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§ 13. Either

when it is sym

bolically used,

§14. Or in architectural decoration.

and in such circumstances it is perhaps necessary to adopt a typical form. The evil consequences of the opposite treatment are ludicrously exhibited in the St. Peter of Carlo Dolci in the Pitti Palace, which owing to the prominent, glossy-plumed, and crimson-combed cock, is liable to be taken for the portrait of a poulterer; only let it be observed that the treatment of the animal form here is offensive, not only from its realization, but from the pettiness and meanness of its realization; for it might, in other hands than Carlo Dolci's, have been a sublime cock, though a real one; but, in his, it is fit for nothing but the spit. Compare, as an example partly of symbolical treatment, partly of magnificent realization, that supernatural lion of Tintoret (in the picture of the Doge Loredano before the Madonna) with the plumes of his mighty wings clashed together in cloudlike repose, and the strength of the sea winds shut within their folding. And note, farther, the difference between the typical use of the animal, as in this case, and that of the fish of Jonah (and again the fish before mentioned whose form is indicated in the clouds of the Baptism), and the actual occurrence of the creature itself, with concealed meaning, as the ass colt of the Crucifixion, which it was necessary to paint as such, and not as an ideal form.

I cannot enter here into the question of the exact degree of severity and abstraction necessary in the forms of living things architecturally employed: my own feeling on the subject is, though I dare not lay it down as a principle (with the Parthenon pediment standing against me like the shield of Ajax), that no perfect representation of animal form is right in architectural decoration. For my own part, I had much rather see the metopes in the Elgin room of the British Museum, and the Parthenon without them, than have them together; and I would not surrender, in an architectural point of view, one mighty line of the colossal, quiet, life-in-death statue mountains of Egypt with their narrow fixed eyes and hands on their rocky limbs, nor one Romanesque façade with its porphyry mosaic of indefinable monsters, nor one Gothic moulding of rigid saints and grinning goblins, for ten Parthenons. And, I believe, I could show some rational ground for this seeming barbarity, if this were the place to do so; but at present I can only ask the reader to compare the effect of the so-called barbarous ancient mosaics on the front of

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

in delicate and

ornament.

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

§ 16. Abstraction necessary

tion of materials.

So far, then, of the abstraction proper to architecture, and to from imperfec- symbolical uses, of which I shall have occasion to speak hereafter at length, referring to it only at present as one of the operations of imagination contemplative; other abstractions there are which are necessarily consequent on the imperfection of materials, as of the hair in sculpture, which is necessarily treated in masses that are in no sort imitative, but only stand for hair, and have the grace, flow, and feeling of it without the texture or division; and other abstractions there are in which the form of one thing is fancifully indicated in the matter of another; as in phantoms and cloud shapes, the use of which, in mighty hands, is often most impressive, as in the cloudycharioted Apollo of Nicolo Poussin in our own gallery, which the reader may oppose to the substantial Apollo, in Wilson's Niobe; and again in the phantom vignette of Turner already noticed; only such operations of the imagination are to be held of lower kind, and dangerous consequence if frequently trusted in; for those painters only have the right imaginative power who can set the supernatural § 17. Abstrac- form before us, fleshed and boned like ourselves.1 Other abstractions occur, frequently, of things which have much accidental variety of varied accident form; as of waves, on Greek sculptures in successive volutes, and of clouds often in supporting volumes in the sacred pictures; but these I do not look upon as results of imagination at all, but mere signs and letters; and whenever a very highly imaginative mind touches them, it always realizes as far as may be. Even Titian is content to use, at the top of his S. Pietro Martire, the conventional, round, opaque cloud, which cuts his trees open like an axe; but Tintoret, in his picture of the Golden Calf, though compelled to represent the Sinai under conventional form, in order that the receiving of the tables might be seen at the top of it, yet so soon as it is possible to give more truth, he takes a grand fold of horizontal cloud straight from the flanks of the Alps, and shows the forests of the mountains through its misty volume, like sea-weed through $18. Yet some deep sea. Nevertheless, when the realization is impossible, bold symbolism is of the highest value, and in religious art, as we shall

tions of things capable of

are not imaginative;

times valuable.

1 Comp. Ch. V. § 4.

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

presently see, even necessary, as of the rays of light in the Titian woodcut of St. Francis; and sometimes the attention is directed by some such strange form to the meaning of the image, which may be missed if it remains in its natural purity (as, I suppose, few, in looking at the Cephalus and Procris of Turner, note the sympathy of those faint rays that are just drawing back and dying between the trunks of the far-off forest, with the ebbing life of the nymph, unless, indeed, they happen to recollect the same sympathy marked by Shelley in the Alastor); but the imagination is not shown in any such modifications; however, in some cases they may be valuable, and I note them merely in consequence of their peculiar use in religious art, presently to be examined.

$19. Exagge

ration. Its laws

and limits.

The last mode we have here to note in which the Imagination regardant may be expressed in art is Exaggeration, of which, as it is the vice of all bad artists, and may be constantly resorted to without any warrant of imagination, it is necessary to note strictly tion. the admissible limits.

In the first place, a colossal statue is not necessarily any more an exaggeration of what it represents, than a miniature is a diminution; it need not be a representation of a giant, but a representation, on a large scale, of a man: only it is to be observed, that, as any plane intersecting the cone of rays between us and the object must receive an image smaller than the object, a small image is rationally and completely expressive of a larger one; but not a large of a small one. Hence I think that all statues above the Elgin standard, or that of Michael Angelo's Night and Morning, are, in a measure, taken by the eye for representations of giants, and I think them always disagreeable. The amount of exaggeration admitted by Michael Angelo is valuable, because it separates the emblematic from the human form, and gives greater freedom to the grand lines of the frame; for notice of his scientific system of increase of size I may refer the reader to Sir Charles Bell's remarks on the statues of the Medici chapel. But there is one circumstance which Sir Charles has not noticed, and in the interpretation of which, therefore, it is likely I may be myself wrong, that the extremities are singularly small in proportion to the limbs; by which means there is an expression given of strength and activity greater

First, In scale of representa

§ 20. Secondly, Of things ca

of scale.

than in the ordinary human type: which appears to me to be an allowance for that alteration in proportion necessitated by increase of size, which has been spoken of in Chap. VI. of the first Section, § 10., note; not but that Michael Angelo always makes the extremities comparatively small, but smallest, comparatively, in his largest works: so I think, from the size of the head, it may be conjectured respecting the Theseus of the Elgins. Such adaptations are not necessary when the exaggerated image is spectral; for, as the laws of matter in that case can have no operation, we may expand the form as far as we choose, only let careful distinction be made between the size of the thing represented, and the scale of the representation. The canvass on which Sir T. Lawrence has stretched his Satan in the schools of the Royal Academy is a mere concession to inability. He might have made him look more gigantic in one of a foot square.

:

Another kind of Exaggeration is of things whose size is variable pable of variety to a size or degree greater than that usual with them, as in waves and mountains; and there are hardly any limits to this exaggeration, so long as the laws which Nature observes in her increase be observed. Thus, for instance, the form and polished surface of a breaking ripple three inches high are not representative of either the form or the surface of the surf of a storm, nodding ten feet above the beach; neither would the cutting ripple of a breeze upon a lake, if simply exaggerated, represent the forms of Atlantic surges but as Nature increases her bulk, she diminishes the angles of ascent, and increases her divisions; and if we would represent surges of size greater than ever existed, which it is lawful to do, we must carry out these operations to still greater extent. Thus Turner, in his picture of the Slave Ship, divides the whole sea into two masses of enormous swell, and conceals the horizon by a gradual slope of only two or three degrees. This is intellectual exaggeration. In the Academy exhibition of 1843, there was, in one of the smaller rooms, a black picture of a storm, in which there appeared on the near sea, just about to be overwhelmed by a breaker curling right over it, an object at first sight liable to be taken for a walnut shell, but which, on close examination, proved to be a ship with mast and sail. This is childish exaggeration,

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