The Crown of Wild Olive
regulating the development of their art; it enabled them at once to
express their passion for light by executing the faces, hands, and feet
of their dark wooden statues in white marble, so that what we look upon
only with pleasure for fineness of texture was to them an imitation of
the luminous body of the deity shining from behind its dark robes; and
ivory afterwards is employed in their best statues for its yet more soft
and flesh-like brightness, receptive also of the most delicate
colour--(therefore to this day the favourite ground of miniature
painters). In like manner, the existence of quarries of peach-coloured
marble within twelve miles of Verona, and of white marble and green
serpentine between Pisa and Genoa, defined the manner both of sculpture
and architecture for all the Gothic buildings of Italy. No subtlety of
education could have formed a high school of art without these
materials.
160. Next to the colour, the fineness of substance which will take a
perfectly sharp edge, is essential; and this not merely to admit fine
delineation in the sculpture itself, but to secure a delightful
precision in placing the blocks of which it is composed. For the
possession of too fine marble, as far as regards the work itself, is a
temptation instead of an advantage to an inferior sculptor; and the
abuse of the facility of undercutting, especially of undercutting so as
to leave profiles defined by an edge against shadow, is one of the chief
causes of decline of style in such encrusted bas-reliefs as those of the
Certosa of Pavia and its contemporary monuments. But no undue temptation
ever exists as to the fineness of block fitting; nothing contributes to
give so pure and healthy a tone to sculpture as the attention of the
builder to the jointing of his stones; and his having both the power to
make them fit so perfectly as not to admit of the slightest portion of
cement showing externally, and the skill to insure, if needful, and to
suggest always, their stability in cementless construction. Plate X.
represents a piece of entirely fine Lombardic building, the central
portion of the arch in the Duomo of Verona, which corresponds to that of
the porch of San Zenone, represented in Plate I. In both these pieces of
building, the only line that traces the architrave round the arch, is
that of the masonry joint; yet this line is drawn with extremest
subtlety, with intention of delighting the eye by its relation of varied
curvature to the arch itself; and it is just as much considered as the
finest pen-line of a Raphael drawing. Every joint of the stone is used,
in like manner, as a thin black line, which the slightest sign of cement
would spoil like a blot. And so proud is the builder of his fine
jointing, and so fearless of any distortion or strain spoiling the
adjustment afterwards, that in one place he runs his joint quite
gratuitously through a bas-relief, and gives the keystone its only sign
of pre-eminence by the minute inlaying of the head of the Lamb, into the
stone of the course above.
161. Proceeding from this fine jointing to fine draughtsmanship, you
have, in the very outset and earliest stage of sculpture, your flat
stone surface given you as a sheet of white paper, on which you are
required to produce the utmost effect you can with the simplest means,
cutting away as little of the stone as may be, to save both time and
trouble; and, above all, leaving the block itself, when shaped, as solid
as you can, that its surface may better resist weather, and the carved
parts be as much protected as possible by the masses left around them.
162. The first thing to be done is clearly to trace the outline of
subject with an incision approximating in section to that of the furrow
of a plough, only more equal-sided. A fine sculptor strikes it, as his
chisel leans, freely, on marble; an Egyptian, in hard rock, cuts it
sharp, as in cuneiform inscriptions. In any case, you have a result
somewhat like the upper figure, Plate XI., in which I show you the most
elementary indication of form possible, by cutting the outline of the
typical archaic Greek head with an incision like that of a Greek
triglyph, only not so precise in edge or slope, as it is to be modified
afterwards.
163. Now, the simplest thing we can do next, is to round off the flat
surface _within_ the incision, and put what form we can get into the
feebler projection of it thus obtained. The Egyptians do this, often
with exquisite skill, and then, as I showed you in a former lecture,
colour the whole--using the incision as an outline. Such a method of
treatment is capable of good service in representing, at little cost of
pains, subjects in distant effect, and common, or merely picturesque,
subjects even near. To show you what it is capable of, and what
coloured sculpture would be in its rudest type, I have prepared the
coloured relief of the John Dory[129] as a natural history drawing for
distant effect. You know, also, that I meant him to be ugly--as ugly as
any creature can well be. In time, I hope to show you prettier
things--peacocks and kingfishers,--butterflies and flowers, on grounds
of gold, and the like, as they were in Byzantine work. I shall expect
you, in right use of your aesthetic faculties, to like those better than
what I show you to-day. But it is now a question of method only; and if
you will look, after the lecture, first at the mere white relief, and
then see how much may be gained by a few dashes of colour, such as a
practised workman could lay in a quarter of an hour,--the whole forming,
if well done, almost a deceptive image--you will, at least, have the
range of power in Egyptian sculpture clearly expressed to you.
164. But for fine sculpture, we must advance by far other methods. If we
carve the subject with real delicacy, the cast shadow of the incision
will interfere with its outline, so that, for representation of
beautiful things, you must clear away the ground about it, at all events
for a little distance. As the law of work is to use the least pains
possible, you clear it only just as far back as you need, and then for
the sake of order and finish, you give the space a geometrical outline.
By taking, in this case, the simplest I can,--a circle,--I can clear the
head with little labor in the removal of surface round it; (see the
lower figure in Plate XI.)
165. Now, these are the first terms of all well-constructed bas-relief.
The mass you have to treat consists of a piece of stone, which, however
you afterwards carve it, can but, at its most projecting point, reach
the level of the external plane surface out of which it was mapped, and
defined by a depression round it; that depression being at first a mere
trench, then a moat of certain width, of which the outer sloping bank is
in contact, as a limiting geometrical line, with the laterally salient
portions of sculpture. This, I repeat, is the primal construction of
good bas-relief, implying, first, perfect protection to its surface from
any transverse blow, and a geometrically limited space to be occupied by
the design, into which it shall pleasantly (and as you shall ultimately
see, ingeniously,) contract itself: implying, secondly, a determined
depth of projection, which it shall rarely reach, and never exceed: and
implying, finally, the production of the whole piece with the least
possible labor of chisel and loss of stone.
166. And these, which are the first, are very nearly the last
constructive laws of sculpture. You will be surprised to find how much
they include, and how much of minor propriety in treatment their
observance involves.
In a very interesting essay on the architecture of the Parthenon, by the
professor of architecture of the Ecole Polytechnique, M. Emile Boutmy,
you will find it noticed that the Greeks do not usually weaken, by
carving, the constructive masses of their building; but put their chief
sculpture in the empty spaces between the triglyphs, or beneath the
roof. This is true; but in so doing, they merely build their panel
instead of carving it; they accept no less than the Goths, the laws of
recess and limitation, as being vital to the safety and dignity of their
design; and their noblest recumbent statues are, constructively, the
fillings of the acute extremity of a panel in the form of an obtusely
summitted triangle.
167. In gradual descent from that severest type, you will find that an
immense quantity of sculpture of all times and styles may be generally
embraced under the notion of a mass hewn out of, or, at least, placed
in, a panel or recess, deepening, it may be, into a niche; the sculpture
being always designed with reference to its position in such recess;
and, therefore, to the effect of the building out of which the recess is
hewn.
But, for the sake of simplifying our inquiry, I will at first suppose no
surrounding protective ledge to exist, and that the area of stone we
have to deal with is simply a flat slab, extant from a flat surface
depressed all round it.
168. A _flat_ slab, observe. The flatness of surface is essential to the
problem of bas-relief. The lateral limit of the panel may, or may not,
be required; but the vertical limit of surface _must_ be expressed; and
the art of bas-relief is to give the effect of true form on that
condition. For observe, if nothing more were needed than to make first a
cast of a solid form, then cut it in half, and apply the half of it to
the flat surface;--if, for instance, to carve a bas-relief of an apple,
all I had to do was to cut my sculpture of the whole apple in half, and
pin it to the wall, any ordinary trained sculptor, or even a mechanical
workman, could produce bas-relief; but the business is to carve a
_round_ thing out of _flat_ thing; to carve an apple out of a
biscuit!--to conquer, as a subtle Florentine has here conquered,[130]
his marble, so as not only to get motion into what is most rigidly
fixed, but to get boundlessness into what is most narrowly bounded; and
carve Madonna and Child, rolling clouds, flying angels, and space of
heavenly air behind all, out of a film of stone not the third of an inch
thick where it is thickest.
169. Carried, however, to such a degree of subtlety as this, and with so
ambitious and extravagant aim, bas-relief becomes a tour-de-force; and,
you know, I have just told you all tours-de-force are wrong. The true
law of bas-relief is to begin with a depth of incision proportioned
justly to the distance of the observer and the character of the subject,
and out of that rationally determined depth, neither increased for
ostentation of effect, nor diminished for ostentation of skill, to do
the utmost that will be easily visible to an observer, supposing him to
give an average human amount of attention, but not to peer into, or
critically scrutinize the work.
170. I cannot arrest you to-day by the statement of any of the laws of
sight and distance which determine the proper depth of bas-relief.
Suppose that depth fixed; then observe what a pretty problem, or,
rather, continually varying cluster of problems, will be offered to us.
You might, at first, imagine that, given what we may call our scale of
solidity, or scale of depth, the diminution from nature would be in
regular proportion, as for instance, if the real depth of your subject
be, suppose a foot, and the depth of your bas-relief an inch, then the
parts of the real subject which were six inches round the side of it
would be carved, you might imagine, at the depth of half-an-inch, and so
the whole thing mechanically reduced to scale. But not a bit of it. Here
is a Greek bas-relief of a chariot with two horses (upper figure, Plate
XXI). Your whole subject has therefore the depth of two horses side by