2 instance; but a still more impressive lesson might be received by comparing the inanity of Canova's garland grace, and ball-room sentiment, with the intense truth, tenderness, and power of men like Mino da Fiesole, whose chisel leaves many a hard edge, and despises down and dimple, but it seems to cut light and carve breath, the marble burns beneath it, and becomes transparent with very spirit. Yet Mino stopped at the human nature; he saw the soul, but not § 28. Michael Angelo. the ghostly presences about it; it was reserved for Michael Angelo to pierce deeper yet, and to see the 3 1 [In the Capella dei Baroncelli, in the south transept, is Bandinelli's "Dead Christ" in marble. For another reference to it, see above, p. 194. Ruskin's account of it in his note-book of 1845 is as follows: "It is difficult to speak of this work (marble, colossal) in terms of sufficient dispraise. It is a bad statue of a dying French duellist or gamester, and the legs of the model have been so bad that, I think in almost every point, their forms may be taken to contrast with the Elgins as pure examples of the wrong. The details and particular references are given at pages 17 and 38 of the note-book [a book of sketches, etc., in illustration of the written diary]. But the peculiarity of its general effect is not there stated. Commonly when a statue is by an inferior hand, one feels a want of vitality, or a rigidity or an imperfection of form resulting from deficient knowledge, or want of completion or badly selected position; but here there is no stoniness, no rigidity, no incompletion; the statue has the disgusting effect of an ugly, naked body; one has the same reluctance to go near it, that one would have if it were a dirty, stripped Italian; the whole purity of the marble is destroyed by the man's vulgar conception, and this is an effect I never recollect having before perceived. Usually bad sculpture is not fleshy enough, but this is too much so." This sculpture partially conceals Giotto's altar-piece, in five panels, of "The Coronation of the Virgin."] [Cf. preceding volume, p. 230.] Ruskin had been specially struck by the two tombs by Mino da Fiesole in the church of the Badia. He writes in his note-book of 1845: - "The recumbent figures have all his usual animation, but the gem of the church is the little child on the right hand side of that of Ugo, Count of Tuscany. It is the most beautiful and breathing realisation of infancy that ever sculptor struck; no fat legs, nor hands that look like stuffed gloves; no curly hair nor round cheeks nor bee-stung lips; the child is thin and somewhat hard in outline, there is no fine nor soft chiselling about it; it looks as if it had been exhausted by too much of the strong life within it, worn out with mind; and the execution is not delicate neither, but in many places hard and false or imperfect in what is commonly called drawing, and this is especially the case with the mouth, which hardly looks like a mouth at all when one looks close at it, but is rather like a deep chip or crack in the marble, and yet at the right distance it is a mouth all lighted up with love and child sweetness, altogether divine. Neither can I at all trace the sources of the heavenly expression in the eyes, for all is simply and even rudely cut, but the lines though apparently not refined in drawing are refined in their degree, their lightness and untraceableness being as total a defeat of all attempt to copy or imitate as nature herself.”] indwelling angels. No man's soul is alone; Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand; the light or the fear of the Spiritual things that move beside it may be seen on the body; and that bodily form with Buonarotti, white, solid, distinct, material, though it be, is invariably felt as the instrument or the habitation of some infinite, invisible power. The earth of the Sistine Adam that begins to burn; the woman-embodied burst of Adoration from his sleep; the twelve great torrents of the Spirit of God that pause above us there, urned in their vessels of clay; the waiting in the shadow of futurity of those through whom the Promise and Presence of God went down from the Eve to the Mary, each still and fixed, fixed in his expectation, silent, foreseeing, faithful, seated each on his stony throne, the building stones of the word of God, building on and on, tier by tier, to the Refused one the head of the corner;1 not only these, not only the troops of terror torn up from the earth by the four-quartered winds of the Judgment, but every fragment and atom of stone that he ever touched became instantly inhabited by what makes the hair stand up and the words be few: the St. Matthew, not yet disengaged from his sepulchre, bound hand and foot by his grave clothes, it is left for us to loose him; the strange spectral wreath of the Florence Pietà, casting its pyramidal, distorted shadow, full of pain and death, among the faint purple light that cross and perish under the obscure dome of St. Maria del Fiore; the white lassitude of joyous limbs, panther-like, yet passive, fainting with their own delight, that gleam among 1 [The description down to this point is of the roof of the Sistine Chapel. (1) The creation of Adam, (2) the creation of Eve, and (3) the twelve Sibyls and Prophets, heralds and pioneers of Christ. "The Last Judgment" is of course on the wall of the same chapel. The "St. Matthew not yet disengaged from his sepulchre" refers to the huge roughed-out form of the disciple, now in the courtyard of the Accademia at Florence-the perfect shape not yet unloosed. "He also began," says Vasari, “a statue in marble of S. Matteo which, though it is but roughly hewn, shows perfection of design, and teaches sculptors how to extract figures from the stone." The unfinished Pietà-the sculptor's last work in marble-stands behind the high altar in the Cathedral of Florence. For the "Bacchus" in the Uffizi, see preceding volume, p. 118. The "Day and Night" and the "Dawn and Twilight" are of course in the Sagrestia Nuova of San Lorenzo; for another reference to them, see next volume, ch. viii. § 6, and, for Ruskin's study of them, see above, Introduction, p. xxi.] the Pagan formalisms of the Uffizii, far away, separating themselves in their lustrous lightness as the waves of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing from the dead stones, though the stones be as white as they;* and finally, and perhaps more than all, those four ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day-not of morning nor evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the twilight and the dawn of the souls of men-together with the spectre sitting in the shadow of the niche above them; † all these, and all else that I could 66 *The Bacchus. There is a small statue opposite it, also unfinished; but a spirit still." I would have insisted more on the ghostly vitality of this dreadful statue; but the passage referring to it in Rogers' Italy supersedes all further description. I suppose most lovers of art know it by heart. "Nor then forget that chamber of the dead, Yet still are breathing and shed round at noon A light, a darkness, mingling each with each; He meditates, his head upon his hand. What from beneath his helm-like bonnet scowls? Is it a face, or but an eyeless skull? 'Tis lost in shade; yet, like the basilisk, It fascinates, and is intolerable. His mien is noble, most majestical! Then most so, when the distant choir is heard At morn or eve-nor fail thou to attend On that thrice-hallowed day, when all are there; When all, propitiating with solemn songs, Visit the dead. Then wilt thou feel his power!" It is strange that this should be the only written instance (as far as I recollect) of just and entire appreciation of Michael Angelo's spiritual power.1 It is perhaps owing to the very intensity of his imagination that he has been so little understood: for, as I before said, imagination can never be met by vanity, nor without earnestness. His Florentine followers saw in him an 1 [A few years later, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who, as we have seen, Vol. III. p. xxxviii., read Ruskin at Florence) wrote a fine commentary on these same statues in Casa Guidi Windows, i. 74 ff.] name of his forming, have borne, and in themselves retain and exercise the same inexplicable power-inexplicable because proceeding from an imaginative perception almost superhuman, which goes whither we cannot follow, and is where we cannot come; throwing naked the final, deepest root of the being of man, whereby he grows out of the invisible, and holds on his God home.* anatomist and posture-master; and art was finally destroyed by the influence over admiring idiocy of the greatest mind that art ever inspired.** ** I italicised the earliest expression of my sense of the destructive power in Michael Angelo; my own mind was, however, still itself in the state described of "admiring idiocy" when I wrote the last words of the note. [1883.] * Í have not chosen to interrupt the argument respecting the essence of the imaginative faculty by any remarks on the execution of the imaginative hand; but we can hardly leave Tintoret and Michael Angelo without some notice of the pre-eminent power of execution exhibited by both of them, in consequence of their vigour and clearness of conception; nor without again1 warning the lower artist from confounding this velocity of decision and impatience with the velocity of affectation or indolence. Every result of real imagination we have seen to be a truth of some sort; and it is the characteristic of truth to be in some way tangible, seizable, distinguishable, and clear, as it is of falsehood to be obscure, confused, and confusing. Not but that many, if not most truths have a dark side, a side by which they are connected with mysteries too high for us,-nay, I think it is commonly but a poor and miserable truth which the human mind can walk all round, but at all events they have one side by which we can lay hold of them, and feel that they are downright adamant, and that their form, though lost in cloud here and there, is unalterable and real, and not less real and rocky because infinite, and joined on, St. Michael's Mount-like, to a far mainland. So then, whatever the real imagination lays hold of, as it is a truth, does not alter into anything else, as the imaginative part works at it, and feels over it, and finds out more of it, but comes out more and more continually; all that is found out pointing to and indicating still more behind, and giving additional stability and reality to that which is discovered already. But if it be fancy or any other form of pseudo-imagination which is at work, then that which it gets hold of may not be a truth, but only an idea, which will keep giving way as soon as we try to take hold of it, and turning into something else; so that, as we go on copying it, every part will be inconsistent with all that has gone before, and at intervals it will vanish altogether and leave blanks which must be filled up by any means at hand. And in these circumstances, the painter, unable to seize his thought, because it has not substance nor bone enough to bear grasping, is liable to catch at every line that he lays down, for help 1 [See preceding volume, p. 126.] of the Imagination is the intuitive perception of Ultimate Truth. Now, in all these instances, let it be observed-for it is to that end alone that I have been arguing all § 29. Recapitulation. The along that the virtue of the Imagination is its perfect function reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing power), a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.' I repeat that it matters not whether the reader is willing to call this faculty Imagination or not; I do not care about the name; but I would be understood when I speak of imagination hereafter, to mean this,' the base of whose authority and suggestion, and to be led away by it to something else, which the first effort to realize dissipates in like manner, placing another phantom in its stead; until, out of the fragments of these successive phantoms, he has glued together a vague, mindless involuntary whole, a mixture of all that was trite or common in each of the successive conceptions, for that is necessarily what is first caught, a heap of things with the bloom off and the chill on, laborious, unnatural, inane, with its emptiness disguised by affectation, and its deadness. enlivened by extravagance. Necessarily from these modes of conception, three vices of execution must result; and these are found in all those parts of the work where any trust has been put in conception, and only to be avoided in portions of actual portraiture, for a thoroughly unimaginative painter can make no use of a study-all his studies are guesses and experiments, all are equally wrong, and so far felt to be wrong by himself, that he will not work by any of them, but will always endeavour to improve upon them in the picture, and so lose the use of them. These three vices of execution are then-first, feebleness of handling, owing to uncertainty of intention; secondly, intentional carelessness of handling, in the hope of getting by accident something more than was meant; and, lastly, violence and haste of handling, in the effort to secure as much as possible of the obscure image of which the mind feels itself losing hold. I am throughout, it will be observed, attributing right feeling to the unimaginative painter; if he lack this, his execution may be cool and determined, as he will set down falsehood without blushing, and ugliness without suffering. Added to these various evidences of weakness, will be the various vices assumed for the sake of concealment; morbid refinements disguising feebleness, or insolence and coarseness to cover desperation. When the imagination is powerful, the resulting execution is of course the contrary of all this: its first steps will commonly be impetuous, in clearing its [With this § compare Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 62, and Pleasures of England, § 90.] 2 [Ed. 1 reads: "to mean this, the true foundation of all art which exercises eternal authority over men's minds; (all other imagination than this is either secondary and contemplative, or utterly spurious); the base of whose authority . . .”]` |