VI
And now, with the 16th Century, the decisive epochal turn begins for Western painting. The trusteeship of architecture in the North and that of sculpture in Italy expire, and painting becomes polyphonic, “picturesque,” infinity-seeking. The colours become tones. The art of the brush claims kinship with the style of cantata and madrigal. The technique of oils becomes the basis of an art that means to conquer space and to dissolve things in that space. With Leonardo and Giorgione begins Impressionism.
In the actual picture there is transvaluation of all the elements. The background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as a fill-up and, as space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance. A development sets in that is paralleled in no other Culture, not even in the Chinese which in many other respects is so near to ours. The background as symbol of the infinite conquers the sense-perceptible foreground, and at last (herein lies the distinction between the depicting and the delineating styles) the depth-experience of the Faustian soul is captured in the kinesis of a picture. The space-relief of Mantegna’s plane layers dissolves in Tintoretto into directional energy, and there emerges in the picture the great symbol of an unlimited space-universe which comprises the individual things within itself as incidentals—the horizon. Now, that a landscape painting should have a horizon has always seemed so self-evident to us that we have never asked ourselves the important question: Is there always a horizon, and if not, when not and why not? In fact, there is not a hint of it, either in Egyptian relief or in Byzantine mosaic or in vase-paintings and frescoes of the Classical age, or even in those of the Hellenistic in spite of its spatial treatment of foregrounds. This line, in the unreal vapour of which heaven and earth melt, the sum and potent symbol of the far, contains the painter’s version of the “infinitesimal” principle. It is out of the remoteness of this horizon that the music of the picture flows, and for this reason the great landscape-painters of Holland paint only backgrounds and atmospheres, just as for the contrary reason “anti-musical” masters like Signorelli and especially Mantegna, paint only foregrounds and “reliefs.” It is in the horizon, then, that Music triumphs over Plastic, the passion of extension over its substance. It is not too much to say that no picture by Rembrandt has a foreground at all. In the North, the home of counterpoint, a deep understanding of the meaning of horizons and high-lighted distances is found very early, while in the South the flat conclusive gold-background of the Arabic-Byzantine picture long remained supreme. The first definite emergence of the pure space-feeling is in the Books of Hours of the Duke of Berry (that at Chantilly and that at Turin) about 1416. Thereafter, slowly and surely, it conquers the Picture.
The same symbolic meaning attaches to clouds. Classical art concerns itself with them no more than with horizons, and the painter of the Renaissance treats them with a certain playful superficiality. But very early the Gothic looked at its cloud-masses, and through them, with the long sight of mysticism; and the Venetians (Giorgione and Paolo Veronese above all) discovered the full magic of the cloud-world, of the thousand-tinted Being that fills the heavens with its sheets and wisps and mountains. Grünewald and the Netherlanders heightened its significance to the level of tragedy. El Greco brought the grand art of cloud-symbolism to Spain.
It was at the same time that along with oil-painting and counterpoint the art of gardens ripened. Here, expressed on the canvas of Nature itself by extended pools, brick walls, avenues, vistas and galleries, is the same tendency that is represented in painting by the effort towards the linear perspective that the early Flemish artists felt to be the basic problem of their art and Brunellesco, Alberti and Piero della Francesca formulated. We may take it that it was not entirely a coincidence that this formulation of perspective, this mathematical consecration of the picture (whether landscape or interior) as a field limited at the sides but immensely increased in depth, was propounded just at this particular moment. It was the proclamation of the Prime-Symbol. The point at which the perspective lines coalesce is at infinity. It was just because it avoided infinity and rejected distance that Classical painting possessed no perspective. Consequently the Park, the deliberate manipulation of Nature so as to obtain space and distance effects, is an impossibility in Classical art. Neither in Athens nor in Rome proper was there a garden-art: it was only the Imperial Age that gratified its taste with ground-schemes of Eastern origin, and a glance at any of the plans of those “gardens” that have been preserved[306] is enough to show the shortness of their range and the emphasis of their bounds. And yet the first garden-theorist of the West, L. B. Alberti, was laying down the relation of the surroundings to the house (that is, to the spectators in it) as early as 1450, and from his projects to the parks of the Ludovisi and Albani villas,[307] we can see the importance of the perspective view into distance becoming ever greater and greater. In France, after Francis I (Fontainebleau) the long narrow lake is an additional feature having the same meaning.
The most significant element in the Western garden-art is thus the point de vue of the great Rococo park, upon which all its avenues and clipped-hedge walks open and from which vision may travel out to lose itself in the distances. This element is wanting even in the Chinese garden-art. But it is exactly matched by some of the silver-bright distance-pictures of the pastoral music of that age (in Couperin for example). It is the point de vue that gives us the key to a real understanding of this remarkable mode of making nature itself speak the form-language of a human symbolism. It is in principle akin to the dissolution of finite number-pictures into infinite series in our mathematic: as the remainder-expression[308] reveals the ultimate meaning of the series, so the glimpse into the boundless is what, in the garden, reveals to a Faustian soul the meaning of Nature. It was we and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless range of vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving—to be alone with endless space. The great achievement of Le Nôtre and the landscape-gardeners of Northern France, beginning with Fouquet’s epoch-making creation of Vaux-le-Vicomte, was that they were able to render this symbol with such high emphasis. Compare the Renaissance park of the Medicean age—capable of being taken in, gay, cosy, well-rounded—with these parks in which all the water-works, statue-rows, hedges and labyrinths are instinct with the suggestion of long range. It is the Destiny of Western oil-painting told over again in a bit of garden-history.
But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history. At a distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future. The Baroque park is the park of the Late season, of the approaching end, of the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of mortality. It is perspective that begins to awaken a premonition of something passing, fugitive and final. The very words of distance possess, in the lyric poetry of all Western languages, a plaintive autumnal accent that one looks for in vain in the Greek and Latin. It is there in Macpherson’s “Ossian” and Hölderlin, and in Nietzsche’s Dionysus-Dithyrambs, and lastly in Baudelaire, Verlaine, George and Droem. The Late poetry of the withering garden avenues, the unending lines in the streets of a megalopolis, the ranks of pillars in a cathedral, the peak in a distant mountain chain—all tell us that the depth-experience which constitutes our space-world for us is in the last analysis our inward certainty of a Destiny, of a prescribed direction, of time, of the irrevocable. Here, in the experience of horizon as future, we become directly and surely conscious of the identity of Time with the “third dimension” of that experienced space which is living self-extension. And in these last days we are imprinting upon the plan of our megalopolitan streets the same directional-destiny character that the 17th Century imprinted upon the Park of Versailles. We lay our streets as long arrow-flights into remote distance, regardless even of preserving old and historic parts of our towns (for the symbolism of these is not now prepotent in us), whereas a megalopolis of the Classical world studiously maintained in its extension that tangle of crooked lanes that enabled Apollinian man to feel himself a body in the midst of bodies.[309] Herein, as always, practical requirements, so called, are merely the mask of a profound inward compulsion.
With the rise of perspective, then, the deeper form and full metaphysical significance of the picture comes to be concentrated upon the horizon. In Renaissance art the painter had stated and the beholder had accepted the contents of the picture for what they were, as self-sufficient and co-extensive with the title. But henceforth the contents became a means, the mere vehicle of a meaning that was beyond the possibility of verbal expression. With Mantegna or Signorelli the pencil sketch could have stood as the picture, without being carried out in colour—in some cases, indeed, we can only regret that the artist did not stop at the cartoon. In the statue-like sketch, colour is a mere supplement. Titian, on the other hand, could be told by Michelangelo that he did not know how to draw. The “object,” i.e., that which could be exactly fixed by the drawn outline, the near and material, had in fact lost its artistic actuality; but, as the theory of art was still dominated by Renaissance impressions, there arose thereupon that strange and interminable conflict concerning the “form” and the “content” of an art-work. Mis-enunciation of the question has concealed its real and deep significance from us. The first point for consideration should have been whether painting was to be conceived of plastically or musically, as a static of things or as a dynamic of space (for in this lies the essence of the opposition between fresco and oil technique), and the second point, the opposition of Classical and Faustian world-feeling. Outlines define the material, while colour-tones interpret space.[310] But the picture of the first order belongs to directly sensible nature—it narrates. Space, on the contrary, is by its very essence transcendent and addresses itself to our imaginative powers, and in an art that is under its suzerainty, the narrative element enfeebles and obscures the more profound tendency. Hence it is that the theorist, able to feel the secret disharmony but misunderstanding it, clings to the superficial opposition of content and form. The problem is purely a Western one, and reveals most strikingly the complete inversion in the significance of pictorial elements that took place when the Renaissance closed down and instrumental music of the grand style came to the front. For the Classical mind no problem of form and content in this sense could exist; in an Attic statue the two are completely identical and identified in the human body.
The case of Baroque painting is further complicated by the fact that it involves an opposition of ordinary popular feeling and the finer sensibility. Everything Euclidean and tangible is also popular, and the genuinely popular art is therefore the Classical. It is very largely the feeling of this popular character in it that constitutes its indescribable charm for the Faustian intellects that have to fight for self-expression, to win their world by hard wrestling. For us, the contemplation of Classical art and its intention is pure refreshment: here nothing needs to be struggled for, everything offers itself freely. And something of the same sort was achieved by the anti-Gothic tendency of Florence. Raphael is, in many sides of his creativeness, distinctly popular. But Rembrandt is not, cannot be, so. From Titian painting becomes more and more esoteric. So, too, poetry. So, too, music. And the Gothic per se had been esoteric from its very beginnings—witness Dante and Wolfram. The masses of Okeghem and Palestrina, or of Bach for that matter, were never intelligible to the average member of the congregation. Ordinary people are bored by Mozart and Beethoven, and regard music generally as something for which one is or is not in the mood. A certain degree of interest in these matters has been induced by concert room and gallery since the age of enlightenment invented the phrase “art for all.” But Faustian art is not, and by very essence cannot be, “for all.” If modern painting has ceased to appeal to any but a small (and ever decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because it has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street can understand. It has transferred the property of actuality from contents to space—the space through which alone, according to Kant, things are. And with that a difficult metaphysical element has entered into painting, and this element does not give itself away to the layman. For Phidias, on the contrary, the word “lay” would have had no meaning. His sculpture appealed entirely to the bodily and not to the spiritual eye. An art without space is a priori unphilosophical.
VII
With this is connected an important principle of composition. In a picture it is possible to set the things inorganically above one another or side by side or behind one another without any emphasis of perspective or interrelation, i.e., without insisting upon the dependence of their actuality upon the structure of space which does not necessarily mean that this dependence is denied. Primitive men and children draw thus, before their depth-experience has brought the sense-impressions of their world more or less into fundamental order. But this order differs in the different Cultures according to the prime symbols of these Cultures. The sort of perspective composition that is so self-evident to us is a particular case, and it is neither recognized nor intended in the painting of any other Culture. Egyptian art chose to represent simultaneous events in superposed ranks, thereby eliminating the third dimension from the look of the picture. The Apollinian art placed figures and groups separately, with a deliberate avoidance of space-and-time relations in the plane of representation. Polygnotus’s frescoes in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi are a celebrated instance of this. There is no background to connect the individual scenes—for such a background would have been a challenge to the principle that things alone are actual and space non-existent. The pediment of the Ægina temple, the procession of gods on the François Vase and the Frieze of the Giants of Pergamum are all composed as meander-syntheses of separate and interchangeable motives, without organic character. It is only with the Hellenistic age (the Telephus Frieze of the altar of Pergamum is the earliest example that has been preserved) that the un-Classical motive of the consistent series comes into existence. In this respect, as in others, the feeling of the Renaissance was truly Gothic. It did indeed carry group-composition to such a pitch of perfection that its work remains the pattern for all following ages. But the order of it all proceeded out of space. In the last analysis, it was a silent music of colour-illumined extension that created within itself light-resistances, which the understanding eye could grasp as things and as existence, and could set marching with an invisible swing and rhythm out into the distance. And with this spatial ordering, with its unremarked substitution of air-and light-perspective for line-perspective, the Renaissance was already, in essence, defeated.
And now from the end of the Renaissance in Orlando Lasso and Palestrina right up to Wagner, from Titian right up to Manet and Marées and Leibl, great musicians and great painters followed close upon one another while the plastic art sank into entire insignificance. Oil-painting and instrumental music evolve organically towards aims that were comprehended in the Gothic and achieved in the Baroque. Both arts—Faustian in the highest sense—are within those limits prime phenomena. They have a soul, a physiognomy and therefore a history. And in this they are alone. All that sculpture could thenceforward achieve was a few beautiful incidental pieces in the shadow of painting, garden-art, or architecture. The art of the West had no real need of them. There was no longer a style of plastic in the sense that there were styles of painting or music. No consistent tradition or necessary unity links the works of Maderna, Goujon, Puget and Schlüter. Even Leonardo begins to despise the chisel outright: at most he will admit the bronze cast, and that on account of its pictorial advantages. Therein he differs from Michelangelo, for whom the marble block was still the true element. And yet even Michelangelo in his old age could no longer succeed with the plastic, and none of the later sculptors are great in the sense that Rembrandt and Bach are great. There were clever and tasteful performances no doubt, but not one single work of the same order as the “Night Watch” or the “Matthew Passion,” nothing that expresses, as these express, the whole depth of a whole mankind. This art had fallen out of the destiny of the Culture. Its speech meant nothing now. What there is in a Rembrandt portrait simply cannot be rendered in a bust. Now and then a sculptor of power arises, like Bernini or the masters of the contemporary Spanish school, or Pigalle or Rodin (none of whom, naturally, transcended the decorative and attained the level of grand symbolism), but such an artist is always visibly either a belated imitator of the Renaissance like Thorwaldsen, a disguised painter like Houdon or Rodin, an architect like Bernini and Schlüter or a decorator like Coysevox. And his very appearance on the scene only shows the more clearly that this art, incapable of carrying the Faustian burden, has no longer a mission—and therefore no longer a soul or a life-history of specific style-development—in the Faustian world. In the Classical world, correspondingly, music was the art that failed. Beginning with probably quite important advances in the earliest Doric, it had to give way in the ripe centuries of Ionic (650-350) to the two truly Apollinian arts, sculpture and fresco; renouncing harmony and polyphony, it had to renounce therewith any pretensions to organic development as a higher art.
VIII
The strict style in Classical painting limited its palette to yellow, red, black and white. This singular fact was observed long ago, and, since the explanation was only sought for in superficial and definitely material causes, wild hypotheses were brought forward to account for it, e.g., a supposed colour-blindness in the Greeks. Even Nietzsche discussed this (Morgenröte, 426).
But why did this painting in its great days avoid blue and even blue-green, and only begin the gamut of permissible tones at greenish-yellow and bluish-red? It is not that the ancient artists did not know of blue and its effect. The metopes of many temples had blue backgrounds so that they should appear deep in contrast with the triglyphs; and trade-painting used all the colours that were technically available. There are authentic blue horses in archaic Acropolis work and Etruscan tomb-painting; and a bright blue colouring of the hair was quite common. The ban upon it in the higher art was, without a doubt, imposed upon the Euclidean soul by its prime symbol.
Blue and green are the colours of the heavens, the sea, the fruitful plain, the shadow of the Southern noon, the evening, the remote mountains. They are essentially atmospheric and not substantial colours. They are cold, they disembody, and they evoke impressions of expanse and distance and boundlessness.
For this reason they were kept out of the frescoes of Polygnotus. And for this reason also, an “infinitesimal” blue-to-green is the space-creating element throughout the history of our perspective oil-painting, from the Venetians right into the 19th Century; it is the basic and supremely important tone which supports the ensemble of the intended colour-effect, as the basso continuo supports the orchestra, whereas the warm yellow and red tones are put on sparingly and in dependence upon this basic tone. It is not the full, gorgeous and familiar green that Raphael and Dürer sometimes—and seldom at that—use for draperies, but an indefinite blue-green of a thousand nuances into white and grey and brown; something deeply musical, into which (notably in Gobelin tapestry) the whole atmosphere is plunged. That quality which we have named aerial perspective in contrast to linear—and might also have called Baroque perspective in contrast to Renaissance—rests almost exclusively upon this. We find it with more and more intense depth-effect in Leonardo, Guercino, Albani in the case of Italy, and in Ruysdael and Hobbema in that of Holland, but, above all, in the great French painters, from Poussin and Claude Lorrain and Watteau to Corot. Blue, equally a perspective colour, always stands in relation to the dark, the unillumined, the unactual. It does not press in on us, it pulls us out into the remote. An “enchanting nothingness” Goethe calls it in his Farbenlehre.
Blue and green are transcendent, spiritual, non-sensuous colours. They are missing in the strict Attic fresco and therefore dominant in oil-painting. Yellow and red, the Classical colours, are the colours of the material, the near, the full-blooded. Red is the characteristic colour of sexuality—hence it is the only colour that works upon the beasts. It matches best the Phallus-symbol—and therefore the statue and the Doric column—but it is pure blue that etherealizes the Madonna’s mantle. This relation of the colours has established itself in every great school as a deep-felt necessity. Violet, a red succumbing to blue, is the colour of women no longer fruitful and of priests living in celibacy.
Yellow and red are the popular colours, the colours of the crowd, of children, of women, and of savages. Amongst the Venetians and the Spaniards high personages affected a splendid black or blue, with an unconscious sense of the aloofness inherent in these colours. For red and yellow, the Apollinian, Euclidean-polytheistic colours, belong to the foreground even in respect of social life; they are meet for the noisy hearty market-days and holidays, the naïve immediateness of a life subject to the blind chances of the Classical Fatum, the point-existence. But blue and green—the Faustian, monotheistic colours—are those of loneliness, of care, of a present that is related to a past and a future, of destiny as the dispensation governing the universe from within.
The relation of Shakespearian destiny to space and of Sophoclean to the individual body has already been stated in an earlier chapter. All the genuinely transcendent Cultures—that is all whose prime-symbol requires the overcoming of the apparent, the life of struggle and not that of acceptance—have the same metaphysical inclination to space as to blues and blacks. There are profound observations on the connexion between ideas of space and the meaning of colour in Goethe’s studies of “entoptic colours” in the atmosphere; the symbolism that is enunciated by him in the Farbenlehre and that which we have deduced here from the ideas of Space and Destiny are in complete agreement.
The most significant use of dusky green as the colour of destiny is Grünewald’s. The indescribable power of space in his nights is equalled only by Rembrandt’s. And the thought suggests itself here, is it possible to say that his bluish-green, the colour in which the interior of a great cathedral is so often clothed, is the specifically Catholic colour?—it being understood that we mean by “Catholic” strictly the Faustian Christianity (with the Eucharist as its centre) that was founded in the Lateran Council of 1215 and fulfilled in the Council of Trent. This colour with its silent grandeur is as remote from the resplendent gold-ground of Early Christian-Byzantine pictures as it is from the gay, loquacious “pagan” colours of the painted Hellenic temples and statues. It is to be noted that the effect of this colour, entirely unlike that of yellow and red, depends upon work being exhibited indoors. Classical painting is emphatically a public art, Western just as emphatically a studio-art. The whole of our great oil-painting, from Leonardo to the end of the 18th Century, is not meant for the bright light of day. Here once more we meet the same opposition as that between chamber-music and the free-standing statue. The climatic explanation of the difference is merely superficial; the example of Egyptian painting would suffice to disprove it if disproof were necessary at all. Infinite space meant for Classical feeling complete nothingness, and the use of blue and green, with their powers of dissolving the near and creating the far, would have been a challenge to the absolutism of the foreground and its unit-bodies, and therefore to the very meaning and intent of Apollinian art. To the Apollinian eye, pictures in the colours of Watteau would have been destitute of all essence, things of almost inexpressible emptiness and untruth. By these colours the visually-perceived light-reflecting surface of the picture is made effectively to render, not circumscribed things, but circumambient space. And that is why they are missing in Greece and dominant in the West.
IX
Arabian art brought the Magian world-feeling to expression by means of the gold ground of its mosaics and pictures. Something of the uncanny wizardry of this, and by implication of its symbolic purpose, is known to us through the mosaics of Ravenna, in the work of the Early Rhenish and especially North Italian masters who were still entirely under the influence of Lombardo-Byzantine models, and last but not least in the Gothic book-illustrations of which the archetypes were the Byzantine purple codices.
In this instance we can study the soul of three Cultures working upon very similar tasks in very dissimilar ways. The Apollinian Culture recognized as actual only that which was immediately present in time and place—and thus it repudiated the background as pictorial element. The Faustian strove through all sensuous barriers towards infinity—and it projected the centre of gravity of the pictorial idea into the distance by means of perspective. The Magian felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the world-cavern with their spiritual substance—and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours. Gold is not a colour. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours—whether coloured substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment applied with the brush—are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.[311] It recalls impressively the other symbols of the Culture, Alchemy and Kabbala, the Philosophers’ Stone, the Holy Scriptures, the Arabesque, the inner form of the tales of the “Thousand and One Nights.” The gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their substantial being. Everything that was taught in the circle of Plotinus or by the Gnostics as to the nature of things, their independence of space, their accidental causes—notions paradoxical and almost unintelligible to our world-feeling—is implicit also in the symbolism of this mysterious hieratic background. The nature of bodies was a principal subject of controversy amongst Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-Platonists, as it was later in the schools of Baghdad and Basra. Suhrawardi distinguishes extension, as the primary existence of the body, from width and height and depth as its accidents. Nazzâm pronounced against the corporeal substantiality and space-filling character of the atom. These and the like were the metaphysical notions that, from Philo and Paul to the last great names of the Islamic philosophy, manifested the Arabian world-feeling. They played a decisive part in the disputes of the Councils upon the substantiality of Christ.[312] And thus the gold background possesses, in the iconography of the Western Church, an explicit dogmatic significance. It is an express assertion of the existence and activity of the divine spirit. It represents the Arabian form of the Christian world-consciousness, and with such a deep appropriateness that for a thousand years this treatment of the background was held to be the only one metaphysically—and even ethically—possible and seemly in representations of the Christian legend. When “natural” backgrounds, with their blue-green heavens, far horizons and depth perspective, began to appear in early Gothic, they had at first the appearance of something profane and worldly. The change of dogma that they implied was, if not acknowledged, at any rate felt, witness the tapestry backgrounds with which the real depth of space was covered up by a pious awe that disguised what it dared not exhibit. We have seen how just at this time, when the Faustian (German-Catholic) Christianity attained to consciousness of itself through the institution of the sacrament of Contrition—a new religion in the old garb—the tendency to perspective, colour, and the mastering of aerial space in the art of the Franciscans[313] transformed the whole meaning of painting.
The Christianity of the West is related to that of the East as the symbol of perspective to the symbol of gold-ground—and the final schism took place almost at the same moment in Church and in Art. The landscape-background of the depicted scene and the dynamic infiniteness of God were comprehended at the same moment; and, simultaneously with the gold ground of the sacred picture, there vanished from the Councils of the West that Magian, ontological problem of Godhead which had so passionately agitated Nicæa, Ephesus, Chalcedon and all the Councils of the East.
X
The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a space-forming and quasi-musical motive, the handwriting of the visible brush-stroke. The Florentine masters had never at any time challenged the fashion—would-be Classical and yet in Gothic employ—of smoothing out all turns of the brush so as to produce pure, cleanly-outlined and even colour-surfaces. In consequence, their pictures have a certain air of being, something felt, unmistakably, as the opposite of the inherent motion-quality of the Gothic expression-means that were storming in from over the Alps. The 15th-Century manner of applying colour is a denial of past and future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains permanently visible and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the historical feeling comes out. Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something that has become but something that is becoming. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A piece of Perugino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is ready-made, given, simply present. But the individual brush-strokes—first met with as a complete new form-language in the later work of Titian—are accents of a personal temperament, characteristic in the orchestra-colours of Monteverde, melodically-flowing as a contemporary Venetian madrigal: streaks and dabs, immediately juxtaposed, cross one another, cover one another, entangle one another, and bring unending movement into the plain element of colour. Just so the geometrical Analysis of the time made its objects become instead of being. Every painting has in its execution a history and does not disguise it; and a Faustian who stands before it feels that he too has a spiritual evolution. Before any great landscape by a Baroque master, the one word “historical” is enough to make us feel that there is a meaning in it wholly alien to the meaning of an Attic statue. As other melody, so also this of the restless outlineless brush-stroke is part of the dynamic stability of the universe of eternal Becoming, directional Time, and Destiny. The opposition of painting-style and drawing-style is but a particular aspect of the general opposition of historical and ahistorical form, of assertion and denial of inner development, of eternity and instantaneity. A Classical art-work is an event, a Western is a deed. The one symbolizes the here-and-now point, the other the living course. And the physiognomy of this script of the brush—an ornamentation that is entirely new, infinitely rich and personal, and peculiar to the Western Culture—is purely and simply musical. It is no mere conceit to compare the allegro feroce of Frans Hals with the andante con moto of Van Dyck, or the minor of Guercino with the major of Velasquez. Henceforward the notion of tempo is comprised in the execution of a painting and steadily reminds us that this art is the art of a soul which, in contrast to the Classical, forgets nothing and will let nothing be forgotten that once was. The aëry web of brush-strokes immediately dissolves the sensible surface of things. Contours melt into chiaroscuro. The beholder has to stand a very long way back to obtain any corporeal impression out of our coloured space values, and even so it is always the chromatic and active air itself that gives birth to the things.
At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting another symbol of highest significance, which subdued more and more the actuality of all colour—the “studio-brown” (atelierbraun). This was unknown to the early Florentines and the older Flemish and Rhenish masters alike. Pacher, Dürer, Holbein, passionately strong as their tendency towards spatial depth seems, are quite without it, and its reign begins only with the last years of the 16th Century. This brown does not repudiate its descent from the “infinitesimal” greens of Leonardo’s, Schöngauer’s and Grünewald’s backgrounds, but it possesses a mightier power over things than they, and it carries the battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails over the more primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake off its Renaissance association with architectural motives. Between it and the Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is an enduring and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end dissolve the tangible existences of the sense-world—the world of moments and foregrounds—into atmospheric semblances. Line disappears from the tone-picture. The Magian gold-ground had only dreamed of a mystic power that controlled and at will could thrust aside the laws governing corporeal existence within the world-cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a prospect into an infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery marks for the Western style a culmination in the process of its becoming. As contrasted with the preceding green, this colour has something Protestant in it. It anticipates the hyperbolic[314] Northern pantheism of the 18th Century which the Archangels voice in the Prologue of Goethe’s “Faust.”[315] The atmosphere of Lear and the atmosphere of Macbeth are akin to it. The contemporary striving of instrumental music towards freer and ever freer chromatics (de Rore, Luca Marenzio) and towards the formation of bodies of tone by means of string and wind choruses corresponds exactly with the new tendency of oil-painting to create pictorial chromatics out of pure colours, by means of these unlimited brown shadings and the contrast-effect of immediately juxtaposed colour-strokes. Thereafter both the arts spread through their worlds of tones and colours—colour-tones and tone-colours—an atmosphere of the purest spatiality, which enveloped and rendered, no longer body—the human being as a shape—but the soul unconfined. And thus was attained the inwardness that in the deepest works of Rembrandt and of Beethoven is able to unlock the last secrets themselves—the inwardness which Apollinian man had sought with his strictly somatic art to keep at bay.
From now onward, the old foreground-colours yellow and red—the Classical tones—are employed more and more rarely and always as deliberate contrasts to the distances and depths that they are meant to set off and emphasize (Vermeer in particular, besides of course Rembrandt). This atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the Renaissance, is the unrealest colour that there is. It is the one major colour that does not exist in the rainbow. There is white light, and yellow and green, and red and other light of the most entire purity. But a pure brown light is outside the possibilities of the Nature that we know. All the greenish-brown, silvery, moist brown, and deep gold tones that appear in their splendid variety with Giorgione, grow bolder and bolder in the great Dutch painters and lose themselves towards the end of the 18th Century, have the common quality that they strip nature of her tangible actuality. They contain, therefore, what is almost a religious profession of faith; we feel that here we are not very far from Port Royal, from Leibniz. With Constable on the other hand—who is the founder of the painting of Civilization—it is a different will that seeks expression; and the very brown that he had learnt from the Dutch meant to him not what it had meant to them—Destiny, God, the meaning of life—but simply romance, sensibility, yearning for something that was gone, memorial of the great past of the dying art. In the last German masters too—Lessing, Marées, Spitzweg, Diez, Leibl[316]—whose belated art is a romantic retrospect, an epilogue, the brown tones appear simply as a precious heirloom. Unwilling in their hearts to part with this last relic of the great style, they preferred to set themselves against the evident tendency of their generation—the soulless and soul-killing generation of plein-air and Haeckel. Rightly understood (as it has never yet been), this battle of Rembrandt-brown and the plein-air of the new school is simply one more case of the hopeless resistance put up by soul against intellect and Culture against Civilization, of the opposition of symbolic necessary art and megalopolitan “applied” art which affects building and painting and sculpture and poetry alike. Regarded thus, the significance of the brown becomes manifest enough. When it dies, an entire Culture dies with it.
It was the masters who were inwardly greatest—Rembrandt above all—who best understood this colour. It is the enigmatic brown of his most telling work, and its origin is in the deep lights of Gothic church-windows and the twilight of the high-vaulted Gothic nave. And the gold tone of the great Venetians—Titian, Veronese, Palma, Giorgione—is always reminding us of that old perished Northern art of glass painting of which they themselves know almost nothing. Here also the Renaissance with its deliberate bodiliness of colour is seen as merely an episode, an event of the very self-conscious surface, and not a product of the underlying Faustian instinct of the Western soul, whereas this luminous gold-brown of the Venetian painting links Gothic and Baroque, the art of the old glass-painting and the dark music of Beethoven. And it coincides precisely in time with the establishment of the Baroque style of colour-music by the work of the Netherlanders Willaert and Cyprian de Rore, the elder Gabrieli, and the Venetian music-school which they founded.
Brown, then, became the characteristic colour of the soul, and more particularly of a historically-disposed soul. Nietzsche has, I think, spoken somewhere of the “brown” music of Bizet, but the adjective is far more appropriate to the music which Beethoven wrote for strings[317] and to the orchestration that even as late as Bruckner so often fills space with a browny-golden expanse of tone. All other colours are relegated to ancillary functions—thus the bright yellow and the vermilion of Vermeer intrude with the spatial almost as though from another world and with an emphasis that is truly metaphysical, and the yellow-green and blood-red lights of Rembrandt seem at most to play with the symbolism of space. In Rubens, on the contrary—brilliant performer but no thinker—the brown is almost destitute of idea, a shadow-colour. (In him and in Watteau, the “Catholic” blue-green disputes precedence with the brown.) All this shows how any particular means may, in the hands of men of inward depth, become a symbol for the evocation of such high transcendence as that of the Rembrandt landscape, while for other great masters it may be merely a serviceable technical expedient—or in other words that (as we have already seen) technical “form,” in the theoretical sense of something opposed to “content,” has nothing whatever to do with the real and true form of a great work.
I have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and future, and overpowers the assertiveness of any instantaneous element that may be represented. The other colours of distance have also this significance, and they lead to an important, considerable and distinctly bizarre extension of the Western symbolism. The Hellenes had in the end come to prefer bronze and even gilt-bronze to the painted marble, the better to express (by the radiance of this phenomenon against a deep blue sky) the idea of the individualness of any and every corporeal thing.[318] Now, when the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found them black and green with the patina of many centuries. The historic spirit, with its piety and longing, fastened on to this—and from that time forth our form-feeling has canonized this black and green of distance. To-day our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a bronze—an ironical illustration of the fact that this whole species of art is something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of time and place? Have we not got to the point of artificially producing this patina?[319]
But even more than this is involved in the ennoblement of decay to the level of an art-means of independent significance. That a Greek would have regarded the formation of patina as the ruin of the work, we can hardly doubt. It is not merely that the colour green, on account of its “distant” quality, was avoided by him on spiritual grounds. Patina is a symbol of mortality and hence related in a remarkable way to the symbols of time-measurement and the funeral rite. We have already in an earlier chapter discussed the wistful regard of the Faustian soul for ruins and evidences of the distant past, its proneness to the collection of antiquities and manuscripts and coins, to pilgrimages to the Forum Romanum and to Pompeii, to excavations and philological studies, which appears as early as the time of Petrarch. When would it have occurred to a Greek to bother himself with the ruins of Cnossus or Tiryns?[320] Every Greek knew his “Iliad” but not one ever thought of digging up the hill of Troy. We, on the contrary, are moved by a secret piety to preserve the aqueducts of the Campagna, the Etruscan tombs, the ruins of Luxor and Karnak, the crumbling castles of the Rhine, the Roman Limes, Hersfeld and Paulinzella from becoming mere rubbish—but we keep them as ruins, feeling in some subtle way that reconstruction would deprive them of something, indefinable in terms, that can never be reproduced.[321] Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this reverence for the weather-beaten evidences of a once and a formerly. It cleared out of sight everything that did not speak of the present; never was the old preserved because it was old. After the Persians had destroyed old Athens, the citizens threw columns, statues, reliefs, broken or not, over the Acropolis wall, in order to start afresh with a clean slate—and the resultant scrap-heaps have been our richest sources for the art of the 6th Century. Their action was quite in keeping with the style of a Culture that raised cremation to the rank of a major symbol and refused with scorn to bind daily life to a chronology. Our choice has been, as usual, the opposite. The heroic landscape of the Claude Lorrain type is inconceivable without ruins. The English park with its atmospheric suggestion, which supplanted the French about 1750 and abandoned the great perspective idea of the latter in favour of the “Nature” of Addison, Pope and sensibility, introduced into its stock of motives perhaps the most astonishing bizarrerie ever perpetrated, the artificial ruin, in order to deepen the historical character in the presented landscape.[322] The Egyptian Culture restored the works of its early period, but it would never have ventured to build ruins as the symbols of the past. Again, it is not the Classical statue, but the Classical torso that we really love. It has had a destiny: something suggestive of the past as past envelops it, and our imagination delights to fill the empty space of missing limbs with the pulse and swing of invisible lines. A good restoration—and the secret charm of endless possibilities is all gone. I venture to maintain that it is only by way of this transposition into the musical that the remains of Classical sculpture can really reach us. The green bronze, the blackened marble, the fragments of a figure abolish for our inner eye the limitations of time and space. “Picturesque” this has been called—the brand-new statue and building and the too-well-groomed park are not picturesque—and the word is just to this extent, that the deep meaning of this weathering is the same as that of the studio-brown. But, at bottom, what both express is the spirit of instrumental music. Would the Spearman of Polycletus, standing before us in flashing bronze and with enamel eyes and gilded hair, affect us as it does in the state of blackened age? Would not the Vatican torso of Heracles lose its mighty impressiveness if, one fine day, the missing parts were discovered and replaced? And would not the towers and domes of our old cities lose their deep metaphysical charm if they were sheathed in new copper? Age, for us as for the Egyptian, ennobles all things. For Classical man, it depreciates them.
Lastly, consider Western tragedy; observe how the same feeling leads it to prefer “historical” material—meaning thereby not so much demonstrably actual or even possible, but remote and crusted subjects. That which the Faustian soul wanted, and must have, could not be expressed by any event of purely momentary meaning, lacking in distance of time or place, or by a tragic art of the Classical kind, or by a timeless myth. Our tragedies, consequently, are tragedies of the past and of the future—the latter category, in which men yet to be are shown as carriers of a Destiny, is represented in a certain sense by “Faust,” “Peer Gynt” and the “Götterdämmerung.” But tragedies of the present we have not, apart from the trivial social drama of the 19th Century.[323] If Shakespeare wanted on occasion to express anything of importance in the present, he at least removed the scene of it to some foreign land—Italy for preference—in which he had never been, and German poets likewise take England or France—always for the sake of getting rid of that nearness of time and place which the Attic drama emphasized even in the case of a mythological subject.