The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 2 (of 3). Fuseli Henry
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.
Such were the artists, who, according to the most corresponding data, formed the style of that second period, which fixed the end and established the limits of art, on whose firm basis arose the luxuriant fabric of the third or the period of refinement, which added grace and polish to the forms it could not surpass; amenity or truth to the tones it could not invigorate; magic and imperceptible transition to the abrupt division of masses; gave depth and roundness to composition; at the breast of Nature herself caught the passions as they rose, and familiarized expression: The period of Apelles, Protogenes, Aristides, Euphranor, Pausias, the pupils of Pamphilus and his master Eupompus, whose authority obtained what had not been granted to his great predecessor and countryman Polycletus, the new establishment of the school of Sicyon.19
The leading principle of Eupompus may be traced in the advice which he gave to Lysippus (as preserved by Pliny), whom, when consulted on a standard of imitation, he directed to the contemplation of human variety in the multitude of the characters that were passing by, with the axiom, 'that Nature herself was to be imitated, not an artist.' Excellence, said Eupompus, is thy aim, such excellence as that of Phidias and Polycletus; but it is not obtained by the servile imitation of works, however perfect, without mounting to the principle which raised them to that height; that principle apply to thy purpose, there fix thy aim. He who, with the same freedom of access to Nature as another man, contents himself to approach her only through his medium, has resigned his birth-right and originality together; his master's manner will be his style. If Phidias and Polycletus have discovered the substance and established the permanent principle of the human frame, they have not exhausted the variety of human appearances and human character; if they have abstracted the forms of majesty and those of beauty, Nature, compared with their works, will point out a grace that has been left for thee; if they have pre-occupied man as he is, be thine to give him that air with which he actually appears.20
Such was the advice of Eupompus: less lofty, less ambitious than what the departed epoch of genius would have dictated, but better suited to the times, and better to his pupil's mind. When the spirit of liberty forsook the public, grandeur had left the private mind of Greece: subdued by Philip, the gods of Athens and Olympia had migrated to Pella, and Alexander was become the representative of Jupiter; still those who had lost the substance fondled the shadow of liberty; rhetoric mimicked the thunders of oratory, sophistry and metaphysic debate that philosophy, which had guided life, and the grand taste that had dictated to art the monumental style, invested gods with human form and raised individuals to heroes, began to give way to refinements in appreciating the degrees of elegance or of resemblance in imitation: the advice of Eupompus however, far from implying the abolition of the old system, recalled his pupil to the examen of the great principle on which it had established its excellence, and to the resources which its inexhaustible variety offered for new combinations.
That Lysippus considered it in that light, his devotion to the Doryphorus of Polycletus, known even to Tully, sufficiently proved. That figure which comprised the pure proportions of juvenile vigour, furnished the readiest application for those additional refinements of variety, character, and fleshy charms, that made the base of his invention: its symmetry directing his researches amid the insidious play of accidental charms, and the claims of inherent grace, never suffered imitation to deviate into incorrectness; whilst its squareness and elemental beauty melted in more familiar forms on the eye, and from an object of cold admiration became the glowing one of sympathy. Such was probably the method formed by Lysippus on the advice of Eupompus, more perplexed than explained by the superficial extract and the rapid phrase of Pliny.
From the statuary's we may form our idea of the painter's method. The doctrine of Eupompus was adopted by Pamphilus the Amphipolitan, the most scientific artist of his time, and by him communicated to Apelles of Cos, or as Lucian will have it, of Ephesus,21 his pupil; in whom, if we believe tradition, Nature exhibited, once, a specimen what her union with education and circumstances could produce. The name of Apelles in Pliny is the synonyme of unrivalled and unattainable excellence, but the enumeration of his works points out the modification which we ought to apply to that superiority; it neither comprises exclusive sublimity of invention, the most acute discrimination of character, the widest sphere of comprehension, the most judicious and best balanced composition, nor the deepest pathos of expression: his great prerogative consisted more in the unison than in the extent of his powers; he knew better what he could do, what ought to be done, at what point he could arrive, and what lay beyond his reach, than any other artist. Grace of conception and refinement of taste were his elements, and went hand in hand with grace of execution and taste in finish; powerful 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 recognized 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.22
The refinements of the art were by Aristides of Thebes applied to the mind. The passions which tradition had organized for Timanthes, Aristides caught as they rose from the breast or escaped from the lips of Nature herself; his volume was man, his scene society: he drew the subtle discriminations of mind in every stage of life, the whispers, the simple cry of passion and its most complex accents. Such, as history informs us, was the suppliant whose voice you seemed to hear, such his sick man's half-extinguished eye and labouring breast, such Byblis expiring in the pangs of love, and above all, the half-slain mother shuddering lest the eager babe should suck the blood from her palsied nipple. This picture was probably at Thebes when Alexander sacked that town; what his feelings were when he saw it, we may guess from his sending it to Pella. Its expression, poised between the anguish of maternal affection and the pangs of death, gives to commiseration an image, which neither the infant piteously caressing his slain mother in the group of Epigonus,23 nor the absorbed feature of the Niobe, nor the struggle of the Laocoon, excites. Timanthes had marked the limits that discriminate terror from the excess of horror; Aristides drew the line that separates it from disgust. His subject is one of those that touch the ambiguous line of a squeamish sense. – Taste and smell, as sources of tragic emotion, and in consequence of their power, commanding gesture, seem scarcely admissible in art or on the theatre, because their extremes are nearer allied to disgust, and loathsome or risible ideas, than to terror. The prophetic trance of Cassandra, who scents the prepared murder of Agamemnon at the threshold of the ominous hall; the desperate moan of Macbeth's queen on seeing the visionary spot still uneffaced infect her hand, – are images snatched from the lap of terror, – but soon would cease to be so, were the artist or the actress to inforce the dreadful hint with indiscreet expression or gesture. This, completely understood by Aristides, was as completely missed
Pliny, l. xxxv. c. 18.
Lysippum Sicyonium – audendi rationem cepisse pictoris Eupompi responso. Eum enim interrogatum, quem sequeretur antecedentium, dixisse demonstrata hominum multitudine, naturam ipsam imitandam esse, non artificem. Non habet Latinum nomen symmetria, quam diligentissime custodivit, nova intactaque ratione quadratas veterum staturas permutando: Vulgoque dicebat, ab illis factos, quales essent, homines: à se, quales viderentur esse. Plin. xxxiv. 8.
Μαλλον δε Ἀπελλης ὁ Ἐφεσιος παλαι ταυτην προῦλαβε την εἰκονα· Και γαρ αὐ και οὑτος διαβληθεις προς Πτολεμαιον —
Λουκιανού περι του μ. ῥ. Π. Τ. Δ.
Apelles was probably the inventor of what artists call
In matri interfectæ infante miserabiliter blandiente. Plin. l. xxxiv. c. 9.