The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 2 (of 3). Fuseli Henry
expression should not clash with the dictionary of my audience; mine is nearly that of your late president. I shall confine myself at present to a few of the most important; the words nature, beauty, grace, taste, copy, imitation, genius, talent. Thus, by nature I understand the general and permanent principles of visible objects, not disfigured by accident, or distempered by disease, not modified by fashion or local habits. Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object. On beauty I do not mean to perplex you or myself with abstract ideas, and the romantic reveries of platonic philosophy, or to inquire whether it be the result of a simple or complex principle. As a local idea, beauty is a despotic princess, and subject to the anarchies of despotism, enthroned to-day, dethroned to-morrow. The beauty we acknowledge is that harmonious whole of the human frame, that unison of parts to one end, which enchants us; the result of the standard set by the great masters of our art, the ancients, and confirmed by the submissive verdict of modern imitation. By grace I mean that artless balance of motion and repose sprung from character, founded on propriety, which neither falls short of the demands nor overleaps the modesty of nature. Applied to execution, it means that dexterous power which hides the means by which it was attained, the difficulties it has conquered. When we say taste, we mean not crudely the knowledge of what is right in art: taste estimates the degrees of excellence, and by comparison proceeds from justness to refinement. Our language, or rather those who use it, generally confound, when speaking of the art, copy with imitation, though essentially different in operation and meaning. Precision of eye and obedience of hand are the requisites of the former, without the least pretence to choice, what to select, what to reject; whilst choice directed by judgment or taste constitutes the essence of imitation, and alone can raise the most dexterous copyist to the noble rank of an artist. The imitation of the ancients was, essential, characteristic, ideal. The first cleared nature of accident, defect, excrescence; the second found the stamen which connects character with the central form; the third raised the whole and the parts to the highest degree of unison. Of genius I shall speak with reserve, for no word has been more indiscriminately confounded; by genius I mean that power which enlarges the circle of human knowledge, which discovers new materials of nature, or combines the known with novelty, whilst talent arranges, cultivates, polishes the discoveries of genius.
Guided by these preliminaries we now approach that happy coast, where, from an arbitrary hieroglyph, the palliative of ignorance, from a tool of despotism, or a ponderous monument of eternal sleep, art emerged into life, motion, and liberty; where situation, climate, national character, religion, manners and government conspired to raise it on that permanent basis, which after the ruins of the fabric itself, still subsists and bids defiance to the ravages of time; as uniform in the principle as various in its applications, the art of the Greeks possessed in itself and propagated, like its chief object Man, the germs of immortality.
I shall not detail here the reasons and the coincidence of fortunate circumstances which raised the Greeks to be the arbiters of form.4 The standard they erected, the cannon they framed, fell not from Heaven: but as they fancied themselves of divine origin, and Religion was the first mover of their art, it followed that they should endeavour to invest their authors with the most perfect form; and as Man possesses that exclusively, they were led to a complete and intellectual study of its elements and constitution; this, with their climate, which allowed that form to grow, and to show itself to the greatest advantage; with their civil and political institutions, which established and encouraged exercises and manners best calculated to develope its powers; and above all that simplicity of their end, that uniformity of pursuit which in all its derivations retraced the great principle from which it sprang, and like a central stamen drew it out into one immense connected web of congenial imitation; these, I say, are the reasons why the Greeks carried the art to a height which no subsequent time or race has been able to rival or even to approach.
Great as these advantages were, it is not to be supposed that Nature deviated from her gradual progress in the developement 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 etymology of the word used by the Greeks to express Painting being the same with that which they employ for Writing, makes the similarity of tool, materials, method, almost certain. The tool was a style or pen of wood or metal; the materials a board, or a levigated plane of wood, metal, stone, or some prepared compound; the method, letters or lines.
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 Physiognomy, under the name of Silhouettes; without any other addition of character or feature but what the profile of the object, thus delineated could afford.
The next step of the art was the Monogram, outlines of figures without light or shade, but with some addition of the parts within the outline, and from that to the Monochrom, or paintings of a single colour on a plane or tablet, primed with white, and then covered with what they called punic wax, first amalgamated with a tough resinous pigment, generally of a red, sometimes dark brown, or black colour. In, or rather through this thin inky ground, the outlines were traced with a firm but pliant style, which they called Cestrum; if the traced line happened to be incorrect or wrong, it was gently effaced with the finger or with a sponge, and easily replaced by a fresh one. When the whole design was settled, and no farther alteration intended, it was suffered to dry, was covered, to make it permanent, with a brown encaustic varnish, the lights were worked over again, and rendered more brilliant with a point still more delicate, according to the gradual advance from mere outlines to some indications, and at last to masses of light and shade, and from those to the superinduction of different colours, or the invention of the Polychrom, which by the addition of the pencil to the style, raised the mezzotinto or stained drawing to a legitimate picture, and at length produced that vaunted harmony, the magic scale of Grecian colour.5
If this conjecture, for it is not more, on the process of linear painting, formed on the evidence and comparison of passages always unconnected, and frequently contradictory, be founded in fact, the rapturous astonishment at the supposed momentaneous production of the Herculanean dancers and the figures on the earthern vases of the ancients, will cease; or rather, we shall no longer suffer ourselves to be deluded by palpable impossibility of execution: on a ground of levigated lime or on potters ware, no velocity or certainty attainable by human hands can conduct a full pencil with that degree of evenness equal from beginning to end with which we see those figures executed, or if it could, would ever be able to fix the line on the glassy surface without its flowing: to make the appearances we see, possible, we must have recourse to the linear process that has been described, and transfer our admiration, to the perseverance, the correctness of principle, the elegance of taste that conducted the artist's hand, without presuming to arm it with contradictory powers: the figures he drew and we admire, are not the magic produce of a winged pencil, they are the result of gradual improvement, exquisitely finished monochroms.
How long the pencil continued only to assist, when it began to engross and when it at last entirely supplanted the cestrum, cannot in the perplexity of accidental report be ascertained. Apollodorus in the 93d Olymp. and Zeuxis in the 94th, are said to have used it with freedom and with power. The battle of the Lapithæ and the Centaurs, which according to Pausanias, Parrhasius painted on the shield of the Minerva of Phidias, to be chased by Mys, could be nothing but a monochrom, and was probably designed with the cestrum, as an instrument of greater accuracy.6 Apelles and Protogenes, nearly a century afterwards, drew their contested lines with the pencil; and that alone, as delicacy and evanescent subtlety were the characteristic of those
This has been done in a superior manner by J. G. Herder, in his
This account is founded on the conjectures of Mr.
Pausanias Attic. c. xxviii. The word used by Pausanias καταγραψαι, shows that the figures of Parrhasius were intended for a Bassorelievo. They were in profile. This is the sense of the word