Pictor in fabula

Apelles and Protogenes, nearly a century afterwards, drew their contested lines with the pencil ; and that alone, as delicacy and evanescent subtilty were the characteristic of those lines, may give an idea of their excellence.

Grace of conception and refinement of taste were his elements, and went hand in hand with grace of execution and taste in finish; powerfull and seldom possessed singly, irresistible when united: that he built both on the firm basis of the former system, not on its subversion, his well-known contest of lines with Protogenes, not a legendary tale, but a well-attested fact, irrefragably proves: what those lines were, drawn with nearly miraculous subtlety in different colours, one upon the other, or rather within each other, it would be equally unavailing and useless to inquire; but the corollaries we may deduce from the contest are obviously these, that the schools of Greece recognised all one elemental principle; that acuteness and fidelity of eye and obedience of hand form precision; precision, proportion; proportion, beauty; that it is the “little more or less”, imperceptible to vulgar eyes, which constitutes grace, and establishes the superiority of one artist over another: that the knowledge of the degrees of things, or taste, presupposes a perfect knowledge of the things themselves: that colour, grace, and taste are ornaments, not substitutes of form, expression, and character, and when they usurp that title, degenerate into splendid faults.

Such were the principles on which Apelles formed his Venus, or rather the personification of Female Grace, the wonder of Art, the despair of artists: whose outline baffled every attempt at emendation, whilst imitation shrunk from the purity, the force, the brilliancy, the evanescent gradations of her tints[[3:Apelles was probably the inventor of what artists call glazing. See Reynolds on Du Fresnoy, note 37, vol. II]].

Great as these advantages were, it is not to be supposed that nature deviated from her gradual process in the development of human faculties, in favour of the Greeks. Greek Art had her infancy, but the Graces rocked the cradle, and Love taught her to speak. If ever legend deserved our belief, the amorous tale of the Corinthian maid, who traced the shade of her departing lover by the secret lamp, appeals to our sympathy to grant it, and leads us, at the same time, to some observations on the first mechanical essays of painting, and that linear method which, though passed nearly unnoticed by Winkelmann, seems to have continued as the basis of execution, even when the instrument for which it was chiefly adapted had long been laid aside. […] The first essays of the art were skiagrams, simple outlines of a shade, similar to those which have been introduced to vulgar use by the students and parasites of physiognomony, under the name of silhouettes, without any other addition of character or feature but what the profile of the object thus delineated could afford.

None of the ancients seem to have united or wished to combine, as man and artist, more qualities seemingly incompatible than Parrhasius. The volubility and ostentatious insolence of an Asiatic with Athenian simplicity and urbanity of manners; punctilious correctness with blandishments of handling and luxurious colour, and with sublime and pathetic conception, a fancy libidinously sportive.

[[4:suit Parrhasius orgueil]] If he[[5:Parrhasius.]] was not the inventor, he surely was the greatest master of allegory, supposing that he really embodied, by signs universally comprehended, that image of the Athenian δημος or people, which was to combine and to express at once its contradictory qualities. Perhaps he traced the jarring branches to their source, the aboriginal moral principle of the Athenian character, which he made intuitive[[3:The meaning of this is very obscure, and certainly throws no light whatever on the subject. W.]]. This supposition alone can shed a dawn of possibility on what else appears impossible. We know that the personification of the Athenian Δῆμος was an object of sculpture, and that its images by Lyson and Leochares[[3:In the portico of the Piraeus by Leochares ; in the hall of the Five-hundred, by Lyson ; in the back portico of the Ceramicus there was a picture of Theseus, of Democracy and the Demos, by Euphranor. Pausan. Attic. I. 3. Aristolaus, according to Pliny, was a painter “e seuerissimis”.]] were publicly set up; but there is no clue to decide whether they preceded or followed the conceit of Parrhasius. It was repeated by Aristolaus, the son of Pausias.

Polygnotus, says Aristotle, improves the model.

No picture of Antiquity is more celebrated than his Immolation of Iphigenia in Aulis, painted, as Quintilian informs us, in contest with Colotes of Teos, a painter and sculptor from the school of Phidias; crowned with victory at its rival exhibition, and since, the theme of unlimited praise from the orators and historians of antiquity, thought the solidity or justice of their praise relatively to the art has been questioned by modern criticism. On this subject, wich non only contains the gradations of affection from the most remote to the closest link of humanity, but appears to me to offer the fairest specimen of the limits which the theory of the ancient had prescribed to the expression of pathos, I think it my duty the more circumstantially to expatiate, as the censure passed on the method of Timanthes, has been sanctioned by the highest authority in matters of art, that of your late President, in his eight discourse at the delivery of the academic prize for the best picture painted from this very subject.

How did Timanthes treat it? Iphigenia, the victim ordained by the oracle to be offered for the success of the Greek expedition against Troy, was represented standing ready for immolation at the altar, the priest, the instruments of death at her side; and around her, an assembly of the most important agents or witnesses of the terrible solemnity, from Ulysses, who had disengaged her from the embraces of ther mother at Mycenae, to her nearest male relations, her uncle Menelaus, and her own father, Agamemnon. Timanthes, say Pliny and Quintilian with surprising similarity of phrase, when, in gradation he had consumed every image of grief within the reach of art, from the unhappy priest, to the deeper grief of Ulysses, and from that to the pangs of kindred sympathy in Menelaus, unable to express with dignity the father’s one, indiscriminately borrowed, as might easily be supposed, by all the concurrents for the prize, gave rise to the following series of criticism:

“Before I conclude, I cannot avoid making one observation on the pictures now before us. I have observed, that every candidate has copied the celebrated invention of Timanthes in hiding the face of Agamemnon in his mantle; indeed such lavish encomiums have been bestowed on this thought, and that too by men of the highest character in critical knowledge, — Cicero, Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, and Pliny —, and have been since re-echoed by almost every modern that has written on the Arts, that your adopting it can neither be wondered at nor blamed. It appears to be now so much connected with the subject, that the spectator would perhaps be desappointed in not finding united in the picture what he always united in his mind, and considered as indispensably belonging to the subject. But it may be observed, that those who praise this circumstance were not painters. They use it as an illustration of their own art; it served their purpose, and it was certainly not their business to enter into the objections that lie against it in another Art. I fear we have but very scanty means of exciting those powers over the imagination which make so very considerable and refined a part of poetry. It is a doubt with me, wether we should ever make the attempt. The chief, if not the only occasion which the painter has for this artifice, is, when the subject is improper to be more fully represented, either for the sake of decency, or to avoid what would be desagreeable to be seen; and this is not to raise or increase the passions, which is the reason that is given for this practice, but on the contrary to diminish their effect.

Mr. Falconet has observed, in a note on this passage in his translation of Pliny, that the circumstance of covering the face of Agamemnon was probably not in consequence of any fine imagination of the painter; which he considers as a discovery of the critics; but merely copied from the description of the sacrifice, as it is found in Euripides.

The words from which the picture is supposed to be taken, are these: Agamemnon saw Iphigenia advance towards the fatal altar; he groaned, he turned aside his head, he shed tears, and covered his face with his robe.

Falconet does not at all acquiesce in the praise that is bestowed on Timanthes; not only because it is not his invention, but because he thinks meanly of this trick of concealing, exept in instances of blood, where the objects would be too horrible to be seen; but, says he, « in an afflicted Father, in a King, in Agamemnon, you, who are a painter, conceal from me the most interesting circumstance, and then put me off with sophistry and a veil. You are (he adds) a feeble painter, without resources; you do not know even those of your Art : I care not what veil it is, wether closed hands, arms raised, or any other action that conceals from me the countenance of the Hero. You think of veiling Agamemnon; you have unveiled your own ignorance. A Painter who represents Agamemnon veiled, is as ridiculous as a poet would be, who in a pathetic situation, in order to satisfy my expectations, and rid himself of the business, should say, that the sentiments of his Hero are so far above whatever can be said on the accasion, that he shall say nothing. »

To what Falconet has said, we may add, that supposing this method of leaving the expression of grief to imagination, to be, as it was thought to be, the invention of the painter, and that it deserves all the praise that has been given it, still it is a trick that will serve but once; whoever does it a second time will not only want novelty, but be justly suspected of using artifice to evade difficulties. If difficulties overcome make a great part of the merit of art, difficulties evaded can deserve but little commendation.”

To this string of animadversions, I subjoin with diffidence the following observations:

The subject of Timanthes was the immolation of Iphigenia; Iphigenia was the principal figure, and her form, her resignation, or her anguish the painter’s principal task; the figure of Agamemnon, however important, is merely accessory, and no more necessary to make the subject a completely tragic one, than that of Clytemnestra the mother, no more than that of Priam, to impress us with sympathy at the death of Polyxena. Is is therefore a misnomer of the French critic, to call Agamemnon “the hero” of the subject. Neither the French nor the English critic appears to me have comprehended the real motive of Timanthes, as contained in the words, “decree, pro dignitate, and digne”, in the passages of Tully, Quintilian, and Pliny[[3:Cicero, Oratore, 73 seq. : In alioque ponatur, aliudque totum sit, utrum decere an oportere dicas ; oportere enim, perfectionem declarat officii, quo et semper utendum est, et omnibus ; decere, quasi aptum esse consentaneumque tempori et personæ ; quod cum in factis sæpissime, tum in dictis valet, in vultu deumque, et gestu, et incessu, contraque item dedecere. Quod si poeta fugit, ut maximum vitium, qui peccat, etiam, cum probam orationem affingit improbo, stultoque sapientis : si denique pictor ille vidit, cum immolanda Iphigenia tristis Calchas esset, tristior Ulixes, maereret Menelaus, obvolendum caput Agamemnonis esse, quoniam summum illum luctum penicillo, non posset imitari ; si denique histrio quid deceat quærit : quid faciendum oratori putemus?

M.F. Quintilianus, l. II c. 14 : Operienda sunt quaedam, sive ostendi non debent, sive exprimi pro dignitate non possunt: ut fecit Timanthes, ut opinor, Cythnius, in ea tabula, qua Coloten Teium vicit. Nam cum in Iphigeniæ immolatione pinxisset tristem Calchantem, tristiorem Ulixen, addixisset Menelao quem summum poterat ars efficere mærorem ; consumptis affectibus, non reperiens quo digne modo patris vultum posset exprimere, velavit ejus caput et suo quique animo dedit æstimandum.

It is evident to the slightest consideration, that both Cicero and Quintilian lose sight of their premises, and contradict themselves in the motive they ascribe to Timanthes. Their want of acquaintance with the nature of plastic expression made them imagine the face of Agamemnon beyond the power of the artist. They were not aware that by making him waste expression on inferior actors at the expense of a principal one, they call him an improvident spendthrift, and not a wise economist.

From Valerius Maximus, who calls the subject « luctuosum immolatae Iphigeniae sacrificium » instead of immolandae, little can be expected to the purpose. Pliny, with the digne of Quintilian, has the same confusion of motive.]], they ascribe to impotence what was the forbearance of judgment; Timanthes felt like a father: he did not hide the face of Agamemnon, because it was beyond the power of this art, not because it was beyond the possibility, but because it was beyond the dignity of expression, because the inspiring feature of paternal affection at that moment, and the action which of necessity must have accompanied it, would either hae destroyed the grandeur of the character and the solemnity of the scene, or subjected the painter with the majority of his judges to the imputation of sensibility. He must either have represented him in tears, or convulsed at the flash of the raised dagger, forgetting the chief in the father, or shown him absorbed by despair, and in that state of stupefaction, which levels all features and deadens expression; he might indeed have chosen a fourth mode, he might have exhibited him fainting and palsied in the arms of his attendants, and by this confusion of male and female character, merited the applause of every theatre in Paris. But Timanthes had too true a sense of nature to expose a father’s feelings or to tear a passion to rags; nor had the Greeks yet learnt of Rome to steel the face. If he made Agamemnon bear his calamity as a man, he made him also feel it as a man. It became the leader of Greece to sanction the ceremony with his presence, it did not become the father to see his daughter beneath the dagger’s point: the sale nature that threw a real mantle over the face of Timoleon, when he assisted at the punishment of his brother, taught Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, propriety of expression was his aim.

The critics grants that the expedient of Timanthes may be allowed in “instances of blood”, the supported aspect of which would change a scene of commiseration and terror into one of abomination and horror, which ought for ever to be excluded from the province of art of poetry as well as painting: and would not the face of Agamemnon, uncovered, have had this effect? Was not the scene he must have witnessed a scene of blood? And whose blood was to be shed? That of his own daughter – and what daughter? Young, beautiful, helpless, innocent, resigned – the very idea of resignation in such a victim, must either have acted irresistibly to procure her relief, or thrown a veil over a father’s face. A man who is determined to sport wit at the expence of heart alone could call such an expedient ridiculous – “as ridiculous, Mr Falconet continues, “as a poet woud be, who in a pathetic situation, instead of satisfying my expectation, to rid himself in the business, should say, that the sentiments of his hero are so far above whatever can be said on the occasion, that he shall say nothing.” And has not Homer, though he does not tell us this, acted upon a similar principle? Has he not, when Ulysses addresses Ajax in Hades, in the most pathetic and conciliatory manner, instead of furnishing him with an answer, made him remain in indignant silence during the address, then turn his step and stalk away? Has not the universal voice of genuine criticism with Longinus told us, and if it had not, would not Nature’s own voice tell us, that silence was characteristic, that it precluded, included, and soaring above all answer, consigned Ulysses for ever to a sense of inferiority? Nor is it necessary to render such criticism contemptible to mention the silence of Dido in Virgil, or the Niobe of Aeschylus, who was introduced veiled, and continued mute during her presence on the stage.

But in hiding Agamemnon’s face, Timanthes loses the honour of invention, as he is merely the imitator of Euripides, who did it before him?[[3:It is observed by an ingenious critic, that in the tragedy of Euripides, the procession is described, and upon Iphigenias’s looking back on her father, he groans, and hides his face to conceal his tears; whilst the picture gives the moment that precedes the sacrifice, and the hiding has a different object and arises from another impression.

Ως δ’εσειδεν Αγαμεμνων αναξ

Επι σφαφας στειχουσαν εις αλσος κορην,

Ανεστεναξε κἀμπαλιν στεψας καρα,

Δακρυα προηγεν, ομματων πεπλον προθεις.]] I am not prepared with chronologic proofs to decide whether Euripides or Timanthes, who were contemporaries, about the period of the Peloponnesian war, fell first on this expedient; though the silence of Pliny and Quintilian of that head, seems to be in favour of the painter, neither of whom could be ignorant of the celebrated drama of Euripides, and would not willingly have suffered the honour of this master-stroke of an art they were so much better acquainted with than painting, to be transferred to another from its real author, had the poet’s claim been prior: nor shall I urge that the picture of Timanthes was crowned with victory by those who were in daily habits of assisting at the dramas of Euripides, without having their verdict impeached by Colotes or his friends, who would not have failed to avail themselves of so flagrant a proof of inferiority as the want of invention, in the work of his rival: – I shall only ask, what is invention? If it be the combinationof a fact with the most varied effects of the reigning passion on the characters introduced – the invention of Timanthes consisted in showing, by the gradation of that passion in the faces of the assistant mourners, the reason why that of the principal one, was hid. This he performed, and this the poet, whether prior or subsequent, did not and could not do, but left it with a silent appeal to our own mind and fancy[[3:It may be questionned whether, under the circumstances, Agamemnon could have been represented in any other way. Notwithstanding his conviction that his attendance was necessary to sanction the deed, he could not look upon it; it would be unnatural. W.]].

In presuming to differ on the propriety of this mode of expression in the picture of Timanthes from the respectable authority I have quoted, I am far from a wish to invalidate the equally pertinent and acute remarks made on the danger of its imitation, though I am decidedly of opinion that it is strictly within the limits of our art. If it be a “trick”, it is certainly one that “has served more than once”. We find it adopted to express the grief of a beautiful female figure on a basso-rilievo formerly in the palace Valle at Rome, and preserved in the Admiranda of S. Bartoli; it is used, though with his own originality, by Michael Angelo in the figure of Abijam, to mark unutterable woe; Raphael, to show that the thought it the best possible mode of expressing remorse and the deepest sense of repentance, borrowed it in the expulsion from Paradise, without any alteration, from Masaccio; and like him, turned Adam out with both his hands before his face[[3:It was made use of also by Polygnotus long before either Timanthes or Euripides. In the Destruction of Troy, in the Lesche at Delphi, an infant is represented holding his hands before his eyes, to escape the horrors of the scene. Pausanias, XI, 26. W.]]. And how has he represented Moses at the burning bush, to express the astonished awe of human in the visible presence of divine nature? By a double repetition of the same expedient; one in the ceiling of a Stanza, and again in the loggia of the Vatican, with both his hands before his face, or rather with his face immersed in his hands. As we cannot suspect in the master of expression the unworthy motive of making use of this mode merely to avoid a difficulty, or to denote the insupportable splendour of the vision, which was so far from being the case, that, according to the sacred record, Moses stepped out of his way to examine the ineffectual blaze: we must conclude that Nature herself dictated to him this method as superior to all he could express by features; and that he recognized the same dictate in Masaccio, who can no more be supposed to have been acquainted with the precedent of Timanthes, than Shakespeare with that of Euripides, when he made Macduff draw his hat over his face.

Masaccio and Raphael proceeded on the principle, Gherard Lairesse copied only the image of Timanthes, and has perhaps incurred by it the charge of what Longinus calls parenthyrsos, in the ill-timed application of supreme pathos, to an inadequate call. Agamemnon is introduced covering his face with his mantle, at the death of Polyxena, the captive daughter of Priam, sacrificed to the manes of Achilles, her betrothed lover, treacherously slain in the midst of the nuptial ceremony, by her brother Paris. The death of Polyxena, whose charms had been productive of the greatest disaster that could befall the Grecian army, could not perhaps provoke in its leader emotions similar to those which he felt at that of his own daughter: it must however be owned that the figure of the chief is equally dignified and pathetic; and that, by the introduction of the spectre of Achilles at the immolation of the damsel to his manes, the artist’s fancy has in some degree atoned for the want of discrimination in the professor.

His principle was epic, and this Aristotle either considered not, or did not comprehend, when he refuses him the expression of character in action and feature.

From the essential style of Polygnotus, and the specific discrimination of Apollodorus, Zeuxis, by comparison of what belonged to the genius and what to the class, framed at last that ideal form, which, in his opinion, constituted the supreme degree of human beauty, or, in other words, embodied possibility, by uniting the various but homogeneous powers scattered among many, in one object, to one end. Such a system, if it originated in genius, was the considerate result of a taste, refined by the unremitting perseverance with which he observed, consulted, compared, selected the congenial but scattered forms of nature. Our ideas are the offspring of our senses: we are not able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form, must have composed it from actual existence, and he alone can comprehend what one degree of beauty wants to become equal to another, and at last superlative. He who thinks the pretty handsome, will think the handsome a beauty, and fancy he has met an ideal form in a merely handsome one; whilst he who has compared beauty with beauty, will at last improve form upon form to a perfect image: this was the method of Zeuxis, and this he learnt from Homer, whose model of ideal composition, according to Quintilian, he considered his model[[3:Quintilian (Inst. Orator. XII. 10) says that Zeuxis followed Homer, and loved powerful forms even in women. W.]]. Each individual of Homer forms a class, expresses and is circumscribed by one quality of heroic power; Achilles alone unites their various but congenial energies. The grace of Nireus, the dignity of Agamemnon, the impetuosity of Hector, the magnitude, the steady prowess of the great, the velocity of the lesser Ajax, the perserverance of Ulysses, the intrepidity of Diomede, are emanations of energy that reunite in one splendid centre fixed in Achilles. This standard of the unison of homogeneous powers exhibited in successive action by the poet, the painter, invigorated, no doubt, by the contemplation of the works of Phidias, transferred to his own art, and substantiated by form, when he selected the congenial beauties of Croton to compose a perfect female[[3:This was for a picture of Helen for the temple of Juno Lacinia at Croton, and which Zeuxis painted from five virgins of that place. Zeuxis exhibited this picture for a head-money, before it was placed in its destination, whence it acquired the nick-name of the Prostitute (Cicero, De Invent. II, 1 ; Aelian, Var. Hist. IV, 12). W.]].