Part 20 (2/2)

And you will be surprised to find, when you try the experiment, how much the eye must instinctively judge in this manner. Take the front of San Zenone for instance, Plate I. You will find it impossible without a lens, to distinguish in the bronze gates, and in great part of the wall, anything that their bosses represent. You cannot tell whether the sculpture is of men, animals, or trees; only you feel it to be composed of pleasant projecting ma.s.ses; you acknowledge that both gates and wall are, somehow, delightfully roughened; and only afterwards, by slow degrees, can you make out what this roughness means; nay, though here (Plate III.) I magnify[112] one of the bronze plates of the gate to a scale, which gives you the same advantage as if you saw it quite close, in the reality,--you may still be obliged to me for the information, that _this_ boss represents the Madonna asleep in her little bed, and this smaller boss, the Infant Christ in His; and this at the top, a cloud with an angel coming out of it, and these jagged bosses, two of the Three Kings, with their crowns on, looking up to the star, (which is intelligible enough I admit); but what this straggling, three-legged boss beneath signifies, I suppose neither you nor I can tell, unless it be the shepherd's dog, who has come suddenly upon the Kings with their crowns on, and is greatly startled at them.

23. Farther, and much more definitely, the pleasantness of the surface decoration is independent of structure; that is to say, of any architectural requirement of stability. The greater part of the sculpture here is exclusively ornamentation of a flat wall, or of door panelling; only a small portion of the church front is thus treated, and the sculpture has no more to do with the form of the building than a piece of a lace veil would have, suspended beside its gates on a festal day; the proportions of shaft and arch might be altered in a hundred different ways, without diminis.h.i.+ng their stability; and the pillars would stand more safely on the ground than on the backs of these carved animals.

24. I wish you especially to notice these points, because the false theory that ornamentation should be merely decorated structure is so pretty and plausible, that it is likely to take away your attention from the far more important abstract conditions of design. Structure should never be contradicted, and in the best buildings it is pleasantly exhibited and enforced; in this very porch the joints of every stone are visible, and you will find me in the Fifth Lecture insisting on this clearness of its anatomy as a merit; yet so independent is the mechanical structure of the true design, that when I begin my Lectures on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will be one in which the structure is wholly concealed. It will be the Baptistry of Florence, which is, in reality, as much a b.u.t.tressed chapel with a vaulted roof, as the Chapter House of York--but round it, in order to conceal that b.u.t.tressed structure, (not to decorate, observe, but to _conceal_) a flat external wall is raised; simplifying the whole to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge ware, on the surface of which the eye and intellect are to be interested by the relations of dimension and curve between pieces of encrusting marble of different colours, which have no more to do with the real make of the building than the diaper of a Harlequin's jacket has to do with his bones.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--THE ARETHUSA OF SYRACUSE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--THE WARNING TO THE KINGS.

San Zenone. Verona.]

25. The sense of abstract proportion, on which the enjoyment of such a piece of art entirely depends, is one of the aesthetic faculties which nothing can develop but time and education. It belongs only to highly-trained nations; and, among them, to their most strictly refined cla.s.ses, though the germs of it are found, as part of their innate power, in every people capable of art. It has for the most part vanished at present from the English mind, in consequence of our eager desire for excitement, and for the kind of splendour that exhibits wealth, careless of dignity; so that, I suppose, there are very few now even of our best-trained Londoners who know the difference between the design of Whitehall and that of any modern club-house in Pall-mall. The order and harmony which, in his enthusiastic account of the Theatre of Epidaurus, Pausanias insists on before beauty, can only be recognized by stern order and harmony in our daily lives; and the perception of them is as little to be compelled, or taught suddenly, as the laws of still finer choice in the conception of dramatic incident which regulate poetic sculpture.

26. And now, at last, I think, we can sketch out the subject before us in a clear light. We have a structural art, divine, and human, of which the investigation comes under the general term, Anatomy; whether the junctions or joints be in mountains, or in branches of trees, or in buildings, or in bones of animals. We have next a musical art, falling into two distinct divisions--one using colours, the other ma.s.ses, for its elements of composition; lastly, we have an imitative art, concerned with the representation of the outward appearances of things. And, for many reasons, I think it best to begin with imitative Sculpture; that being defined as _the art which, by the musical disposition of ma.s.ses, imitates anything of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us; and does so in accordance with structural laws having due reference to the materials employed_.

So that you see our task will involve the immediate inquiry what the things are of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us: what, in few words,--if we are to be occupied in the making of graven images--we ought to like to make images _of_. Secondly, after having determined its subject, what degree of imitation or likeness we ought to desire in our graven image; and lastly, under what limitations demanded by structure and material, such likeness may be obtained.

These inquiries I shall endeavour to pursue with you to some practical conclusion, in my next four lectures, and in the sixth, I will briefly sketch the actual facts that have taken place in the development of sculpture by the two greatest schools of it that hitherto have existed in the world.

27. The tenor of our next lecture then must be an inquiry into the real nature of Idolatry; that is to say, the invention and service of Idols: and, in the interval, may I commend to your own thoughts this question, not wholly irrelevant, yet which I cannot pursue; namely, whether the G.o.d to whom we have so habitually prayed for deliverance ”from battle, murder, and sudden death,” _is_ indeed, seeing that the present state of Christendom is the result of a thousand years' praying to that effect, ”as the G.o.ds of the heathen who were but idols;” or whether--(and observe, one or other of these things _must_ be true)--whether our prayers to Him have been, by this much, worse than Idolatry;--that heathen prayer was true prayer to false G.o.ds; and our prayers have been false prayers to the True One.

FOOTNOTES:

[107] I had a real ploughshare on my lecture table; but it would interrupt the drift of the statements in the text too long if I attempted here to ill.u.s.trate by figures the relation of the coulter to the share, and of the hard to the soft pieces of metal in the share itself.

[108] A sphere of rock crystal, cut in j.a.pan, enough imaginable by the reader, without a figure.

[109] One of William Hunt's peaches; not, I am afraid, imaginable altogether, but still less representable by figure.

[110] The crystal ball above mentioned.

[111] All grandest effects in mouldings may be, and for the most part have been, obtained by rolls and cavettos of circular (segmental) section. More refined sections, as that of the fluting of a Doric shaft, are only of use near the eye and in beautiful stone; and the pursuit of them was one of the many errors of later Gothic. The statement in the text that the mouldings, even of best time, ”have no real relation to construction,” is scarcely strong enough: they in fact contend with, and deny the construction, their princ.i.p.al purpose seeming to be the concealment of the joints of the voussoirs.

[112] Some of the most precious work done for me by my a.s.sistant Mr.

Burgess, during the course of these lectures, consisted in making enlarged drawings from portions of photographs. Plate III. is engraved from a drawing of his, enlarged from the original photograph of which Plate I. is a reduction.

LECTURE II.

IDOLATRY.

_November, 1870._

28. Beginning with the simple conception of sculpture as the art of fiction in solid substance, we are now to consider what its subjects should be. What--having the gift of imagery--should we by preference endeavour to image? A question which is, indeed, subordinate to the deeper one--why we should wish to image anything at all.

29. Some years ago, having been always desirous that the education of women should begin in learning how to cook, I got leave, one day, for a little girl of eleven years old to exchange, much to her satisfaction, her schoolroom for the kitchen. But as ill fortune would have it, there was some pastry toward, and she was left unadvisedly in command of some delicately rolled paste; whereof she made no pies, but an unlimited quant.i.ty of cats and mice.

Now you may read the works of the gravest critics of art from end to end; but you will find, at last, they can give you no other true account of the spirit of sculpture than that it is an irresistible human instinct for the making of cats and mice, and other imitable living creatures, in such permanent form that one may play with the images at leisure.

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