here the grandeur of painting is at once attested by the first of its laws, which is to choose the sentiments or thoughts it will express, the figures it will repre- rcscnt, the theatre of action, the character of the accompanying objects. The poet, the writer, know of no monster so odious that art cannot make pleas- ing to the eye^ because the eyes to which poetry 26 PAINTING. speaks are those of the mind ; but the painter of igno- ble spectacles does not relate them ; he shows them, and having but an instant in which to show them, his images strike us without warning, without preface ; they are not only ignoble, but coarse ; they disgust us. The first law, then, of painting, is to .avoid hideous or repulsive subjects. Many people, it is true, affect to think that all sub- jects are good, and there is nothing ignoble in paint- ing ; that there are no gluttons, no baboons that the wit of Teniers does not make pleasing, that there is no dirty vagabond under the pencil of Brauwer, that Ostade interests us in the deformed, or rather un- formed peasants that dance in a cabaret with the elegance of bears, — but, if we admit this, we must add that painters are not ignoble when they do not intend to be so, or when their representations are redeemed by a stroke of satire. When Brauwer seeks vagrants in their cellars to imitate their horri- ble grimaces, and their red, drunken faces ; when he so sympathetically paints them vomiting wine and insults, he employs a talent full of warmth, delicacy, and harmony, to make us pardon what he wishes to make us admire. As soon as he chooses a subject, the artist should think of the picturesque and distrust the literary beauties which may have charmed him in the books or recitals that have inspired it. What a painter should borrow from a poet, is not what he has read in his poems, but what he has^^^;^; the living, acting idea, the sentiment when it becomes movement. PAINTING. 29 Suppose a iDainter wishes to express what he has heard, or has thought himself, that Voltaire is the . personification of the eighteenth century, that all proceeds from his genius and is to be absorbed in it again, that he is the centre whence issue and to which return all the rays of philosophy. How could he give a picturesque form to an idea so metaphysical, so abstract? An artist who excels in invention has solved this problem in the happiest, the most admir- able manner, in one of those cartoons ordered by the State, in 1848, for the monumental decoration of the French Pantheon. This cartoon represents " The Staircase of Voltaire." We see ascending and de- scending all the philosophers of the times, all distin- guished for intelligence, with the exception of Rous- seau, who, in the eighteenth century, was the precursor of ours. Placed at the top of the stair-way, Voltaire is dismissing one of his visitors, d'Alembert, to whom he gives an article for the " Encyclopaedia." Upon a lower step Diderot awaits the termination of the adieus to accompany d'Alembert Thus are formu- lated in vivid images, in speaking figures, speculations of the mind that one might have thought foreign to painting, and it is by methods peculiar to it, that painting has expressed them, by making them visible, giving them a body. In this same scries of cartoons in which picturesque invention abounds, and which were to form a univer- sal histoiy and palingenesis of the human race, the author, Paul Chenavard, has consecrated one of the 30 PAIN17NG. grandest compositions to the obscure beginnings of Christianity, when the new god was noiselessly sapping the foundations of pagan Rome. This vast scene is divided into two horizontal zones. In the upper, filled with sunlight, passes the pompous and noisy cort6ge of a triumphant Caesar, with his lictors, his generals, his trophies, his conquered prisoners, his eagles, and his elephants. The lower zone, silent and dark, rep- resents the first Christians at prayer in the Catacombs, which they have dug like a tomb under the steps of the conqueror, and in which the Roman Empire will soon be broken up. It is impossible to relate history more clearly and vividly by the figurative language of art, mute language that engraves itself upon the memory of peoples in ineffaceable lines, like the elo- quence of the Athenian orator which left its needles in the heart. Invention is a rare quality among painters, rare even among the great masters. Leonardo da Vinci, that investigating genius, profoundly inquisitive, a prey to all the disquietudes of his art, advised his pupils to look sometimes attentively at the accidental spots upon old walls, the jaspered stones, the veins of marble, the shadings, as things offering to an idle imagination singular combinations of lines and forms and unexpected vtotives. Generally when they invent, painters only find, tnvenire, in fable, poetry, religion, history, subjects already invented by the poets, already illustrated and consecrated by tradition. As if imagination were a faculty rather Northern and PAINTING. 3 1 Germanic, there have been few inventors more pow- erful than Albert Diirer and Rembrandt Moreover, it has been agreed to regard as an invention of the painter, every new manner of conceiving a known subject. Why are the men of the North more inventive ?' Perhaps because they are more habituated to interior life, to meditation, reflection. Solitude is imperative to facilitate that prolonged attention, that persistent and profound meditation, which are the source of great thoughts, because, little by little, warming the mind, they end by enkindling enthusiasm. As a miser ever finds opportunities for acquisition, because always thinking of it, so the artist can find means of enrich- ing his mind if his thoughts are ever thus directed. Meditation is precisely what the painters of to-day lack. Impatient to produce, urged on, eager to fol- low the breathless march of a civilization driven by steam, they do not give themselves time to meditate, and that in an art for which all the men of genius have worked as if they had no genius. " Painting," said Michael Angelo, " is a jealous Muse ; she desires lovers who give themselves up to her without reserve, with undivided heart." Again, whether he invent his motives^ or discovers them in a poet, or renews them from the ancients, the painter ought to conceive them in vivid figures, and, drawing them from the vague obscurity in which im- agination perceives them, make them visible, pal- pable. If he is not the first creator of his thought, 32 PAINTING. he ought to recreate it by rendering that which was poetical picturesque, by making a representation what was only an idea, a sentiment or a dream. Thus from the moment of the birth of invention the art of the painter is distinguished from all other arts. For the pleasure of citing a hemistich of Hor- ace the resemblance of painting to poetry has too often been affirmed. It is fitting, in this book, to show, not only the bonds that unite them, but the limits that separate them. VIL The first means the painter uses to express IIIS THOUGHT IS arrangement. One day when Prud'hoti was dining at the table of M. Frochot, prefect of the Seine, that magistrate expressed the desire that Prud'hon should paint a picture to hang in the hall where the assizes of the criminal court were held, and, in speaking of the effect to be produced upon the accused, he quoted these verses of Horace : — ** Raro antecedentem scelestum Deseruit pede poena claudo." " It is seldom that limping punishment does not overtake the criminal it pursues." At once Prud'hon rose and asked permission to trace with a pen the desired picture, of which the whole arrangement had presented itself to his im- agination. With the eyes of his thought he saw the flying criminal, antecedentem scelestum^ and Justice appeared to him, not limping as the poet represents her, but cleaving the air in rapid flight and accom- panied by another winged figure, divine Vengeance. Prud'hon did not invent the subject, but he invented 3 34 PAINTING. the arrangement, and he invented it with the genius of a painter, by transfiguring the written image, giv- ing it wings, instead of crutches. In a moment he had indicated the great lines, sketched the figures and their drapery, represented their pantomime, bal- anced the masses, arranged the picture. Such are the operations that constitute what we mean by arrangement, and what we also call composition ; but this latter word, whose signification is more extended, includes the invention of the painter and the econ- omy of his picture, to such an extent that it is often used as a synonym of the picture itself. In its more restricted acceptation, the composition is only the arrangement, that is to say, the art of putting in order the elements of the picture, of disposing them, combining them, or, if one pleases, of distrib- uting the roles to the actors of the drama, for the Greeks called the composition the drama of the painter, that is the niise en scenes without which the composition alone would be the whole painting. Two things are to be observed and reconciled in the arrangement, — its optical beauty, that which re- sponds to the pleasure of the eyes, and its moral or poetical beauty, that which touches the feelings. The first of these would be the most important, and might almost suffice if the composition were purely decorative, as would be, for instance, a painting rep- resenting the pleasures of the harvest or the vintage. But if the picture appeals to the mind or heart, if it aims to excite the passions, the moral character of the (Aoidcnijr of Vtuici.) PAINTING, 37 arrangement should take precedence of the pictur- esque, which ought pitilessly to be sacrificed to the expression if it is impossible to obtain both, to strengthen one by the other. " Touch me, astonish me, rend me, make me tremble, weep, shiver, anger me, you may gratify my eyes afterwards if you can." So said Diderot. In the Gothic ages, when art was still in its infancy, painters scarcely knew of more than one arrange- ment, — symmetry ; and there were several reasons for this naive arrangement : first, the timid ignorance of the early painters, who would have been embar- rassed at a complicated composition, afterwards a sort of pious ingenuousness and respect for sacred subjects ; for there is in symmetry something sacra- mental and religious, because it corresponds to a sentiment of immobility, of meditation and silence. Besides it was not by movement and life that the arts began. The first pictures, as well as the first statues, have a stiffness, a grave and quiet look that, by means of symmetry, becomes solemn. In the human body, which is perfectly symmetrical, the symmetry is apparent only when it is rigid and motionless. As soon as the human figure moves, the symmetry is broken by the movement, and in the foreshortenings of perspective it escapes notice. The figure, however, does not lose its symmetry ; what was a coldly rigid regularity is replaced by another kind of symmetry, which is equilibrium. The same phe- nomenon manifests itself in art. As soon as it has 38 PAINTING. attained maturity, feels itself bold* and strong, it aban- dons symmetrical compositions and substitutes for them equilibrium. Instead of arranging its figures in equal number, to right and left of the centre, paint- ing introduces a certain balancing of corresponding masses, compensates for the similitude of lines and figures by the opposition of equivalent groups, so that under the appearance of a facile liberty the composi- tion maintains its equilibrium, and the eye, secretly charmed, takes pleasure in the variety of the arrange- ment, without perceiving the artificial and concealed symmetry of it. This happens at the moment of vi- rility, when painting advances from Giovanni Bellini to Titian, from Verocchio to Leonardo, from Ghirlan- dajo to Michael Angelo, from Perugino to Raphael. Of this transition from traditional and measured art to free and vigorous painting we may see an illus- trious example in one of the stanze of the Vatican. Opposite the " Disputa," of which the upper part is arranged according to the laws of the primitive regu- larity, Raphael has painted " The School of Athens," which is not only a chef cTosuvre of invention, draw- ing, style, and expression, but is an incomparable masterpiece of composition, the last expression of genius in arrangement. At the first look it is a fine disorder of figures that seem grouped by chance meetings or isolated by chance. There is such perfect verisimilitude in the manner in which the groups are separated from and yet united with each other, the gaps are so naturally PAINTING. 39 filled or so happily managed, that one scarcely sus- pects the intervention of art, in a combination nev- ertheless so well meditated and so wise. Not hav- ing put any apparent symmetry in the order of the figures where it ought to be broken by life and movement, Raphael has put it in the immovable things, the architecture and the statues, to redeem by the solidity of the foundation the simulated disorder of the picturesque arrangement. In addition, Raphael has supposed the spectator placed in the axis of the vaulted edifice which shelters this imaginary reunion of all the Greek philosophers. But as no one personage should dominate in so august an assemblage, presided over by the invisible spirit of Philosophy itself, no figure is placed upon the median line that passes between Plato and Aristotle, the two geniuses who will forever dispute the empire of souls, because one personifies sentiment, the other reason. This is not the place to notice the exquisite propri- ety with which all these heroes of the old world of in- telligence are characterized ; Pythagoras writing his harmonic tables, Epicurus crowned with vine leaves, the grave Heraclitus, the cynical Diogenes, Socrates arguing, Plato indoctrinating his own enthusiasm, Aristotle explaining experiments, the Pyrrhonian smiling at his doubts, the Eclectic gathering up his notes, Archimedes tracing on the ground his geo- metric problems, the astrologer Zoroaster, the geog- rapher Ptolemy. If one considers onlv the beauty of 40 PAINTING. the arrangement, " The School of Athens" is a model forever admirable of the art that Raphael has inau- gurated, of multiplying figures without confusion, of peopling a canvas without overloading it, of securing equilibrium without symmetry, and of diffusing unity, without destroying it, in a charming variety. Unity, that is the true secret of all composition. But what is unity with respect to arrangement? It signifies that in the choice of the great lines a certain character should govern, that in the disposition of the parts there should be a dominant. Why? Because if man has two eyes he has only one sight, and he has only one sight because he has but one soul. Straight or curved, horizontal or vertical, parallel or divergent, all the lines have a secret relation to the sentiment. In the spectacles of the world as in the human figure, in painting as in architecture, the straight lines correspond to a sentiment of austerity and force, and give to a composition in which they are repeated a grave, imposing, rigid aspect The horizontals, which express, in nature, the calm- \ ness of the sea, the majesty of far-off horizons, the vegetal tranquillity of the strong, resisting trees, the quietude of the globe, after the catastrophes that have upheaved it, motionless, eternal duration — the horizontals in painting express analagous sentiments, the same character of eternal repose, of peace, of du- ration. If such are the sentiments the painter wishes to evoke in us, if such is the character he wishes to stamp upon his work, the horizontal lines should I PAINTING. 43 dominate in it, and the contrast of the other lines, instead of attenuating the accent of horizontality will render it still more striking. Witness " The Testa- ment of Eudamidas;" in it Poussin has repeated the horizontal lines. Lying upon his death-bed, the citi- zen of Corinth forms the dominant line of the arrange- ment. The lance of the hero repeats this line and, prostrate like him, seems condemned to the repose of its master and to affirm a second time his death. The figures of the physician, the mother, and the scribe are here opposed to the horizontal, but the contrast has a little too much importance, and in disputing the principal disposition enfeebles the unity. Look now at "The Life of Saint Bruno," by Lesueur, in that admirable series of naive and touch- ing pictures. The solemnity of the religious senti- ment, which is an ascending aspiration, is expressed in it by the dominant repetition and parallelism of the verticals ; and this parallelism, which would be only monotony if the painter had had other person- ages to put upon the canvas, becomes an expressive repetition, where it is necessary to render apparent the respect and uniformity of the monastic rule, the silence, meditation, renunciation of the cloister. If it is necessary to represent a terrible idea, — for instance, that of the last judgment; if one wishes to recall the memory of a violent action, like the rape bf the Sabines or Pyrrhus saved, such subjects demand lines vehement, impetuous, and moving. Michael An- 44 FAINTING. gelo covers the wall of. the Sistine Chapel with con- trasting and flamboyant lines. Poussin torments and twists his in the pictures of " Pyrrhus Saved " and the " Sabines," and the linear modes employed by these masters are examples of the law to be followed, that of bringing back with decision to their domi- nant character the whole of the great lines, that is to say, the first means of expression, arrangement. Those were very futile and false ideas which pre- vailed in the schools of painting from the end of the sixteenth century, thanks to the imitators, without genius, of the genius of Michael Angelo. According to their notions there should always and everywhere be contrast; the lines, the angles, the groups, the movements, the attitudes, the limbs, all ought to combat, contradict each other, for the sake of a bril- liant variety, whose effect, while amusing the eye by oppositions, was to corrupt the eternal principle of unity. Monstrous abuse 1 Even the impetuous Diderot was shocked at it, and saw in this ill-under- stood and continual contrast " one of the most fatal causes of mannerism." There was a time when the pyramidal arrangement was set up as a principle by the rhetors of art, and it was insisted upon for the groups as well as for the entire picture. There is nothing more dangerous than this pretended principle, for the pyramid con- tains two contrary elements, the horizontal and the perpendicular. But, from the moment that these lines have a language that appeals to the sentiment, a PAINTING. 45 moral signification, it is not fitting to leave the look uncertain between these two directions ; the one must dominate the other so that the horizontal shall govern if the pyramid is very obtuse, and the vertical if it is very acute. In the " Piece of a Hundred Florins," a celebrated print of Rembrandt, in which Jesus Christ is represented healing the sick, the composition is developed decidedly in width, and the horizontal di- rection triumphs over the pyramid formed by the figure of Christ with the groups of sick that implore help. The " Transfiguration " of Raphael, so often criti- cised as containing two pictures in one frame, betrays a second time this faulty arrangement, which is made still more apparent, by opposing to the pyramidal mass of the upper group the horizontal mass formed by the possessed of the devil and. the apostles. It is evident that the want of unity, which for once escaped the notice of the great master, becomes more striking by the unfortunate choice of two contrary arrangements, which add optical duality to moral duality. Suppose, however, the painter wishes to represent an Assumption of the Virgin, an Ascension of Jesus Christ, the transport of a saint, an apotheosis, or any other subject that naturally demands the pyramidal disposition, the unity would not be lost, if the whole of the composition, drawn as a lengthened oval, should be finished in the lower portion as a reversed pyramid. Raphael, who in spite of the instances quoted, is the master pixr excellence^ in arrangement, has thus com- V 46 PAINTING. posed the " Sistine Madonna," by opposing to the pyramidal lines of the heavenly apparition the very narrow base formed by the two cherubs grouped in the middle of the lower plinth which forms the sup- port of an open window upon the balcony. Whether one considers the optical beauty of the arrangement, or regards it as the rough draught of the expression, unity is the one principle, the true secret. As Montabert has judiciously written {TraOe compkt de Petnture), we must not say to the painter : " Compose pyramidally, stuff up the holes, do not leave gaps, avoid angles and parallels, seek contrasts ; " we should say : " Compose according to your feeling, but whatever your combinations, bring back the lines, the groups, the masses, the directions, the dimensions to the unity you may have chosen, and have felt." By unity, the artist can make all methods of arrang- ing a picture successful: the convex that pleased Rubens and Correggio, which brings the principal figures into relief; the concave, employed by Raphael in the " Disputa," which is another way of concentrat- ing the looks ; the diagonal, as in the " Descent from the Cross " of Rubens, which arrests the attention by an unforeseen obliquity ; and the strange distributions of Rembrandt, which, dictated by the emotion of genius, seem to address themselve$ only to the eye of the soul. That the forms of the border ought to be indicated by the dominant line of the picture, is a truth often misunderstood and nevertheless so apparent that it PAINTING. 47 seems superfluous to insist upon it. A couchant Cleopatra, a sleeping Ariadne, forming a horizontal, would be badly placed in an upright frame. At Ver- sailles there are piers, very long vertically, filled with military subjects whose horizontality is in shocking contradiction to the form of the panel. Everybody knows, from the print of Pradier, the beautiful com- position of Ingres, " Virgil reading the iEneid." The painter intended to represent it horizontally, but when it occurred to him to put in the background the statue of Marcellus, lifting itself before the eyes of Livy, as the spectre of remorse evoked by the verse, " Tu Marcellus eris," the whole idea of the composition was changed, and the height became dominant, that the proportions of the picture might conform to the new direction taken by the thought of the painter, indicated by the poetic apparition of this phantom of marble, vaguely repeated by its shadow on the wall of the palace of Caesar. VIII. m Although the painter who composes his pic- ture OUGHT certainly TO BE ACQUAINTED WITH THE LAWS OF PERSPECTIVE AND SUBMIT TO THEM, THE OBSERVANCE OF THESE LAWS ALLOWS SUFFICIENT PLAY OF SENTIMENT. The painter having to hollow fictitious depths upon a smooth surface, and to give to these depths the same appearance they would have in nature, must of necessity know the laws of perspective, that is, the science of apparent lines and colors. In accordance with the manner in which the eye is formed, the height and size of all objects diminish in proportion to the distance whence they are seen, and all lines parallel to the visual ray seem to con- verge towards the point of the horizon to which the looks are directed. Some are lowered, others elevated, and all unite together at the point upon a level with the eye, which is called the point of sight. Again, in proportion to the distance of objects from us, the contour becomes less marked, the form more vague, and the color paler, less decided. What was angular becomes rounded, what was brilliant loses color, the layers of air interposed between the things FAINTING. 49 looked at and the eye that sees them, are like a veil that renders them confused, and if the atmos- phere is thick and loaded with vapor, the confusion increases and the spectacle is lost. These two phe- nomena — the convergence of sloping lines and the gradation of colors — have given rise to the distinc- tion of two kinds of perspective, in painting, linear and aerial. The latter is imposed upon the painter only when he finishes his picture ; when he puts in, with the colors, the lights and shadows ; we shall speak of it when we come to consider chiaro 'scuro, coloring and touch. The artist, at the moment in which he arranges his picture, that is to say, at the moment in which he assigns to each figure and to each object the place it is to occupy, takes into ac- count only linear perspective. Now what is a pic- ture, properly so called, in painting ? It is the rep- resentation of a scene of which the whole can be embraced at one glance. Man having but one soul, his two eyes give him but one view. Unity, then, is essential to every spectacle that addresses itself to the soul. If the wish be simply to amuse by optical artifices and to excite the curiosity of the spectator by procuring for him, in a series of varied scenes, the pleasures of a momentary and material illusion, unity is no longer necessary, because the artist, in- stead of conceiving a picture, is arranging the ma- chinery of a panorama. On the contrary, as soon as the painter wishes to express a thought or awake a sentiment, it is indispensable that the action should 4 / 50 PAINTING. be one, that is to say, that all parts of the picture should concur in one dominant action. But unity of action is inseparable from unity of place, and unity "I I I of place involves unity of the visual point, without which the spectator, drawn in different directions, would be as if trans]>orted to several places at the same time. It seems, then, that unity is more neces* PAINTING. 5 1 sary in a poem of images and colors than in a writ- ten poem or tragedy, because in painting the place is immovable, the time indivisible, and the action in- stantaneous. That determined, how shall the artist submit to the unity of one point of sight the scene that his. imagination has invented, or that it evokes by mem- ory ? Experience teaches us that our eyes can take in an object at one look only at a distance equal to about three times the greatest dimension of the ob- ject For instance, to see at one glance a stick a yard long, we must, if endowed with ordinary sight, place ourselves at a distance of three yards. Sup- pose the painter looks at a landscape from the win- dow of his room, the objects presented to his view will be so numerous and will occupy so vast an ex- tent that he will be obliged to turn his head and run his eye over the landscape to see, one after another, the different points. If he retires into the chamber the extent will diminish, and if the window be a yard wide and he withdraws to a distance of three yards, this distance will furnish the measure of the space he can take in at one look. The window will form the frame of his picture ; and if we suppose that instead of canvas or paper, it is a single square of glass that fills the aperture, and that the artist with a long pen- cil could sketch upon the glass the contour of the objects as they present themselves, his sketch would be the exact representation of the landscape which 52 FAINTING. will be drawn according to the rules of perspective, since the perspective will draw itself. Hence, a draughtsman with a trained, a correct eye, could put in perspective all that he draws, with- out the aid of geometrical operations ; but for this it would be necessary that the picture he traces should be always beautiful enough and sufficiently con- formed to his idea to remain invariable ; for if the artist wishes to displace a line, to change a figure, to efface a rock or a tree, to add a building, or simply to put at a distance what was near, and to draw near what was far off, the correctness of his eye will no longer suffice : the perspective no longer drawing it- self upon the glass transformed into a canvas^ the painter must have recourse to the laws that observa- tion has discovered and geometry formulated. These laws of perspective are simple, and are in- teresting and admirable from their very simplicity. They were known to the ancients, and in the fifth century before our era, the Athenians who heard the tragedies of iEschylus could admire upon the stage a fictitious architecture designed by Agatharcus. Two pupils of this artistgeometrician, Democritus and Anaxagoras, published the theory of perspective, and later, Pamphylus publicly taught it at Sicyon. At the epoch of the Renaissance, perspective was redis- covered or reinvented by the Italian masters that flourished in the fifteenth century, — Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca. The last wrote a treatise upon it. Uccello found FAINTING. 53 such delight in it that he devoted his life to it, study- ing day and night, saying to his wife, who remon- strated at his depriving himself of sleep, " Oh ! what a charming thing perspective is." " Oh I che dolce cosa ^ questa prospettiva^ In our day the illustrious geometrician, Monge, upon the foundation of de- scriptive geometry, of which he had made a body of science, furnished a rigorous demonstration of per- spective when the books of Albert Diirer, of Jean Cousin, Peruzzi, Serlio, Vignole, Dubreuil, and Des- argues, contained little more than affirmed results. Now, perspective, clearly explained in the " Elements" of Valenciennes, animated with spirit in the different works of Adh^mar, considered by M. de La Gour- nerie in its effects and in its relations to theatrical painting and decoration, simplified in the new Theory of Sutter, perspective, we say, can be easily and thoroughly learned. In studying these authors the artist will learn that — the picture being generally considered as a plane placed vertically — he ought to preface the opera- tions of perspective by establishing three lines. The first is the fundamental or ground line which forms the base of the picture, the second is the horizon line, which is always on a level with the eye, and determines the position, as above or below, of the ob- jects looked at, the third is a vertical line that cuts the first two at right angles, and which, ordinarily, divides the picture into two equal parts. The point at which the visual ray perpendicular to 54 PAINTING. the picture meets it, is called in perspective the point of sight It is found at the extremity of the ray which passes from the eye of the spectator to the horizon, and as the horizon rises in proportion to the elevation of the eye, and descends as the eye is low- ered, the visual ray terminates at the horizon, what- ever its elevation upon the vertical line. The point of sight and the horizon line being determined upon the picture, measure the distance at which the spec- tator should place himself, to see the picture as the painter saw it ; in other words, measure the length of the visual ray. This ray, being perpendicular to the eye, is, so far as the eye is concerned, but a single point. To see its true size, we suppose it lowered upon the prolonged horizon line, and the point where this lowered line ends is called the point of distance^ which ought to be as far from the point of sight as the spectator is distant from the picture. These are the two points and the three lines that serve to con- struct all good persiKCtivc. He must also take ac- count of the numerous exceptions certain objects may present, which have no regular relation to the picture — as, for instance, a chair overthrown by chance in a room — and whose horizontal lines will terminate at an accidental point placed upon the horizon. If we suppose the chair tipped over upon another, in such a way as to rest upon the floor or to have its four legs in the air, the accidental point would be above or below the horizon. To resume, the masters of perspective will teach the artist : — PAINTING. 55 That all the lines perpendicular to the picture con- verge at the point of sight ; That all the lines parallel to the base of the pic- ture have their apparent perspective parallel to this base; That all the horizontal lines forming with the pic- ture an angle of 45 degrees, converge at the point of distance ; That all the horizontal lines parallel with each other, but not with the picture, converge at the same point upon the horizon line ; That all the parallel oblique lines converge at a point that may be above or below the horizon, within or without the picture, according to the situation of the lines ; That all the objects diminish in every way, in pro- portion to their distance from the observer. Thus, the point of sight being placed in the cen- tre of the composition forms there a star, whose rays are the sloping lines perpendicular to the picture, and as some descend to the horizon and others as- cend to it, the horizon line divides the picture into two fans, opened in opposite directions, and cut by the four sides of the frame and by the lines parallel to its sides. Remarkable union I the sight of our eye resembles perfectly the sight of our reason, and optics is in na- ture what it is in philosophy. The difference in the point of sight changes the moral perspective of ideas as well as the linear perspective of things, and ac- $6 PAINTING. cording to the point of distance at which our mind is placed, it seizes only details the prominence of which I I i I 11 li II S P \ il i deceives or embraces the whole whose grandeur en- lightens it. Moreover, physical perspective, however rigorously the rule and compass of the geometrician FAINTING. 57 may be applied, rests submissively under the empire of sentiment Louis David used to say to his pu- pils : " Other painters know the laws of perspective better than I, but they don't feel them so well." This signifies clearly enough that knowledge alone does not suffice to the artist when he traces the perspec- tive of his picture; sentiment also should find its place in it. We shall see, indeed, that sentiment ought to direct, one by one, all the operations of the painter; determine the height of the horizon, the choice of the visual point, the point of distance, and the size of the optical angle. The elevation of the horizon. Although the line of the horizon is curved, owing to the spherical form of the earth, this curvature is so microscopic and inap- preciable that it may be replaced by a straight line. But at what elevation should the horizon be drawn? If one wishes to paint a sea view, the hor- izon will naturally be the line that separates the sea from the sky, for the horizon is only the level of the sea that we should perceive if the land and the mountains that conceal it were transparent. Taste teaches that the elevation of the horizon in the pic- ture should depend upon the subject the painter has chosen and the number of figures he wishes to place upon the canvas. If he desires to represent a public fete^ like the " Kermesse," of Rubens, or a magnificent festival, like the " Marriage at Cana," of Paul Veronese, it is evident he must elevate the horizon to show as large 58 FAINTING. a number of persons as possible, and to unfold the scene to the eye of the spectator as he would see it if he were placed upon a terrace or behind a window, which, for him, would be the frame of the picture. David, wishing to paint the " Serment du jeu de Paume," imagined himself standing upon a table, whence he could see all the groups and all the movements of the assembly.' Gros, to bring out the dark battle-field of Eylau, has placed the horizon level with an eminence, whence he could have taken in, in its whole extent, the entire spectacle of this great disaster. " When the picture," says Adh^mar ("Supplement to the Treatise upon Perspective"), "represents a room in which are several persons, some seated, others standing, the horizon should be on a level with a person standing. In this case, the spectator will have the same impression as if he were standing near those represented in the picture. If the subject contains only two or three persons seated, one will do well to place the horizon on a level with their eyes. After some moments' atten- tion, the spectator might believe he is himself seated beside them, and taking part in their conversation. But if one of them should appear to raise the head a little, as if he were looking at some one standing, it would be necessary, as in the preceding example, to place the horizon on a level with the person stand- mg. . Let us suppose, now, that the artist has to com- pose a picture for a fixed place, or a wall painting at FAINTING. 59 a determined height ; the horizon line will be chosen in conformity therewith, but with a certain manage- ment, or at need, with certain tricks favorable to the view. The celebrated painter, Mantegna, having a commission from the Marquis of Gonzaga to paint the " Triumph of Julius Caesar," which was to adorn the palace of Mantua, and to be placed higher than the eye of the spectator, took care to place the first figures upon the ground line forming the base of the picture, then the feet and legs of the persons in the middle distance gradually disappcjarcd in accordance with the given line of the horizon and geometric laws. The littel's, the vases, the eagles, and the trophies borne in triumph, he drew so that the eye perceived only the bottom. Vasari praises highly this scrupulous observance of the laws of perspective. But should truth be carried so far as to astonish the eye by showing it singularities that confound it? It may happen that the eye is justly offended by the very precautions one takes not to offend it, and that the spectator, not taking into account the horizon line that the painter has chosen, finds bizarre "^hzi is, nevertheless, justified by geometric science. The es- sential thing in painting is to move or captivate the soul, even at the expense of the rigorous laws of sce- nography, or at least by a slight infraction of these laws. Tlu point of sight. The point of sight is always upon the line of the horizon, but upon what point of this line should it be placed? In the middle 6o PAINTING. of the picture ? To right or left, more or less near the frame ? Here also the artist takes counsel of the sentiment. The great masters in their most famous compositions, — Leonardo da Vinci in the " Last Sui>- per," Raphael in the " Disputa," the " Heliodorus " and the. "School of Athens," Poussin in the "Judg- ment of Solomon," Lesueur in the "St. Paul at Ephesus," — have fixed their point of sight either at the centre of the picture, — that is at the intersection of the diagonals, — or at equal distance from the lateral lines of the frame. There results a symmetry which has something grave, calm, majestic ; that is perfectly in keeping with religious subjects and the imposing scenes of history. The optical equilibrium produced by the equality of the masses that correspond to each other, produces in the mind a sort of moral equilibrium. Wherever the architecture furnishes a perspective clearly defined, the point of sight placed in the mid- dle of the scene calls the attention of the spectator at first to it, afterwards recalls it to the same point. If, for instance, Jesus Christ is seated in the centre of the picture in the Last Supper, the lines that con- verge at the point of sight constantly bring back the visual ray to the dominant figure, to the knot of the drama, where emotion is concentrated, where, cease- lessly, the eyes of the mind turn. Solomon, seated on the throne from which he is to render judgment, seems to me still more justly placed, in a composition whose rigorous balancing seems an allusion to the sovereign impartiality of the judge who occupies the PAINTING. 6 1 centre of it. And if we would borrow from contem- poraneous art an illustrious example, we shall see the .-fs author of the "Apotheosis of Homer" add to the solemnity of his arrangement an august equilibrium, - by choosing the point of sight, indicated by symme- try, to place in it the venerable figure of the poet between the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey," in the very axis of the temple where he is to be deified, and which serves as a background to the spectacle of his coronation. There are excellent painters who have often placed the point of sight at the side of the picture, not far from the edge. Lesueur himself, in the twenty-two admirable compositions that form the " Life of St. Bruno," has almost invariably supposed the spectator to be at the right or left of the middle line. Some- times his point of sight is fixed upon one of the lat- eral lines of the frame, so that one composition seems to be the half of another ; for ifistance, that which represents St. Bruno distributing his goods to the poor. One might believe that these quiet images of the life of the cloister, these scenes of melancholy austerity, would gain by presenting more perspective equilibrium, less inequality in the masses separated by the point of sight. But it is proper to observe that, compositions forming a single history, a single whole, may complete themselves to the look in such a way that one picture may balance that which pre- cedes or that which follows. One might say also that Lesueur, in throwing the point of sight to the 62 PAINTING. corner of the picture, has wished to express the dis- tance of the profane eye, and to raise only a comer of the veil that conceals from the cenobites the things of the world. Raphael, in the most animated scenes, keeps the central position of the point of sight ; thus he puts the movement of the figures in opposition to the im- mobility of the architecture. In painting his sub- lime fresco of " Heliodorus," in which we see the sacrilegious robber overthrown by a miraculous horseman, and whipped with rods by two angels that cleave the air with rapid flight, Raphael doubtless thought of the contrast the quietude of a symmet- rical architecture would produce, with the impetuous movements of the celestial cavalier who rides down Heliodorus and the angels that strike him with rods ; while the high-priest, Onias, in the depths of the sanctuary, where all the sloping lines of the perspec- tive converge, is still asking of Jehovah the miracle already accomplished, overwhelming and swift as lightning. The equilibrium produced by placing the point of sight in the middle of the horizon line, may serve, sometimes, to strengthen the picture if it is calm, sometimes to heighten the movement if it is dra- matic. But the example of Raphael suggests to us another observation ; it is that in mural painting the real architecture dominates the fictitious, and it would be shocking to place upon a wall a perspec- tive which would suppose the spectator at an impos- PAINTING. 63 sible place, and which would be falsified by the sur- rounding construction. The role of sentiment is so great in painting, even when geometry dominates, that a certain great painter has allowed himself two horizon lines in one picture, and we pardon this license, Paul Veronese, in the "Marriage at Cana," considers the horizon line, not as a line without breadth, but as a zone which allows two points of convergence, the one above the other. Veronese did this for two reasons : first, because the lofty architecture of the picture would have presented lines sloping too much, whose direction towards a single point would have been too precipitate and without grace ; then, because before a picture so large, filled with episodes and without rigorous unity, since he could only express the gen- eral joy and the pleasing disorder of a feast, at which Jesus himself plays merely the role of a guest, the spectator is to be interested successively by the dif- ferent groups, and to walk before the picture rather than to fix his eye upon the point of sight. The point of distance^ that which marks the dis- tance of the spectator from the picture, is also under the empire of sentiment. Balthazar Peruzzi and Raphael, according to Lomazzo (" Trattato della Pit- tura "), thought " that the artist who wishes to paint the fa9ade of a house in a narrow street, is not obliged to represent objects according to their dis- tance from the opposite wall, but he ought to draw them according to an imaginary distance, supposed 64 PAINTING. greater, and which would be equal to three times the height of the fa9ade, else the figures painted would seem to stumble and fall backward {trabbocare e ca- dersi addosso). At present it is a fixed rule for designers who have to put in perspective the interior of a chamber or gallery, to draw it, not as they see it, but as they would see it if they could withdraw to a distance that supposes the overthrow of the wall against which they lean. Although this distance is arbi- trary, it must in all cases be so great that the spectator may take in the whole of the picture at one glance, without moving the head, else the objects near the frame would undergo those monstrous changes that in perspective are called anamorphoses. A column, for instance, showing its base when seen from above, and its capital seen from below, would be an architectural member unrecognizable by the abrupt diminution of the capital, which would seem to fall inwards, and of the base, which would appar- ently fall outwards. Every one has remarked the angular deformity presented by the photographs of the Bourse at Paris. To avoid such deformities and have an agreeable view of the building, the photog- rapher would be obliged to retire to a distance rendered impossible by the surrounding buildings. This withdrawal the painter secures fictitiously by the methods of perspective, which allow him to rec- tify what he sees by drawing it as he would see it at a suitable distance. The photographer who wishes to PAINTING. 65 have a faithful portrait, without diminution of the extremities, must, according to MM. Babinet and de la Gournerie, place his instrument ten metres from the model. Mathematical truth is not of the same nature as picturesque truth. So it constantly hap- pens that the geometrician says one thing and our mind another. If I see a man five feet off, his appar- ent diameter is double what it would be if I saw him at a distance of ten feet ; science affirms it, and does not deceive ; nevertheless, this man will always appear to me of the same size, and the error of my mind will be as infallible as the truth of the geom- etrician. That is a mystery that mathematics cannot explain, as Voltaire observes in the ** Philosophy of Newton." " Whatever supposition one makes," says he, " the angle at which I see a man at the distance of five feet, is always double the angle at which I see him at ten, and neither geometry nor physics can resolve the problem." We need, in truth, something besides physics and geometry to explain, how the tes- timony of our eyes is contradicted by a decree of sentiment, and how an incontestable truth may be overcome by an irresistible falsehood. The optical angle. The angle of which Voltaire here speaks, is the optical angle. This is formed by two visual rays which pass from the centre of the eye to the extremities of the object seen. The opening of the optical angle depends upon the dis- tance of the spectator from the picture, for the nearer an object is to the eye, the wider the eye opens to 5 66 PAINTING. see it. But this angle cannot be greater than a right ' angle ; in other words, the greatest space that the eye can take in is included in a quarter of the circumfer- ence. In painting, every representation ought to be seen at a single optical angle, or, as said Leonardo da Vinci, " from a single window " (" la pittura deve esser vista da una solafinestra "). Through this win- dow of the eye the mind can embrace but one picture at a time. But the visual rays that transmit it are of very unequal strength. The only powerful ray is that which is perpendicular to the retina; all the others grow feeble in proportion to their distance from this normal ray, so that the more the angle is opened by the nearness of the spectator, the more weak rays it contains ; the more the angle is lessened by the distance of the object, the more powerful rays it contains. Thus, short-sighted persons partially close the eyes to concentrate their vision by drawing the extreme rays, which are weak, nearer to the nor- mal ray, which is the only strong one. But while the oblique rays become feebler, the ob- jects are lessened by distance, the color fades out, sharpness of contour is lost. Thus man can see in their true size, that is geometrically^ only the things that are perpendicular to his retina, and at a certain distance; for the geometrical image of an object is that seen in its real dimensions by an eye as large as it; everything greater than the eye is seen in perspec- tive^ that is, in its apparent dimensions. Strange and beneficent illusion, which testifies at the same time to oiir littleness and our grandeur! PAINTING. 67 Only the eye of God can sec the universe geometric- ally ; man, in his infirmity, seizes only foreshortenings. Yet as if all nature were subject to him he runs his intelligent eye over it, and each of his movements changing his point of sight, the lines come of them- selves to converge there and form for him a specta- cle always changing, always new. Perspective is, so to say, the ideal of visible things, and it is not sur- prising that the old Italian master vaunted its charms. But this ideal, like the other, ceaselessly flies and escapes us. Always within reach of the eye, we can never seize it. As man advances towards his horizon, his horizon retreats from him, and the lines that seem to unite in the remote distance, remain eternally separate in their eternal convergence. Man bears within himself, as it were, a mobile poetry that obeys the will of his movements, and that seems to have been given him to veil the nakedness of the true, to correct the rigor of the absolute, and to soften in his eyes the inexorable laws of the divine geom- etry. .IX. Coloring his sketch or limiting himself to outline in his composition, the painter attains expression only in defining it by the drawing, the attitude, the gesture, or the movement of each figure. Composition is not improvised. The excited painter may, in a moment of inspiration, see a composition before the eyes of his thought, but he must study it, prove its verisimilitude, submit it to the decision of his judgment. " What I improvise 1 " wrote Eugene Delacroix ; " sketch and finish at the same time, satisfy the imag- ination and the judgment at one stroke, in the same breath ! That would be speaking the language of the gods with one's every-day tongue. Would one know what resources talent has for concealing its efforts ? Who can say what an admirable passage may have cost ? At the most, what one might call improvisation would be rapid execution without re- touching or changing ; but without the sketch wisely studied, in view of complete finishing, this sleight-of- hand would be impossible, even to an artist like Tin- toretto, who is called the most impassioned of painters, PAINTING. 69 or to Rubens himself With Rubens especially, this supreme labor, those last touches that complete the thought of the artist, are not, as from their strength and firmness one might believe, the labor that has excited to the highest pitch the creative force of the painter. It is in the conception of the whole^ from the first lineaments of the picture ; it is in the arrange- ment of the parts, that the most powerful of his facul- ties is exercised ; it is there he has truly labored." Thus speaks an artist who had the fever of his art, who was impassioned often even to delirium. Like the orator who heard the murmurs of the people in the dash of the waves, the painter must create his picture, thinking of the spectators present or future who will judge it ; he must prepare himself /(? speaJi the language of the gods. But how shall the artist test his composition ? Ought he at first to try colors, and, necessarily, light and shadow, or shall he sketch the expression of his thought by lines alone ? Very great masters — Mi- chael Angelo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Julio Ro- mano — have drawn their sketches as if they planned a bas-relief. Before thinking of coloring, of lighting up their picture, they fixed the construction and the form of it Nevertheless, if painting be inseparable from color and light, it seems as if the pencil and cliarcoal arc not enough for the artist who composes ; that it is important to represent to himself, palette in hand, the kind of effect that will aid the expression to be produced. Rembrandt no sooner conceived a 70 FAINTING. picture than, in thought, he lighted it up. Rubens foresaw the play of color, even in a sketch in which he only indicated the masses of light and shadow. Prud'hon also always invents in connection with light ; as soon as he imagines his drama, he sees it by the light of the sun, or the rays of the moon, or the light of torches. How shall we decide between methods so different and geniuses so diverse ? Must we condemn the great Italians for having given so decided a preference to drawing in the sketch of their works ? No. These masters, par excellence^ were above all things preoccupied with the moral element, — the expression. Color, which speaks to the senses rather than to the mind, seemed to them more external, hence, secondary. All composition was good to them, so soon as its lines were appro- priately disposed, balanced, and arranged ; they ren- dered it expressive by the character of the forms, the language of the drawing, the choice of the contour. Let us imagine Michael Angelo tracing with the pen the composition of the " Last Judgment," of which the sketches have been preserved. With a sovereign will, a master-hand, he draws figures and groups whose movement and violence he foresees. There exist upon the paper, as yet, only some manly and rapid strokes, but already we seize the web of this great tragedy: we see a troop of threatening angels coming from the upper air bearing the instru- ments of the Passion, as if to crush humanity with them ; we divine the Christ hurling down his thun- PAINTING. 73 dcrbolts ; wc perceive avalanches of the condemned cast into the abyss ; we anticipate the terror that will fill all souls, even those of the martyrs who display the marks of their tortures, trembling lest they may not have deserved celestial pardon. Through these pen-scratches appear astonished patriarchs, women filled with anguish, the Virgin, who seems frightened at having given birth to a God so terrible. The most hideous sins are rolled pell-mell together, the dead awake, hell yawns, and all this is expressed only by an entanglement of heroic lines ; the groups unite, the composition grows complicated, the arrangement perfects itself; and all that the fresco will reveal is already foreseen in this sublime confusion. Without having recourse to the effects of color and light, the painter will at- tain his supreme aim, he will have expressed the sen- timent of inexpressible terror. Let us suppose now that a genius of the North, a Rembrandt, dreams of painting such a scene ; he \ will take another road to reach the depths of our soul ; this immense drama will begin to unravel itself by spots of color as if through clouds. In the in- finite depth of the shadows we shall see nations emptying their tombs ; the joy of the blessed will be indicated by the brilliancy of the coloring ; terror will be expressed by dark tints rather than by dis- torted or violent forms. The souls uncertain of their fate will be enveloped in a mysterious half-light. The radiant heaven, the sombre earth, will mark the L^ 74 PAINTING. contrast of eternal destinies, and hell will be enkin- dled at the fires of color. Thus great painters, vaiying their methods accord- ing to their genius, may disconcert the philosophy of art, and constrain her to change, or at least to modify her laws. Nevertheless, the art of the painter, having now passed through the entire cycle of its devdopments, can no longer neglect the effects of color and of chiaro 'scuro, so far as they are expressive. The age of painting is too far advanced to go back to the epochs in which its youth allowed it to perform prod- igies, without at the same time employing all its re- sources. We may then regard as preferable the col- oring of the sketch, above all when we wish to ob- tain the expression that results from color and light, an expression that harmonizes with nature, and is so important in landscape. But the great painters who make the woof of their work of human figures will none the less continue to seek expression by the atti- tude, the gesture, or the movement of these figures. It is not with painting as with sculpture; the figures of the painter having neither thickness nor weight, being only pure appearances, may assume attitudes, make gestures that it would be impossible to execute in marble. Moderation of movement, sobriety of ges- ture, are the inherent laws of sculpture ; they are de- manded both by the solidity of the statue and its dig- nity, for it is not only because his figures are heavy, that an extravagant, outri gesture is forbidden to the PAINTING. 75 « sculptor ; but because the divine forms of calm beauty suit beings whose image is to last for ages, and their movements, drawn not from beyond life, but from above it, ought to manifest a soul serene as that of the immortal gods, or of heroes that are to become such. Less restricted in his flight, bolder and freer, the painter may represent attitudes that would be incom- patible with the gravity of marble. He may hazard movements that reveal the fire of passion, gestures that betray the boiling of the blood in the heart But here, still, the imitation of nature does not alone suffice to the painter more than to the sculptor ; there must be choice^ there must be style. Listen to a passionate man ; observe him ; his words like his gestures will reveal in a striking and true manner the passion that animates him ; but it maybe that his angry words are an ignoble truth, and the excess of his gestures a repulsive one. It may be also, for want of sufficient vitality, he manifests im- perfectly the emotions his feeble soul experiences. Hence, for the poet and the painter, the necessity of softening what nature has marked too strongly, or of accentuating with energy what she has expressed too feebly. The observation of natural pantomime is an excellent study, upon condition that the artist knows how, sometimes, to render it more significant, some- times to spy out the moment in which it is energetic, without being mean. But the gesture is not only individual, that is to 76 PAINTING. say, modified by temperament; it varies also in char- acter according to customs and ideas, according to climate, and each nation stamps upon it the imprint of its own genius. What a difference between the reserve of an Englishman, and the grimacing mim- icry of a Neapolitan ? How, then, can we discover the principle of the gesture among such variations ? Is it possible, among such slight differences, to un- ravel the generic accents ? Yes. In spite of its va- riations, the gesture has its roots in the human heart, and it is possible to find them again there. What- ever may be, for instance, the different signs of ven- eration, it expresses itself, in all the countries of the world, by a tendency to bow the head and bend the body, as if to represent the inferiority of him who venerates in presence of him who is venerated. While the European of the North will indicate his respect by a cold inclination of the head, the man of Southern blood will bend himself double, and the Oriental, concealing his face, will prostrate himself to the earth. But all the degrees, marked or slight, will be included between these two extremes, and the artist will have a whole scale of differences from which to choose his pantomime. If the gestures and the movements of man were all dictated by the organism, there would be more re- semblance between them, because the arrangement of the human machine would produce them in a fixed manner, without other diversities than those of tem- perament, weak or energetic, generous or cold. But PAINTING. 77 there are movements, gestures, and attitudes, that have their source in the depths of the soul, and whose external manifestation is only a feeble echo, a symbol of that which agitates the world of imagina- tion, that inner world in which pass the dreams of the sleeper and the reveries of the waking man. Ges- ture, like speech, has its metaphors. We reject an ill-sounding proposition almost as we would repulse a dangerous beast; we shrink from the recital of a 78 PAINTING. horror as we would from the reality of a frightful spectacle. The orator who is meditating his ha- rangues, and who wishes to electrify his imaginary audience, needs to move, to keep step with his speech, as Rousseau did when along the highway he declaimed his impassioned prosopopoeias. It is not by a cursory look at Nature that the artist will find the expression of those pantomimes which reveal the secret evolutions of thought. When Michael ISiMiiK Ctupcl.) Angelo, decorating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, wished to paint " Preoccupation," in the figure of Isaiah, it was in the depths of his own spirit he found the lines to express the attention of a thinker whom nothing can distract from his meditations. An angel calls Isaiah at the moment in which, hav- ing placed his hand in the book of the Law, to mark the place where he had ceased reading, the prophet PAINTING. 79 was following the course of his own thoughts. Scarcely moving his body, he slowly turns his head as if even an angel's voice could not snatch him from the abyss of reflection into which he is plunged. The Prophets and Sibyls of Michael Angelo are the finest examples of the higher truth of gestures or attitudes of which Nature contains only the germ, and which it is the province of genius to discover, in order to create from it immortal types. The sublime figures of Jeremiah and Daniel, of Joel and Zech- ariah, the Erythraean, Cumaean, and Delphic Sibyls, are true creations of this kind. Without falsifying Nature, they are, nevertheless, supernatural. Each of their attributes, each of their movements, relates the drama of thought. The Sibyl of Delphi is the proud image of the intelligence that commands; the Cumaean seems absorbed by undecipherable enig- mas. The Persian pores over a writing full of mys- tery that she seems to devour. She of Lybia, hold- ing high her book and casting down a disdainful look, expresses contempt for the vulgar, to whom the sibylline books were forever interdicted. And what ideal power in the figure of Jeremiah I The Prophet of the Lamentations is overwhelmed with the weight of his sad presentiments ; his elbow upon his knee, he supports with one hand his bowed head, and closes the mouth ready to utter a groan, while he drops the other hand with unutterable mel- ancholy. Even his coarse and neglected drapery adds to the expression by the simple, grand play, which 8o PAINTING. IS, as it were, the gesture of the vestments. Would one paint, instead of. the woes the prophet sees in the future, the woes that humanity suffers in the present, it is still in the frescoes of Michael Angelo he will seek an example of that grand style which, far from enfeebling attitude by generalizing it, renders it still more striking by imprinting upon it a typical signifi- cation. Never were consciousness of misfortune, excess of physical dejection, and moral lassitude ex- pressed in a more memorable manner than in the attitude of Ahaz. The point expression can attain in painting by means of gesture, we see and marvel at in thfe " Last Supper" of Leonardo da Vinci. There we recognize what style is, and how the observation of real life, after having germinated in the mind of a great painter, leads him to a higher truth. He was obliged to repeat eleven times the grievous surprise that the announcement of betrayal was to produce in faithful friends. He must paint astonishment, indignation, grief, tenderness, simple loyalty, unchangeable can- dor, all the sentiments, or rather all the variations of sentiment, that must necessarily be evoked among the Apostles by these words of Christ : " One of you shall betray me." Leonardo, with that penetration that led him to discover souls in the movements of the body, knew how to express the individual shades of feeling common to all the Apostles. One, aston- ished, is already threatening the traitor ; another is cast down at the mere suggestion of such a crime ; PAINTING. 83 this one begins to exculpate himself, that seeks the culprit Indignant honesty takes the form of con- tempt or vents itself in anger. The irritable Peter would avenge his master; John thinks only of dying with his God. The gestures of the " Last Supper " have been an- alyzed with much feeling and sagacity by Stend- hal : " St. James the Less passing his arm over the shoulder of St. Andrew, indicates to St. Peter that the traitor is beside him. St. Andrew looks at Judas with horror. St. Bartholomew, who is at the end of the table, has risen, the better to see the traitor. To the left of Christ, St. James protests his innocence by the gesture common to all nations — opening his arms and offering his defenceless breast St Thomas leaves his place, approaches Jesus, and, rais- ing a finger of the right hand seems to say to the Saviour, " One of us ? " This is one of the necessi- ties which remind us that painting is a terrestrial art This gesture was imperative to mark to the eye the moment, to make understood the words just spoken. St Philip, the youngest of the Apostles, by a movement full of naivet^ and frankness, rises to protest his fidelity. St. Matthew repeats the terrible words to St Simon, who refuses to believe. St Thaddeus, who has first repeated them to him, points to St Matthew, who has heard them as well as himself. St Simon, the last of the Apostles, to. the right of the spectators seems to cry out, " How dare you tell us such a horrible thing ? " 84 PAINTING. Let us pass now to another order of ideas ; let us suppose the artist occupied in painting genre pic- tures, delineations of customs, scenes of manners, or village f&tes, as Callot delighted to represent them in his etchings, Teniers in his paintings ; the genius of observation will suffice, because the comic does not exclude the ugly ; on the contrary, and among popu- lar and familiar gestures, the painter has only to choose the most impressive. Style would here be a perversion, for the value of the pantomime is pre- . cisely in the individual turn, in the strangeness of the incident. Generalized, the grotesque would be cold ; it has no savor, but when it is individualized to the last point, seized by a photographic spirit, taken in the act A bohemian of Callot, a peasant of Teniers, even an invalid of Charlet, are the more interesting the less they resemble others. But the originals are found only in Nature. We must have run through the fairs with Callot or haunted the Kermesses like Teniers, to paint, for instance, the gestures and move- ments of a player at bowls, when, having thrown his ball, he runs after it, follows it with his eye, encour* ages it with voice and hand, trembles at every stone that may hit it, and leads it to the end with a pan- tomime that hesitates between fear and triumph. See in one of the inimitable lithographs of Charlet, the " Call for the Contingent of the Commune," with what skill he characterizes the gait of the young soldier whom the discipline of the regiment has not yet fashioned. We distinguish in the band, at the PAINTING. 85 first glance, the skulker who is already ducking his head to let the bullets pass by, the mourner for his dear Falaise^ the. farm-boy advancing with resigna- tion, and the scapegrace apprentice with love-lock on his forehead, his hat over one eye, who comes whist- ling and promising himself to get at once a bullet in his head or win his chevrons. Thus, the role of Nature is the more important the lower art descends, the more familiar it grows. Naivete is then the happiest gift ; it is even precious in grave subjects where some features of common life are introduced. The picture of Lesueur, in which St. Bruno receives a letter from the Pope, shows us a charming example of naiVetd in the embarrassed countenance of the rustic envoy, who, with hand on his cap, not knowing if it be admissible to remain covered during the reading, seeks to read the effect of the letter upon the countenance of the monk. There is a great painter who has excelled in ges- ture — Rembrandt. He did not attain the beautiful, but he often touched the sublime. Drawing his inspiration from the heart, he was great because he was human, and he has thus touched the permanent and invariable in Nature. Under the costume of the Jews of Holland he has painted the men of all coun- tries and all times. He understood perfectly that gesture is optical language, the language peculiar to painting, which ought to render the thought visible. When Rembrandt represents a drama of the Scrip- tures, " The Sacrifice of Abraham," for instance, with 86 PAINTING. what genius he renders the words from Genesis, " The Angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven : Abraham I Abraham ! lay not thine hand upon the lad." Translated in painting, the cry of the angel becomes a decisive gesture. The messenger of God, seizing with both hands the arms of the pa- triarch, shows us at the same moment the beginning and the end of the tragedy. And, since we are speaking of gestures and attitudes, how touching is the resignation of Isaac^ who stretches out his neck with the confidence and gentleness of the lamb about to be slain. Before plunging the knife into the blood of his son, the old man covers his eyes with his hand to spare him, at least, the sight of death. All this pantomime is admirable, more pathetic even than the recital of the Bible, conforming to the letter of which so many other painters, even celebrated ones, have drawn an angel pointing coldly and vaguely to heaven. The last word of art is to reconcile force of ges- ture with beauty of movement, warmth of truth with dignity of style. Here, Leonardo da Vinci and Ra- phael are inimitable. Raphael, especially, had the se- cret of intimating, by the mimicry of his figures, more than he shows. He knows how, by the move- ment, to indicate a part of the action that has pre- ceded and a little of that which is to follow. What speaking truth in the figure of Elymas struck with blindness. The gesture seems simple, nevertheless it is studied. Nature furnished the motive, but style PAINTING. 87 has revised the expression of it: "And immediately there fell on him a mist and a darkness, and he went about seeking some to lead him by the hand." This / instant Raphael has seized in a way to show us the sudden and irresistible power of the Apostle. The sorcerer, deprived of sight, seeks a guide, not like 88 PAINTING. one bom blind, but like a man who just now saw and suddenly has passed from light to night. To feel thoroughly this shade of difference, let us compare the Elymas of Raphael with the etching of Rem- brandt, in which the aged Tobias so well represents the instinctive timidity and the gropings of the blind man, accustomed to the darkness, dragging his feet and tremblingly stretching out his hand. Look, now, at the " School of Athens ; " in it an attitude, a gesture, characterizes each of the philoso- phers of antiquity. The cynicism of Diogenes is manifested by the abandon of his posture ; the ob- scure and discouraging doctrine of Heraclitus by his saddened countenance ; the indifference of the Pyr- rhonian by his quiet and ironical way of looking over his shoulder at the young aspirant who is eagerly writing the words he hears. The divine Plato points with his finger to the land of the ideal, the positive Aristotle seems, by his gesture, to moderate the enthu* siasm of his master. Socrates, who, while reasoning, holds with his right hand the forefinger of his left, has the air of counting upon his fingers the deductions he draws, one by one, from his interlocutor, Alcibiades. In the group of pupils of Archimedes, we recognize by their different bearing the attentive disciple who follows the theorem of the geometrician ; the scholar, more penetrating, who has outstripped the demon- stration, and one who, wishing to explain it to a fourth, finds in him only a slow intelligence, marked by the vacuity of the countenance and the open hand that has been able to seize nothing. PAINTING. 91 In the fifteenth chapter of his treatise, Leonardo da Vinci recommends the imitation of mutes in their pantomime, because mutes, for want of one sign, have learned the art of supplying it by all others ; but the fear of not being understood drives them to excess of gesticulation, and might lead the painter to grimaces, or, at least, to strongly marked, overloaded mimicry. Pantomime is not only a means of making the intention of the figures understood, it is a means of representing them beautiful and interesting even in their passions. The principal figure of a picture ought rather to allow his soul to be seen than to dis- play it. His gesture is not to demonstrate his pas- sion but to betray it. The painter of " Marcus Sextus " and " Clytem- nestra," Pierre Guerin, went often to the theatre to study his art. Thence his poetically solemn but somewhat stilted manner. At first thought it would seem as if the study of the tragic scene ought to profit the painter, who aims at style, but it is not so. The pantomime of the actor, explained by speech, cannot be the same as that of the painter, which speaks only to the eyes. The spectator whom the preceding scenes have prepared, whom the dec- lamation warms and fascinates, permits, in the hero of the stage, exaggerated movements, whose exagger ation he does not even see. It is with scenic ges- ture almost as with decoration ; both address them- selves to the masses, for whom it is fitting to heighten the colors and the action, because they do 92 PAINTING. ♦ not and cannot look closely enough to appreciate the delicacies and shadings that taste demands. On the contrary, having before him only a cool spectator, the painter could not make him accept anything fac- titious or exaggerated. It is then true, that it is not I in the conventionalities of the theatre, but in the truth of passion and of life that he must seek his first inspiration. Why refer to the interpretations of poetry, instead of going back to the sources of poetry itself? The actor and the painter have this in common -^ they study individual truth the nearer they draw to the comic. When Moli^re writes the " Misan- thrope " or " Tartufe," he generalizes, it is true, but he produces a comedy so high it touches the tragic. So the painter, in proportion as he elevates himself, abandons the small truth for the great one, remem- bering that painting, like the stage, has its sock and buskin. The celebrated Garrick said one day to a come- dian who was playing the r&le of a drunkard, " My friend, your head is really drunk, but your feet and legs are perfectly sober." That is equivalent to say- ing that unity in gesture is the law of the master and the secret of Nature. Gratiolet has very well said (" Conferences sur la physionomie,") : " The society of the organs of the living body is a perfect republic ; all the organs groan at the suffering of one, all re- joice at the joy of one — and this contagion of sen- timent, this concert of the organs, is marvellously ex- PAINTING. 93 pressed by the word sympathy." Nature, indeed, has localized our organs to perfect their solidarity. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, divide the labor of life, and make the analysis of the sensations whose synthesis is in the soul. We cannot touch colors nor see perfumes ; sound does not affect our eyes, nor light our taste, and the smell does not tell us if the rose is lighter than the pink ; but the sensation, once received, is generalized, is felt through the whole organism. Look at the figure of Laocoon ; it suffers from head to foot — it shudders even to the toes. Descartes observes that the soul, which always has some influence over the muscles, has none over the blood ; thus, pallor, or the sudden blush, do not de- pend upon the will. This admirable remark may be extended to certain gestures which are as involun- tary as the movements of the blood, and escape the empire of the soul. The painter should take note of them, seize them in their rapid flight But models are not always under the eye of the painter ; besides how fugitive are the movements that Nature offers us. How can one imitate them if he does not know their niechanical conditions, their wheel-work ? The artists of antiquity, according to all appearance, in studying gestures made use of arti- ficial skeletons, whose limbs were put together with screws. These jointed statuettes are described with precision in a satire of Petronius : " While we were drinking and admiring the magnificence of the re- past, a slave brought a silver skeleton, made in such 94 PAINTING. a way that its joints and vertebrae could turn in every direction. Aftcff placing this skeleton several times upon the table, and giving it the different postures that the movable joints permitted, Trimalcion cried out : * Poor creatures I See what we all are ! ' " This passage of Petronius recalls to us the learned and judicious Paillot de Montabert. Become blind, he loved to talk of an art that had absorbed all his thoughts. One day, when we were talking of man- ikins, he begged me to read him a chapter of his " Traits de Peinture," in which he describes the jointed and moving figures that the ancient painters must have used, not only to compose expressive pan- tomimes, but to represent flying or falling figures for which no model could pose. It was in studying the monochrome figures upon Greek vases, that the pro- found theorist had • dreamed of the manikins of cut cards, of which he has given a drawing in his book. We see, indeed, upon ancient pottery, bold and free gestures, movements sometimes exaggerated even to caricature, but always lively, resolute, speaking, which seem to have been invented by means of movable pieces. Is it not the imagination of the artist, rather than Nature, which has inspired the pantomimes of these astonishing silhouettes, and the expressiveness of these figures of priestesses, bacchan- tes, youths, and satyrs, that seem sometimes to be celebrating mysteries, sometimes executing sacred dances, or deliriously pursuing each other around the amphora? Moreover, is it possible that a model PAINTING. 95 by his attitude or his gesture, could faithfuly obey the thought, the dream of another ? How, then, sup- ply that which Nature does not furnish more surely than by these moving figures, which, presenting as it MOVAftLn PICURRS IW PinCIW. PAII.LOT D« MOMTABERT. were the algebra of the human body, are the more suitable to formulate its postures and movements, in the measure of the possible, and which, passing 96 PAINTING. under the hand of the painter, from the feeblest sig- nification to the strongest, tell him the exact moment at which the gesture is energetic without being vio- lent After all, whatever means the artist may have pre- ferred, he must, if he wishes to become great, build upon real truth in order to elevate himself to a higher truth, so that that which in Nature was only language, in Art may become eloquence. X. When the composition is once decided upon — when the gestures and the movements are foreseen, the painter refers to the model to give verisimilitude to his ideal, and natural- ness to the forms that must express it. Nature is a poem, but a poem obscure, of un- fathomable depth, and of a complexity that seems to us sublime disorder. All the germs of beauty are contained in it, but only the human mind can dis- cover them, set them free, and create them a second time, by bringing them into order, proportion, and harmony, — that is to say, unity. Nature gives us all sounds, but man alone has invented music. She possesses all woods and marbles ; man alone has drawn from them architecture. She unrolls before our eyes countries bristling with mountains and forests, bathed by rivers, cut by torrents ; he alone has found in them the grace of gardens. Every day she gives birth to innumerable individuals and forms of endless variety ; man, alone, capable of recogniz- ing himself in this labyrinth, draws thence the ele- ments of the ideal he has conceived, and in submit- ting these forms to the laws of unity, he, sculptor or painter, makes of it a work of art. 08 PAINTING. When the lines of his composition have been con- structed, when the gestures and movements of his figures have been anticipated, the painter has drawn his picture, that is, has sought expression by the char- acter of the drawing. He must choose, in the im- mense repertory of human formsi those best suited to translate his emotion or his thought. What is drawing ? Is it a pure imitation of form ? If so, the most faithful of all drawings should be the best ; then no copy would be preferable to the image fixed upon the daguerreotype plate, or traced me chanically, or drawn by the diagraph. But neither of these instruments gives us a drawing comparable to that which Leonardo da Vinci or Michael Angelo would have made. The most exact imitation, then, after all, is not the most faithful, and the machine in seizing the real does not always catch the true. Why ? Because drawing is not a simple imitation, a copy corresponding mathematically to the original an inert reproduction, a pleonasm. Drawing is a work of the mind, as is indicated by the orthography of our fathers, who wrote it dessein — design. Every drawing is the expression of a thought or a senti- ment, and is charged to show us something superior to the apparent truth, when that reveals no senti- ment, no thought. But what is this superior truth ? It is sometimes the character of the object drawn, sometimes the character of the designer, and in high art, is what we call style. What do these words signify : the character of an PAINTING. 99 object ? They signify the permanent side of its phys- iognomy, the dominant of the impressions it can produce. But the whole of the features that give to objects their character, the eye alone does not seize ; it is the thought. It may be that these characters do not appear clearly on the surface ; the painter then makes them apparent It may be they are changed by some alloy ; the painter then discriminates between inherent and foreign qualities. He unravels the primitive truth among the accidents that have cor- rupted it, he brings it back to harmony, unity. It is in this sense we must interpret a phrase that Taddeo Zuccaro attributes to Raphael: "We must paint Nature not as she is but as she should be. See that rock ; it is abrupt, sharp ; nevertheless if we look at it closely, we shall notice, perhaps, smooth parts, fissures softened and rounded; but these ex- ceptional features do not hinder the rock's being rough and savage, and to render it still more rough and savage the designer will neglect or attenuate, voluntarily or in spite of himself, such accidental forms, while he will amplify, if it is necessary, and insist upon the significant forms. Thus the drawing will have put in relief the character of the object drawn, and far superior to the work of a machine, it will be a work of art That the character of the forms should be, in the drawing, the dominant quality, greatly superior to mathematical exactness, is so true, that there is nothing more interesting than the sketch of a mas- I OO PAINTING. ■ u ten I do not speak of those trifles in which the pencil only touches a half perceived image, because the artist is only, as F^nelon says, humming his thought I speak of those abridged, rapid drawings, in which the painter, not having had leisure to be , correct, has seized only the most striking aspect of the object and has thrown upon the paper a senti- ment rather than an imitation, an impression rather than a copy. How many features are wanting or are but just indicated 1 How many details are omitted I Nevertheless this concentrated, condensed sketch has said everything if it has made us touch with the finger the character, veiled or prominent, that all the forms, even the inanimate ones present, and which is then, so to say, the spirit of things. Again, in presence of the creations of Nature, the artist has the privilege of seeing in them what he himself carries in the depths of his soul, of tinting them with the colors of his imagination, of lend- ing them the witchery of his genius. A woman in whom Correggio would find all the graces of volup- tuousness, Michael Angelo would see chaste and haughty. A landscape that to Van de Velde would have a sweet and familiar aspect, would seem savage to Hobbema. Claude and Poussin have both painted the same fields, but the one discovered in them the poetry of Virgil, the other heard more manly accents, followed a severer muse. Thus, the temperament of the painter modifies the character of things, and even that of living figures; and Nature, for him, is FAINTING. lOI ■ > what he wills her to be. But this taking possession is the appanage of great hearts, of great artists, those whom we call masters ; precisely because instead of being the slaves of reality they govern it ; instead of obeying Nature, or rather by reason of having known how to obey her, they know how to command hen These have a style; those that imitate them have only a manner. But aside from the style peculiar to every great master, there is something still superior and imper- sonal ; it is style. What we mean by this word we have already said in the course of this work. It is truth aggrandized, simplified, freed from all insig- nificant details, restored to its original essence, its typical aspect. This style, par excellence^ in which, instead of recognizing the soul of an artist, we feel the breath of the universal soul, has been realized in the Greek sculpture of the time of Pericles, and now we have to examine if it be realizable in painting. We have proven that drawing is not a mere imita- tion of form, a literal imitation. Not that at least, for a master. For a master, I say, for we must distinguish be- tween him who learns and him who knows, and turn our attention to the teaching of drawing. The saying of Raphael, that we have quoted, " We must paint Nature not as she is but as she should be," is not addressed to pupils ; it is perfectly intelligible only at the last degree of initiation ; and I am sure, if it were spoken, it was only before such men as Julio I02 PAINTING. Romano, Perino del Vaga, or Polydorus. For a be- ginner nothing would be more misunderstood than to counsel the ideal and to say to him, " Correct Nature." The artist who is beginning ought to copy naively, religiously what he sees ; but to copy Nature it is not enough to have eyes, he must know how to look, he must learn to see : and how shall he learn? Several methods may be good. There is one, * however, that Philosophy recommends; it is that which consists in passing from the simple to the complex, from the permanent to the accidental, from that which is to that which seems to be. All bodies having three dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness, have a form. Yet there are those that, to the eye, have no thickness ; these have only contour. A leaf of paper, for instance, has a configuration determined by its exterior lines. The figures whose fantastic silhouettes decorate Greek ' vases, offer no appearance of thickness ; thus they are not human forms but only the shadows of them. That which we understand in painting by the word form, is an object that has salient and reentering parts. Hence it is impossible to draw any form whatever without more or less of perspective ; that is why Leonardo da Vinci saw in perspective, " the universal reason of drawing." But what is perspec tive ? The science of apparent forms. To repre- sent well objects as they appear, it is of consequence to know them as they are. One cannot see truly but with the eyes of the mind ; and a form that one PAINTING. 103 should draw without comprehending it himself, he could not make comprehensible to others : the igno- rant looks, the intelligent sees. Then, before teaching pei"spective, which is the side continually accidental, it is useful to teach the geometrical, which is for everything its real and per- manent manner ofbeing; for the visual change of an object seen foreshortened, of a capital, for instance, is independent of the capital itself, which none the less preserves its positive proportions, its height, its breadth, its volume ; in other terms, its geometric con- struction. What does the architect do before draw- ing a building? He traces at first the plan that measures the depth, then the profile that determines the height, afterwards the face that gives the breadth, and it is when it possesses all these measures that he draws the edifice geometrically, that is to say, as it is in reality ; later he draws it in perspective, such as it will be in appearance; thus should the beginner pro- ceed. Does he wish to give the idea of a pyramid with unequal faces? Let him decompose the super- ficies of it, let him know just what is the polygon that is the base of it ; then let him draw the triangles of which each side of the plan will be the base : let him take account of the relations between them; when he shall know that the pyramid is only the assemblage of these surfaces, he will draw it intel- ligently. If, on the contrary, the pupil is allowed to get in . the habit of drawing objects by approximation, with- I04 FAINTING. out measure and rule, he will fare like a traveller who wished to learn English, and who, scarcely landed in Dover, hastened to repeat everything he heard. From speaking badly in the beginning he contracted the habit of it ; he taught himself a bad pronunciation, which became incorrigible. If he had for a while kept silent, he would have accus- tomed his ear to the true pronunciation, which would have penetrated into his mind, his memory. But in order that it should penetrate there perfectly, it is essential that our traveller should have seen the language printed ; that he should know how the words are written, of what consonants and vowels they are formed. That is, as it were, the geometry of the tongue, the change it undergoes in the mouth of the people is the perspective. So to pronounce a form well by drawing, we must first know how it is written in the vocabulary of Nature. To be acquainted with forms before drawing them is a necessary condition for the beginner. He will not know how to pencil a head correctly if he does not know the divisions of it; still less a whole figure if he has not learned the proportions of the skeleton and its generic measures. And as all the lines are straight or curved, and geometry is the principle of all forms, it is by the elements of geometry that the teaching of drawing should commence. The artist, in proceeding thus, will follow the path traced by him whom Plato calls the eternal geom- etrician. Long before life manifested itself by that PAINTING. 105 which is the highest expression of it, sentiment and thought, crystallization produced a mysteriously sym- metrical geometry, the triangular or polyhedric forms that bodies take in passing from a liquid to a solid state ; and the rigid lines of the prisms of minerals preceded the reign in which the elegance of vegeta- bles, the curves of flowers displayed themselves, and that other reign, far higher, in which a new sym- metry is announced, no longer .rigorous, frozen, but broken by liberty of movement, animated by life, redeemed by grace, or replaced by equilibrium. The geometry that marked the beginning of this di-1 vine creation of which life was the coronation, ought also to occupy the first rank in that human creation — art, whose last word is beauty. All the knowledge of the designer consisting in hollowing fictitious depths upon smooth surfaces, and in arranging distances, the child who shall have succeeded in putting a cube in perspective, and in representing the convexity of a sphere, will possess, in abridgment, the whole science of design, because he will know how to imitate the projecting and re- treating, and manage all that gives to forms their modelling ; that is, light, half light, shade, reflection, projected shadow. But a precaution is to be taken with the young pupil ; one must not ask him to solve two problems at once, — to catch the form he must imitate, and at the same time to find out the manner by which he shall translate his imitation upon paper. To know how to read the model is not easy; to know /' \ I06 PAINTING, how to write what one has read, with the pencil or stump, is a second difficulty added to the first. Why should the pupil painfully invent proceedings that others have invented before him. It seems to us that the drawing of objects already drawn or en- graved ought to precede drawing directly from a model, geometrical or not ; and that before putting [ one's self face to face with reality, it is well to learn the conventional proceedings by which it is inter- preted. For finally the contour that imprisons a figure is made up of lines agreed upon, necessary to fix the image upon a smooth surface. The fashion of expressing the shadows and indicating the degrees of distance by cuttings on the pencil or tints laid on with the stump, are equally agreed upon. It is use- less to complicate the embarrassments of the begin- ner by making him study at the same time the art of seeing and the art of interpreting. As to placing the pupil at once in presence of the living model, it would precipitate him into a deluge of errors and prepare for him the bitterest discouragements, with as little prudence and reason as to ask an aspiring musician to decipher a symphony. After geometry and perspective, the designer who feels in himself the high vocation of the painter will do well to learn the elements of architecture. Not long since an eminent sculptor, in a very remarkable lecture upon the teaching of drawing, said : " There are still in the field of creation exact notions and a sovereign art ; for if, at the beginning of our studies FAINTING. 107 wc find architecture the arsenal, as it were, of prac- tical means, at the beginning of higher education we shall find it contains all the principles of composi- tion. It gives a foundation and a frame to all works of art It fixes picturesque ideas in stable lines ; of necessity it fixes masses, movements, life, even senti- ment, that it may present all in a representation that shall be animated without causing fear, lest it should tumble to pieces or fade away." Is there a principle of correct drawing ? Yes, and now we are to find ourselves with the great masters. They will teach us that art, like science, rests upon axioms so simple as, at first thought, to excite a smile. " The whole is more important than a part,'\ is one of the truths that serves as a rule to the de- signer, as it is the starting point of the geometrician. When a model poses before us, we must study the whole, closing our eyes to details, till the general movement of the figure has been seized. Raphael makes us feel this predominance of synthesis even in the parts; that is, after taking the whole of the whole he takes the whole of each part. And this manner of seeing which seems so natural, so simple, we find in perfection only in the Greek sculptures of the golden age, and in the drawings of some of the great masters. Some illustrious artists have pro- ceeded differently. Michael Angelo, for instance, who, instead of blending the parts into one whole, gives them an exaggerated relief, a strongly marked contour. Instead of enveloping the muscles, he de- 108 PAINTING. velops them ; but Michael Angelo is a man whom we must admire without following, because his genius, absolutely inimitable, inevitably leads copyists astray. The true masters for the beginner are Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael : the first because, in spite of his love of detail, he is great by reason of the repose and breadth of his shadows ; the second, because he teaches grandeur without effort, and even in a feeble copy of his drawing there is grace and PAINTING, 109 charm, — so difficult is it to destroy the beauty of the original. To enable us to understand better, let us suppose Albert Diirer drawing in the atelier of Raphael and with him, from the model that posed for the " Apollo of Parnassus." While the Roman artist, after hav- ing with a few strokes seized the movement of the model, looks at the broad surfaces and firmly indi- cates the principal insertions of the muscles, Albert Diirer devours with his eyes successively all parts of the figure ; he analyzes it, copies it bit by bit. He sees a world in each morsel, and stops to contemplate it according to the degree of curiosity that it inspires in him. Coming to the hand, he discovers in it an infinity of details. He counts the veins and the folds of the skin, and the edges of flesh around the nails ; meanwhile, he forgets the whole, or, as a Ger- man proverb says, the trees prevent his seeing the forest; so that if the figure stands well upon its feet, if the general movement is correct or seems to be, it will be through a miracle, or because the Teutonic genius with infinite patience will several times have corrected its work. From this search for detail there will result something unequal, disagreeable, and stiff in the drawing and in the entire figure ; an individuality not consonant with grandeur and style. Finally, the model we have supposed posing before Raphael and Albert Diirer will remain, in the work of one, a peasant of the Campagna, while the painter of Urbino will only have to suppress some peculiar- I lO PAINTING. ities to ennoble his subject, and soon mounting to Parnassus, the fiddler of the Sabine hills will lead the choir of the Muses, as the god of Poesy. But a question presents itself now which is per- haps the most delicate, most difficult, and important that we have to examine. Is style in painting of the same quality as in sculpture ? Sculpture, as we have already said, demands beauty above everything. It seeks, among the countless examples of human and animal life, those that represent a collective variety, a whole family of beings. Its mission is to fix types. It does not imitate the features of a certain strong and generous man; it sculptures the generous strength we call Hercules. It does not model- the image of such or such a handsome young man ; it models the accom- plished gymnast, the elegant and supple, the robust and light-footed adolescent — Mercury, the embodi- ment of manly youth and grace. To the sculptor we may apply the verses of an unknown poet upon an ancient painter : — *' En rassemblant ces traits, le sculpteur transport^, Ne forme aucune belle ; il forme la be