73. The positions of our Saviour and of the Virgin are not strictly co-equal; the glory in which the Madonna is seated is both lower and less; but the equality is more complete in the painting of the same subject in Santa M. Novella. We believe Lord Lindsay is correct in thinking Orcagna the only artist who has dared it. We question whether even wrath be intended in the countenance of the principal figure; on the contrary, we think it likely to disappoint at first, and appear lifeless in its exceeding tranquillity; the brow is indeed slightly knit, but the eyes have no local direction. They comprehend all things—are set upon all spirits alike, as in that word-fresco of our own, not unworthy to be set side by side with this, the Vision of the Trembling Man in the House of the Interpreter. The action is as majestic as the countenance—the right hand seems raised rather to show its wound (as the left points at the same instant to the wound in the side), than in condemnation, though its gesture has been adopted as one of threatening—first (and very nobly) by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the figure of the Angel departing, looking towards Sodom—and afterwards, with unfortunate exaggeration, by Michael Angelo. Orcagna's Madonna we think a failure, but his strength has been more happily displayed in the Apostolic circle. The head of St. John is peculiarly beautiful. The other Apostles look forward or down as in judgment—some in indignation, some in pity, some serene—but the eyes of St. John are fixed upon the Judge Himself with the stability of love—intercession and sorrow struggling for utterance with awe—and through both is seen a tremor of submissive astonishment, that the lips which had once forbidden his to call down fire from heaven should now themselves burn with irrevocable condemnation.
74. "One feeling for the most part pervades this side of the composition,—there is far more variety in the other; agony is depicted with fearful intensity and in every degree and character; some clasp their hands, some hide their faces, some look up in despair, but none towards Christ; others seem to have grown idiots with horror:—a few gaze, as if fascinated, into the gulf of fire towards which the whole mass of misery are being urged by the ministers of doom—the flames bite them, the devils fish for and catch them with long grappling-hooks:—in sad contrast to the group on the opposite side, a queen, condemned herself but self-forgetful, vainly struggles to rescue her daughter from a demon who has caught her by the gown and is dragging her backwards into the abyss—her sister, wringing her hands, looks on in agony—it is a fearful scene.
"A vast rib or arch in the walls of pandemonium admits one into the contiguous gulf of Hell, forming the third fresco, or rather a continuation of the second—in which Satan sits in the midst, in gigantic terror, cased in armor and crunching sinners—of whom Judas, especially, is eaten and ejected, re-eaten and re-ejected again and again forever. The punishments of the wicked are portrayed in circles numberless around him. But in everything save horror this compartment is inferior to the preceding, and it has been much injured and repainted."—Vol. iii., p. 138.
75. We might have been spared all notice of this last compartment. Throughout Italy, owing, it may be supposed, to the interested desire of the clergy to impress upon the populace as forcibly as possible the verity of purgatorial horrors, nearly every representation of the Inferno has been repainted, and vulgar butchery substituted for the expressions of punishment which were too chaste for monkish purposes. The infernos of Giotto at Padua, and of Orcagna at Florence, have thus been destroyed; but in neither case have they been replaced by anything so merely disgusting as these restorations by Solazzino in the Campo Santo. Not a line of Orcagna's remains, except in one row of figures halfway up the wall, where his firm black drawing is still distinguishable: throughout the rest of the fresco, hillocks of pink flesh have been substituted for his severe forms—and for his agonized features, puppets' heads with roaring mouths and staring eyes, the whole as coarse and sickening, and quite as weak, as any scrabble on the lowest booths of a London Fair.
76. Lord Lindsay's comparison of these frescoes of Orcagna with the great work in the Sistine, is, as a specimen of his writing, too good not to be quoted.
"While Michael Angelo's leading idea seems to be the self-concentration and utter absorption of all feeling into the one predominant thought, Am I, individually, safe? resolving itself into two emotions only, doubt and despair—all diversities of character, all kindred sympathies annihilated under their pressure—those emotions uttering themselves, not through the face but the form, by bodily contortion, rendering the whole composition, with all its overwhelming merits, a mighty hubbub—Orcagna's on the contrary embraces the whole world of passions that make up the economy of man, and these not confused or crushed into each other, but expanded and enhanced in quality and intensity commensurably with the 'change' attendant upon the resurrection—variously expressed indeed, and in reference to the diversities of individual character, which will be nowise compromised by that change, yet from their very intensity suppressed and subdued, stilling the body and informing only the soul's index, the countenance. All therefore is calm; the saved have acquiesced in all things, they can mourn no more—the damned are to them as if they had never been;—among the lost, grief is too deep, too settled for caricature, and while every feeling of the spectator, every key of the soul's organ, is played upon by turns, tenderness and pity form the under-song throughout and ultimately prevail; the curse is uttered in sorrow rather than wrath, and from the pitying Virgin and the weeping archangel above, to the mother endeavoring to rescue her daughter below, and the young secular led to paradise under the approving smile of S. Michael, all resolves itself into sympathy and love.—Michael Angelo's conception may be more efficacious for teaching by terror—it was his object, I believe, as the heir of Savonarola and the representative of the Protestant spirit within the bosom of Catholicism; but Orcagna's is in better taste, truer to human nature, sublimer in philosophy, and (if I mistake not) more scriptural."—Vol. iii., pp. 139-141.
77. We think it somewhat strange that the object of teaching by terror should be attributed to M. Angelo more than to Orcagna, seeing that the former, with his usual dignity, has refused all representation of infernal punishment—except in the figure dragged down with the hand over the face, the serpent biting the thigh, and in the fiends of the extreme angle; while Orcagna, whose intention may be conjectured even from Solazzino's restoration, exhausted himself in detailing Dante's distribution of torture, and brings into successive prominence every expedient of pain; the prong, the spit, the rack, the chain, venomous fang and rending beak, harrowing point and dividing edge, biting fiend and calcining fire. The objects of the two great painters were indeed opposed, but not in this respect. Orcagna's, like that of every great painter of his day, was to write upon the wall, as in a book, the greatest possible number of those religious facts or doctrines which the Church desired should be known to the people. This he did in the simplest and most straightforward way, regardless of artistical reputation, and desiring only to be read and understood. But Michael Angelo's object was from the beginning that of an artist. He addresses not the sympathies of his day, but the understanding of all time, and he treats the subject in the mode best adapted to bring every one of his own powers into full play. As might have been expected, while the self-forgetfulness of Orcagna has given, on the one hand, an awfulness to his work, and verity, which are wanting in the studied composition of the Sistine, on the other it has admitted a puerility commensurate with the narrowness of the religion he had to teach.
78. Greater differences still result from the opposed powers and idiosyncrasies of the two men. Orcagna was unable to draw the nude—on this inability followed a coldness to the value of flowing lines, and to the power of unity in composition—neither could he indicate motion or buoyancy in flying or floating figures, nor express violence of action in the limbs—he cannot even show the difference between pulling and pushing in the muscles of the arm. In M. Angelo these conditions were directly reversed. Intense sensibility to the majesty of writhing, flowing, and connected lines, was in him associated with a power, unequaled except by Angelico, of suggesting aërial motion—motion deliberate or disturbed, inherent or impressed, impotent or inspired—gathering into glory, or gravitating to death. Orcagna was therefore compelled to range his figures symmetrically in ordered lines, while Michael Angelo bound them into chains, or hurled them into heaps, or scattered them before him as the wind does leaves. Orcagna trusted for all his expression to the countenance, or to rudely explained gesture aided by grand fall of draperies, though in all these points he was still immeasurably inferior to his colossal rival. As for his "embracing the whole world of passions which make up the economy of man," he had no such power of delineation—nor, we believe, of conception. The expressions on the inferno side are all of them varieties of grief and fear, differing merely in degree, not in character or operation: there is something dramatic in the raised hand of a man wearing a green bonnet with a white plume—but the only really far-carried effort in the group is the head of a Dominican monk (just above the queen in green), who, in the midst of the close crowd, struggling, shuddering, and howling on every side, is fixed in quiet, total despair, insensible to all things, and seemingly poised in existence and sensation upon that one point in his past life when his steps first took hold on hell; this head, which is opposed to a face distorted by horror beside it, is, we repeat, the only highly wrought piece of expression in the group.
79. What Michael Angelo could do by expression of countenance alone, let the Pietà of Genoa tell, or the Lorenzo, or the parallel to this very head of Orcagna's, the face of the man borne down in the Last Judgment with the hand clenched over one of the eyes. Neither in that fresco is he wanting in dramatic episode; the adaptation of the Niobe on the spectator's left hand is far finer than Orcagna's condemned queen and princess; the groups rising below, side by side, supporting each other, are full of tenderness, and reciprocal devotion; the contest in the center for the body which a demon drags down by the hair is another kind of quarrel from that of Orcagna between a feathered angel and bristly fiend for a diminutive soul—reminding us, as it forcibly did at first, of a vociferous difference in opinion between a cat and a cockatoo. But Buonaroti knew that it was useless to concentrate interest in the countenances, in a picture of enormous size, ill lighted; and he preferred giving full play to the powers of line-grouping, for which he could have found no nobler field. Let us not by unwise comparison mingle with our admiration of these two sublime works any sense of weakness in the naïveté of the one, or of coldness in the science of the other. Each painter has his own sufficient dominion, and he who complains of the want of knowledge in Orcagna, or of the display of it in Michael Angelo, has probably brought little to his judgment of either.
80. One passage more we must quote, well worthy of remark in these days of hollowness and haste, though we question the truth of the particular fact stated in the second volume respecting the shrine of Or San Michele. Cement is now visible enough in all the joints, but whether from recent repairs we cannot say:—
"There is indeed another, a technical merit, due to Orcagna, which I would have mentioned earlier, did it not partake so strongly of a moral virtue. Whatever he undertook to do, he did well—by which I mean, better than anybody else. His Loggia, in its general structure and its provisions against injury from wet and decay, is a model of strength no less than symmetry and elegance; the junction of the marbles in the tabernacle of Or San Michele, and the exquisite manual workmanship of the bas-reliefs, have been the theme of praise for five centuries; his colors in the Campo Santo have maintained a freshness unrivaled by those of any of his successors there;—nay, even had his mosaics been preserved at Orvieto, I am confident the commettitura would be found more compact and polished than any previous to the sixteenth century. The secret of all this was that he made himself thoroughly an adept in the mechanism of the respective arts, and therefore his works have stood. Genius is too apt to think herself independent of form and matter—never was there such a mistake; she cannot slight either without hamstringing herself. But the rule is of universal application; without this thorough mastery of their respective tools, this determination honestly to make the best use of them, the divine, the soldier, the statesman, the philosopher, the poet—however genuine their enthusiasm, however lofty their genius—are mere empirics, pretenders to crowns they will not run for, children not men—sporters with Imagination, triflers with Reason, with the prospects of humanity, with Time, and with God."—Vol. iii., pp. 148, 149.
A noble passage this, and most true, provided we distinguish always between mastery of tool together with thorough strength of workmanship, and mere neatness of outside polish or fitting of measurement, of which ancient masters are daringly scornful.
81. None of Orcagna's pupils, except Francisco Traini, attained celebrity—
"nothing in fact is known of them except their names. Had their works, however inferior, been preserved, we might have had less difficulty in establishing the links between himself and his successor in the supremacy of the Semi-Byzantine school at Florence, the Beato Fra Angelico da Fiesole.... He was born at Vicchio, near Florence, it is said in 1387, and was baptized by the name of Guido. Of a gentle nature, averse to the turmoil of the world, and pious to enthusiasm, though as free from fanaticism as his youth was innocent of vice, he determined, at the age of twenty, though well provided for in a worldly point of view, to retire to the cloister; he professed himself accordingly a brother of the monastery of S. Domenico at Fiesole in 1407, assuming his monastic name from the Apostle of love, S. John. He acquired from his residence there the distinguishing surname 'da Fiesole;' and a calmer retreat for one weary of earth and desirous of commerce with heaven would in vain be sought for;—the purity of the atmosphere, the freshness of the morning breeze, the starry clearness and delicious fragrance of the nights, the loveliness of the valley at one's feet, lengthening out, like a life of happiness, between the Apennine and the sea—with the intermingling sounds that ascend perpetually from below, softened by distance into music, and by an agreeable compromise at once giving a zest to solitude and cheating it of its loneliness—rendering Fiesole a spot which angels might alight upon by mistake in quest of paradise, a spot where it would be at once sweet to live and sweet to die."—Vol. iii., pp. 151-153.
82. Our readers must recollect that the convent where Fra Giovanni first resided is not that whose belfry tower and cypress grove crown the "top of Fésole." The Dominican convent is situated at the bottom of the slope of olives, distinguished only by its narrow and low spire; a cypress avenue recedes from it towards Florence—a stony path, leading to the ancient Badia of Fiesole, descends in front of the three-arched loggia which protects the entrance to the church. No extended prospect is open to it; though over the low wall, and through the sharp, thickset olive leaves, may be seen one silver gleam of the Arno, and, at evening, the peaks of the Carrara mountains, purple against the twilight, dark and calm, while the fire-flies glance beneath, silent and intermittent, like stars upon the rippling of mute, soft sea.
"It is by no means an easy task to adjust the chronology of Fra Angelico's works; he has affixed no dates to them, and consequently, when external evidence is wanting, we are thrown upon internal, which in his case is unusually fallacious. It is satisfactory therefore to possess a fixed date in 1433, the year in which he painted the great tabernacle for the Company of Flax-merchants, now removed to the gallery of the Uffizii. It represents the Virgin and child, with attendant Saints, on a gold ground—very dignified and noble, although the Madonna has not attained the exquisite spirituality of his later efforts. Round this tabernacle as a nucleus, may be classed a number of paintings, all of similar excellence—admirable that is to say, but not of his very best, and in which, if I mistake not, the type of the Virgin bears throughout a strong family resemblance."—Vol. iii., pp. 160, 161.
83. If the painter ever increased in power after this period (he was then forty-three), we have been unable to systematize the improvement. We much doubt whether, in his modes of execution, advance were possible. Men whose merit lies in record of natural facts, increase in knowledge; and men whose merit is in dexterity of hand increase in facility; but we much doubt whether the faculty of design, or force of feeling, increase after the age of twenty-five. By Fra Angelico, who drew always in fear and trembling, dexterous execution had been from the first repudiated; he neither needed nor sought technical knowledge of the form, and the inspiration, to which his power was owing, was not less glowing in youth than in age. The inferiority traceable (we grant) in this Madonna results not from its early date, but from Fra Angelico's incapability, always visible, of drawing the head of life size. He is, in this respect, the exact reverse of Giotto; he was essentially a miniature painter, and never attained the mastery of muscular play in the features necessary in a full-sized drawing. His habit, almost constant, of surrounding the iris of the eye by a sharp black line, is, in small figures, perfectly successful, giving a transparency and tenderness not otherwise expressible. But on a larger scale it gives a stony stare to the eyeball, which not all the tenderness of the brow and mouth can conquer or redeem.
84. Further, in this particular instance, the ear has by accident been set too far back—(Fra Angelico, drawing only from feeling, was liable to gross errors of this kind,—often, however, more beautiful than other men's truths)—and the hair removed in consequence too far off the brow; in other respects the face is very noble—still more so that of the Christ. The child stands upon the Virgin's knees,[9] one hand raised in the usual attitude of benediction, the other holding a globe. The face looks straightforward, quiet, Jupiter-like, and very sublime, owing to the smallness of the features in proportion to the head, the eyes being placed at about three-sevenths of the whole height, leaving four-sevenths for the brow, and themselves only in length about one-sixth of the breadth of the face, half closed, giving a peculiar appearance of repose. The hair is short, golden, symmetrically curled, statuesque in its contour; the mouth tender and full of life: the red cross of the glory about the head of an intense ruby enamel, almost fire color; the dress brown, with golden girdle. In all the treatment Fra Angelico maintains his assertion of the authority of abstract imagination, which, depriving his subject of all material or actual being, contemplates it as retaining qualities eternal only—adorned by incorporeal splendor. The eyes of the beholder are supernaturally unsealed: and to this miraculous vision whatever is of the earth vanishes, and all things are seen endowed with an harmonious glory—the garments falling with strange, visionary grace, glowing with indefinite gold—the walls of the chamber dazzling as of a heavenly city—the mortal forms themselves impressed with divine changelessness—no domesticity—no jest—no anxiety—no expectation—no variety of action or of thought. Love, all fulfilling, and various modes of power, are alone expressed; the Virgin never shows the complacency or petty watchfulness of maternity; she sits serene, supporting the child whom she ever looks upon, as a stranger among strangers; "Behold the handmaid of the Lord" forever written upon her brow.
85. An approach to an exception in treatment is found in the Annunciation of the upper corridor of St. Mark's, most unkindly treated by our author:—
"Probably the earliest of the series—full of faults, but imbued with the sweetest feeling; there is a look of naïve curiosity, mingling with the modest and meek humility of the Virgin, which almost provokes a smile."—iii., 176.
Many a Sabbath evening of bright summer have we passed in that lonely corridor—but not to the finding of faults, nor the provoking of smiles. The angel is perhaps something less majestic than is usual with the painter; but the Virgin is only the more to be worshiped, because here, for once, set before us in the verity of life. No gorgeous robe is upon her; no lifted throne set for her; the golden border gleams faintly on the dark blue dress; the seat is drawn into the shadow of a lowly loggia. The face is of no strange, far-sought loveliness; the features might even be thought hard, and they are worn with watching, and severe, though innocent. She stoops forward with her arms folded on her bosom: no casting down of eye nor shrinking of the frame in fear; she is too earnest, too self-forgetful for either: wonder and inquiry are there, but chastened and free from doubt; meekness, yet mingled with a patient majesty; peace, yet sorrowfully sealed, as if the promise of the Angel were already underwritten by the prophecy of Simeon. They who pass and repass in the twilight of that solemn corridor, need not the adjuration inscribed beneath:—
"Virginis intactae cum veneris ante figuram
Praetereundo cave ne sileatur Ave."[10]
We in general allow the inferiority of Angelico's fresco to his tempera works; yet even that which of all these latter we think the most radiant, the Annunciation on the reliquary of Santa Maria Novella, would, we believe, if repeatedly compared with this of St. Mark's, in the end have the disadvantage. The eminent value of the tempera paintings results partly from their delicacy of line, and partly from the purity of color and force of decoration of which the material is capable.
86. The passage, to which we have before alluded, respecting Fra Angelico's color in general, is one of the most curious and fanciful in the work:—
"His coloring, on the other hand, is far more beautiful, although of questionable brilliancy. This will be found invariably the case in minds constituted like his. Spirit and Sense act on each other with livelier reciprocity the closer their approximation, the less intervention there is of Intellect. Hence the most religious and the most sensual painters have always loved the brightest colors—Spiritual Expression and a clearly defined (however inaccurate) outline forming the distinction of the former class; Animal Expression and a confused and uncertain outline (reflecting that lax morality which confounds the limits of light and darkness, right and wrong) of the latter. On the other hand, the more that Intellect, or the spirit of Form, intervenes in its severe precision, the less pure, the paler grow the colors, the nearer they tend to the hue of marble, of the bas-relief. We thus find the purest and brightest colors only in Fra Angelico's pictures, with a general predominance of blue, which we have observed to prevail more or less in so many of the Semi-Byzantine painters, and which, fanciful as it may appear, I cannot but attribute, independently of mere tradition, to an inherent, instinctive sympathy between their mental constitution and the color in question; as that of red, or of blood, may be observed to prevail among painters in whom Sense or Nature predominates over Spirit—for in this, as in all things else, the moral and the material world respond to each other as closely as shadow and substance. But, in Painting as in Morals, perfection implies the due intervention of Intellect between Spirit and Sense—of Form between Expression and Coloring—as a power at once controlling and controlled—and therefore, although acknowledging its fascination, I cannot unreservedly praise the Coloring of Fra Angelico."—Vol. iii., pp. 193, 194.
87. There is much ingenuity, and some truth, here, but the reader, as in other of Lord Lindsay's speculations, must receive his conclusions with qualification. It is the natural character of strong effects of color, as of high light, to confuse outlines; and it is a necessity in all fine harmonies of color that many tints should merge imperceptibly into their following or succeeding ones:—we believe Lord Lindsay himself would hardly wish to mark the hues of the rainbow into divided zones, or to show its edge, as of an iron arch, against the sky, in order that it might no longer reflect (a reflection of which we profess ourselves up to this moment altogether unconscious) "that lax morality which confounds the limits of right and wrong." Again, there is a character of energy in all warm colors, as of repose in cold, which necessarily causes the former to be preferred by painters of savage subject—that is to say, commonly by the coarsest and most degraded;—but when sensuality is free from ferocity, it leans to blue more than to red (as especially in the flesh tints of Guido), and when intellect prevails over this sensuality, its first step is invariably to put more red into every color, and so "rubor est virtutis color." We hardly think Lord Lindsay would willingly include Luca Giordano among his spiritual painters, though that artist's servant was materially enriched by washing the ultramarine from the brushes with which he painted the Ricardi palace; nor would he, we believe, degrade Ghirlandajo to fellowship with the herd of the sensual, though in the fresco of the vision of Zacharias there are seventeen different reds in large masses, and not a shade of blue. The fact is, there is no color of the spectrum, as there is no note of music, whose key and prevalence may not be made pure in expression, and elevating in influence, by a great and good painter, or degraded to unhallowed purpose by a base one.
88. We are sorry that our author "cannot unreservedly praise the coloring of Angelico;" but he is again curbed by his unhappy system of balanced perfectibility, and must quarrel with the gentle monk because he finds not in him the flames of Giorgione, nor the tempering of Titian, nor the melody of Cagliari. This curb of perfection we took between our teeth from the first, and we will give up our hearts to Angelico without drawback or reservation. His color is, in its sphere and to its purpose, as perfect as human work may be: wrought to radiance beyond that of the ruby and opal, its inartificialness prevents it from arresting the attention it is intended only to direct; were it composed with more science it would become vulgar from the loss of its unconsciousness; if richer, it must have parted with its purity, if deeper, with its joyfulness, if more subdued, with its sincerity. Passages are, indeed, sometimes unsuccessful; but it is to be judged in its rapture, and forgiven in its fall: he who works by law and system may be blamed when he sinks below the line above which he proposes no elevation, but to him whose eyes are on a mark far off, and whose efforts are impulsive, and to the utmost of his strength, we may not unkindly count the slips of his sometime descent into the valley of humiliation.
89. The concluding notice of Angelico is true and interesting, though rendered obscure by useless recurrence to the favorite theory.
"Such are the surviving works of a painter, who has recently been as unduly extolled as he had for three centuries past been unduly depreciated,—depreciated, through the amalgamation during those centuries of the principle of which he was the representative with baser, or at least less precious matter—extolled, through the recurrence to that principle, in its pure, unsophisticated essence, in the present —in a word, to the simple Imaginative Christianity of the middle ages, as opposed to the complex Reasoning Christianity of recent times. Creeds therefore are at issue, and no exclusive partisan, neither Catholic nor Protestant in the absolute sense of the terms, can fairly appreciate Fra Angelico. Nevertheless, to those who regard society as progressive through the gradual development of the component elements of human nature, and who believe that Providence has accommodated the mind of man, individually, to the perception of half-truths only, in order to create that antagonism from which Truth is generated in the abstract, and by which the progression is effected, his rank and position in art are clear and definite. All that Spirit could achieve by herself, anterior to that struggle with Intellect and Sense which she must in all cases pass through in order to work out her destiny, was accomplished by him. Last and most gifted of a long and imaginative race—the heir of their experience, with collateral advantages which they possessed not—and flourishing at the moment when the transition was actually taking place from the youth to the early manhood of Europe; he gave full, unreserved, and enthusiastic expression to that Love and Hope which had winged the Faith of Christendom in her flight towards heaven for fourteen centuries,—to those yearnings of the Heart and the Imagination which ever precede, in Universal as well as Individual development, the severer and more chastened intelligence of Reason."—Vol. iii., pp. 188-190.
90. We must again repeat that if our author wishes to be truly serviceable to the schools of England, he must express himself in terms requiring less laborious translation. Clearing the above statement of its mysticism and metaphor, it amounts only to this,—that Fra Angelico was a man of (humanly speaking) perfect piety—humility, charity, and faith—that he never employed his art but as a means of expressing his love to God and man, and with the view, single, simple, and straightforward, of glory to the Creator, and good to the Creature. Every quality or subject of art by which these ends were not to be attained, or to be attained secondarily only, he rejected; from all study of art, as such, he withdrew; whatever might merely please the eye, or interest the intellect, he despised, and refused; he used his colors and lines, as David his harp, after a kingly fashion, for purposes of praise and not of science. To this grace and gift of holiness were added, those of a fervent imagination, vivid invention, keen sense of loveliness in lines and colors, unwearied energy, and to all these gifts the crowning one of quietness of life and mind, while yet his convent-cell was at first within view, and afterwards in the center, of a city which had lead of all the world in Intellect, and in whose streets he might see daily and hourly the noblest setting of manly features. It would perhaps be well to wait until we find another man thus actuated, thus endowed, and thus circumstanced, before we speak of "unduly extolling" the works of Fra Angelico.
91. His artistical attainments, as might be conjectured, are nothing more than the development, through practice, of his natural powers in accordance with his sacred instincts. His power of expression by bodily gesture is greater even than Giotto's, wherever he could feel or comprehend the passion to be expressed; but so inherent in him was his holy tranquillity of mind, that he could not by any exertion, even for a moment, conceive either agitation, doubt, or fear—and all the actions proceeding from such passions, or, à fortiori, from any yet more criminal, are absurdly and powerlessly portrayed by him; while contrariwise, every gesture, consistent with emotion pure and saintly, is rendered with an intensity of truth to which there is no existing parallel; the expression being carried out into every bend of the hand, every undulation of the arm, shoulder, and neck, every fold of the dress and every wave of the hair. His drawing of movement is subject to the same influence; vulgar or vicious motion he cannot represent; his running, falling, or struggling figures are drawn with childish incapability; but give him for his scene the pavement of heaven, or pastures of Paradise, and for his subject the "inoffensive pace" of glorified souls, or the spiritual speed of Angels, and Michael Angelo alone can contend with him in majesty,—in grace and musical continuousness of motion, no one. The inspiration was in some degree caught by his pupil Benozzo, but thenceforward forever lost. The angels of Perugino appear to be let down by cords and moved by wires; that of Titian, in the sacrifice of Isaac, kicks like an awkward swimmer; Raphael's Moses and Elias of the Transfiguration are cramped at the knees; and the flight of Domenichino's angels is a sprawl paralyzed. The authority of Tintoret over movement is, on the other hand, too unlimited; the descent of his angels is the swoop of a whirlwind or the fall of a thunderbolt; his mortal impulses are oftener impetuous than pathetic, and majestic more than melodious.
92. But it is difficult by words to convey to the reader unacquainted with Angelico's works, any idea of the thoughtful variety of his rendering of movement—Earnest haste of girded faith in the Flight into Egypt, the haste of obedience, not of fear; and unweariedness, but through spiritual support, and not in human strength—Swift obedience of passive earth to the call of its Creator, in the Resurrection of Lazarus—March of meditative gladness in the following of the Apostles down the Mount of Olives—Rush of adoration breaking through the chains and shadows of death, in the Spirits in Prison. Pacing of mighty angels above the Firmament, poised on their upright wings, half opened, broad, bright, quiet, like eastern clouds before the sun is up;—or going forth, with timbrels and with dances, of souls more than conquerors, beside the shore of the last great Red Sea, the sea of glass mingled with fire, hand knit with hand, and voice with voice, the joyful winds of heaven following the measure of their motion, and the flowers of the new earth looking on, like stars pausing in their courses.
93. And yet all this is but the lowest part and narrowest reach of Angelico's conceptions. Joy and gentleness, patience and power, he could indicate by gesture—but Devotion could be told by the countenance only. There seems to have been always a stern limit by which the thoughts of other men were stayed; the religion that was painted even by Perugino, Francia, and Bellini, was finite in its spirit—the religion of earthly beings, checked, not indeed by the corruption, but by the veil and the sorrow of clay. But with Fra Angelico the glory of the countenance reaches to actual transfiguration; eyes that see no more darkly, incapable of all tears, foreheads flaming, like Belshazzar's marble wall, with the writing of the Father's name upon them, lips tremulous with love, and crimson with the light of the coals of the altar—and all this loveliness, thus enthusiastic and ineffable, yet sealed with the stability which the coming and going of ages as countless as sea-sand cannot dim nor weary, and bathed by an ever flowing river of holy thought, with God for its source, God for its shore, and God for its ocean.
94. We speak in no inconsiderate enthusiasm. We feel assured that to any person of just feeling who devotes sufficient time to the examination of these works, all terms of description must seem derogatory. Where such ends as these have been reached, it ill becomes us to speak of minor deficiencies as either to be blamed or regretted: it cannot be determined how far even what we deprecate may be accessory to our delight, nor by what intricate involution what we deplore may be connected with what we love. Every good that nature herself bestows, or accomplishes, is given with a counterpoise, or gained at a sacrifice; nor is it to be expected of Man that he should win the hardest battles and tread the narrowest paths, without the betrayal of a weakness, or the acknowledgment of an error.
95. With this final warning against our author's hesitating approbation of what is greatest and best, we must close our specific examination of the mode in which his design has been worked out. We have done enough to set the reader upon his guard against whatever appears slight or inconsiderate in his theory or statements, and with the more severity, because this was alone wanting to render the book one of the most valuable gifts which Art has ever received. Of the translations from the lives of the saints we have hardly spoken; they are gracefully rendered, and all of them highly interesting—but we could wish to see these, and the enumerations of fresco subjects[11] with which the other volumes are in great part occupied, published separately for the convenience of travelers in Italy. They are something out of place in a work like that before us. For the rest, we might have more interested the reader, and gratified ourselves, by setting before him some of the many passages of tender feeling and earnest eloquence with which the volumes are replete—but we felt it necessary rather to anticipate the hesitation with which they were liable to be received, and set limits to the halo of fancy by which their light is obscured—though enlarged. One or two paragraphs, however, of the closing chapter must be given before we part:—
96. "What a scene of beauty, what a flower-garden of art—how bright and how varied—must Italy have presented at the commencement of the sixteenth century, at the death of Raphael! The sacrileges we lament took place for the most part after that period; hundreds of frescoes, not merely of Giotto and those other elders of Christian Art, but of Gentile da Fabriano, Pietro della Francesca, Perugino and their compeers, were still existing, charming the eye, elevating the mind, and warming the heart. Now alas! few comparatively and fading are the relics of those great and good men. While Dante's voice rings as clear as ever, communing with us as friend with friend, theirs is dying gradually away, fainter and fainter, like the farewell of a spirit. Flaking off the walls, uncared for and neglected save in a few rare instances, scarce one of their frescoes will survive the century, and the labors of the next may not improbably be directed to the recovery and restoration of such as may still slumber beneath the whitewash and the daubs with which the Bronzinos and Zuccheros 'et id genus omne' have unconsciously sealed them up for posterity—their best title to our gratitude.—But why not begin at once? at all events in the instances numberless, where merely whitewash interposes between us and them.
"It is easy to reply—what need of this? They—the artists—have Moses and the prophets, the frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo—let them study them. Doubtless,—but we still reply, and with no impiety—they will not repent, they will not forsake their idols and their evil ways—they will not abandon Sense for Spirit, oils for fresco—unless these great ones of the past, these Sleepers of Ephesus, arise from the dead.... It is not by studying art in its perfection—by worshiping Raphael and Michael Angelo exclusively of all other excellence—that we can expect to rival them, but by re-ascending to the fountain-head—by planting ourselves as acorns in the ground those oaks are rooted in, and growing up to their level—in a word, by studying Duccio and Giotto that we may paint like Taddeo di Bartolo and Masaccio, Taddeo di Bartolo and Masaccio that we may paint like Perugino and Luca Signorelli, Perugino and Luca Signorelli that we may paint like Raphael and Michael Angelo. And why despair of this, or even of shaming the Vatican? For with genius and God's blessing nothing is impossible.
"I would not be a blind partisan, but, with all their faults, the old masters I plead for knew how to touch the heart. It may be difficult at first to believe this; like children, they are shy with us—like strangers, they bear an uncouth mien and aspect—like ghosts from the other world, they have an awkward habit of shocking our conventionalities with home truths. But with the dead as with the living all depends on the frankness with which we greet them, the sincerity with which we credit their kindly qualities; sympathy is the key to truth—we must love, in order to appreciate."—iii., p. 418.
97. These are beautiful sentences; yet this let the young painter of these days remember always, that whomsoever he may love, or from whomsoever learn, he can now no more go back to those hours of infancy and be born again.[12] About the faith, the questioning and the teaching of childhood there is a joy and grace, which we may often envy, but can no more assume:—the voice and the gesture must not be imitated when the innocence is lost. Incapability and ignorance in the act of being struggled against and cast away are often endowed with a peculiar charm—but both are only contemptible when they are pretended. Whatever we have now to do, we may be sure, first, that its strength and life must be drawn from the real nature with us and about us always, and secondly, that, if worth doing, it will be something altogether different from what has ever been done before. The visions of the cloister must depart with its superstitious peace—the quick, apprehensive symbolism of early Faith must yield to the abstract teaching of disciplined Reason. Whatever else we may deem of the Progress of Nations, one character of that progress is determined and discernible. As in the encroaching of the land upon the sea, the strength of the sandy bastions is raised out of the sifted ruin of ancient inland hills—for every tongue of level land that stretches into the deep, the fall of Alps has been heard among the clouds, and as the fields of industry enlarge, the intercourse with Heaven is shortened. Let it not be doubted that as this change is inevitable, so it is expedient, though the form of teaching adopted and of duty prescribed be less mythic and contemplative, more active and unassisted: for the light of Transfiguration on the Mountain is substituted the Fire of Coals upon the Shore, and on the charge to hear the Shepherd, follows that to feed the Sheep. Doubtful we may be for a time, and apparently deserted; but if, as we wait, we still look forward with steadfast will and humble heart, so that our Hope for the Future may be fed, not dulled or diverted by our Love for the Past, we shall not long be left without a Guide:—the way will be opened, the Precursor appointed—the Hour will come, and the Man.
98. The stranger in Florence who for the first time passes through the iron gate which opens from the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella into the Spezieria, can hardly fail of being surprised, and that perhaps painfully, by the suddenness of the transition from the silence and gloom of the monastic inclosure, its pavement rough with epitaphs, and its walls retaining, still legible, though crumbling and mildewed, their imaged records of Scripture History, to the activity of a traffic not less frivolous than flourishing, concerned almost exclusively with the appliances of bodily adornment or luxury. Yet perhaps, on a moment's reflection, the rose-leaves scattered on the floor, and the air filled with odor of myrtle and myrrh, aloes and cassia, may arouse associations of a different and more elevated character; the preparation of these precious perfumes may seem not altogether unfitting the hands of a religious brotherhood—or if this should not be conceded, at all events it must be matter of rejoicing to observe the evidence of intelligence and energy interrupting the apathy and languor of the cloister; nor will the institution be regarded with other than respect, as well as gratitude, when it is remembered that, as to the convent library we owe the preservation of ancient literature, to the convent laboratory we owe the duration of mediæval art.
99. It is at first with surprise not altogether dissimilar, that we find a painter of refined feeling and deep thoughtfulness, after manifesting in his works the most sincere affection for what is highest in the reach of his art, devoting himself for years (there is proof of this in the work before us) to the study of the mechanical preparation of its appliances, and whatever documentary evidence exists respecting their ancient use. But it is with a revulsion of feeling more entire, that we perceive the value of the results obtained—the accuracy of the varied knowledge by which their sequence has been established—and above all, their immediate bearing upon the practice and promise of the schools of our own day.
Opposite errors, we know not which the least pardonable, but both certainly productive of great harm, have from time to time possessed the masters of modern art. It has been held by some that the great early painters owed the larger measure of their power to secrets of material and method, and that the discovery of a lost vehicle or forgotten process might at any time accomplish the regeneration of a fallen school. By others it has been asserted that all questions respecting materials or manipulation are idle and impertinent; that the methods of the older masters were either of no peculiar value, or are still in our power; that a great painter is independent of all but the simplest mechanical aids, and demonstrates his greatness by scorn of system and carelessness of means.
100. It is evident that so long as incapability could shield itself under the first of these creeds, or presumption vindicate itself by the second; so long as the feeble painter could lay his faults on his palette and his panel; and the self-conceited painter, from the assumed identity of materials proceed to infer equality of power—(for we believe that in most instances those who deny the evil of our present methods will deny also the weakness of our present works)—little good could be expected from the teaching of the abstract principles of the art; and less, if possible, from the example of any mechanical qualities, however admirable, whose means might be supposed irrecoverable on the one hand, or indeterminate on the other, or of any excellence conceived to have been either summoned by an incantation, or struck out by an accident. And of late, among our leading masters, the loss has not been merely of the system of the ancients, but of all system whatsoever: the greater number paint as if the virtue of oil pigment were its opacity, or as if its power depended on its polish; of the rest, no two agree in use or choice of materials; not many are consistent even in their own practice; and the most zealous and earnest, therefore the most discontented, reaching impatiently and desperately after better things, purchase the momentary satisfaction of their feelings by the sacrifice of security of surface and durability of hue. The walls of our galleries are for the most part divided between pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief perfections so many subjects of future regret.
101. But if these evils now continue, it can only be through rashness which no example can warn, or through apathy which no hope can stimulate, for Mr. Eastlake has alike withdrawn license from experimentalism and apology from indolence. He has done away with all legends of forgotten secrets; he has shown that the masters of the great Flemish and early Venetian schools possessed no means, followed no methods, but such as we may still obtain and pursue; but he has shown also, among all these masters, the most admirable care in the preparation of materials and the most simple consistency in their use; he has shown that their excellence was reached, and could only have been reached, by stern and exact science, condescending to the observance, care, and conquest of the most minute physical particulars and hindrances; that the greatest of them never despised an aid nor avoided a difficulty. The loss of imaginative liberty sometimes involved in a too scrupulous attention to methods of execution is trivial compared to the evils resulting from a careless or inefficient practice. The modes in which, with every great painter, realization falls short of conception are necessarily so many and so grievous, that he can ill afford to undergo the additional discouragement caused by uncertain methods and bad materials. Not only so, but even the choice of subjects, the amount of completion attempted, nay, even the modes of conception and measure of truth are in no small degree involved in the great question of materials. On the habitual use of a light or dark ground may depend the painter's preference of a broad and faithful, or partial and scenic chiaroscuro; correspondent with the facility or fatality of alterations, may be the exercise of indolent fancy, or disciplined invention; and to the complexities of a system requiring time, patience, and succession of process, may be owing the conversion of the ready draughtsman into the resolute painter. Farther than this, who shall say how unconquerable a barrier to all self-denying effort may exist in the consciousness that the best that is accomplished can last but a few years, and that the painter's travail must perish with his life?
102. It cannot have been without strong sense of this, the true dignity and relation of his subject, that Mr. Eastlake has gone through a toil far more irksome, far less selfish than any he could have undergone in the practice of his art. The value which we attach to the volume depends, however, rather on its preceptive than its antiquarian character. As objects of historical inquiry merely, we cannot conceive any questions less interesting than those relating to mechanical operations generally, nor any honors less worthy of prolonged dispute than those which are grounded merely on the invention or amelioration of processes and pigments. The subject can only become historically interesting when the means ascertained to have been employed at any period are considered in their operation upon or procession from the artistical aim of such period, the character of its chosen subjects, and the effects proposed in their treatment upon the national mind. Mr. Eastlake has as yet refused himself the indulgence of such speculation; his book is no more than its modest title expresses. For ourselves, however, without venturing in the slightest degree to anticipate the expression of his ulterior views—though we believe that we can trace their extent and direction in a few suggestive sentences, as pregnant as they are unobtrusive—we must yet, in giving a rapid sketch of the facts established, assume the privilege of directing the reader to one or two of their most obvious consequences, and, like honest 'prentices, not suffer the abstracted retirement of our master in the back parlor to diminish the just recommendation of his wares to the passers-by.
103. Eminently deficient in works representative of the earliest and purest tendencies of art, our National Gallery nevertheless affords a characteristic and sufficient series of examples of the practice of the various schools of painting, after oil had been finally substituted for the less manageable glutinous vehicles which, under the general name of tempera, were principally employed in the production of easel pictures up to the middle of the fifteenth century. If the reader were to make the circuit of this collection for the purpose of determining which picture represented with least disputable fidelity the first intention of its painter, and united in its modes of execution the highest reach of achievement with the strongest assurance of durability, we believe that—after hesitating long over hypothetical degrees of blackened shadow and yellowed light, of lost outline and buried detail, of chilled luster, dimmed transparency, altered color, and weakened force—he would finally pause before a small picture on panel, representing two quaintly dressed figures in a dimly lighted room—dependent for its interest little on expression, and less on treatment—but eminently remarkable for reality of substance, vacuity of space, and vigor of quiet color; nor less for an elaborate finish, united with energetic freshness, which seem to show that time has been much concerned in its production, and has had no power over its fate.
104. We do not say that the total force of the material is exhibited in this picture, or even that it in any degree possesses the lusciousness and fullness which are among the chief charms of oil-painting; but that upon the whole it would be selected as uniting imperishable firmness with exquisite delicacy; as approaching more unaffectedly and more closely than any other work to the simple truths of natural color and space; and as exhibiting, even in its quaint and minute treatment, conquest over many of the difficulties which the boldest practice of art involves.
This picture, bearing the inscription "Johannes Van Eyck (fuit?) hic, 1434," is probably the portrait, certainly the work, of one of those brothers to whose ingenuity the first invention of the art of oil-painting has been long ascribed. The volume before us is occupied chiefly in determining the real extent of the improvements they introduced, in examining the processes they employed, and in tracing the modifications of those processes adopted by later Flemings, especially Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyck. Incidental notices of the Italian system occur, so far as, in its earlier stages, it corresponded with that of the north; but the consideration of its separate character is reserved for a following volume, and though we shall expect with interest this concluding portion of the treatise, we believe that, in the present condition of the English school, the choice of the methods of Van Eyck, Bellini, or Rubens, is as much as we could modestly ask or prudently desire.
105. It would have been strange indeed if a technical perfection like that of the picture above described (equally characteristic of all the works of those brothers), had been at once reached by the first inventors of the art. So far was this from being the case, and so distinct is the evidence of the practice of oil-painting in antecedent periods, that of late years the discoveries of the Van Eycks have not unfrequently been treated as entirely fabulous; and Raspe, in particular, rests their claims to gratitude on the contingent introduction of amber-varnish and poppy-oil:—"Such perhaps," he says, "might have been the misrepresented discovery of the Van Eycks." That tradition, however, for which the great painters of Italy, and their sufficiently vain historian, had so much respect as never to put forward any claim in opposition to it, is not to be clouded by incautious suspicion. Mr. Eastlake has approached it with more reverence, stripped it of its exaggeration, and shown the foundations for it in the fact that the Van Eycks, though they did not create the art, yet were the first to enable it for its function; that having found it in servile office and with dormant power—laid like the dead Adonis on his lettuce-bed—they gave it vitality and dominion. And fortunate it is for those who look for another such reanimation, that the method of the Van Eycks was not altogether their own discovery. Had it been so, that method might still have remained a subject of conjecture; but after being put in possession of the principles commonly acknowledged before their time, it is comparatively easy to trace the direction of their inquiry and the nature of their improvements.
106. With respect to remote periods of antiquity, we believe that the use of a hydrofuge oil-varnish for the protection of works in tempera, the only fact insisted upon by Mr. Eastlake, is also the only one which the labor of innumerable ingenious writers has established: nor up to the beginning of the twelfth century is there proof of any practice of painting except in tempera, encaustic (wax applied by the aid of heat), and fresco. Subsequent to that period, notices of works executed in solid color mixed with oil are frequent, but all that can be proved respecting earlier times is a gradually increasing acquaintance with the different kinds of oil and the modes of their adaptation to artistical uses.
Several drying oils are mentioned by the writers of the first three centuries of the Christian era—walnut by Pliny and Galen, walnut, poppy, and castor-oil (afterwards used by the painters of the twelfth century as a varnish) by Dioscorides—yet these notices occur only with reference to medicinal or culinary purposes. But at length a drying oil is mentioned in connection with works of art by Aetius, a medical writer of the fifth century. His words are:—
"Walnut oil is prepared like that of almonds, either by pounding or pressing the nuts, or by throwing them, after they have been bruised, into boiling water. The (medicinal) uses are the same: but it has a use besides these, being employed by gilders or encaustic painters; for it dries, and preserves gildings and encaustic paintings for a long time."
"It is therefore clear," says Mr. Eastlake, "that an oil varnish, composed either of inspissated nut oil, or of nut oil combined with a dissolved resin, was employed on gilt surfaces and pictures, with a view to preserve them, at least as early as the fifth century. It may be added that a writer who could then state, as if from his own experience, that such varnishes had the effect of preserving works 'for a long time,' can hardly be understood to speak of a new invention."—P. 22.
Linseed-oil is also mentioned by Aetius, though still for medicinal uses only; but a varnish, composed of linseed-oil mixed with a variety of resins, is described in a manuscript at Lucca, belonging probably to the eighth century:—
"The age of Charlemagne was an era in the arts; and the addition of linseed-oil to the materials of the varnisher and decorator may on the above evidence be assigned to it. From this time, and during many ages, the linseed-oil varnish, though composed of simpler materials (such as sandarac and mastic resin boiled in the oil), alone appears in the recipes hitherto brought to light."—Ib., p. 24.
107. The modes of bleaching and thickening oil in the sun, as well as the siccative power of metallic oxides, were known to the classical writers, and evidence exists of the careful study of Galen, Dioscorides, and others by the painters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the loss (recorded by Vasari) of Antonio Veneziano to the arts, "per che studio in Dioscoride le cose dell'erbe," is a remarkable instance of its less fortunate results. Still, the immixture of solid color with the oil, which had been commonly used as a varnish for tempera paintings and gilt surfaces, was hitherto unsuggested; and no distinct notice seems to occur of the first occasion of this important step, though in the twelfth century, as above stated, the process is described as frequent both in Italy and England. Mr. Eastlake's instances have been selected, for the most part, from four treatises, two of which, though in an imperfect form, have long been known to the public; the third, translated by Mrs. Merrifield, is in course of publication; the fourth, "Tractatus de Coloribus illuminatorum," is of less importance.
Respecting the dates of the first two, those of Eraclius and Theophilus, some difference of opinion exists between Mr. Eastlake and their respective editors. The former MS. was published by Raspe,[14] who inclines to the opinion of its having been written soon after the time of St. Isidore of Seville, probably therefore in the eighth century, but insists only on its being prior to the thirteenth. That of Theophilus, published first by M. Charles de l'Escalopier, and lately from a more perfect MS. by Mr. Hendrie, is ascribed by its English editor (who places Eraclius in the tenth) to the early half of the eleventh century. Mr. Hendrie maintains his opinion with much analytical ingenuity, and we are disposed to think that Mr. Eastlake attaches too much importance to the absence of reference to oil-painting in the Mappæ Clavicula (a MS. of the twelfth century), in placing Theophilus a century and a half later on that ground alone. The question is one of some importance in an antiquarian point of view, but the general reader will perhaps be satisfied with the conclusion that in MSS. which cannot possibly be later than the close of the twelfth century, references to oil-painting are clear and frequent.
108. Nothing is known of the personality of either Eraclius or Theophilus, but what may be collected from their works; amounting, in the first case, to the facts of the author's "language being barbarous, his credulity exceptionable, and his knowledge superficial," together with his written description as "vir sapientissimus;" while all that is positively known of Theophilus is that he was a monk, and that Theophilus was not his real name. The character, however, of which the assumed name is truly expressive, deserves from us no unrespectful attention; we shall best possess our readers of it by laying before them one or two passages from the preface. We shall make some use of Mr. Hendrie's translation; it is evidently the work of a tasteful man, and in most cases renders the feeling of the original faithfully; but the Latin, monkish though it be, deserved a more accurate following, and many of Mr. Hendrie's deviations bear traces of unsound scholarship. An awkward instance occurs in the first paragraph:—
"Theophilus, humilis presbyter, servus servorum Dei, indignus nomine et professione monachi, omnibus mentis desidiam animique vagationem utili manuum occupatione, et delectabili novitatum meditatione declinare et calcare volentibus, retributionem cœlestis præmii!"
"I, Theophilus, an humble priest, servant of the servants of God, unworthy of the name and profession of a monk, to all wishing to overcome and avoid sloth of the mind or wandering of the soul, by useful manual occupation and the delightful contemplation of novelties, send a recompense of heavenly price."—Theophilus, p. 1.
Prœmium is not "price," nor is the verb understood before retributionem "send." Mr. Hendrie seems even less familiar with Scriptural than with monkish language, or in this and several other cases he would have recognized the adoption of apostolic formulæ. The whole paragraph is such a greeting and prayer as stands at the head of the sacred epistles:—"Theophilus, to all who desire to overcome wandering of the soul, etc., etc. (wishes) recompense of heavenly reward." Thus also the dedication of the Byzantine manuscript, lately translated by M. Didron, commences "A tous les peintres, et à tous ceux qui, aimant l'instruction, étudieront ce livre, salut dans le Seigneur." So, presently afterwards, in the sentence, "divina dignatio quæ dat omnibus affluenter et non improperat" (translated, "divine authority which affluently and not precipitately gives to all"), though Mr. Hendrie might have perhaps been excused for not perceiving the transitive sense of dignatio after indignus in the previous text, which indeed, even when felt, is sufficiently difficult to render in English; and might not have been aware that the word impropero frequently bears the sense of opprobo; he ought still to have recognized the Scriptural "who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not." "Qui," in the first page, translated "wherefore," mystifies a whole sentence; "ut mereretur," rendered with a schoolboy's carelessness "as he merited," reverses the meaning of another; "jactantia," in the following page, is less harmfully but not less singularly translated "jealousy." We have been obliged to alter several expressions in the following passages, in order to bring them near enough to the original for our immediate purpose:
"Which knowledge, when he has obtained, let no one magnify himself in his own eyes, as if it had been received from himself, and not from elsewhere; but let him rejoice humbly in the Lord, from whom and by whom are all things, and without whom is nothing; nor let him wrap his gifts in the folds of envy, nor hide them in the closet of an avaricious heart; but all pride of heart being repelled, let him with a cheerful mind give with simplicity to all who ask of him, and let him fear the judgment of the Gospel upon that merchant, who, failing to return to his lord a talent with accumulated interest, deprived of all reward, merited the censure from the mouth of his judge of 'wicked servant.'
"Fearing to incur which sentence, I, a man unworthy and almost without name, offer gratuitously to all desirous with humility to learn, that which the divine condescension, which giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, gratuitously conceded to me: and I admonish them that in me they acknowledge the goodness, and admire the generosity of God; and I would persuade them to believe that if they also add their labor, the same gifts are within their reach.
"Wherefore, gentle son, whom God has rendered perfectly happy in this respect, that those things are offered to thee gratis, which many, plowing the sea waves with the greatest danger to life, consumed by the hardship of hunger and cold, or subjected to the weary servitude of teachers, and altogether worn out by the desire of learning, yet acquire with intolerable labor, covet with greedy looks this 'BOOK OF VARIOUS ARTS,' read it through with a tenacious memory, embrace it with an ardent love.
"Should you carefully peruse this, you will there find out whatever Greece possesses in kinds and mixtures of various colors; whatever Tuscany knows of in mosaic-work, or in variety of enamel; whatever Arabia shows forth in work of fusion, ductility, or chasing; whatever Italy ornaments with gold, in diversity of vases and sculpture of gems or ivory; whatever France loves in a costly variety of windows; whatever industrious Germany approves in work of gold, silver, copper, and iron, of woods and of stones.
"When you shall have re-read this often, and have committed it to your tenacious memory, you shall thus recompense me for this care of instruction, that as often as you shall have successfully made use of my work, you pray for me for the pity of Omnipotent God, who knows that I have written these things, which are here arranged, neither through love of human approbation, nor through desire of temporal reward, nor have I stolen anything precious or rare through envious jealousy, nor have I kept back anything reserved served for myself alone; but in augmentation of the honor and glory of His name, I have consulted the progress and hastened to aid the necessities of many men."—Ib. pp. xlvii.-li.
109. There is perhaps something in the naive seriousness with which these matters of empiricism, to us of so small importance, are regarded by the good monk, which may at first tempt the reader to a smile. It is, however, to be kept in mind that some such mode of introduction was customary in all works of this order and period. The Byzantine MS., already alluded to, is prefaced still more singularly: "Que celui qui veut apprendre la science de la peinture commence à s'y préparer d'avance quelque temps en dessinant sans relache ... puis qu'il adresse à Jesus Christ la prière et oraison suivante," etc.:—the prayer being followed by a homily respecting envy, much resembling that of Theophilus. And we may rest assured that until we have again begun to teach and to learn in this spirit, art will no more recover its true power or place than springs which flow from no heavenward hills can rise to useful level in the wells of the plain. The tenderness, tranquillity, and resoluteness which we feel in such men's words and thoughts found a correspondent expression even in the movements of the hand; precious qualities resulted from them even in the most mechanical of their works, such as no reward can evoke, no academy teach, nor any other merits replace. What force can be summoned by authority, or fostered by patronage, which could for an instant equal in intensity the labor of this humble love, exerting itself for its own pleasure, looking upon its own works by the light of thankfulness, and finishing all, offering all, with the irrespective profusion of flowers opened by the wayside, where the dust may cover them, and the foot crush them?
110. Not a few passages conceived in the highest spirit of self-denying piety would, of themselves, have warranted our sincere thanks to Mr. Hendrie for his publication of the manuscript. The practical value of its contents is however very variable; most of the processes described have been either improved or superseded, and many of the recipes are quite as illustrative of the writer's credulity in reception, as generosity in communication. The references to the "land of Havilah" for gold, and to "Mount Calybe" for iron, are characteristic of monkish geographical science; the recipe for the making of Spanish gold is interesting, as affording us a clew to the meaning of the mediæval traditions respecting the basilisk. Pliny says nothing about the hatching of this chimera from cocks' eggs, and ascribes the power of killing at sight to a different animal, the catoblepas, whose head, fortunately, was so heavy that it could not be held up. Probably the word "basiliscus" in Theophilus would have been better translated "cockatrice."
"There is also a gold called Spanish gold, which is composed from red copper, powder of basilisk, and human blood, and acid. The Gentiles, whose skillfulness in this art is commendable, make basilisks in this manner. They have, underground, a house walled with stones everywhere, above and below, with two very small windows, so narrow that scarcely any light can appear through them; in this house they place two old cocks of twelve or fifteen years, and they give them plenty of food. When these have become fat, through the heat of their good condition, they agree together and lay eggs. Which being laid, the cocks are taken out and toads are placed in, which may hatch the eggs, and to which bread is given for food. The eggs being hatched, chickens issue out, like hens' chickens, to which after seven days grow the tails of serpents, and immediately, if there were not a stone pavement to the house, they would enter the earth. Guarding against which, their masters have round brass vessels of large size, perforated all over, the mouths of which are narrow, in which they place these chickens, and close the mouths with copper coverings and inter them underground, and they are nourished with the fine earth entering through the holes for six months. After this they uncover them and apply a copious fire, until the animals' insides are completely burnt. Which done, when they have become cold, they are taken out and carefully ground, adding to them a third part of the blood of a red man, which blood has been dried and ground. These two compositions are tempered with sharp acid in a clean vessel; they then take very thin sheets of the purest red copper, and anoint this composition over them on both sides, and place them in the fire. And when they have become glowing, they take them out and quench and wash them in the same confection; and they do this for a long time, until this composition eats through the copper, and it takes the color of gold. This gold is proper for all work."—Ib. p. 267.