Part 8 (1/2)

We need not pause to consider whether the Italian's inferiority to the Greek's in the plastic ious sentis of men so frankly realistic and so scientifically earnest as the nificent cartoon of Leda and the Swan, if it falls short of soreto_ of antique fresco, does assuredly not do so because the draughtsman's hand faltered in pious dread or pious aspiration Nevertheless, Ruskin is right in telling us that no Italian modelled a female nude equal to the Aphrodite of Melos, or a male nude equal to the Apoxyo out that no Greek sculptor approached the beauty of facial fornise in Raffaello's Madonna di San Sisto, in Sodoma's S Sebastian, in Guercino's Christ at the Corsini Palace, in scores of early Florentine sepulchral e portrait-fancies by Da Vinci

The fact seems to be that Greek and Italian plastic art followed different lines of develop to the difference of dominant ideas in the races, and to the difference of social custoion naturally played a foremost part in the art-evolution of both epochs

The anthropoed sculptors to concentrate their attention upon what Hegel called ”the sensuous manifestation of the idea,” while Greek habits rendered theion withdrew Italian sculptors and painters froed them to study the expression of sentiments and aspirations which could only be rendered by enomy At the same time, modern habits of life reo further, and observe that the conditions under which Greek art flourished developed what the Gereneralise, which was inily marked facial expression or characterisation The conditions of Italian art, on the other hand, favoured an opposite tendency--to particularise, to enforce detail, to emphasise the artist's own ideal or the model's quality When the type of a Greek deity had been fixed, each successive master varied this within the closest limits possible For centuries the type re subtle transformations, due partly to the artist's tees in the temper of society Consequently those aspects of the hueneralisation, the body and the limbs, exerted a kind of conventional tyranny over Greek art And Greek artists applied to the face the saeneralisation which were applicable to the body

The Greek God or Goddess was a sensuous manifestation of the idea, a particle of universal Godhood incarnate in a special fleshly forical attributes of the deity whoeneralised type was possible The Christian God, on the contrary, is a spirit; and all the emanations from this spirit, whether direct, as in the person of Christ, or derived, as in the persons of the saints, owe their sensuous forencies of mortal existence, which these persons temporarily and phenomenally obeyed

Since, then, the sensuous er an indispensable investiture of the idea, it may be altered at will in Christian art without irreverence The ut or refining a generalised type, but in discovering soical quality in a particular being Doing so, he inevitably insists upon the face; and having forive to the body that generalised beauty which belongs to a Greek nymph or athlete

What we mean by the differences between Classic and Ro Classicism sacrifices character to breadth Romanticism sacrifices breadth to character Classic art deals ains by being broadly treated Romantic art deals more triu broadly treated

This brings me back to Mr Ruskin, who, in another of his treatises, conde, in his heads and faces Were this the case, Michelangelo would have little claim to rank as one of the world's chief artists We have admitted that the Italians did not produce such perfectly beautiful bodes and lireed that the Greeks produced less perfectly beautiful faces than the Italians Suppose, then, that Michelangelo failed in his heads and faces, he, being an Italian, and therefore confessedly inferior to the Greeks in his bodies and lie less ht hi section will appear superfluous, poles I wrote it, and I let it stand, however, because it serves as preface to what I have to say in general about Michelangelo's ideal of form He was essentially a Romantic as opposed to a Classic artist That is to say, he sought invariably for character--character in type, character in attitude, character in every action of each ance of pose He applied the Romantic principle to the body and the liion of the human form which the Greeks had conquered as their province He did so with consuical law What is more, he compelled the body to becoeneral conceptions, but of the nant personal einality At the sa a Romantic, he deliberately renounced the main tradition of that manner He refused to study portraiture, as Vasari tells us, and as we see so plainly in the statues of the Dukes at Florence He generalised his faces, co an ideal cast of features out of several types

In the rendering of the face and head, then, he chose to be a Classic, while in the treatment of the body he was vehemently modern In all his hich is notthe dans--character is sacrificed to a studied ideal of form, so far as the face is concerned That he did this wilfully, on principle, is certain The proof reenii of the Sistine, each one of whom possesses a beauty and a quality peculiar to himself alone They show that, if he had so chosen, he could have played upon the human countenance with the sa its expressiveness _ad infinitueneralise the face and to particularise the body remains a secret buried in the abysmal deeps of his personality In his studies from the ue, while working out the trunk and liht and fascinated by the problem offered by the eyes and features of a male or female He places masks or splendid commonplaces upon frauish

In order to guard against an apparent contradiction, I elo particularised the body and the limbs, he strove to make them the symbols of some definite passion or egestions afforded by their pose and muscular employment than he was about the expression of the features But we shall presently discover that, so far as pure physical type is concerned, he early began to generalise the structure of the body, passing finally into what may not unjustly be called a mannerism of form

These points may be still further illustrated by what a coelo's treatment of form ”No one,” says Professor Brucke, ”ever kneell as Michelangelo Buonarroti how to produce powerful and strangely harures in the and ordering theure existed only in his particular representation of it; hoould have looked in any other position was a o further, and elo was sometimes wilfully indifferent to the physical capacities of the human body in his passionate research of attitudes which present picturesque and novel beauty The ancients worked on quite a different method

They created standard types which, in every conceivable posture, would exhibit the grace and syelo looked to the effect of a particular posture He ures in clay instead of going invariably to the living subject, and so may have handled nature with unwarrantable freedom Anyhoe have here another demonstration of his rohest art is that it should rightly represent the hureed upon this point, it reelo conceived and represented the human for instincts in this decisive matter, we shall unlock, so far as that is possible, the secret of his personality as reatwith the phenoe irandeur, inspired with equal strength and sweetness, antiphonal notes in dual harmony Praxiteles leans to the feaurative craftsmen, we discover more or less affinity for racefulness, the other by our Few have realised the Pheidian perfection of doing equal justice

Michelangelo ehty master as dominated by the vision of h the fascination of the other sex The defect of his art is due to a certain constitutional callousness, a want of sensuous or iinative sensibility for what is specifically fele woelo has the charinity The Eve of the Sistine, the Madonna of S Peter's, the Night and Dawn of the Medicean Sacristy, are ferandly modelled forms, but not feminine in their sentiment This proposition requires no proof It is only needful to recall a Madonna by Raphael, a Diana by Correggio, a Leda by Lionardo, a Venus by titian, a S

Agnes by Tintoretto We find ourselves iion of artists who loved, admired, and comprehended what is feminine in the beauty and the teelo neither loved, nor admired, nor yielded to the female sex Therefore he could not deal plastically hat is best and loveliest in the female form His plastic ideal of the woman is masculine He builds a colossal frame of muscle, bone, and flesh, studied with supreives to Eve the full pelvis and enored that he chose to symbolise the fecundity of her as destined to be the , why did he notsymbol of fatherhood? Adam is an adolescent man, colossal in proportions, but beardless, hairless; the attributes of sex in hiht, for whom no symbolish nancies Those deeply delved wrinkles on the vast and flaccid abdoelo's sonnets on Night, we find that he habitually thought of her as a h potent for the soul, disappeared before the frailest of all creatures bearing light The Dawn, again, in her deep lassitude, has nothing of vernal freshness Built upon the sa herself from heavy slumber, for once satiated as well as tired, stricken for once with the conscience of disgust When he chose to depict the acts of passion or of sensual pleasure, a similar want of sympathy hat is feminine in womanhood leaves an even more discordant impression on the mind I would base the proof of this reello Museu the phantom of Juno under the forelo's own handiwork; heexpression, as of a drunken profligate, upon the face of Leda Yet in both cases he is indubitably responsible for the general design, and for the brawny carnality of the repulsive woman I find it difficult to resist the conclusion that Michelangelo felt hih they were another and less graceful sort of uishes the sex, whether voluptuously or passionately or poetically apprehended, ees in no eminent instance of his work There is a Cartoon at Naples for a Bacchante, which Bronzino transferred to canvas and coloured This design illustrates the point on which I a

An athletic circus-rider of ht have posed as model for this fe, Michelangelo had not seen those frescoes of the dancing Bacchantes from Pompeii; nor had he perhaps seen the Maenads on Greek bas-reliefs tossing wild tresses backwards, swaying virginal lithe bodies to the music of the tambourine We must not, therefore, compare his concept with those ination Still, many of his conteht, a Giovanni da Udine, a Perino del Vaga, a Primaticcio, not to speak of Raffaello or of Lionardo, felt what the charht be He remained insensible to the melody of purely feminine lines; and the only reason why his transcripts froross like those of Flemish painters, repulsive like Rereeable like the drawings made by criminals in prisons, is that they have little womanly about thenise Michelangelo's syroups, coroinings between the s in the Sistine Chapel, have a charht senti the loveliest and most tranquil of his conceptions The Madonna above the tomb of Julius II cannot be accused of ure of the Rachel beneath it Both of these statues represent what Goethe called ”das ewig Weibliche” under a truly felt and natural aspect The Delphian and Erythrean Sibyls are superb in their ns for Crucifixions, Depositions froelo's attention during his old age, we find an intense and pathetic synity and a pious sense of Godhead in the huhout the cases I have reserved as exceptions, it is not woelo has rendered, but woman in her tranquil or her saddened and sorrow-stricken moods What he did not coirlishness, her youthful joy, her physical attractiveness, her est des, composite and undetermined products of the human race in evolution, before the specific qualities of sex have been eli mass of masculinity At their best, they carry us into the realination He could not have incarnated in plastic foren, Dante's Francesca da Riht have supplied a superb illustration to the opening lines of the Lucretian epic, where Mars lies in the bed of Venus, and the Goddess spreads her aes tallying the vision of primal passion in the fourth book of that poe about Lucretius: ”There is sos and pleasure-throes, these incomplete fruitions of souls pent within their frames of flesh We seem to see a race of men and women such as never lived, except perhaps in Ro in leonine embracements that yield pain, whereof the clie and respite for afire There is a life elehty lie-bed has in it the stress of stors of leopards at play Take this single line:--

_et Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum_

What a picture of primeval breadth and vastness! The forest is the world, and the bodies of the lovers are things natural and unashamed, and Venus is the tyrannous instinct that controls the blood in spring”

What elo's crudity in his plastic treatment of the female form the more remarkable is that in his poetry he seems to feel the influence of women mystically I shall have to discuss this topic in another place It is enough here to say that, with very few exceptions, we re a woman at all There are none of those spontaneous utterances by which a s of his heart to a beloved object, the throb of irresistible e, the joys and pains, the hopes and fears, the ecstasies and disappointenuine passion The wo he has not approached and handled Of her personality we learn nothing Of her bodily presentment, the eyes alone are mentioned; and the eyes are treated as the path to Paradise for souls which seek emancipation from the flesh

Raffaello's few and far inferior sonnets vibrate with an intense and potent sensibility to this woht just as well be a h they have nothing sensual about them, reveal a finer touch in the emotion of the writer It is difficult to connect this vaporous incorporeal ”donna” of the poems with those brawny colossal adult feelo remained callous both to the physical attractions and the emotional distinction of woman as she actually is