And were the Carracci such? Separate the precept from the practice, the artist from the teacher, and the Carracci are in possession of my submissive homage. Lodovico is the inventor of that solemn hue, that sober twilight, which you have heard so often recommended as the proper tone of historic colour. Agostino, with learning, taste, and form, combined Corregiesque tints. Annibale, inferior to both in sensibility and taste, in the wide range of talent, undaunted execution and academic prowess, left either far behind. But if he preserved the breadth of the style we speak of, he added nothing to its dignity; his pupils were inferior to him, and to his pupils, their successors. Style continued to linger, with fatal symptoms of decay, in Italy; and if it survives, has not yet found a place to re-establish its powers on this side of the Alps.
TWELFTH LECTURE.
ON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART, AND THE CAUSES WHICH CHECK ITS PROGRESS
Such is the influence of the plastic Arts on society, on manners, sentiments, the commodities and the ornaments of life, that we think ourselves generally entitled to form our estimate of times and nations by its standard. As our homage attends those whose patronage reared them to a state of efflorescence or maturity, so we pass with neglect, or pursue with contempt, the age or race which want of culture or of opportunity averted from developing symptoms of a similar attachment.
A genuine perception of Beauty is the highest degree of education, the ultimate polish of man; the master-key of the mind, it makes us better than we were before. Elevated or charmed by the contemplation of superior works of Art, our mind passes from the images themselves to their authors, and from them to the race which reared the powers that furnish us with models of imitation or multiply our pleasures.
This inward sense is supported by exterior motives in contact with a far greater part of society, whom wants and commerce connect with the Arts; for nations pay or receive tribute in proportion as their technic sense exerts itself or slumbers. Whatever is commodious, amene, or useful, depends in a great measure on the Arts: dress, furniture, and habitation owe to their breath what they can boast of grace, propriety, or shape: they teach Elegance to finish what Necessity invented, and make us enamoured of our wants.
This benign influence infallibly spreads or diminishes in proportion as its original source, a sense of genuine Beauty, flows from an ample or a scanty vein, in a clear or turbid stream. As Taste is adulterated or sinks, Ornament takes a meagre, clumsy, barbarous, ludicrous, or meretricious form; Affectation dictates; Simplicity and elegance are loaded; interest vanishes: in a short time Necessity alone remains, and Novelty with Error go hand in hand.
These obvious observations on the importance of the Arts, lead to the question so often discussed, and at no time more important than ours – on the causes that raised them at various times, and among different nations – on the means of assisting their progress, and how to check their decay. Of much that has been said on it, much must be repeated, and something added.
The Greeks commonly lead the van of the arguments produced to answer this question. Their religious and civil establishments; their manners, games, contests of valour and of talents; the Cyclus of their Mythology, peopled with celestial and heroic forms; the honours, the celebrity of artists; the serene Grecian sky and mildness of the climate, are the causes supposed to have carried that nation within the ken of perfection.
Without refusing to each of these various advantages its share of effect, History informs us that if Religion and Liberty prepared a public, and spread a technic taste over all Greece, Athens and Corinth must be considered as the principal nurses of Art, without whose fostering care the general causes mentioned could not have had so decided an effect; for nothing surely contributed so much to the gradual evolution of Art, as that perpetual opportunity which they presented to the artist of public exhibition; the decoration of temples, halls, porticoes, a succession of employments equally numerous, important, and dignified: hence that emulation to gain the heights of Art; the fervour of public encouragement, the zeal and gratitude of the artists were reciprocal: Polygnotus prepared with Cimon what Phidias with Pericles established, on public taste, Essential, Characteristic, and Ideal Styles.
Whether human nature admitted of no more, or other causes prevented a farther evolution of powers, nothing greater did arise; Polish, Elegance, and Novelty supplied Invention: here is the period of decay; the Art gradually sunk to mediocrity, and its final reward – Indifference.
The artist and the public are ever in the strictest reciprocity: if the Arts flourished nowhere as in Greece, no other nation ever interested itself with motives so pure in their establishment and progress, or allowed them so ample a compass. As long as their march was marked with such dignity, whilst their union excited admiration, commanded attachment, and led the public, they grew, they rose; but when individually to please, the artist attempted to monopolize the interest due to Art, to abstract by novelty and to flatter the multitude, ruin followed. To prosper, the Art not only must feel itself free, it ought to reign: if it be domineered over, if it follow the dictate of Fashion or a Patron's whims, then is its dissolution at hand.
To attain the height of the Ancient was impossible for Modern Art, circumscribed by narrower limits, forced to form itself rapidly and on borrowed principles; still it owes its origin and support to nearly similar causes. During the fourteenth, and still more in the course of the fifteenth century, so much activity, so general a predilection for Art spread themselves over the greater part of Italy, that we are astonished at the farrago of various imagery produced at those periods. The artist and the Art were indeed considered as little more than craftsmen and a craft; but they were indemnified for the want of honours, by the dignity of their employment, by commissions to decorate churches, convents, and public buildings.
Let no one to whom truth and its propagation are dear, believe or maintain that Christianism was inimical to the progress of Arts, which probably nothing else could have revived. Nothing less than Christian enthusiasm could give that lasting and energetic impulse whose magic result we admire in the works that illustrate the period of Genius and their establishment. Nor is the objection that England, France, and Germany professed Christianity, built churches and convents, and yet had no Art, an objection of consequence; because it might with equal propriety be asked, why it did not appear sooner in Italy itself. The Art forms a part of social education and the ultimate polish of man, nor can it appear during the rudeness of infant societies; and as, among the Western nations, the Italians were the first who extricated themselves from the bonds of barbarism and formed asylums for industry, Art and Science kept pace with the social progress, and produced their first legitimate essays among them.
How favourably religious enthusiasm operated on Art, their sympathetic revolutions still farther prove; they flourished, they languished, they fell together. As zeal relented and public grandeur gave way to private splendour, the Arts became the hirelings of Vanity and Wealth; servile they roamed from place to place, ready to administer to the whims and wants of the best bidder: in this point of sight we can easily solve all the phænomena which occur in the history of Art, – its rise, its fall, eclipse, and re-appearance in various places, with styles as different as various tastes.
The efficient cause, therefore, why higher Art at present is sunk to such a state of inactivity and languor that it may be doubted whether it will exist much longer, is not a particular one, which private patronage, or the will of an individual, however great, can remove; but a general cause, founded on the bent, the manners, habits, modes of a nation, – and not of one nation alone, but of all who at present pretend to culture. Our age, when compared with former ages, has but little occasion for great works, and that is the reason why so few are produced:1– the ambition, activity, and spirit of public life is shrunk to the minute detail of domestic arrangements – every thing that surrounds us tends to show us in private, is become snug, less, narrow, pretty, insignificant. We are not, perhaps, the less happy on account of all this; but from such selfish trifling to expect a system of Art built on grandeur, without a total revolution, would only be less presumptuous than