The Crown of Wild Olive
marble a physical impossibility. The first result of it is that the
sculptor thinks in clay instead of marble, and loses his instinctive
sense of the proper treatment of a brittle substance. The second is that
neither he nor the public recognize the touch of the chisel as
expressive of personal feeling or power, and that nothing is looked for
except mechanical polish.
179. The perfectly simple piece of Greek relief represented in Plate
XIII., will enable you to understand at once,--examination of the
original, at your leisure, will prevent you, I trust, from ever
forgetting--what is meant by the virtue of handling in sculpture.
The projection of the heads of the four horses, one behind the other, is
certainly not more, altogether, than three-quarters of an inch from the
flat ground, and the one in front does not in reality project more than
the one behind it, yet, by mere drawing,[132] you see the sculptor has
got them to appear to recede in due order, and by the soft rounding of
the flesh surfaces, and modulation of the veins, he has taken away all
look of flatness from the necks. He has drawn the eyes and nostrils with
dark incision, careful as the finest touches of a painter's pencil: and
then, at last, when he comes to the manes, he has let fly hand and
chisel with their full force, and where a base workman, (above all, if
he had modelled the thing in clay first,) would have lost himself in
laborious imitation of hair, the Greek has struck the tresses out with
angular incisions, deep driven, every one in appointed place and
deliberate curve, yet flowing so free under his noble hand that you
cannot alter, without harm, the bending of any single ridge, nor
contract, nor extend, a point of them. And if you will look back to
Plate IX. you will see the difference between this sharp incision, used
to express horse-hair, and the soft incision with intervening rounded
ridge, used to express the hair of Apollo Chrysocomes; and, beneath, the
obliquely ridged incision used to express the plumes of his swan; in
both these cases the handling being much more slow, because the
engraving is in metal; but the structural importance of incision, as the
means of effect, never lost sight of. Finally, here are two actual
examples of the work in marble of the two great schools of the world;
one, a little Fortune, standing tiptoe on the globe of the Earth, its
surface traced with lines in hexagons; not chaotic under Fortune's feet;
Greek, this, and by a trained workman;--dug up in the temple of Neptune
at Corfu;--and here, a Florentine portrait-marble, found in the recent
alterations, face downwards, under the pavement of St'a Maria
Novella;[133] both of them first-rate of their kind; and both of them,
while exquisitely finished at the telling points, showing, on all their
unregarded surfaces, the rough furrow of the fast-driven chisel, as
distinctly as the edge of a common paving-stone.
180. Let me suggest to you, in conclusion, one most interesting point of
mental expression in these necessary aspects of finely executed
sculpture. I have already again and again pressed on your attention the
beginning of the arts of men in the make and use of the ploughshare.
Read more carefully--you might indeed do well to learn at once by
heart,--the twenty-seven lines of the Fourth Pythian, which describe the
ploughing of Jason. There is nothing grander extant in human fancy, nor
set down in human words: but this great mythical expression of the
conquest of the earth-clay, and brute-force, by vital human energy, will
become yet more interesting to you when you reflect what enchantment has
been cut, on whiter clay, by the tracing of finer furrows;--what the
delicate and consummate arts of man have done by the ploughing of
marble, and granite, and iron. You will learn daily more and more, as
you advance in actual practice, how the primary manual art of engraving,
in the steadiness, clearness, and irrevocableness of it, is the best
art-discipline that can be given either to mind or hand;[134] you will
recognize one law of right, pronouncing itself in the well-resolved work
of every age; you will see the firmly traced and irrevocable incision
determining not only the forms, but, in great part, the moral temper, of
all vitally progressive art; you will trace the same principle and power
in the furrows which the oblique sun shows on the granite of his own
Egyptian city,--in the white scratch of the stylus through the colour on
a Greek vase--in the first delineation, on the wet wall, of the groups
of an Italian fresco; in the unerring and unalterable touch of the great
engraver of Nueremberg,--and in the deep driven and deep bitten ravines
of metal by which Turner closed, in embossed limits, the shadows of the
Liber Studiorum.
Learn, therefore, in its full extent, the force of the great Greek word,
[Greek: charasso];--and, give me pardon--if you think pardon needed,
that I ask you also to learn the full meaning of the English word
derived from it. Here, at the Ford of the Oxen of Jason, are other
furrows to be driven than these in the marble of Pentelicus. The
fruitfullest, or the fatallest of all ploughing is that by the thoughts
of your youth, on the white field of its imagination. For by these,
either down to the disturbed spirit, "[Greek: kekoptai kai charassetai
pedon];" or around the quiet spirit, and on all the laws of conduct that
hold it, as a fair vase its frankincense, are ordained the pure colours,
and engraved the just Characters, of AEonian life.
FOOTNOTES:
[126] Nothing is more wonderful, or more disgraceful among the forms of
ignorance engendered by modern vulgar occupations in pursuit of gain,
than the unconsciousness, now total, that fine art is essentially
Athletic. I received a letter from Birmingham, some little time since,
inviting me to see how much, in glass manufacture, "machinery excelled
rude hand work." The writer had not the remotest conception that he
might as well have asked me to come and see a mechanical boat-race rowed
by automata, and "how much machinery excelled rude arm-work."
[127] Such as the sculptureless arch of Waterloo Bridge, for instance,
referred to in the Third Lecture, Sec. 84.
[128] It is strange, at this day, to think of the relation of the
Athenian Ceramicus to the French Tile-fields, Tileries, or Tuileries;
and how these last may yet become--have already partly become--"the
Potter's field," blood-bought (December, 1870.)
[129] This relief is now among the other casts which I have placed in
the lower school in the University galleries.
[130] The reference is to a cast from a small and low relief of
Florentine work in the Kensington Museum.
[131] The actual bas-relief is on a coin, and the projection not above
the twentieth of an inch, but I magnified it in photograph, for this
Lecture, so as to represent a relief with about the third of an inch for
maximum projection.
[132] This plate has been executed from a drawing by Mr. Burgess, in
which he has followed the curves of incision with exquisite care, and
preserved the effect of the surface of the stone, where a photograph
would have lost it by exaggerating accidental stains.
[133] These two marbles will always, henceforward, be sufficiently
accessible for reference in my room at Corpus Christi College.
[134] That it was also, in, some cases, the earliest that the Greeks
gave, is proved by Lucian's account of his first lesson at his uncle's;
the [Greek: enkopeus], literally "in-cutter"--being the first tool put
into his hand, and an earthenware tablet to cut upon, which the boy
pressing too hard, presently breaks;--gets beaten--goes home crying, and
becomes, after his dream above quoted, a philosopher instead of a
sculptor.
LECTURE VI.
THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS.
_December, 1870._
181. It can scarcely be needful for me to tell even the younger members
of my present audience, that the conditions necessary for the production
of a perfect school of sculpture have only twice been met in the history
of the world, and then for a short time; nor for short time only, but
also in narrow districts, namely, in the valleys and islands of Ionian
Greece, and in the strip of land deposited by the Arno, between the
Apennine crests and the sea.
All other schools, except these two, led severally by Athens in the
fifth century before Christ, and by Florence in the fifteenth of our own
era, are imperfect; and the best of them are derivative: these two are
consummate in themselves, and the origin of what is best in others.
182. And observe, these Athenian and Florentine schools are both of
equal rank, as essentially original and independent. The Florentine,
being subsequent to the Greek, borrowed much from it; but it would have
existed just as strongly--and, perhaps, in some respects, more
nobly--had it been the first, instead of the latter of the two. The task
set to each of these mightiest of the nations was, indeed, practically
the same, and as hard to the one as to the other. The Greeks found
Phoenician and Etruscan art monstrous, and had to make them human. The
Italians found Byzantine and Norman art monstrous, and had to make them
human. The original power in the one case is easily traced; in the other
it has partly to be unmasked, because the change at Florence was, in
many points, suggested and stimulated by the former school. But we
mistake in supposing that Athens taught Florence the laws of design; she
taught her, in reality, only the duty of truth.
183. You remember that I told you the highest art could do no more than
rightly represent the human form. This is the simple test, then, of a
perfect school,--that it has represented the human form, so that it is
impossible to conceive of its being better done. And that, I repeat, has
been accomplished twice only: once in Athens, once in Florence. And so
narrow is the excellence even of these two exclusive schools, that it
cannot be said of either of them that they represented the entire human
form. The Greeks perfectly drew, and perfectly moulded the body and
limbs; but there is, so far as I am aware, no instance of their
representing the face as well as any great Italian. On the other hand,
the Italian painted and carved the face insuperably; but I believe there
is no instance of his having perfectly represented the body, which, by
command of his religion, it became his pride to despise, and his safety
to mortify.
184. The general course of your study here renders it desirable that you
should be accurately acquainted with the leading principles of Greek
sculpture; but I cannot lay these before you without giving undue
prominence to some of the special merits of that school, unless I
previously indicate the relation it holds to the more advanced, though
less disciplined, excellence of Christian art.
In this and the last lecture of the present course,[135] I shall
endeavour, therefore, to mass for you, in such rude and diagram-like
outline as may be possible or intelligible, the main characteristics of
the two schools, completing and correcting the details of comparison
afterwards; and not answering, observe, at present, for any
generalization I give you, except as a ground for subsequent closer and
more qualified statements.
And in carrying out this parallel, I shall speak indifferently of works
of sculpture, and of the modes of painting which propose to themselves
the same objects as sculpture. And this indeed Florentine, as opposed to
Venetian, painting, and that of Athens in the fifth century, nearly
always did.
185. I begin, therefore, by comparing two designs of the simplest
kind--engravings, or, at least, linear drawings, both; one on clay, one