ESSAYS.

ESSAYS TOWARDS THE HISTORY OF PAINTING.

ESSAY I.

The Historical and Literary knowledge of an Art is, for the learned, and for Artists, what maps are for the Warrior, the Traveller, and the Sailor.

Raspe.

To write such a book upon any art as should be eminently useful to the professors of that art, as instructing them in methods whereby they may improve their practice, and avoid the difficulties they have to encounter, or gracefully evade them, would require the hand of a consummate artist, who, to great practice, should join large knowledge of his subject, and a minute acquaintance with the materials upon whose nature more of practical success depends, than enthusiasts in art are willing to own. Besides, he should possess sufficient learning to communicate the experience of past ages, for the improvement of this; and a good taste and acquaintance with general literature, to adorn his subject with the graces that all arts may borrow from each other, becoming always richer in proportion as they draw from their common treasury, Nature.

To write a work of just criticism, upon a peculiar art, the author should no less be a professor, whose practice might exemplify his criticism, or at any rate might enable him justly to appreciate the merits and defects of the peculiar works which he should choose as subjects on which to found his criticisms.

The lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds made art popular in this country, less because they contained excellent precepts and well-chosen examples, than because, like Johnson’s criticism in the Lives of the Poets, they laid open the general principles applicable to all the arts. Poetry and music, painting and sculpture, architecture and landscape-gardening, may equally profit by them, the passages peculiarly appropriated to painters being far from the most numerous, though such as none but a painter could have written.

Fuseli appears to be more exclusively a critic in his own art. He had prodigious practice in his own wild walk, wherein, however, even he often mistook the glare of caprice for the light of genius. He had great learning, the effect of which he injured by affectation and quaintness, yet there are exquisite passages in his lectures, which will always be read with profit and delight both by artists and lovers of art.

The practical lectures delivered or published by other authors, some living, and some whose loss we have to lament, have not been popular, chiefly because they were most properly composed for the use of artists. And when we consider that they have been for the most part the works of men whose lives were passed in the most laborious department of a Profession that demands constant application, namely portrait painting, it is surprising how much they did in those hours which nature might have claimed as due to rest and relaxation. But such is the advantage possessed by a professor, when writing on the art be practises and understands.

I am aware that a certain class of connoisseurs, amateurs, or enthusiasts have lately put forth, perhaps I should say revived, the strange opinion that a practical artist is of all men the least fit to judge of art, and that it belongs to them, that is the connoisseurs only, to judge of his work. I believe this notion to have lurked in secret in the bosom of many an amateur for centuries back; but it required the fostering hand of German enthusiasm to publish it, as an axiom, to the world; and to write books upon the absurd notion, that those who know nothing practically of a subject, are the best judges and instructors concerning it.

Apelles had different notions; for while he bade the shoemaker stick to his last, he took his advice about the sandals of his Venus.

In truth, to use the words of the wisest of modern men, “the labours of speculative men, in active matters, seem to men of experience, little better than Phormio’s discourses of war; which seemed to Hannibal as dreams and dotage[1].”

If mere lovers of art will, nevertheless, devote their thoughts and pens to her enchanting service, I think they may do an acceptable office, even to painters themselves, by collecting what is, or has been known of her progress, following up her history from the first faint traces of her path among savage tribes, to her majestic footsteps in the flourishing states of Greece; nor losing sight of her entirely in her sad hours of degradation under Imperial Rome, and finally watching over her gentle though slow revival under the brilliant sun of Italy.

There is a kind of history of art which has been successfully cultivated: I mean that which addresses itself directly to the eye by a chronological display of the remaining works of art in the great publications of Monfaucon, Dagincourt, Micali, and the various archæological works of different societies[2]. But these are books of such price as must always render them difficult of access; and, unfortunately, the descriptions attached to the prints seldom admit of separation; and are, in general, written too dully to interest, or so much in the spirit of controversy as to render them disagreeable.

Such history can never become popular. There remains, however, open, an unpretending path, yet untrodden, by which those who love art may be led sufficiently near her temple to enjoy her beauties, understand her virtues, and be blessed by her happy influence, without encroaching on the province of her professed servants, or engaging in combat with her false or mistaken friends, or avowed enemies.

Tis this path that I would pursue, and take along with me those of my sex and country who love the good and the beautiful, and who likewise love to look up through them, to the fountain of all goodness, and to the Author of all beauty.

A great deal of time and much temper have been wasted, in disputes concerning the native country of the arts. China, Upper India, and Egypt, have been perhaps the favourites of the learned, though there have not been wanting champions for the claims of Western Asia, and even Greece.

But, if we could trace all the arts, whether springing from the primary wants, or the mere desires and wishes of man, to one original inventor, we should not be much the forwarder. As mankind increased, and formed separate nations, these arts would naturally and necessarily vary, in order to accommodate themselves to climates and circumstances. And we are as little likely to fix, with any thing like certainty, on the native country of painting or sculpture, as to discover that of the various kinds of grain, which in all ages have formed the principal food of civilized men. The discovery of the great Western World, long enough after the art of printing, to secure whatever memorials might be written concerning the state of its inhabitants, opened to us a monument of the early condition of all mankind, a thousand times more instructive than pillars of marble or of brass.

The Spaniards found in Florida one species of grain, cultivated and used for bread, in the same way, and in as much ignorance of its origin, as wheat in the Old World: and in many provinces, a substitute for the finer grains was used, requiring infinitely more ingenuity in its preparation, and of the origin of which the natives knew so little, as to look upon it as the gift of a benevolent enchanter[3]. In Mexico and Peru they found many arts considerably advanced. The smelting, casting, embossing, engraving of metals; the making of very fine pottery; the chiselling of the hardest stones and marbles. There, too, was painting practised, not as a mere luxury, but as a matter of prime necessity. For the nations were still so young as not to have discovered alphabetical writing; therefore, painting, mixed with a variety of conventional signs, almost amounting to hieroglyphic characters, was used, to record the history of the nations, the transactions of the priests and merchants, and the decisions of the laws[4].

Since that great first discovery, many and various tribes have been gradually revealed to us, none so savage as not to have discovered some longing after arts, beyond those absolutely necessary to existence. The cloth of the Sandwich Islander was stamped with mimic leaves and branches. The clubs, darts, and hatchets of the New Zealanders were covered with flowers and foliage; and not unfrequently we find on them an attempt at the human form.

The fences of the Morais presented, on many of the poles, a human head, grossly cut indeed, but still bearing the impress of man’s imitative genius.

Instances of this sort might be multiplied; but for the present I have named enough for my purpose, which is, to prove that it is unnecessary to trace the arts from country to country, or from house to house, to give them, as it were, a formal genealogy; but that we may expect to find that, circumstances being tolerably alike, the fine arts will spring up in all nations as they advance in civilization.

The progress of art is a separate question, and must have been influenced by many circumstances not naturally connected with it. Hence we see it in one nation beginning in splendour and advancing rapidly for a time; when suddenly it is stopped as by an enchanter’s wand: the handicraft may improve, but the form, character, and spirit, remain for ever fixed. In another, on the contrary, it advances, firm and free: every age improves it: and its career is only cut short when the nation itself sinks before a foreign conqueror!

Differently again, but still influenced by the circumstances of society, we have beheld the arts almost touching upon perfection and then withering, by slow and sickly decay, till all that ennobled them has disappeared, and they seem fitted for nothing but to adorn the ephemeral trophies of fashion or caprice.

Having thus so far cleared the ground, I will endeavour to collect the scattered notices concerning art, in the most ancient times, and among the most anciently civilized nations; and so prepare the way for more connected details, when we reach the period of common history.

The book of Genesis names one of the great grandsons of Cain, as the first who wrought and graved on metal, and another as the inventor of musical instruments,—a proof that the arts were cultivated in very early stages of civilization[5].

Again, within four centuries after the flood, we find that men had made images of wood, and stone, and metal, to worship. They had not only built them cities, but they had tasted of the barbarous civilities of war; they had erected trophies; poets had extolled the exploits of heroes; and sculptors had already fashioned their images, to adore. Constant tradition names Terah, the father of Abraham, as a maker of images; and that the worship of them continued in his family for nearly two hundred years, notwithstanding the call and conversion of Abraham, is proved by Rachel’s theft of the images of Laban, when she left her father’s house to accompany her husband to the land of Canaan.

But, if we may believe Greek and Egyptian tradition, more than a century before the call of Abraham, a colony had been planted at Sicyon, by an Egyptian leader, Ægialeus,[6] who brought with him the knowledge of sculpture and painting, and founded the earliest and purest school of Greek art.

Another civilized colony, from Egypt, soon settled in Greece. Inachus founded the city of Argos, while Abraham was still an idolater, in Ur.

At this period, Egypt and Chaldea both seem to have sent out colonies on every side, and history and tradition alike point to this period also, as that of the invention of alphabetical writing: or, at any rate, its establishment in a great part of the then civilized world. The claims of the Egyptian Memnon and the Phœnician Cadmus to the invention, appear to be equally and entirely without foundation; and Pliny’s notion that it had existed from the beginning, in Chaldea and the adjacent countries, is supported, by a very remarkable passage in the book of Joshua[7].

On the victorious march of the Israelites, under Joshua himself, to Palestine, we find he took Debir; i.e. the place of an oracle or wise discourse. The name of the town was before Kirjath Sepher, or city of books or of letters; therefore books and letters were ancient, in that country, in Joshua’s time.[8] That pictures and sculpture were so likewise, I infer from the command given in Numbers, xxxiii. 52, to destroy the pictures and molten images of the natives of Palestine.

If any reliance is to be placed on the annals of China and of India, civilization and its attendant arts were at least as early with them as with Egypt and Chaldea, each claiming the priority, and each pretending to have been the teacher of the rest of the world, on equally plausible grounds.

There is no doubt of the antiquity of Indian civilization. The ancient Greek writers talk of the Indian philosophers, as belonging to a nation highly polished, before a grain of corn had been sown in Greece; and the pretensions of China are supported by the Indians themselves.

I have said thus much of the general civilization of these nations, because I could not separate it from the cultivation of the arts. I will now keep closer to my subject, reserving, however, the liberty of digressing wherever I see occasion, or, in other words, whenever it suits my humour.

As I take it, the Chinese remain, more nearly than any other people, in the state in which they were two or three thousand years ago, and are, for their age, the veriest babes that inhabit the earth. I will begin with them, and see what their proficiency in art has ever amounted to.

It is plain from their written signs, for alphabet they have none: that in early times, they, like the Mexicans, exerted their powers of imitation to represent in painting, events, the memory of which they wished to preserve. On dissecting the hundred and seventeen elementary characters, whose endless combinations represent their language, it is not difficult to trace the rude forms of men, birds, quadrupeds, fish, houses, trees, hills, and so forth; and in the very oldest writings, before the circular forms were rejected altogether, these shapes were still more distinct[9].

We may naturally expect that, as long as painting is thus used, convenience alone would require the once admitted forms and colours to be invariable, and that precautions would be taken against innovation, even for improvement, lest the painted pages should become unintelligible. But the Chinese had advanced far beyond that. Their characters approach, even more nearly than hieroglyphics, to alphabetical writing, and yet their art remained stationary and at a very low point. It is very difficult to account for this among so ingenious a people. It was not that the Tartar conquest, by any direct influence, lessened their civilization or stopped their progress. We have undeniable witnesses to the contrary, in the Chinese histories, as interpreted by the missionaries and other learned orientalists; and, what is still more curious and satisfactory, in the writings of Marco Paulo, who accompanied the Tartar conqueror on his expedition.

The religion of the Chinese, as Bhuddhists, is assuredly not calculated to call forth the genius of painting. The insipid Goorus do not, like the gods of the Hindoo or Greek mythologies, present subjects for fancy to play with; and the statues of Bhud, while they have all the stiffness, have none of the grandeur of the Egyptian gods.

Perhaps, as the Chinese have always been a commercial nation, they contented themselves with cultivating the art of painting, just so far as to decorate their exquisite porcelain and lacquered ware for the market, and sought after nothing more.

They had certainly attained to great manual dexterity, and the power of copying servilely whatever inanimate subjects were before them; and they had discovered the method of extracting colours from metallic substances, capable of bearing the furnace, as well as those of more obvious use, in the chalks and earths of their country: besides some of the finest varnishes in existence. We ought not to marvel that they did not attain, in their painting, to common, much less ideal beauty, when we reflect on the general character of form, in their own nation or their Tartar conquerors, which is very far below that of the Indians and their western neighbours. And we have, perhaps, no right to expect better human shapes than that of the portly mandarin and his crimp-footed lady, upon their plates and dishes. But their animals, whether painted, modelled in clay, or cast in metal, are little less distorted than their men: and as to perspective, linear, or aërial, they seem to have no sense of either[10]. In flowers and birds, their pencilling is delicate, and often true to admiration; but, even in these objects, except in treatises on botany or ornithology, their peculiar taste breaks out in monstrous combinations of leaves and flowers, that never grew in the same soil; and of beaks and wings, that were never hatched in the same nest.

The Japanese appear to have carried many arts to much greater perfection than the Chinese; and even in painting, the very old Japan figures approach nearer in style to beauty and a certain sort of greatness.

But the reading of one Chinese novel or drama, such, for instance, as the “Fortunate Alliance,” or “The Adventures of the Fair Shuey Ping Sing, and the Chalk Ring,” or “Le Cercle de Craie,” must satisfy us that, whatever progress that nation may have made in science, or whatever sagacity it may have displayed in internal government or in commerce, a true taste for the liberal arts has never ennobled its other pursuits, or charmed the leisure of its philosophers and statesmen.

I do not mean to say that they neither look at pictures nor listen to music: but those pictures and that music differ so widely in taste and quality from what the greater number of civilized nations are agreed in admiring, that I feel justified in considering them as insensible to that standard of taste which all the rest of the world acknowledges.

Was India then the mother of the arts? and, among her many claims to distinction can she, with justice, advance that of having instructed Egypt and anticipated the splendours of Babylon?

It might be expected that the remaining works of art, in that most ancient nation, might decide the question. But far from it. Nor does history or tradition throw any trust-worthy light on the subject.

The most ancient monuments of Egypt bear a certain resemblance to some of those of India, and what we know of the religion of both countries indicates, that, in some most remote period, their mysteries and rites had a close resemblance. Yet, on some material points, such as their funeral ceremonies, the difference seems to have been so decided that we are forced to conclude that they were of different sects, emanating, possibly, from a common source.

It is curious, that the figures of Bhud, whether on the continent of India, or the island of Ceylon, or in China, should present the form, and curled woolly hair of a Southern African. But the Bhuddhists of India do not appear to have produced better works, in sculpture, than those of China. The Brahmins, on the contrary, have left, besides magnificent architectural monuments, in their caverns, in which they are rivalled by the Bhuddhists, pieces of sculpture, of a very different character from theirs, where there is occasionally grandeur, and, not unfrequently, freedom and grace. No one, who has seen the colossal head of the Trimurti, in Elephanta, can deny the grandeur, almost the sublimity, of that strange work; and the compartments of the same temple-cavern are examples of a gracious feeling of nature. The sculptured rock, at Mavellipoor, or Mahabalipoor, called the Tapas, or Penance of Arjoon, is a further example of freedom and taste; and the figures of the elephants, and other animals, attendant on the holy penitent, are designed with the greatest truth. The deformities, almost constant in Egypt, of placing the heads of animals on men’s shoulders, because the qualities of those animals were figurative of the attributes of the deities, are added to by the Hindoos, who, regarding the human hand as the symbol of power, have accordingly multiplied the hands of the gods.

I shewed the late Mr. Flaxman some drawings of the sculptured rocks of Mahabalipoor: he was struck with the freedom and expression of several of the figures, in which there was an evident attempt to imitate nature, and especially he was pleased with the expression of the courtiers of Bali, in the design of the Vamuna Avater.

I must observe that at Mavellipoor, within a circuit of less than two miles, there are, besides the ruins of several large temples, built of hewn stone, eight Monothelite temples: small[11], but all differing in form, richly and capriciously ornamented; several caverns, on the walls of which there are many mythological subjects carved in high relief, some of the figures being seven feet high; and the sculptured rock of Arjoon, which I have already mentioned.

Yet, in most of these works, the execution is coarse, as if the material had been too stubborn for the tools of the workman. I am told that this defect does not exist in some other of the cavern temples of India, but it runs through all that I have seen.

Of the painting of the Hindoos, no specimen of anything like ancient times has been preserved[12]; though, from their undoubtedly ancient poems and plays, it is certain that they did paint, and that their pictures were not only single portraits, but compositions, both of what we call history and familiar life[13].

Who, indeed, can read Sir William Jones’s pleasant abridgement of the Hindoo mythology, his translation of Sacontala, or the hymn to Camdeo, and not perceive that the Indians wanted neither imagination, nor subjects to exercise it upon, in their religion and poetry?

But their florid religion, and exaggerated songs, were of later date, in all probability, than that grave and philosophical faith which gave the Brahmins their reputation in Greece and Egypt; and, perhaps, their more natural pieces of sculpture and their pictures belong to that later time rather than to the age of the gymnosophists; or if the Indian arts furnished examples to Egypt or Chaldea, we must seek those examples in the hewn rocks, which represent figures nearly as large as the Egyptian Memnon, with their hands attached to their sides, and their feet planted together, and of which some few still exist, within the Peninsula, and on the Indian side of the borders of Tartary[14].

What do we know of the arts of Chaldea, in very early times[15]? Babylon and Nineveh have, for thousands of years, been buried in utter ruin; and if here and there a bauble, such as the signet of a Satrap, or the breast-pin of a lady, be picked up, however delicately the cornelian or the onyx may be chiselled, the forms are stiff and angular, and nothing displays the freedom and grace that render art valuable. The great sculptured rocks met with in various parts of modern Persia, have everywhere the same character. But, upon the whole however, there is a graver and more majestic air than in the monuments of India, and a much greater dexterity of hand is displayed in the workmanship, but there is less nature in the design.

As to painting, in that country, there are neither relics nor memorials, of earlier date than our æra[16].

It is with reverence, not unmixed with awe, that I approach the subject of Egyptian art: and here, as in India and the intermediate countries, I must consider its sculpture as the only satisfactory monument. I am aware that coloured subjects, by courtesy called pictures, have been discovered on the walls of tombs and caverns, by persons well qualified to examine and pronounce, as antiquaries, on their meaning and their merit.

But they are, in composition, entirely sculpturesque; and many of them are, in fact, coloured basso-relievos.

Belzoni told me he had seen, in Egypt, figures in relief wrought in stucco on the walls of some of the catacombs, which were coloured in simple unbroken colours. To these he ascribed a marvellous effect, and said, they were the grandest pictures he had seen. Such also, I remember, was the language used by my enthusiastic friend Kestner, when, in 1827, he described to me the tombs of Egyptian character, opened the year before at Tarquinii, in the country of the ancient Etruscans.

I can imagine readily that in the chambers of the dead, the plain form shadowed out in a simple colour, and lighted by the glare of torches, may have had an awful and ghostly character; and if these figures were of the size of life, or larger, and further aided by the varying tints afforded by a low relief, as the torches glared upon them, a describer could hardly be charged with exaggeration, whatever effects he might impute to them.

Still these are not pictures, though the artists approached nearly to picturesque design in many of the chiselled figures on the walls of the temples and tombs of Thebes, where the attacking and defending towns, the triumphs of a victorious king, the punishment of rebels, and other historical facts, are rendered with considerable spirit, and convey a notion that their authors might have become painters, had they not been restrained by custom from change or progress. These could not, however, be the beginnings of art. They mark already a very advanced state of society, since such great works of ornament could be required and executed; and they, it seems, were ancient when Herodotus visited Egypt 450 years before our era[17].

But we have more authentic documents in favour of the antiquity of the arts in Egypt, even than those afforded by the father of Greek history. Fifteen centuries before Herodotus travelled into Egypt, Abraham had been entertained there by a powerful king, who gave him gifts, such as only the head of a people already conversant with many arts could bestow. The whole history of Joseph’s life in Egypt[18] bears witness to the progress already made there in civility and the arts of polished life.

Could we read the inscription freely, which covers the obelisk of Mataryah, the only remains of the stately Heliopolis, the On of Scripture, perhaps we might find some record of that high priest who gave his daughter in marriage to the Hebrew governor.

Both sacred[19] and profane history[20] fix upon the two centuries between 1600 and 1400 before Christ, as the period when a prodigious movement took place in Egypt, and when great works were undertaken by the kings, and important colonies led forth into the western parts of Asia, and into Greece.

I have already mentioned the foundation of Argos and Sicyon, said to have taken place nearly 600 years before the period of which I am now speaking. They were, therefore, flourishing states when Cecrops[21], the Egyptian, taught the people of Attica to sow corn, instead of trusting to the precarious chances of the seasons in bringing forth wild fruits, or the still more uncertain product of the chase; and chose for the patroness of his new colony the goddess to whom his native city Saïs was consecrated; Minerva or Bubastis. The rich country of Asia Minor had not been more backward than Egypt in the earlier times; nor afterwards less forward than Greece in receiving colonies. In the time of Abraham, Damascus was a market, where slaves[22] were sold; and forty years after Cecrops had founded Athens, Scamander settled a colony in Troy.

Scarcely a hundred years[23] after the Egyptians had carried their arts and their religion into Attica, we find the first Panathenaic procession mentioned, when the whole people of Athens solemnly dedicated themselves to the service of the goddess Athena or Minerva, and to that of their country, and bore before them to her temple her banner, or veil, formed of fine linen, and embroidered with subjects relative to her history or her attributes.

The fine arts were therefore known in Attica at this early time; for whether the peplos or veil were wrought in Attica, or imported from Saïs, those who followed the banner could not be blind to the designs and colours that adorned it. It was about this time that Cadmus brought from the Eastern countries to Greece the knowledge of alphabetical writing; at this time, when Minos gave his laws to Crete; while Danaus, believed to be an Egyptian prince, reigned at Argos, and Erichthonius in Athens; that Rameses was Phrah, or king of, at least, Northern Egypt. He had caused the descendants of Abraham to build for him the treasure cities of Rameses and Pithom[24]; and in his reign Moses led forth the Israelites, to escape from his tyranny, into the land promised to their forefathers.

Before I say anything concerning the arts of Egypt alone, or the changes they underwent in different soils, and under different circumstances, I must point out the only minute account we have, that can be relied upon, of any peculiar works executed by any of the various tribes who at that time separated themselves from their nursing mother. I mean the ark of the covenant, fashioned by the direction of Moses in the wilderness, and the contemporary golden calf and brazen serpent.

And here we have, as far as I know, the names of the two most ancient artists recorded: Aholiab and Bezaleel, whom the Scripture calls the wise in heart; but they had many assistants, and it appears that Aaron himself was a skilful workman.

The arts required for the making of the ark and the erection of the tabernacle were the preparing and dying of skins; the weaving of fine linen; the fine dyes, blue, scarlet, red, and purple; designing for the embroiderers[25], who wrought the pomegranates, the flowers, and the leaves; every variety of carving in wood; casting and chiselling of metals; and, finally, the engraving on precious stones, and setting them according to the jewellers’ art.

When, to quiet the impatient Israelites, Aaron consented to make a god for them, such as they had been used to in Egypt, he caused them to bring their jewels of gold to him for the purpose; and, after he had cast or made a molten image, he finished it with the graver[26]. Now this is the process of casting figures in metal to this very day.

Here, then, we have the Jews designing, making moulds, casting metals, and finishing with the graver. They were, therefore, not all mere brick-makers in Egypt; but some of them, like Moses and Aaron, had been instructed in the learning, or at least the arts, of the Egyptians. Again, for the brass and gold ornaments of the tabernacle and the ark, Bezaleel made the cherubim[27] on the mercy seat of beaten gold; that is, their faces and wings were embossed and chiselled. So likewise was the great candlestick, with its flowers and its almonds, its leaves and its buds.

The whole putting together of the tent of the tabernacle is most ingenious, and denotes an acquaintance with great magnificence in architecture and in furniture. The breastplate was composed of twelve precious stones, from diamond the hardest, down to the most easily wrought, cornelian; yet each was engraved after the manner of a signet, with the name of one of the tribes, and set in its own peculiar setting.

Such are the particulars we learn on undoubted authority of the arts at that early period, as practised in Egypt for convenience and ornament.

But Egypt had another use for the arts. She applied them mainly to the service of religion.

All nations, however rude, evince a desire to record their own actions and those of their fathers. Poets, bards, senachies, scalds, or by whatever name the same class of men may be called, are, like the traditionary tale-tellers of the American Indians, the earliest of historians. Their art, which is that of so placing words as to form sentences, whether distinguished by rhyme or by only a peculiar rhythm, more easily and pleasantly remembered than the same words would be in the ordinary arrangement of speech, may be practised by the warrior or the huntsman, without interfering with his other avocations. It is, therefore, peculiarly fitted for rude tribes, who cannot afford that any individual should give himself up exclusively to an inactive profession.

The rhapsodies of the bards, however, may be forgotten, and will probably be so in a few generations;[28] and, if a tribe migrate so as to settle where other tongues are spoken, the songs are sung in the ears of the deaf, and the beginnings of history are swept wholly away.

How, then, shall the memory of the past be preserved? the propensity of man to imitation will lead him to attempt to form a likeness of any great benefactor to the community. The simple stone set up for a memorial will soon be cut into a rude statue. The face of a rock will admit of carving figures enough to represent an event of importance; or the outlines may be scratched upon a board, and the use of colour, which abounds everywhere, is an easy step towards the beginning of painting. Such, we have positive proof, it was in Mexico; such, we may reasonably presume, it must have been in Egypt.

But the heroes and benefactors of a lively and enthusiastic people soon came to be looked upon as something divine. He, who first in the sight of his tribe, scattered seed upon the earth, and, trusting to the certain return of the season, taught how to gather in the harvest and convert the grain into bread, must have stood in the light of a Creator. When accident had attracted observation to the fatty nature of the olive, he who applied oil to the feeding of a lamp would be celebrated as a benefactor. The tamer of the bull, who brought kine to labour for men, and from their milk produced such variety of delicious food, merited still higher gratitude; and those who converted rude dross and shapeless ore into instruments of agriculture, mechanical tools, weapons offensive and defensive, almost deserved the divine honours paid to them.

It is neither my business nor my inclination to discuss the origin or principles of the mythology of any country, farther than as it affected the arts.

The pictures and statues of the benefactors, or, as they soon began to be called, of the gods, were intended to be lasting memorials of their forms and acts. They were to speak a language independent of the tongue. Hence it became absolutely necessary, that their representative type should remain for ever fixed. So that to whatever excellence the mechanic might attain, or whatever improvement the progress of science might enable the artist to make, all change was forbidden; and though the labour and finish became exquisite, it would have been sacrilege to alter the form. Hence, while the statues of other nations not under these restrictions, assumed the freedom and grace of nature, Egypt saw her Osiris and Isis retaining their rigid and unnatural characters, notwithstanding the sublime style in which they were conceived.

The basso-relievos, intaglios, and painted stuccoes of the temples and catacombs, present greater varieties of action and design; but even in them, the human figure is still monotonous in character.

But whole statues and pictures engraved on rocks and walls of granite and freestone, are inconvenient registers. Hence one well known form was soon allowed to stand as the sign of a subject or action; part of that figure might, in time, be substituted for the whole.

The forms of animals whose qualities were supposed to bear relation to those of man, were admitted to represent abstract ideas; as, for instance, in India, the elephant’s head adorned the shoulders of the god of wisdom, and in Egypt, the watchfulness of the cat procured her the honour of lending a mask sometimes to the greatest of the goddesses. Insects whose appearance was constant at particular seasons, became the types of those seasons, or of the heavenly bodies which regulate them; so by a natural process, a scheme of hieroglyphic representation, if we must not say writing, was framed, which long continued in use among the governing priests of Egypt to preserve the annals of the country.

Their hieroglyphics were themselves too cumbrous for constant use, and it appears certain from ancient tradition and modern discovery, that they produced a variety of steps approaching more or less to alphabetical writing; and in all probability the learned priests who could not be ignorant of the existence of such writing, preferred their own mysterious and obscure characters for the sake of that power which unusual and exclusive knowledge always confers.

The effect that the use of hieroglyphic painting, whether more or less near to writing, had upon the art of painting itself was most disastrous. Those who were permitted to paint at all, were bound to make no improvement. The art was jealously kept for the adornment of hideous mummy cases[29] and sepulchral chambers, where the nearest approaches to what is properly painting were a sort of portraits, drawn upon the inner coffins, which were composed of folds of linen prepared with a chalk ground, or basso-relievos either coloured themselves, or imitated in flat colours upon the walls. The wood upon which the commoner coffin-painting was executed appears to have been sycamore; it was prepared with fine lime, mixed with some kind of gum or size for the colourer. The pigments were ochres for the most part; but the blues and greens appear to have been prepared from copper. The black was lamp-black, and the white a very fine lime[30]. These colours when applied on wood, or cotton, or linen, were probably mixed with gums, probably gum arabic or the Sarcocolla, which the Egyptians used in preparing their mummies, and also for glue[31], and that gum probably formed part of the varnish found on the mummy cases. According to Mr. Wilkinson’s account, the pictures in the catacombs were executed either on the bare limestone wall, or on the sandstone prepared with fine lime. Whether the groups were to be painted or chiselled in intaglio or relief, they were outlined with red ochre, then corrected with black. The next step was the carving the intaglios or the reliefs, or modelling the stucco applications, after which, in some of the tombs, plain unbroken colour was applied. But even this approach to painting arose from the desire of distinguishing objects, as tribute of gold from tribute of silver, prisoners of white, tawny, or black nations, and so on. But nothing like a picture, as we understand the word, has ever been found; nothing displaying a knowledge of light and shadow, perspective either lineal or aërial, nothing which by means of colour and tint imitates nature: nor have we the name of any Egyptian painter in the annals of art.

Under some of the Ptolemys, artists from Greece visited the court of the Grecian kings; and doubtless the merchants of Alexandria may have been permitted to possess Greek pictures; but the Ptolemys became Egyptians, and adopted the hieroglyphic manner of recording their acts and lives; and until the Christian hermits plastered over the mystic figures of the Egyptian priests, that they might without pollution erect their simple altars within the shelter of the abandoned temples, no change appears to have taken place with regard to the practice of the arts in Egypt.

It was reserved for the followers of Mahomet, who abhorred statuary and painting, to introduce a gay and florid architecture among the severe palaces and tombs of the children of Misraim, to use their temples as quarries for building materials, and to burn their statues for lime[32].

Egypt, therefore, though once excelling in architecture and religious sculpture, knowing the use of colour, and conferring innumerable benefits on other countries in most of the arts of design, has never herself been the country of painting.

Extract of a Letter from Mr. Clift to Mrs. Callcott.

November 1835.

I have been present, and assisted in the opening of several mummies, in which, although there was a general resemblance in the manner, yet there were palpable differences too, arising probably from difference of person, time, and price; but in none of them was there any painting whatever on the inner linen wrappings: they appear to differ chiefly in the greater or less care taken according to the price; some being much more laboriously and carefully prepared than others.

Raspe may have been right in the particular to which you allude, of the inner bandages being painted, if he has not mistaken the inner coffin for bandaging: as Mr. Pettigrew in his late quarto volume on Mummies, has given a three-quarter face portrait, which I think he describes as having been found on the surface of the immediate wrappers of the body within the second coffin of a specimen in the British Museum, which I have not seen; and he has, or had, the head of a supposed female mummy, which had the features of a face and head-dress outlined upon the exterior wrapper of the body, but I have seen no other example.

It is not unusual, in the more expensively prepared mummies, to find the inside of the outer or wooden case ornamented with figures in outline; but I do not recollect any such that were coloured: the greatest labour appears to have been always bestowed on the second or internal coffin, or case which immediately contains the body.

The outer, or wooden case, which is generally believed to be made of sycamore-wood, is sometimes wrought out of the solid, that is, excavated; and sometimes composed of several pieces joined by dowels, or wooden pegs, instead of nails. I never saw an instance of iron or metal being employed. This outer case is also usually of considerable thickness, viz., from two to three or four or more inches, and generally coated thickly with distemper colour, on which is painted various emblematical devices in a very inferior manner; the mask or face sometimes gilded, sometimes red (male), sometimes yellow (female). I never observed any appearance of varnish having been employed on the colours of this outer case.

On wrenching open the upper and lower portions of this outer or wooden case, which are united by flat tenons received in sockets and fastened by pegs, and apparently glue in the joint, the second or inner case appears. This case has not any wood in its composition, except a small piece at the bottom, or foot-board, on which the feet of the mummy rest. This case is composed of at least ten or a dozen layers of linen of the same quality as that which envelopes the body; these laminæ are very firmly cemented together by a material apparently glue and lime, or plaster. This case is originally moulded on a rude mass or model of clay and straw, of the size and form of the swathed body intended to be afterwards contained in it, and when sufficiently dry to retain its form, the clay and straw are scraped or scooped out from the back part which is left open, or rather apparently cut open for that purpose, and then the body is introduced, and the edges of the aperture brought together and secured by a very simple and ingenious method of drum-like bracing, and the seam and lacing covered afterwards with a strip of cloth, glued or cemented, over them. This, with the foot-board, which is braced in or secured in the same manner, rendered the body as it were, hermetically sealed in its chrysalis case.

The painting on the exterior of the inner case is, I believe, the most laboured part of the process, and I have seen some which must have occupied many days, perhaps many weeks, in the very elaborate outlining and colouring in water-colour or distemper; and finally varnishing or fixing the subject of this hieroglyph or allegory. The ground of this painting is of very fine and pure white, resembling stucco. The parts that are drawn on, and apparently outlined with a pen and then coloured, are the only parts that are afterwards varnished:—the blank parts of the white ground remain unvarnished, except where the varnish-brush has occasionally slipped beyond the outline, and there the white has become yellow. This white ground may be disturbed by a wetted finger, which is not the case with the varnished parts. Their varnish must have been of excellent quality, as it retains its transparency and gloss in a most extraordinary degree; in some instances appearing as if executed only a few days. In one that was opened in Sir Benjamin Brodie’s new theatre in Kinnerton-street, Knightsbridge, during the last summer, some persons were so deceived as to believe the varnish to have been duly laid on and not yet dry; and really it might appear so to an inexperienced eye, without touching.

What the nature of the pigments used were, I have no adequate knowledge; they generally appear to be earthy or ochreous and opaque: yet their artists understood the art of representing transparent objects with them, for example:—in one which was opened about two years since at the College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, on which several figures were introduced, one of them had its limbs partly naked, partly covered by a thin transparent robe, and a third degree seen through a double and thicker part of the dress. The body of this mummy was enveloped in at least fifteen or twenty layers of linen filet, measuring I think about one hundred and thirty yards of handbreadth strips, torn the length way of the piece. The only entire piece from one end to the other of the warp, which I could preserve, measured eighteen feet, which, folded twice, made the length of their ordinary robe or dress (four feet six inches), of which we met with several examples. The outer general envelope or winding-sheet was in one piece, about seven feet in length, and nearly two yards wide, of excellently regular manufacture, with a very good and uniform selvage: there were also various pieces of about a yard long, and two yards or rather more in breadth, folded and placed under the hollow parts of the body, together with three or four halves (all of the left side) of robes or dresses, torn lengthwise, that had been much worn and darned, or strengthened with much ingenuity and neatness. These were folded, and laid behind or beneath the back as a palliasse. The name of this mummy, as deciphered by Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Pettigrew, was “Horseisi, son of Naspihiniegori, incense bearing Priest in the Temple of Ammon at Thebes.” This inscription was repeated three or four times on the bandaging, between the body and the external surface of the wrappers, but there was no appearance of any painting whatever on them.

FOOTNOTES:

ESSAY II. OF ART IN ANCIENT ITALY[33].

Arts are advanced not so much by them that dare make a great show of Art, as by them that know how to find out what there is in Art.

Isocrates.

Honour doth nourish Arts, and we are all drawn by glory to take pains; as are also such things ever neglected, as are little regarded in the opinion of men.

Cicero.

It is very disagreeable to unlearn the learning of one’s youth, and to give up belief in certain things that seem, from our long familiar acquaintance, as if they made up a part of the system of nature itself.

But so it must be, if we will give ourselves fair play in examining into the history of art or science, polity or commerce, in ancient Italy. In our early education it is Rome only to which the attention is directed. Rome is represented as first in arts and arms, as spreading civilisation along with her dominion: and, in short, Roman virtue and Roman greatness dazzle our young imaginations, till, seeing nothing but the glare of her meridian splendour, we forget to look whence and how it arose.

Yet Italy must have had a long and not inglorious history before the seven-hilled city could boast of a shepherd’s hut, or the politic Romulus, if such a king ever reigned, found a village considerable enough to tempt him to make himself a king contrary to the custom of the neighbouring federal states, one of which, Cœre, had, not very long before his time, expelled its Lucumon (Mezentius) for little reason but that he had sought to change the annual magistracy into a monarchy for life[34].

This history will probably remain for ever obscure as to the particular facts relating to it, and the names of those who might have figured in it; because, the vainglory of the Romans, infecting even their writers, desired that their own history and their own monuments should stand foremost in the eyes of posterity; and though the ancient books existed, and the ancient language was still understood to a late period[35], no use was made of them by those who recorded the achievements of the Romans; and it is because they found it so difficult to conquer the Italian tribes, one by one, that we are led to form an idea of their strength and importance.

Many men of learning and understanding in Italy, had, from time to time, thrown doubts on the early portion of the Roman history, some perhaps feeling that their own native provinces had been wronged by their gorgeous adversary.

But the fate of Italy,

had lowered the energies that, under other circumstances, would have boldly proclaimed these doubts long ago, and have shown Rome as she was, the destroyer of men and of happiness; a conqueror converting whole well-peopled and cultivated provinces into deserts, ever which a few wretched slaves wandered to their task work, instead of the free peasants who once gathered their own rich harvests; a tyrant at whose frown the liberal arts withered, and commerce deserted the useless ports and abandoned storehouses of the subdued merchants and spiritless artists.

But the pains-taking critics of Germany had no morbid sensibility to prevent them from attacking Rome; none of the hopeless feeling of those who would, but must not, vindicate the fame of their ancestors; and with something of roughness and much of justice, they have taught us to trample on ancient prejudice, and to dare to look upon Italy as not dependant entirely upon Rome.

There have not been wanting Italians to join in these views, and to acknowledge the merit of their trans-alpine critics. Among these Micali is conspicuous; and, as his late work, with its atlas, throws considerable light on a very early period of art in Italy, I shall make use of it in preference to any other in what I have to say of painting and its kindred arts, before the period of Roman authentic history begins.

The scattered notices to be found in ancient writers, leave no doubt as to a few facts: namely, that a rude tribe, or several rude tribes, called by the various titles of Opicians, Auruncians, Oscans, Cascans, or Priscan Latins, under the general name of Ausonians, and all speaking the same language, once possessed, at least, the hill countries of Italy; that these were succeeded by a race speaking a different dialect, resembling the Pelasgians, who appear in several countries as the first people possessing the arts of civilized life, beginning to build cities, and introducing regular government.

Then we read of Umbrians, Siculi, and colonies from Greece and Phrygia; and Italy next appears, long before the foundation of Rome, as chiefly possessed by a people whose native name seems to have been Ra-seni, who were called generally by the Greeks, Tyrrhenians, and by the Latins, Tuscans or Etruscans.

It is among this remarkable people, possessed of some of the sciences and most of the arts of social life, that the fine arts were first cultivated in Italy; and that they were no mean proficients, will not be disputed by any one who has beheld even a single Etruscan vase[36].

They had not pyramids or giant temples to boast of. Their works were not for kings or for the exclusive profit of the governing priests, like those of Egypt or India, but for the public. They have left walls of cities, solid quays and ports, drains and sluices, useful even at the present time, as their monuments.

But in their country, as well as in Egypt, it is in the repositories of the dead that we are to look for the relics of whatever was beautiful or ornamental among them[37].

The first steps of art have, doubtless, been the same among all nations; but the Tyrrhenians had some advantages in their early cultivation. They were early a maritime people; as merchants or as pirates they visited whatever ports the Phœnicians traded to, in the Mediterranean; and the effect of their foreign intercourse is to be traced in whatever we know of their institutions or see of their arts.

But I must not allow myself to be seduced into more than the very slightest mention of the resemblance of some of their institutions to those of Greece, and of others to those of Egypt; and that mention is only made because the influence of the intercourse with other nations, upon the arts of Etruria, is so conspicuous, that it is impossible to give the slightest sketch of them without a reference to it[38].

The relics, confessedly of Etruscan manufacture, that from time to time have been discovered in various parts of Italy, had convinced us that the nation was early acquainted with the arts, but there was little to guide antiquaries as to the age of the relics themselves, or the sources whence those arts had been derived. The fabulous as well as the true stories of colonies from Asia, Egypt, and Greece, which had been left by the ancients, became signals of battle for modern disputants, and much ink has been shed in support of all manner of contradictory theories.

The late historical disquisitions of the Germans and Italians cleared away a good deal of obscurity; the re-opening of the great cemeteries of Chuisi, Tarquinii, and Vulscii, have, as far as relates to art, done much more[39]; and we may safely conclude that the Etruscan artists, not mean in themselves, were improved by the importation of models from other countries, and probably by the settling of potters and metal founders from Sicyon, Corinth, and other Greek cities among them.

That they early adopted the deities of other countries is also proved by the opening of the tombs of Chuisi. It is impossible not to be struck with the close resemblance to the sculpture and coloured bas-reliefs of Egypt found there; and, saving that the Tuscans do not appear to have practised embalming, the mystic ceremonies in honour of the dead are shown to be the same.

The beautiful vases of different kinds and colours, of clay baked or unbaked, are covered with designs, in exquisite taste and delicately touched. They are mostly painted in one single colour, or at most two or three flat colours, picked out with black or white. Some have figures in slight relief; and, with few exceptions, the subjects are from the Greek mysteries of Bacchus, Hercules, and Ceres, when their attributes coincide with those of the Egyptian deities, Osiris and his family. The genii, with two or four wings, found in some of the most ancient, mark a very early intercourse with the priests of both countries; and though the most offensive particulars belonging to their mythologies are totally absent, the great Egyptian demon of destruction is common on cups, pateræ, and vases[40].

Among the great variety of designs found in the newly opened tombs, I cannot refrain from mentioning one which Micali has published, of a domestic rural scene, painted in several colours. Under a canopy there is a grave elderly man seated, and before him his servants are weighing corn, brought in nets from the field[41]. Below, as if in a vault, others are stowing sacks of corn, which we may suppose have been weighed. The resemblance of the subject on this patera or plate to some of those found by Mr. Wilkinson on the walls of the catacombs of Egypt, is very remarkable.

Besides the vases of clay, some utensils of wood and metal were found in the cemeteries. Gems also, with chased ornaments, of beautiful fancy and excellent workmanship, necklaces, armlets, rings, buckles, signets, besides armour, all designed with taste, and executed with skill, show, to our regret, against how civilized a people the Romans made war, and leave us to lament that the selfish vainglory of the conquerors thought of preserving no annals but their own.

To describe the painted sides of the tombs at Chuisi and other ruined Italian cities, would be to repeat what I have already said of those of Egypt, as far as their colouring is concerned, or their approach to the nature of a true picture; but I must remark that the designs, if not so imposing, have more nature and grace, though they are not to be compared in size, number, or variety, with those of Egypt.

But there is some reason to believe that the ancient Italians had true painters among them. Indeed I think the evidence for it as good as that we have for any other facts connected with the arts. Pliny[42], after refuting the story that painting was brought into Italy from Corinth, by Cleophantus, a friend of Tarquinius Priscus[43], who had fled from the tyranny of Cypselus, says expressly[44], “Extant there be at this day to be seen at Ardea, within the temples there, antique pictures, and indeed more ancient than the city of Rome. And I assure you no pictures ever came to my sight which I wonder so much at, namely, that they should continue so long fresh and as if they were newly made, considering the places where they be so ruinate and uncovered over head. Semblably at Lanuvium, there remain two pictures of Lady Atalanta and Queen Helena, close one to the other, painted naked, by one and the same hand: both of them are for beauty incomparable, and yet a man may discern one of them to be a maiden by her modest and chaste countenance, which pictures, notwithstanding the ruin of the temple where they stand, are not a whit disfigured or defaced[45];” and farther on he says, that at Cære there were pictures of still greater antiquity.

These were of course the works of Etruscan artists, and, as Pliny had opportunities of seeing and judging of the best Greek pictures which successive conquerors had brought to Rome before his time, his praises may be taken as good evidence for the general estimation of the skill of those early painters.

Happily, although the barbarous Romans had not taste enough to value and preserve the fame of their Etruscan rivals, they did not disdain to employ their artists. One of the Roman modes of honouring their forefathers was to preserve their effigies in plaster, wax, stone, or metal; and on the death of any member of a family, the figures or heads of the ancestors were taken from the family treasury to accompany the body to the place of burial, or to the funeral pyre.

This alone would render the Etruscan sculptors popular. One of the most ancient remaining works, executed by them for Rome, is the bronze wolf, “the thunder-stricken nurse of Rome,” preserved in the Capitol, and of which Micali has given an excellent figure. But this, and also the most ancient statues of the kings and consuls, must have been cast in Etruscan towns, and brought to Rome; for Pliny[46] tells us that the very first bronze statue cast within the city was that of the goddess Ceres, the expense being defrayed by the forfeited goods of Spurius Capius, who was put to death for aspiring to the dignity of king[47].

The Romans were so fond of the Tuscan statues that they collected them from all quarters. At the taking of Volsinum (now Bolsena) alone, they removed two thousand to their own city; and the practice of setting up statues, even in the public places, must have become a nuisance, before the senate made a decree that they should all be removed, excepting such as had been erected by public vote in honour of great personages. Thus, when the streets and market-places were cleared of the nameless crowd, the bronze portraits of Poplicola and of Cornelia became of double importance.

Among the most ancient of the monumental bronzes were several equestrian statues in honour of women as well as men. That of Clelia was especially prized, and there was another of the daughter of Poplicola held in the highest reverence.

Of colossal figures, there was an Etruscan Apollo, of fifty feet high, placed in the library of the Temple of Augustus; of which Pliny says, “But the bigness thereof is not so much as the matter and the workmanship; for hard it is to say, whether is more admirable the beautiful figure of the body, or the exquisite temperature of the metal[48].”

There was also the colossal Jupiter of the Capitol, cast by Corvillius out of the brazen armour taken from the dead bodies of the conquered Samnites.

Besides this taste for statues, the Romans were not slow to acquire a love for ornamented cups and bowls and dishes of the precious metals; nor were there wanting among the spoils conveyed to Rome from the Etruscan cities, lamps and candelabra and other furniture of elegant design, which the more rigid citizens looked upon as tending to the corrupting of the manners of the ancients, the moderate and aged dedicated to the gods, but the multitude used and enjoyed.

With all these examples of beautiful forms daily before them, and familiar enough with the sight of pictures in the neighbouring towns, the inhabitants of Rome could not long be without painters; indeed, painting seems to have been highly esteemed at one period, for the great and noble family of the Fabii cultivated it so fondly, that one of their distinguishing surnames was Pictor.

Fabius Pictor, the father of that Fabius Pictor who was sent to Delphos to consult the Oracle of Apollo, on the fate of his country, after the disaster at Cannæ, appears to have dedicated the first picture publicly to the gods in Rome. He himself painted the Temple of Salus, in such a manner as to be esteemed even after the introduction of Greek pictures; but the painting with the Temple itself was destroyed by fire in the reign of Claudius Cæsar[49].

Pacuvius, the poet and tragedian, is named as another great painter in the time of the Republic. He lived about sixty years later than Fabius Pictor, and was a native of Brundusium. As the nephew of Ennius, his works would have been sure of a favourable notice from all the wise and polished Romans of his time; but, by what we are told of them, they do not appear to have required indulgence. He painted the Temple of Hercules in the cattle market in Rome, and the pictures are said to have given dignity to the art itself.

But a singular use was made of painting by the Roman heroes. Their inordinate love of military fame discovered a mode of feeding that ruling passion by means of this charming art; and it appears that Valerius Maximus Messala was the first to adopt a practice of exhibiting pictures of his own actions, which became afterwards pretty common, though condemned by some of the chief men of the Republic. Messala then caused a picture to be hung up in the Portico Hostilia, representing the Battle of Messana[50], where he had vanquished both the Carthaginians and Hiero of Syracuse, who had joined his former enemies to resist the invasion of his country by the Romans.

By means of this picture, Messala kept himself before the eyes of the people, in the situation best calculated to further his views whenever he should be a candidate for the magistracy. Instead of sitting himself in the market-place, dressed in the white robe of humility, and pointing to his wounds, as Coriolanus says, to

the picture told the story of his achievements to the best advantage, and perhaps placed his personal and party enemies in doubtful situations or in disgrace.

That some injurious effects were occasionally produced by the practice is certain, from the displeasure entertained by Scipio Africanus against his brother Lucius Scipio, for placing in the Capitol a picture of the battle near Sardes, which won him the title of Asiaticus, but in which, his nephew, the son of Africanus, was taken prisoner.

Again, Scipio Emilianus was highly offended at the display of a picture of the taking of Carthage, exhibited in the market-place by Lucius Hostilius Mancinus. It appears that Mancinus was the first to enter Carthage on the taking of that city: and, on his return to Rome, being desirous of the consulship, he had a picture painted representing the strong situation of the town, with its fortifications, and all the machines employed in the attack and defence, besides the actions of the besiegers, in which care was taken that those of Mancinus should be most conspicuous. This he hung up in the Forum, and, seating himself by it, he explained to the people all the parts of the picture, particularly those in which he was concerned, in such a manner, that he won their good will, and gained the consulship at the very next election.

The lawyers of Rome also made use of pictures in their pleadings, as we learn from Quintilian, who censures the practice of hanging pictures of murders or other atrocious crimes, over the statue of Jupiter, in the Forum, for the purpose of moving the judges. As an example of the bad effects of such machinery, he relates the story of a pleader, who, having undertaken the cause of a young woman whose husband had been murdered, had a picture of the murder painted, in order to produce it at the proper moment, and thereby to affect the judges and the audience in her favour. But his design failed, and the painting produced excessive mirth instead of tears; for they who had received directions for showing it, not properly comprehending them, displayed the picture as often as the orator looked their way. This notice, attracted at a wrong moment, was mischievous enough; but when the lookers on perceived that the husband was an ugly old man, the contrast between his figure and the representation of the pleader was so ludicrous, that the pleading lost all its merit, and the young woman her cause.

It appears also that pictures of their disasters were hawked about, by shipwrecked mariners, persons whose houses had been burnt, and other unfortunate men, in order to move compassion and obtain assistance; and that painted tablets were also hung up by such persons in the temples in thankfulness to the gods for their escape.

It is probable that these pictures were but coarse; yet there must have been in them sufficient individual likeness for the people to recognise the portrait, and the painters must have had skill enough in grouping to have rendered their subjects intelligible.

To the early scene-painters the birds of Rome are reputed to have paid as great a compliment as those of Greece did to the grapes of Zeuxis; for when Claudius Pulcher, during his edileship, exhibited dramas publicly in Rome, the scenery representing houses and other buildings was so natural, that the ravens and other birds, deceived by their verisimilitude, came to perch there.

But by this time all Italy was merged in Rome the conqueror; and the posterity of the Etruscan artists was confounded with her other military Helots. Yet one last compliment was paid to painters in Rome by Augustus himself. The nephew or grandson of that Pœdius, who had been appointed by Julius Cæsar his coheir along with Augustus, was born dumb; and the Emperor consulting with Messala, the child’s maternal grandfather, determined that he should be brought up a painter. He displayed considerable talent, but died while yet a youth.

I mention this the more particularly, because some writers have asserted, that after the time of Pacuvius painting became disreputable, if not infamous, in Rome. Had that been the case, Augustus would not have chosen it as a profession for one so nearly allied to him. Nevertheless, centuries passed before native Italians again distinguished themselves in the fine arts.

From the time of the Consul Mummius, foreign pictures were daily brought to Rome. The first publicly exhibited was a Bacchus and Ariadne, painted by Aristides of Thebes, for which King Attalus had offered so large a sum, that Mummius suspected there must be some secret charm attached to the picture, and so broke off the bargain and took it himself to Rome, where he dedicated it in the Temple of Ceres.

After this example every general seems to have been ambitious of adorning the city with the finest pictures and statues from Greece, Asia Minor, and Sicily. Julius Cæsar enshrined the two exquisite pictures of Medea and Ajax[51] in the temple of Venus, where he had hung up the shield covered with British pearl.

Augustus hung his forum with pictures of the horrors of war and the glories of a triumph; and in the temple, which he dedicated to the deified Julius, he placed many choice pictures, the first and most beautiful of which was the Venus Anadyomene of Apelles.

Another work of the same painter, namely, Alexander in triumph leading War bound and manacled, was defaced by Claudius, who caused the face of Alexander to be erased, and that of Augustus to be painted instead. Among many pictures of note in the same temple was one of Castor and Pollux, of especial value.

In the Comitium also Augustus placed some excellent works of Nicias of Athens, and Philochares his friend, less attractive for their subjects than for the execution and beauty of the design.

The Temple of Peace was rich in pictures of the highest class. There was placed the most valued of all the works of Protogenes, namely, the hunter Ialysus with his dogs and game.

It is said that when Demetrius laid siege to Rhodes, and was upon the point of taking the city, he abstained from an attack that must have been successful, on learning that the picture of Ialysus was in the quarter of the town he might have carried, lest in the confusion the picture should be injured; and the workshop of the painter, being just without the walls at that point, was another reason for sparing it.

In the Temple of Peace also were the Cyclops of Timanthes, and the sea-monster Scylla by Nichomachus.

In the Temple of Concord there was a precious picture by Zeuxis, of Marsyas bound to a tree; and in private hands, the Muses and the Helen of the same painter adorned some of the villas of Rome.

In that shrine of Ceres, where Mummius had placed the Bacchus and Ariadne of Aristides, there were several other pictures by the same painter, which, having been trusted to a restorer that they might appear to advantage in some public procession, were utterly ruined. So ancient was the practice of consulting quack restorers for works of art!!

In the Temple of Minerva on the Capitol was the Theseus of Parrhasius, with the Rape of Proserpine and a victory by Nichomachus.

The portico of Octavia was adorned by pictures of Greek Mythology and History, painted by that finished artist Antiphilus; and that of Pompey boasted of a rare fragment by Polygnotus. It was a soldier upon a scaling ladder, and possibly stolen from some of the great battle pieces which he painted in honour of his countrymen[52].

The Romans were not more ceremonious than modern conquerors in their robberies; witness the conduct of the general who permitted the tombs of Corinth to be broken open, and in the sight of the people the urns containing the ashes of their forefathers torn from their sacred asylum, and publicly sold to the highest bidder among the Romans, who became for a time so passionately fond of them, that not a grave was left unviolated for miles round Corinth; and it was only when the market was glutted, and the fashion had passed away, that Corinthian vessels were laid aside.

A new school, if I may so express myself, of pottery was then established in Italy, where formerly the Etruscan workmen had excelled all others. But as fashion is all-powerful in all ages, a new rage for earthen dishes and bowls of enormous size grew to such a pitch, that the nickname of Patinarius was given to Vitellius, on account of one large platter which he had made for him, and which cost more than a fine wrought vessel of chalcedony would have done[53]; and the satirical poets of that age have named not a few of the lovers of large dishes.

But to return to our imported pictures. The portico of Pompey was still farther adorned with pictures by Nicias. There was a large portrait of Alexander, a figure of Calypso, and some animals painted by him which were much prized. The same Nicias painted that beautiful picture of Hyacinthus, which Augustus valued so highly, that, after his death, Tiberius consecrated it to his memory, in the temple dedicated to him.

But the greatest influx of Greek pictures at any one time into Rome was during the edileship of Scaurus; when, on account of a real or pretended debt owing by the people of Sicyon to Rome, the whole of the pictures of that city were seized and conveyed to Italy. Among these the most precious appears to have been a sacrifice by Pausius, the greatest painter of his native town, and one whose playful disposition and agreeable qualities we may gather from even the short notices we can at this distance of time collect[54].

Such were a few of the many pictures, the prizes of war, which were brought to adorn the temples, palaces, and public places of Rome; not to speak of those with which taste or fashion decorated private houses[55].

It is not to be doubted that such an influx of excellent statues and pictures caused a revival of the taste for the arts. And accordingly there grew up new schools of painting in Italy as a matter of course. But no name of note has been preserved. Pliny, to be sure, tells us of one Ludius, in the time of Augustus, who first devised the decoration of the walls of houses with rural scenery; and nearly at the same time lived Arellius, a man of talent, but of dissolute manners. These were followed by Aurelius, Cornelius Pinus, and Actius Priscus, who were employed by Vespasian to decorate some temples which he rebuilt; but their pictures are said scarcely to have attained mediocrity, much less excellence.

In sculpture there is proof still existing that great manual dexterity had survived the genius that produced the ideal Jupiter of Phidias, and the Venus of Praxiteles. That dexterity was happily applied to portraits.

There is an individual expression, notwithstanding some hardness, in the Roman portraits in marble down to a very late period, that must satisfy us that they are genuine likenesses, and that enables us to read the characters of the men as truly as if we sat in their company. But the artists that wrought in and for Rome were now Greeks, and with the exception of some of those who engraved gems[56], their works are universally of an inferior character.

Under the magnificent Hadrian there was indeed a temporary revival of art. All that the patronage of a Roman Emperor, ambitious of distinction as the reviver of art and elegance could do, was done. The portraits of Antinoüs, which he caused to be executed, whether with a flowery garland, and beautiful as Adonis, or in the character of an Egyptian priest, or as a Greek huntsman, rival the youthful gods and heroes of the sculptors of Greece[57]. But with Hadrian and the Antonines this prosperity ended[58].

The arts could not flourish where tyranny, vice, and civil war alternately reigned. They withered almost to death; and had Constantine not pillaged the monuments of his predecessors his own would have remained mere masses of deformity, to mark the degradation of art[59].

While such was the fate of sculpture, that of painting was little better. Some of the Roman conquerors had introduced, from the eastern provinces, a taste for that gross kind of painting, Mosaic. One of the finest pieces executed in Italy was the great pavement in the Temple of Fortune, at Prænesti[60], by Egyptian artists in the service of Sylla the dictator; and, as a pavement, the coolness and cleanliness of that kind of work must have had strong recommendations, besides whatever merit the designs might possess. This luxury soon became so general, that, even in the remote province of Britain, specimens of mosaic pavements, of no common beauty, are from time to time discovered in the neighbourhood of Roman stations. To the workers in mosaic we are probably indebted for part of what little art outlived the five dull ages preceding the twelfth century; and for a larger part to the illuminators of books, whose miniatures certainly preserved much that was afterwards used to great advantage by the revivers of painting in Italy and Germany.

Pliny mentions Aterius Labeo, a man of prætorian rank, who in his time was very skilful in small works of painting, which I conceive to have been miniature. He exercised his art in Gallia Narboniensis, where he was vice-consul; and I have sometimes fancied that his works might have assisted to form the early illuminators of missals in the southern provinces, nay, perhaps, the Monk of the Golden Isles himself.

I cannot omit to mention here, that the first persons who illustrated books appear to have been Varro and Atticus. In the books of their noble libraries, they each of them inserted small portraits of the authors at the head of their works. This was within a century of our era; and so diligent had they been in seeking out the portraits of authors, that M. Varro published a collection of seven hundred[61].

Cornelius Nepos says, that under each of the heads in his collection, Atticus wrote four or five verses, describing the deeds and honours of the original. Had but a few of these miniatures come down to our times, how precious they would have been to the artist and the antiquary.

Among the last names of ancient Italian painters given us by Pliny, is that of Turpilius, a noble Venetian, who painted at Verona in the first century, with considerable reputation; and it is remarkable that some of the earliest of modern painters appear at Verona, and that many of the most beautiful miniature illuminations extant were executed by very ancient monks of that city[62].

It was in this first century that the great catastrophe, which buried several ancient cities in one of the most cultivated parts of Italy, occurred. It proved fatal, too, to the extraordinary man to whom we owe not only the greatest part of our knowledge of the painters of antiquity, but all that is to be depended upon of the practice of the art. Pompeii with other towns was covered with ashes from Mount Vesuvius; and in them such works of art as were not portable, remained fresh as at the day of their disappearance, to gratify our curiosity: and it was in a visit to Pompeii to observe the phenomena connected with the eruption that Pliny lost his life.

Every one must be struck with the great disparity between the bronzes and marbles, and the pictures of Pompeii. Some of the bronze figures and most of the furniture of that metal are exquisite in taste and execution, and many of the marbles are not far behind them. But the pictures are of a very inferior character, generally speaking. Single figures there are indeed of great beauty, and some arabesques elegantly designed; but the groups are for the most part more like sculpture than painting; and the few landscapes are little better than those of the Chinese.

To account for this in some measure, I would suggest, that the pictures we have found are merely the decorations of small private houses, and that they must have been executed late in the decline of art, because the great earthquake which had destroyed the temples of Pompeii, but a few years before that eruption of the mountain which buried the town, must have shaken the stucco from the walls, and with it whatever specimens of art of a better time might have then existed[63]. Besides, the inhabitants of Pompeii had most of them time to escape with their most precious moveables. Now, if any of the residents in that small provincial town, which was to Rome as Folkestone may be to London, possessed any Greek pictures, or others of value, they were painted on light wooden pannels (larch or sycamore), and were easily removed, so that, if not saved, they must have been consumed in the fields by the fiery showers, that destroyed more persons without the gates of the town than within them. Hence I cannot think that the pictures of Pompeii furnish a fair criterion by which to judge of the real nature of antique painting, any more than the arabesques that have been found in the Roman baths and the subterranean chambers of the palaces, which we cannot suppose to have been the places where the choicest works of art were placed.

Two very beautiful pieces of antique painting, now in London, which were found near Rome, seem to corroborate my opinion that the pictures scattered through the Italian provinces were generally inferior to those belonging to Rome itself and the immediate neighbourhood. One of these is the half figure of a boy, with a double flute; broad in colour and effect, and round and fine in form, reminding one of the Venetian frescoes, particularly those of Paul Veronese. The other is a Ganymede, very beautiful in form, and remarkable for the effect of light and shadow. The light is principally on the body of the Ganymede, in the centre, and carried into the blue sky on the left; but a low, light stone altar on the right balances it. Over the altar, the eagle, with outstretched wings, is dark; and the dark is continued behind the lower part of the figure of the boy by a purple mantle.

These two pictures have none of the stiff, sculpture-like look of almost all the other antique pictures I have seen. They are real pictures, in which the artist has attended to light and shadow, and to general effect, as well as to colour and form. Whether they were the works of Greeks settled in Rome, or of their Italian scholars, they give me the notion of much more skill in painting, as an art quite distinct from sculpture, than any other antique picture I ever saw[64].

By the existing statues we perceive that the ancient writers did not exaggerate the merit of their sculptors; why therefore should we doubt their judgment as to their painters?

But to whatever perfection the art of painting might have arrived in the bright days of Greece, it is certain that, when Pliny wrote, it had sunk down to a very low degree in that country: and there is good reason to believe that under the Empire there were no great Roman painters; but this was not for want of encouragement. In the towns preserved by the ashes of Vesuvius there is scarcely a house where some apartment is not painted, where the precious red walls, varnished with wax[65], are not decorated with dancing figures and arabesques; and certainly not one where the doorways or the kitchens are not adorned or disfigured, as it may be, with portraits of all manner of utensils and articles of food.

I confess I have been charmed to observe that glass decanters, pretty like our own, were used for water, wine, and sherbet, at the drinking houses in those ancient fishing towns; that their sirloins were cut in true English fashion, as in the picture in what is called the surgeon’s house, that dog who is gnawing the bones of one could tell; and that hams and legs of mutton, to say nothing of broiled eels, must have looked just like our own when brought to table. But above all was my fancy diverted, when I perceived, by the sign over the school-master’s door, that the same remedies for dulness were prescribed eighteen centuries ago, as are found beneficial now.

Numerous, indeed, must the painters of the first century have been to supply such demands! But not even one name have they left for posterity to dwell upon.

There is no question but that portrait painters abounded. The numerous portraits of the period, in marble, attest it, if we had no other proof. But Nero himself patronised that branch of the art, and ordered a canvas[66], one hundred and twenty feet high, to be strained, whereon his colossal portrait might overlook the city, from the gardens of Marius. But his design was frustrated; the lightning blasted the portrait ere it was finished, and we have not even the name of the painter left, who was to have been immortalized along with the emperor!

Some small portraits of this period have been preserved among the catacombs, and it would be a matter of great interest to examine carefully those preserved in the cabinets of Christian antiquities, which fill one long gallery of the Vatican. I had too short a time when there to make any observations worth setting down. My first visit to these precious cabinets was in company with Canova, and my second, after a lapse of eight years, with Maia! They drew my attention to other objects; and as I then hoped to revisit Rome, I was willing to be led by such guides, trusting to the future for an opportunity of forwarding my own particular pursuits. But some other person must now take my place. Infirmity, not age, binds me to my own fire side. Happy that I have been permitted to see so much to occupy my thoughts and time with pleasant retrospect, under circumstances that without occupation would be dreary indeed.

In the first century of our era, we may consider painting as a merely decorative art, little better than upholstery, excepting when applied to portraits, for which human vanity will always create a demand. There might also be artists employed to copy the ancient pictures of Greece; and now and then, among that class of painters, one who would, in some original composition, imitate the style and manner of the older masters.

This is so natural that it scarcely wants the confirmation of authority to gain belief. But I think we have authority in the notices scattered through the dialogues of Lucian[67], and in the descriptions of pictures by Philostratus[68], who erects his imaginary gallery on the shores of the bay of Naples.

But a great change was taking place in the world: the gay and poetical, but licentious belief of Greece and Italy, was fading away. The images and actions of gods and heroes no longer delighted the multitude. A graver, purer, yet more impassioned faith, was gradually advancing through many impediments: and it was long ere its votaries had leisure to convert to its service the glorious arts that had adorned the temples of the old religion.

The interval during which the change was going on, could not be otherwise than hurtful to those arts; and accordingly, the first efforts of Christian painting, as far as we see in the few relics we possess, were gross and coarse.

Yet there is in them a certain dignity of expression, which saves them from contempt. But the revival of art in Christian times belongs rather to the Greeks than the Italians, as I shall have occasion to point out; for as the conquest of Greece by Rome brought art and artists into Italy, so the removal of the seat of government attracted them eastward again, to the new court, and they left the deserted Capitol of the Western Empire to seek the patronage of the rising city.

From what I have said in this Essay, it will be seen that the time when Italy could boast of native artists, equal to those of the surrounding nations, was before Rome existed.

That after the Roman conquests, native artists gradually disappeared, and the very few who have left a name seem only placed here and there as beacons, to show the nakedness of the land.

That the forced luxury of art, fostered by imported pictures and statues, foreign artists and imperial patronage, produced in Italy no painter or sculptor of eminence, even in the most flourishing times of Roman politeness; while the free cities of Greece had given birth to those men of sublime genius, whose borrowed works gave to Rome all the lustre she could ever boast of in art[69].

FOOTNOTES:

ESSAY III. PAINTING IN GREECE, FIRST AND SECOND PERIODS.

It is no small glory to be made partaker of a great and worthy matter, however it be but a little you do possess.

Columella.

To write of the beginning of painting in Greece, one of two theories must be repeated. Either that all nations, at a certain stage of civilisation, have discovered a fondness and aptness for the fine arts without communicating with others; or that painting was brought with the other arts ready formed from Egypt to Sicyon and Corinth.

For my part I am apt to consider both these views as partly true.

It is not to be supposed that the civilised people, whatever was its origin, which possessed Greece before the time of the earliest Egyptian colonies, and which in the massy walls and curious treasure-houses, which it has left as monuments, proving a considerable advance in the knowledge of mechanics, had made none in those finer arts that adorn and sweeten life. Neither are we obliged to believe that the Egyptian Colonies, whether led by an unfortunate prince, or composed of men flying from the tyranny of a harsh government, would forget to practise the arts which flourished in their native soil. They might improve the nation on whose shores they landed, and in return be improved by intercourse with it[71].

It is certain, however, that whatever were the first steps of the arts of Greece, they soon out-stripped those of every other nation, making their practice the law by which all others were to be tried for ever.

Alas, for the pictures of Greece! they have perished, and are now mere matter of history, and like the hands that produced them

But the temples they adorned, the statues that were coeval with them, the bassi-relievi conceived in the spirit that inspired them, are not utterly gone; and while we have them before us, the history of the pictures of Greece may still borrow a momentary reality as we read over the descriptions of the heroes of Polygnotus, and the Helens and Venuses of Zeuxis and Apelles.

Of the plastic arts it is scarcely possible to doubt that modelling in clay must be the earliest that arrived at any degree of perfection. The very shaping and moulding of vessels for domestic use, must have given a facility of hand to the potter, highly advantageous when he began to model his first ornamental foliage, and afterwards in his imitations of men and animals. It is a pity not to believe that the first portrait in profile, and the first bust, owed their common origin to love; and after all it may be true. The potter’s art may have formed the clumsy likeness of a human head, and many a rude outline may have been scratched on rocks, or cut in turf, or drawn in the sands before. But Dibutatis tenderly tracing the shadow of her sleeping lover, may still have formed the first individual likeness; and her father’s filling up of that line, the first head in clay that deserved the name of model.

At all events, I would have the poets and the young believe it.

The tale points to Corinth as an early nursery of art; and we have seen how closely the beautiful vases of that city and those of Etruria resemble each other. Of late years, vessels almost equally beautiful, and not dissimilar in form, have been found delineated in the catacombs of Egypt; but it is remarkable, that although they are ornamented with many tracings and scrolls like those of Corinth, there is no instance of their bearing the human form.

The designs on the Corinthian and Etruscan vases, may be considered as pictures in monochrome, according to Fuseli[72], whose ingenious but somewhat fanciful account of the process by which the monochromes were executed, is probably near the truth.

The works of the earliest Greek painters, therefore, which we know were called monochromes, resembled the Corinthian and Etruscan figured vases; and, perhaps, it is equally credible that the two, three, and four-tinted vases represent, with tolerable accuracy, the steps towards the many coloured pictures which excited the admiration of the Greeks in the earliest paintings mentioned in authentic history.

But, before we take up the history of painting exclusively, it will not be uninteresting to name a few of those early productions of the workers in metal, mentioned by the poets or older historians, and, in some instances, preserved in the treasures of the Grecian temples, particularly those of Delphi, to a late period[73]. We must remember that the Greeks of Europe, Asia, and the Islands, practised the arts with equal taste and success; that, by trade or by alliance with the Phœnicians, they maintained an intercourse with Egypt, and also a direct commerce with the Etruscans; and that their border nations on the Asiatic side were cultivated and luxurious, drawing their origin either from the same ancient civilised stock with themselves, or from Egypt, or its immediate neighbourhood.

The shield of Achilles, that noble piece of chased and inlaid work as described by Homer, about nine centuries before our era, is an example. Its rich design could not have been imagined, unless the arts necessary to produce it had arrived at a high degree of perfection in his country at the time he wrote[74], though we may doubt if, at the period of the war of Troy, three hundred years before Homer, there existed artificers capable of executing it.