Chapter I

THE ART OF PAINTING

The most adequate object of sculpture is the tranquil self-absorption of personality in its essential substance, the character whose spiritual individuality is in the fullest degree displayed on the face of its corporeal presentment, making the sensuous frame, which reveals this incorporation of spirit, adequate to such an embodiment of mind wholly in its aspects of external form. The sightless look has as yet failed to concentrate at one point the supreme focus of ideal life, the vital breath of soul, the heart of most intimate feeling, and is as yet without spiritual movement, without the deliberate distinction between a world without it and a life within. It is on account of this that the sculpture of the ancients leaves us in some degree unmoved. We either do not remain long before it, or our delay is rather due to a scientific investigation of the fine modifications of form and detail which it displays. We cannot blame mankind if they are unable to take the profound interest in fine works of sculpture which such works deserve. To know how to value them is a study in itself. At first glance we either experience no attraction, or are immediately conscious of the general character of the whole. To come to closer quarters we have first to discover what it is that continues to supply such an interest. An enjoyment, however, which is only the possible result of study, thought, learning, and a wide experience is not the immediate object of art. And, moreover, the essential demand we make that a character should develop, should pass into the field of action and affairs, and that the soul should thereby meet with divisions and-grow deeper, this, after all our journey in search of the delight which this study of the works of antique sculpture may bring to us, remains unsatisfied. For this reason we inevitably feel more at home in painting. In other words we are at once and for the first time conscious in it of the principle of our finite and yet essentially infinite spiritual substance, the life and breath of our own existence; we contemplate in its pictures the very spark which works and is active in ourselves. The god of sculpture remains for sense-perception an object simply; in painting, on the contrary, the Divine appears as itself essentially the living subject of spiritual life, which comes into direct relations with the community, and makes it possible for each individual thereof to place himself in spiritual communion and reconcilement with Him. The substantive character of such a Divinity is not, as in sculpture, an individual that persists in the inflexible bond of its own limitations[220], but is one which expands into and is differentiated within the community itself.

The same principle generally differentiates the individual from his own bodily frame and external environment to quite as considerable an extent as it brings the soul into mediated relation with the same. Within the compass of this subjective differentiation—regarded as the independent assertion of human individuality as opposed to God, Nature, and the inward and external life of other persons, regarded also conversely as the most intimate relation, the most secure communion of God with the community, and of individual men with God, the environment of Nature and the infinite variety of the wants, purposes, passions, and activities of human existence—falls the entire movement and vitality, which sculpture, both in respect to its content and its means of contributing expression, suffers to escape; and it adds an immeasurable wealth of new material and a novel breadth and variety of artistic treatment which hitherto was absent. Briefly, then, this principle of subjectivity is on the one hand the basis of division, on the other a principle of mediation and synthesis, so that painting unites in one and the same art what hitherto formed the subject-matter of two different arts, namely, the external environment, which architecture treated artistically, and the essentially spiritual form, which was elaborated by sculpture. Painting places its figures on the background of a Nature or an architectural environment, both of which are the products of its own invention in precisely the same sense, and is able to make this external material in both of these aspects by virtue of its emotional powers and soul a counterfeit within its ideal realm, in the degree that it understands how best to place it in relation and harmony with the spirit of the figures that live and move therein.

Such is the principle of the new advance that painting contributes to the representative powers of art.

If we inquire now the course which the more detailed examination of our subject necessitates the following division will serve us.

In the first place we shall have yet further to consider the general character which the art of painting must necessarily receive in accordance with its notion and relatively both to its specific content, the material that is made consonant with this content and finally the artistic treatment which is thereby involved.

Secondly, we have to develop the separate modes of definition, which are contained in the principle of such a content and manner of presentation, and more succinctly fix the boundaries of the subject-matter which is adapted to painting no less than the modes of its conception, composition, and technical qualities as painting.

Thirdly, painting is itself broken up into distinct schools of painting by reason of the above divisions of matter, technique, and so forth, which, as in the other arts, have their own phases of historical development.

1. GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE ART OF PAINTING

After having thus emphasized as the essential principle of painting that world of the soul in its vitality of feeling, conception, and action cast in embrace round heaven and earth, in the variety of its manifestations and external disclosures within the bodily frame, and affirmed on this account that the focus, and centre of this art is to be sought for in romantic and Christian art, it may immediately occur to the reader that not only do we find excellent artists among the ancients, who are as distinguished in this art as others of their age in sculpture—and we cannot praise them more highly—but also that other peoples, notably the Chinese, Hindoos, and Egyptians, have secured distinction in the direction of painting. Without question the art of painting is, by virtue of the variety of the objects treated and the particular type of its manner of execution, less[221] restricted in the range of nations that exemplify its pursuit. This, however, is not the point at issue. If our question is simply that of the historian doubtless we find single examples of one type[222] of painting or another have been produced at the most varied epochs by the nations already mentioned and others. It is, however, a profounder question altogether when we ask ourselves what is the principle of painting, examine the means of its exposition and in doing so seek to establish that content, which by virtue of its own nature is emphatically consonant with the painter's art as such and its mode of presentment, so that we can affirm the form thus selected to be wholly adequate to the content in question. We have but little left us of the painting of the ancient world, examples, in fact, which we see can neither have formed part of the most consummate work of antiquity in this respect, nor have been the product of its most famous masters. At least all that has been discovered through excavation in private houses is of this character. It is impossible, however, not to admire the delicacy of taste, the suitability of the objects, selected, the clearness of the grouping, and, we may add, the lightness of the handling and freshness of the colouring, excellences which without doubt were present in the originals of such pictures in a far higher degree, in imitation of which, for example, the wall paintings in the so-called house of the tragedian at Pompeii have been executed. We have, unfortunately, no examples of the works of famous masters. Whatever degree of excellence, however, these more original productions attained, we may none the less affirm that the ancients could not, alongside of the unmatchable beauty of their sculptures, have lifted the art of painting to the level of artistic elaboration as painting which we find secured in the Christian era of the Middle Ages, and pre-eminently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And we may assume this to be so on the philosophical ground that the most genuine heart of the Greek outlook is, in a degree which is inapplicable to the other arts, concordant with the root and fragrance of that which sculpture and sculpture alone can supply. And in art we are not entitled to separate spiritual content from its mode of presentation. If, having this clear to our minds, we inquire how it is that painting only reached its most characteristic consummation through the content of the romantic type of art, we can but reply that it is precisely the intimacy of feeling, the blessedness[223] and pain that give to us the soul of this profounder content, whose demand is for such a vital infusion, which has paved the way to and in fact been the cause of this higher perfection of painting.

As an example of what I mean I will but recall to recollection one particular instance already cited, namely, that we borrow from Raoul-Rochette of the treatment of Isis carrying Horns on her knees. In general the subject is identical with the Madonna pictures, a Divine mother and her child. The difference of handling and conception in the two cases, however, is immeasurable. The Egyptian Isis, as we find her thus situated on bas-reliefs, has nothing maternal about her, no tenderness, no trait of soul or emotion, such as is not even wholly absent in the stiffer Byzantine pictures of the Madonna. And if we think of Raphael, or any other great Italian master, what results have they not achieved from this subject of the Mother and Christ-babe! What depth of emotion, what spiritual life, what intimacy and wealth of heart, what exaltation and endearment, how human and yet how entirely filled with divine spirit is the soul which speaks to us from every line and feature. And under what infinite variety of forms and situations is this one subject presented to us even by particular masters taken singly and still more by different artists. The mother, the pure Virgin, the physical, the spiritual beauty, loftiness and devotion of love, all this and countless other features are emphasized in their turn as the main significance of the expression. But chief of all we find throughout that it is not the sensuous beauty of mere form, but the animate life of Spirit, by virtue of which artistic genius no less than mastery of execution is asserted and secured. Now it is quite true that Greek art has passed a long way beyond Egyptian art, and we may add that it has made the expression of man's soul an object aimed for. But it was not capable of grasping that intimacy and depth of emotion which is discovered to us in the Christian type of expression, and indeed was careful, in accordance with its entire character, not to attach itself to such intensity of feeling. Take, for instance, the case I have more than once already cited of the faun, who carries the youthful Bacchus in his arms; it is, no doubt, expressive of extremely tender and amiable qualities. The nymphs are equally so who tend upon Bacchus, a situation which is depicted by a gem in a very beautiful group of figures. In such cases we have an analogous sentiment of unconstrained love for a child, equally free from passion and yearning; but, even putting on one side the maternal relation[224], the expression possesses in no respect the intimacy, the depth of soul, which confront us in Christian paintings. The ancients may very well have painted excellent portraits, but neither their way of conceiving natural fact, nor the point of view from which they regarded human and divine conditions was of the kind that, in the case of painting, an infusion of soul-life could be expressed with such intimate intensity as was possible in Christian painting.

The demand of painting, however, for this more personal type of inspiration is a result of its very material. In other words, the sensuous medium in which it moves is an extension on pure surface, and the display of form by means of the use of diversified colours, by virtue of which process the objective shape, as we have it presented to the vision, is converted to an artificial illusion adopted by a spiritual agency[225] in the place of the actual form of fact. It is part of the principle of such a treatment of material that which is external should not ultimately retain its validity in its independent native existence, even in the modified form it takes as a vital product of human hands, but should in this form of realization be lowered as reality to a purely phenomenal reflex of the inward soul-life itself, which seeks to contemplate itself independently as such. When we look into the heart of the matter we shall find that the advance from the rounded form of sculpture amounts to nothing less than the above statement. It is the soul-life, the ideality of Spirit which undertakes to express itself in an intimate way through the counterfeit of the objective world. Add to this, in the second place, that the surface on which the art of painting makes its objects visible, opens independently the path to the employment of a surrounding background and other complex relations; and colour too, regarded as the articulation of that which appears, requires a correspondent differentiation of soul-life, which can only be rendered clearly through the definition of expression, situation, and action, and consequently makes necessary variety, movement, and the detailed exposition of both the inward and external life. This principle of inwardness[226] taken alone, which at the same time in its actual manifestation is associated with the variety of external existence and is cognizable on the face of such particular existence as an essentially complete and independent complex of conditions, we have already seen to be the principle of the romantic type of art, in whose configuration and mode of presentation consequently the medium of painting discovers in a unique way its wholly adequate object. Conversely we may affirm at the same time that romantic art, when the question is actually one of definite works of art, must seek for material which is consonant with its content, and in the first instance it finds such in painting, which consequently remains more or less of a formal character when dealing with all objects and compositions not of this type[227]. Granting, then, the fact that we find outside the Christian paintings an Oriental, Greek, and Roman school of painting, yet the real centre and focus of all is none the less the elaboration which this art secured within the boundaries of romantic art. We can only speak of Oriental and Greek painting in the same kind of way as we did when, despite our main thesis that sculpture attained its highest crown of perfection in the classical Ideal, we referred to a subordinate Christian type of sculpture. In other words we are forced to admit that the art of painting first apprehends its content in the material of the romantic type of art, which completely corresponds to its instruments and its modes, and consequently that it was only after the treatment of such material that it discovered how best to use and elaborate in every direction all the means at its disposal.

Following now the course of the above remarks in a wholly general way we have to observe as follows in connection with the content, material, and artistic mode of treatment of painting.

(a) The fundamental definition of the content of painting is, as we have seen, subjectivity as an independent process[228].

(α) In this process, looking at it from the point of view of a reflex of soul-life, individuality must not wholly pass into the universality its substance, but must on the contrary disclose how it retains that content as a distinctive personality[229], and possesses and expresses its inward life, that is the vitality of its own conception and feeling in the same; neither should the external form be wholly dominated by the ideal individuality as is the case in sculpture. For the principle of subjectivity, albeit that it permeates the external material as the mode of objectivity adequate to express it, is notwithstanding likewise an identity which withdraws itself into itself out of that objective domain, and by virtue of this self-seclusion is relatively to that objective aspect neutral, leaving it quite untrammelled. Just as therefore, on the spiritual side of the content, the particularity of the personal life is not set forth in direct union with its substance and universality, but is essentially reflected as the culminating feature of its independent embodiment[230], so, too, in the objective envisagement of form, the particularity and universality of the same are carried from their previous plastic union[231] to a predominance of the individual aspect, and indeed of comparatively accidental and indifferent features, and in a manner much the same as that which, in the reality of sense experience, is the prevailing character of all phenomena.

(β) A further important point is that connected with the range of scope that is permitted to the art of painting in virtue of its principle with regard to the objects to be thus presented.

The free principle of subjectivity suffers on the one hand the entire field of natural objects, and every department of human activity to remain in its substantive mode of existence; on the other, it is capable of entering into fusion with all possible detail, and creating therefrom a content of its own ideal life, of rather we should say that only in this interfusion with concrete actuality does it assert itself as concrete and vital in its products. Consequently it is possible for the painter to import a wealth of material into the realm occupied by his artistic works, which remains outside, the reach of the sculptor. The entire world of the religious idea, conceptions of heaven and hell, the history of Christ, his disciples and saints, external Nature, all that concerns humanity down to the most fugitive of situations and characters, all this material and more can find a place here. For as we have seen all that pertains to the detail, caprice, and accidental features of human need and interest is affected by this principle, which at once strives to comprehend and compose it.

(γ) And along with this fact we have as its corollary that painting makes the soul of man itself the subject of its creative work. All that is alive within the soul is present in ideal form, if it is, when we consider its content, at once objective and absolute in the abstract sense[232]. For the emotional life of soul can without question carry the universal within its content, a content, however, which, as feeling, does not retain the form of this universality, but appears under the mode as I, this individual person—I know my identity therein and feel the same. In order to educe and set forth this objective content as objective, I must forget myself. In this way the painter no doubt reveals to our sight the ideal substance of soul in the form of external objects, but the truly real content which it expresses is the personal soul that feels. For which reason painting, from the point of view of form, is unable to offer such distinctive envisagements of the Divine as sculpture, but only ideas of less defined character such as belong to the emotions. It may appear as a contradiction to this position that we find again and again selected as subjects of the paintings of masters, who stand without question in the highest rank, the external environment of mankind, mountains, valleys, meadows, brooks, trees, ships, buildings, their interiors, in short earth, sea, and sky. What, however, constitutes the core in the content of such works of art is not the objects themselves, but the vitality and soul imported into them by the artist's conception and execution, his emotional life in fact, which is reflected in his work, and gives us not merely a counterfeit of external objects, but therewith his own personality and temperament[233]. And it is precisely by his doing this that the objects of Nature, as reflected by painting, even from this realistic point of view, are relatively insignificant, because the influence of soul-life begins to assert itself in them as the main significance. In this tendency towards temperament, which, in the case of objects borrowed from external Nature, may frequently only amount to a general response emphasized between the two sides, we find the most important distinction between painting on the one hand and sculpture and architecture on the other. Painting indeed approximates in this respect more closely to music and emphasizes here the point of transition from the plastic arts to that of tone.

(b) To proceed to our second main division I have already several times referred, if only in respect to features of fundamental importance, to the difference we discover between the sensuous material of painting and that of sculpture. I will therefore in this place only touch upon the closer connection which obtains between this material and the spiritual content which it most notably has to display to us.

(α) The first fact we have to consider in this connection is this that painting compresses the three dimensions, of Space. Absolute concentration would be carried to the point, as elimination of all juxtaposition, and as unrest essentially predicable of such concentration, as we find it in the point of Time. Such a mode of negation carried out in its entire result, however, we only meet with in the art of music. Painting, on the contrary, permits the spatial relation still to subsist, and only effaces one of the three dimensions; superficies is made the element of its representations. This reduction of the three dimensions to level surface is implied in principle of increasing reality, which is only capable thereby of asserting itself in spatial relation as such ideal transmutation, owing to the fact that it does not suffer the complete totality of objective fact to persist as such, but restricts the same. Ordinarily we are accustomed to view this reduction as a caprice of the art which amounts to a defect. What is here sought for, it appears, is that natural objects in all their naked reality, or spiritual ideas and feelings, by means of the human body and its postures should be made visible to our senses for such an aim it is obvious that the surface is insufficient and inferior to Nature, which appears before us with a completeness wholly different.

(αα) Painting is unquestionably yet more abstract than sculpture in respect to material conditioned in Space; but this abstraction, remote as it is from being a purely capricious limitation, or an indication of human incapacity, is just that which brings about the necessary advance from sculpture. Even sculpture is not simply an imitation of natural or physical existence, but a creation of intelligence, which removes from form all aspects of natural existence which are not in accord with the definite content it undertakes to present. This elimination was carried out by sculpture in the case of all colour detail, so that what remained to it was only the abstraction of material form. In painting we have the opposite process, its content being the ideality of soul-life, which can only appear on the face of objective reality, by a process of self-absorption from that very material[234]. The art of painting, therefore, no doubt, works for the sense-perception, but in a way, through which the object which it displays remains no longer an actual natural existence wholly in Space, but is changed to a counterfeit creation of intelligence, in which it only so far reveals its spiritual source as it annuls the actual existence of its object, recreating it for itself in a purely phenomenal semblance within its own spiritual realm—for Spirit.

(ββ) And to this intent painting must necessarily effect a breach with the totality of the spatial condition, and there is no reason for charging to human incapacity this loss of Nature's completeness. In other words, inasmuch as the object of painting from the point of view of its spatial existence, is merely a semblance, reflective of the soul of man, exhibited by art for his spirit, the self-subsistency of the object as we find it actually in Space is dissolved, and the object is related in a far more restricted way to the spectator than is the case in sculpture. A statue is by itself wholly an isolated object, independent of the spectator, who may place himself where he pleases; his point of view, his movements, his walking round it, not one of them affect the work of art as a whole[235]. If this self-subsistency is to be preserved the sculptured figure must also have some definite impression to offer each and every point of view. And this independence of the work must be retained in sculpture for the reason that its content is the tranquillity, self-seclusion, and objective presence which, in both an external and ideal sense, reposes on their own substance. In painting, on the contrary, whose content is conditioned by an ideal atmosphere, and in fact is composed of ideal relations essentially particularized, it is precisely this aspect of discord in a work of art between object and spectator which has to be emphasized, and yet with a like directness to be resolved in the fact, that the work, as depicting the ideality of intelligence in its entire mode of presentation, can be only defined under the assumption that it stands there related to an individual mind, that is a spectator, and apart from the same has no self-subsistency. The spectator is assumed and reckoned to be there from the first, and the work of art is only intelligible as related to this point of personal contemplation[236]. For such a relation to mere visibility and its reflection upon an individual consciousness, however, the mere show of reality is sufficient; or rather the actual totality of the spatial condition is a defect, because in that case the objects seen retain an independent existence, and do not appear to be created by Spirit for its own contemplation. Nature consequently is not entitled to reduce its images to the plain surface; its objects possess and claim to possess a real and independent existence. The satisfaction, however, we derive from painting is not in actual existence, but in the contemplative interest we receive from the external reproduction of ideal truths, things born of the soul, and its art therefore dispenses wholly with the need and apparatus of spatial reality in its complete organization.

(γγ) And together with this reduction to the level surface we may thirdly associate the fact that painting is placed in a still more remote position to architecture than that occupied by sculpture. Works of sculpture even where exhibited independently for themselves in public places or gardens, require some kind of pedestal treated architectonically, and, in the case of apartments, forecourts, and halls, either the art of building merely assists in presenting the statue's fitting environment, or conversely the sculptured figure is used as the decoration of the building, and between these two thus related objects we find a close association. Painting, on the contrary, whether placed in the enclosed apartment, or in public halls, or under the open sky, is limited to the wall. Originally its function is simply to fill up empty wall spaces. Among the ancients this original destination is mainly sufficient, and they decorated in this way the walls of their temples, and in more recent times also their private chambers. Gothic architecture, whose main task is the enclosure under the most grandiose conditions, supplies no doubt still larger surfaces, or rather the largest possible, yet it is only in the most ancient mosaics that we find painting is employed as a decoration of empty spaces, whether in the case of the outside or the interior. The more recent architecture of the fourteenth century, on the contrary, fills up its enormous wall surfaces in an architectural manner, the most imposing example I know of which is the main façade of Strasbourg cathedral. Here we find that the empty surfaces, excluding the entrance doors, the rose and other windows, are filled in by the ornamental work analogous to that of windows traced over the walls, and decorated by figures of considerable delicacy and variety of form, so that we have no need here for painting. In the case of religious architecture, therefore, painting mainly appears in buildings which begin to approximate to the ancient type of architecture. As a rule, however, Christian painting is to be distinguished from the arts of building, and presents its works in independent form, as for example in large pictures, whether placed in chapels or on high altars. It is true that here, too, the picture must retain some relation to the character of the place, which it is destined to fill; for the rest, however, it is not merely intended to fill up wall spaces, but to hang them as a work of art independently just as a work of sculpture may do. In conclusion painting has its use as a decoration of halls and apartments in public buildings, town halls, palaces, and private houses, in which respect its association with architecture is once more closely marked, an association, however, in which its independence as a free art ought not to be lost.

(β) A further necessary ground for the contraction of the spatial dimensions in painting to bare surface is due to the fact that the art of painting is concerned to express ideal conditions essentially in their separation[237], and thereby rich in every kind of particular character. A mere restriction to the shapes of spatial form, with which sculpture is able to rest satisfied, vanishes therefore in the more luxuriant art; for the forms of spatial dimension are the most abstract in Nature, and an attempt must now be made to seize particular distinctions, in so far as the demand is now for an essentially more multifold material. The matter specifically defined in the physical sense is attached to the very principle of presentation in Space, the differences of which[238], if they are to appear as essential in the work of art, themselves disclose this fact[239] in the total configuration of spatial form, which no longer remains the final mode of presentation, and they are compelled to make a breach in the complete form of spatial dimensions, in order to cancel the exclusive appearance of the physical medium. For the dimensions in painting are not presented by themselves in their actual reality, but are merely by means of this physical aspect made to appear and be visible as such.

(αα) If we further inquire what is the nature of the physical element which the art of painting makes use of we shall find this to be Light, regarding it as that medium which renders all objects whatever visible.

Previously the sensuous, concrete material of architecture was the resisting matter of gravity, which more particularly in the art of building asserted this character of heavy material in its features of burden, constraint, power to support and be supported, and even in sculpture still retained such characteristics. Heavy material encumbers because it does not possess its centre of material unity in itself, but in something else; and it seeks for this centre and strives towards it, though it retains its position through the resistance of other bodies, which become by doing so bodies of support. The principle of light is an opposite, or extreme, of that material of weight which is not as yet enclosed within its unity. Whatever else we may predicate of light it is obvious that it is absolutely devoid of weight and offers no resistance; rather it is pure identity with itself, and thereby simple self-relation, the primordial ideality, the original self of Nature. In light Nature make its start on the path of ideality or inwardness[240], and is the universal physical ego, which of course is not carried here to the point of particularity[241], nor has as yet concentrated itself within the unit of individuality and self-seclusion, yet is thereby enabled to cancel the bare objectivity and external show of heavy matter and abstract from the sensuous and spatial totality of the same[242]. From this aspect of the more ideal quality of light it becomes the physical principle of the art of painting.

(ββ) Light regarded simply as such, however, only exists as one aspect contained in the principle of subjectivity, that is, as this more ideal identity. In this respect light is manifestation, just that, which, however, in Nature is only asserted generally as the power of making objects visible, holding the particular content of that which it reveals outside itself as an objective world, which is not light, but rather that which confronts it and consequently is dark. These objects light renders cognizable under their distinctions of form by irradiating them, that is, illuminating to a greater or less degree their obscurity and invisibility, and permitting certain parts to be more visible, namely, as they approach the spectator, and others, on the contrary, more obscure as they withdraw from him. For light and darkness, putting for the present on one side the particular colour of an object, is generally speaking due to the relative remoteness of the illuminated objects from us in their specific degree of illumination. In this direct relation to objectivity light is no longer asserted simply as light, but as essentially particularized brightness and obscurity, light and shadow, whose varied manifestations render the shape and distance of objects from one another intelligible to the spectator. This is the principle which painting makes use of, because from the first differentiation is implied in its notion. If we compare this art in this respect with sculpture and architecture we shall see that in these latter arts the actual distinctions of spatial configuration are set forth in their nakedness, and light and shadow are suffered to retain the ordinary effect which light produces in Nature relatively to the position of the spectator, so that the rondure of form is here already independently[243] present and light and shade, whereby they are rendered visible, are merely a result of that which was already actually on the spot independently of this further aspect of their becoming visible. In the art of painting, however, brightness and darkness together with all their gradations and finest transitions are themselves part of the fundamental artistic material, and it is a purely intentional appearance they produce of that medium, which sculpture gives form to in its native state. Light and shade, in short, the appearance of objects under this illumination, is effected by art rather than the mere natural light, which consequently only makes that kind of brightness, darkness, and lighting visible, which are the products of painting. And this it is which constitutes the positive rationale deduced from the material of the art itself, why painting does not require three dimensions. Form is the creation of light and shadow simply, and that form which exists in spatial reality is superfluous.

(γγ) Bright and dark, shadow and light, no less than their interplay are, however, merely an abstraction, which do not exist in Nature as such abstraction, and consequently cannot be utilized as sensuous material. In other words Light, as we have already seen, is related to its opposite Dark. In this relation both principles have no self-subsistency apart from each other, but can only be asserted in their unity, that is, as the interplay of light and dark. The light, which is in this way essentially impaired and obscured, which, however, to a like extent transpierces and illumines darkness[244], supplies us with the principle of colour as the genuine material of painting. Light in its purity is devoid of colour, it is the pure indeterminacy of essential identity. Distinction from bare light, a lowering of its value, is the characteristic of colour, which in contrast to light is already in some degree obscurity, and together with which the principle of light is asserted in union. It is consequently an incorrect and false idea to hold that light is the aggregate result of different colours, or in other words different degrees of obscuration[245].

Form, distance, limitation, rounded shape, in short, all spatial relations and distinctions visible in the phenomena of Space are unfolded in the art of painting entirely by means of colour, the more ideal principle of which is capable of presenting a more ideal content and by virtue of its profounder oppositions, the infinite variety of its transitional gradations and the delicacy of its softest modulations relatively to the fulness and detail of the objects it accepts as subject-matter, is possessed of a field for its activity of the widest range. It is beyond belief what mere colour is able to accomplish in this art. Two human beings are, for example, something totally distinct. Either is in his self-conscious identity no less than his bodily organism an independent and exclusive spiritual and bodily totality, yet the entire result of this difference is in a picture reduced to a distinction of colours. In one place some particular shade of colour ceases, in another a particular one starts up, and by such means we get everything set before us, shape, distance, play of posture, expression, what is nearest to sense and what is most akin to intelligence. And we are not to regard this reduction as a make-shift and defect. Quite the reverse is the fact; the art of painting dispensing with the third dimension in no such way, but deliberately rejecting it in order to set in the place of purely spatial reality the higher and richer principle of colour.

(γ) This wealth enables painting to elaborate in its reproductions the entire extent of the phenomenal world. Sculpture is more or less restricted to the stable self-seclusion of individuality. In painting, however, the individual cannot remain in such limitations of stability whether regarded in his ideal aspect or relatively to the external world, but is placed in every kind of varied definition. For on the one hand, as already pointed out, he is placed in a far closer relation to the spectator, and on the other he receives a more varied connection with other individuals and the environment of Nature. A process, therefore, which merely illuminates semblance of objective fact makes possible the widest expansion of distances and spaces and the present of such and all the varied objects that appear in them in one and the same work of art. Yet it must no less, as a work of art, prove itself to be a self-contained and unified whole, and exhibit itself in this synthesis, not simply as an aggregate whose limits and boundaries are defined by no principle, but rather as a totality whose unified consistency is due to its own subject-matter.

(c) In the third place we have, after this general consideration of the content and sensuous material of painting, briefly to adduce in general terms the principle of the artistic mode of treatment adopted by it.

The art of painting more so than either sculpture or architecture admits of the two extremes. In the first case prominence is given to the religious and ethical severity of the conception and presentation of the ideal beauty of form, and in the second, where the subject-matter is, taken by itself, insignificant, to the detail of what it contains and the personal aspect of the creative art. We may therefore not unfrequently hear two extreme kinds of criticism. Our critic in the one case apostrophizes the nobility of the object, the depth and astonishing sufficiency of the conception, the greatness of the expression, and the boldness of the delineation[246]. And in the other equal praise is given to the fine and unexampled character of the painter's treatment of his colour. This contrast is implied in the very notion of the art; indeed, we may affirm that it is impossible to unite both aspects on one plane of elaboration. Each must remain inevitably independent of the other. For painting has shape simply as such, that is, the forms of spatial limitation, no less than colour as means contributive to its artistic result, and is placed thereby midway between the Ideal of the plastic arts and the extreme form of the direct detail of Nature's reality; by reason of which we get two distinct types of painting. One, that is the ideal, whose essential basis is universality; and the other, that which presents particular objects in all their closeness of detail.

(α) In this respect painting must accept, in the first instance, as sculpture, that which is substantive in the sense that the objects of religious belief are such, no less than the great events of history, and its pre-eminent individual characters, albeit it renders visible this substance in a form wherein the ideal and personal aspect is emphasized. It is the imposing character, the serious significance of the action portrayed, or the depth of the soul expressed which is here of most importance, so that the elaboration and employment of all the rich artistic means which are within the reach of painting, and the dexterity, which the wholly consummate use of these means demands regarded as a tour de force of technique, cannot here be entirely indicated. In cases of this kind it is the force of the content to be presented and the absorption in what is essential and substantive in the same, which tend to drive into the background the overwhelming facility in the art of painting as that aspect which is less essential. In this sense, for instance, the Cartoons of Raphael are of invaluable merit, and fully display the entire excellence of their composition, although Raphael, even in the case of particular pictures, despite all his mastery in drawing, and the purity of his ideal, and at the same time wholly vital personal figures, and the composition he may have arrived at, most certainly in colour, and all that concerns landscape and other aspects, is excelled by the Dutch masters. This is yet more the case with the earlier Italian heroes of art, in contrast to whom Raphael is to a somewhat similar degree inferior in depth, power, and ideality of expression, as he surpasses such in the technique of his craft, in the beauty of vital grouping, in draughtsmanship and the like[247].

(β) Conversely, however, the art of painting, as we have seen, ought to advance further than this exclusive absorption in the ideal and infinite content of man's soul-life; its function is equally to assert the subsistency and freedom of detail, which however incidental it may be, contributes to the environment and background of the work. In this advance from the profoundest seriousness to the objective features of independent detail it is bound to force its way to the extreme articulation of the purely phenomenal, where any and every content is a matter of indifference, and artistic illusion in a realistic sense is the main interest. In such a type of art we find depicted for us the most fugitive aspect of the sky, the time of day, the lighting up of the woods, the gleam and reflection of the clouds, waves, lakes, streams, the shimmer and glitter of wine in the glass, the glance of the eye, and every conceivable look and smile of the human countenance. Painting in such cases moves from the idealistic standpoint to that of living reality, whose phenomenal effect it mainly seeks to reproduce by means of accuracy in the execution of every bit of detail[248]. Yet this effort is no mere assiduity of elaboration, but a real exercise of genuine talent, which strives to present every kind of detail in its independent perfection, and yet retain the whole composition in unity and fusion, and this can only be done by the finest art. In such work the vital force of the realistic appearance thus secured tends to be more near to the artist's aim than the Ideal; and it is precisely this kind of art, as I have already found occasion to remark, which raises, as no other, controversial points over the significance of the Ideal and Nature. No doubt it is very possible to blame the use of the most elaborate technique in subjects of little importance by themselves as mere extravagance; yet there is no real reason for rejecting such material, and it is precisely of that kind which ought to be treated in this way by art, and be permitted to keep every conceivable subtlety and refinement of surface appearance that it possesses.

(γ) The artistic treatment does not, however, stop at this more general kind of opposition, but, inasmuch as painting reposes on the principle of soul-expression and particularity, proceeds yet further in the direction of differentiation in its results. Both architecture and sculpture, it is true, assert differences of national type, and in particular we are made aware in sculpture of a closer individuality typical of certain schools and masters. In the art of painting this distinction and personal aspect in the modes of representation expands to an incalculable degree in proportion as the objects, which it may accept, are taken from a field without definable limitations. In this art to a pre-eminent extent the genius of particular peoples, provinces, epochs and individuals asserts its claims and affects not merely the choice of subjects and the spirit of their conception, but also the character of drawing, grouping, colouring, handling of the dry point no less than that of particular colours down to characteristics of personal style and wont.

Inasmuch as the function of painting is so without restriction concerned with the ideal aspect and the details of its subject-matter, it follows of course that it gives us quite as little opportunity to make definite statements of universal validity as to adduce specific facts which can always without exception be accepted as true of it. We must, however, not rest satisfied with what I have already discussed in respect of the principle of the content, the material and the artistic treatment, but make a further effort, however much we leave on one side all that confronts us in its multifold variety, still to subject certain aspects, that most emphatically enlist our attention, to further examination.

2. PARTICULAR MODES OF THE DEFINITION OF PAINTING

The different points of view, according to which we have to undertake this closer characterization, may be already anticipated from our previous discussion. They refer once more to the content, the material and the artistic treatment.

First, as to content, we have no doubt found the content of the romantic type of art offer the most adequate subject-matter; we must, however, inquire further what specific portions we should select from the entire wealth within this type as pre-eminently adapted to the art of painting.

Secondly, we have already made ourselves fairly cognisant with the principle of the sensuous material. We have now to define more narrowly the forms, which may be expressed on the level surface by means of colouring, in so far as the human form and other facts of Nature have to be made visible in order that the ideality of Spirit may be thereby disclosed.

Thirdly, we have a similar question with regard to the definite character of the artistic conception and presentation, which corresponds to the different character of the content thus itself similarly differentiated, producing thereby different types or schools of painting.

(a) I have already at an earlier stage recalled the fact that the ancients have had excellent painters, but added thereto the statement that the function of painting is only completely satisfied by the way of looking at things and the type of art which is referable to the emotional life and which is actively asserted in the romantic type of art. What appears, however, to contradict this from the point of view of content is the fact that at the very culminating point of Christian painting, during the age of Raphael, Rubens, Correggio, and others, we find that mythological subjects are used and portrayed in part on their own merits, and in part for the decoration and allegorization of great exploits, triumphs, royal weddings, and so forth. In this sense Goethe, for example, has once more borrowed from the descriptions of Philostratus of the pictures of Polygnotus, and, assisted by his imaginative powers as a poet, has added a novel freshness to such subjects for the painter's benefit. If, however, such contributions further imply the demand that subjects of Greek mythology and saga, or scenes, too, from the Roman world, for which the French at a certain period of their painting have evinced a great inclination, should be conceived and portrayed in the definitive mood and significance attached to them by the ancient world we can only object generally that it is impossible to recall to life this past history, and what is peculiarly appropriate to the antique is not wholly compatible with the art of painting. The painter must consequently create from such material an entirely different result, must import therein a totally different spirit, other emotions and modes of seeing things than those present to the ancients, in order to bring such a content into accord with the real problems and aims of painting. For this reason also the circle of antique material and situations is not that which painting has elaborated in a consequential process; rather it is an aspect of it which has been passed over as alien to its material, and which has first to be essentially remodelled. I have several times insisted that painting has before all to seize that, the presentment of which it can, in deliberate contrast to sculpture, music, and poetry, master by means of external form. And this is pre-eminently the self-concentration of Spirit, which is denied to sculpture, while music again is unable to make the passage to the external appearance of ideality, and poetry itself can merely render visible the bodily presence in an incomplete way. Painting, on the contrary, is still in a position to unite both aspects. It can express the entire content of soul-life in an external form, and is consequently bound to accept for its essential content the emotional depth of the soul no less than the particular type of character and its specific traits in its deepest impression—in other words intensity of feeling and ideality in its differentiation, for the expression of which definite events, conditions, and situations not only must appear as the explanatory source of individual character, but the specific individuality must disclose itself as a part of the moulded form of the soul and physiognomy, rooted therein, and entirely taken up into the external embodiment.

In order to express generally this ideality of soul we do not require that ideal self-subsistency and largeness[249] of the classical type we have previously dealt with, in which individuality persists in immediate accord with the substantive core of its spiritual essence and the physical characteristics of its bodily presentment; to quite as little extent will suffice to the manifestation of this soul-life Nature's ordinary hilarity, that Greek geniality of enjoyment and blissful absorption in its object; rather true depth and self-revelation of spiritual life presupposes that the soul has worked its way through its emotions, its forces, its whole inward life, has overcome much, has suffered and endured much anguish or misery of spirit, and yet in all these divisions has retained its sense of unity and come back to the same out of them. The ancients no doubt also place before us in the mythos of Hercules a hero, who after many troubles receives his apotheosis, and enjoys among the gods the repose of blessedness; but the labours which Hercules accomplishes are purely external, and the bliss, which he obtains as a reward, is merely a tranquil cessation from labour; and the ancient rune, that Zeus will have brought his empire to its consummation by his efforts, he, that is the greatest hero of Greece, has not accomplished. Rather the end of the rule of these self-subsistent gods then commences for the first time, where we find man overcomes the dragons and serpents of his own breast, the obstinacy and stubbornness of the soul's native realm rather than the living dragons and serpents of Nature. Only thereby will Nature's gladsomeness attain to that loftier cheerfulness of the spirit, which is perfected in its passage through the negative phase of division, and finally secures an infinite satisfaction through such travail. The feeling of blitheness and happiness must be glorified and expanded in real blessedness. For happiness and content still retain an association with external conditions which partake of Nature's contingency. In blessedness, however, that happiness, which is still related to immediate existence, is left behind, and the entire content is made one with the inner life of soul. Blessedness is a satisfaction which is an attained result, and is thereby justified; it is the gladness of a victory, the emotion of a soul which has essentially set at nought what is sensuous and finite, and thereby thrust from itself the care which lurks for ever in ambush. Blessed is the soul, which has, it is true, experienced both conflict and pain, but come victorious through its troubles.

(α) If we now inquire what is the nature of the actual Ideal in this content we shall find it to be the reconciliation of the individual soul with God, who in His human manifestation has Himself traversed this passage of sorrows. The substantive ideality[250] can only be that of religion, the peace of self-consciousness, which only feels itself truly satisfied, in so far as it is concentrated in its own substance, has broken its earthly heart, has raised itself above the purely natural conditions of finite existence, and in this exaltation has secured an inward life of universal significance, an ideal union in and with God Himself. The soul wills itself, but it finds the object of its will in something other than itself, in its particularity; it thereby gives itself up in its opposition to God, in order to find itself again and its joy in Him. This is the vital character of Love, the soul's function in its truth, that is religious love purged of mere desire, which communicates to Spirit reconciliation, peace, and blessedness. It is not the enjoyment and delight of the actual love of living nature, but rather one that is devoid of passion, nay, one that is without inclination, a tendency of the soul, a love in fact which on the side of Nature is identical with death, and is such a state, so that the actual relation as earthly bond and relation of man to man floats before us as a thing of the Past, which essentially has no consummation in its usual existing form, but carries within itself the defect of its temporality, and as such prepares the way for an exaltation to something beyond it, which is found to be at the same time a conscious state and enjoyment of a love that is without yearning and sensuous desire.

It is this character which gives to us the soulful, intimate, and more elevated Ideal, which we find now in the place of the tranquil greatness and self-subsistency of the antique. No doubt the divinities of the classical Ideal were not without a trait of sombre grief, a negative replete with fateful import, which is as it were the shadow of a cold Necessity passing over these blithesome figures, which remain, however, secure in their substantive divinity and freedom, their simple greatness and might. The freedom of Love, however, is not a freedom of this kind, being more instinct with soul-life, for the reason that it subsists in a relation between soul and soul, and spirit to spirit. This inward glow enkindles the ray of bliss made actual in the soul, a love, which in suffering, and the extremest loss not merely can discover comfort or independence therefrom, but in proportion to the depth of its suffering can feel the more profoundly therein the reality and assuredness of its love, making clear the mastery of its own essential substance in that suffering. In the Ideal of the ancients on the contrary we find no doubt, independently of that trait of a tranquil sorrow already indicated, the expression of the pain of noble natures, as for instance in the case of Niobe and Laocoon. They do not betake themselves to lamentation and despair, but adhere to their greatness and loftiness of spirit; but this self-continency remains empty; their suffering, their pain is likewise the conclusion of the matter. In the place of reconcilement and satisfaction we can only have an austere resignation, which, without suffering entire collapse, surrenders that upon which it had previously laid hold. It is not the base that is crushed[251]; no rage, no contempt or vexation is expressed; but despite of it all the loftiness of this type of individuality is nought but an inflexible self-continency[252], an endurance of destiny that is without relief, in which the nobility and pain of the soul do not appear as reconciled in fulfilment. In the romantic love of religion we find for the first time the expression of blessedness and freedom. This union and satisfaction is by nature concrete in a spiritual sense, for it is the feeling of Spirit which is made cognizant of its unity in something other than itself. And for this reason we find necessary here, if the content presented is to be complete, two aspects, in so far as the reduplication of spiritual personality is necessary to love's appearance. It reposes upon two independent individuals who possess, however, the sense of their intrinsic union. With this union, however, the negative condition is always at the same time connected. In other words Love belongs to the soul's condition; the subject of such a conscious state is, however, this independently self-stable[253] heart, which to experience love must bid good-bye to itself, surrender itself and sacrifice the unyielding focus of its individual isolation. It is this sacrifice which constitutes the motive principle of Love, the life and emotion of which is bound up wholly in a self-surrender. In consequence of this, if notwithstanding a man retains his consciousness of self in an act of such surrender, and just in this very annihilation of his personal independence attains to a truly positive self-subsistency, in that case he has left him at least in the feeling of this unity and its supreme happiness the negative aspect, the movement of Love's principle, not so much in a sense of sacrifice, as of a blessedness undeserved, which in despite of himself permits him still to feel his assured identity at unity with itself. The movement is the feeling of the dialectical contradiction, namely, to have surrendered personality and yet to remain in self-subsistent unity, a contradiction which is present in Love and eternally resolved in it.

In so far, then, as the aspect of an individual human state of soul-life is concerned in this universal condition we find that the unique Love, which blesses and discovers its heaven within it, tends to rise over all that is finite and the specific individuality of character, which lapses into a position of insignificance. Already we have observed that the divine ideals of sculpture pass into one another, always provided, however, that they are not wrested from the content and province of that original and immediate type of individuality; and yet it must be admitted that this individuality remains the essential form of the mode of presentment. In this later pure gleam of blessedness, however, particularity is on the contrary cancelled. Before God all men are equal, or rather piety makes them actually equal, so that the sole point of importance is the expression of love in the concentrated focus above depicted, and which has no further need of happiness, or this or that particular object. No doubt religious Love, too, requires definite individuals as a condition of its existence, which possess also, apart from this experience, other spheres of existence; for the reason, however, that this soul-possessed state of intimate life supplies the really ideal content, the expression and reality of such are not to be found in the isolated distinctions of character, its talents, conditions, and fortunes, but are rather lifted above the same. When consequently nowadays we hear people make a regard for distinctions in the soul-life of different persons a matter of first importance in education, and in that which is the essential requirement of each man individually, from which we deduce the fundamental thesis that every one will and indeed inevitably must act differently in a given case, such a position directly clashes with the fact of the love of religion, in which all such diversities of individual life fall into the background. Conversely, however, individual characterization now, precisely for the reason that it is the unessential, which refuses wholly to fuse with the spiritual realm of celestial Love, receives a more emphatic definition. In other words, agreeably to the romantic type of art, it is free, and is written in character all the more distinct in proportion as it refuses to accept as its supreme principle classical beauty, that is the entire transfusion of immediate vitality, and the particularity of finite existence, with a spiritual or religious content. In despite of this fact, however, there is no absolute reason that this individual characterization should impair this inward intensity of Love, which, as such on its own account, is not shackled to such features, but has become free, and constitutes independently the truly self-substantive Ideal of Spirit.

What, then, constitutes the ideal centre and main content of the religious field is, as we have already indicated in our examination of the romantic type of art, the essentially reconciled and satisfied Love, whose object should appear in the art of painting, whose function it is to exhibit the most spiritual content under the mode of human and corporeal actuality, as no mere "beyond" of Spirit, but in its veritable presence. In conformity with such a result we may adduce the Holy Family, and above all the love of the Madonna to her child as the ideal content pre-eminently fitted to this sphere. On either side of this centre, however, a mass of additional material extends which is in varying degree less adapted in this sense to the art in question. I will now attempt to differentiate the whole of this material on the following lines.

(αα) The first objectification is the object of Love itself in its pure universality and unimpaired unity with itself—God Himself in His unphenomenal essence—or God the Father. In this case, however, painting has great difficulties to overcome, when it attempts to depict God the Father as the religious imagination of Christendom seeks to grasp Him. The Father of gods and men regarded as a particular personality is exhaustively dealt with by art in Zeus. What on the contrary falls away from the Christian conception of God the Father is the human individuality, in which painting is alone in a position to reproduce the spiritual aspect. For taken in His independent self-exclusion God the Father is no doubt spiritual personality and supreme Power, Wisdom and so forth, but only retained as such without defined form and as an abstraction of thought. The art of painting is, however, unable to avoid anthropomorphization, and must perforce assign to Him the figure of man. However broad in its generalization, however lofty, ideal, and masterful the presentment of such a figure may be, we fail to get beyond the fact that it is entirely a human individual of more or less grave aspect, which fails entirely to coalesce with the conception of God the Father. Among the early Flemish painters Van Eyck in his God the Father of the altar picture at Ghent has attained the greatest success that we can conceive as possible in this sphere. It is a creation that may well match our conception of the Olympian Zeus. But however consummate it may be also in its expression of eternal repose, loftiness, power, worth, and other qualities—and it is quite impossible to overstate the depth and imposing character of its conception no less than its execution—yet our imagination cannot fail to find something in it which does not satisfy. For what is here set before us as God the Father, that is to say a creation that is likewise human personality, is just what we first meet with in Christ the Son. It is in Him that we contemplate for the first time this decisive moment in which individuality and human existence combine as a moment in the Divine Life[254], and moreover combine in such a way that the same is not disclosed as an ingenious creature of the phantasy, as was the case with the Greek divinities, but as essential and very revelation, the fact of all importance and fundamental significance.

(ββ) The more essential object, therefore, of Love in the creation of painting will be Christ. In other words, with this object Art at once finds itself in the sphere of humanity, a sphere which along with Christ embraces further material in its presentations of the Virgin Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist, the disciples, and so forth, and ultimately the common folk who in part are followers of the Gospel, and in part cry out for the crucifixion of its Master and mock Him in His sufferings.

And here once more the already mentioned difficulty confronts us how we are to conceive and depict Christ in his universality, when he is presented in the ordinary way of half-length figures or portraits. I must admit that for myself at any rate, the heads of Christ I have seen by Caracci and others and, to take two famous examples, that of Van Eyck, formerly in the Sully Collection and now in the Berlin Museum, and that of Von Hemling, now in Munich, do not give me the entire satisfaction which they ought to do. That of Van Eyck, no doubt, is very imposing in figure, forehead, colour, and general conception, but the mouth and eye wholly fail to express anything that transcends our humanity. The expression is rather that of an inflexible seriousness, which is emphasized by the general type of the form, the parting of the hair, and other traits. And when such heads incline still further in expression and shape towards the specifically human type, and a milder, more yielding and tender aspect is thereby imported, much of their depth and power of impression is very readily lost; and least of all suited to such, as I have already observed, is the beauty of Greek form.

For this reason Christ, as depicted in the experiences of His actual life, is a more suitable subject for pictorial effort. Yet in this connection an essential distinction must not be overlooked. It is quite true that in the biographies of Christ we have from one point of view the human consciousness of God presented us as a fundamental aspect. Christ is one of the gods, but under the guise of an actual man, and takes His place among men as one of them, in whose phenomenal appearance He can consequently be depicted in so far as such expresses the life of Spirit. From another point of view, however, he is not merely an individual man, but entirely God. In such situations, therefore, in which this supreme Divinity forces its way beyond the limits of human soul-life, the art of painting is met with a fresh source of difficulty. The very depth of the content begins to be too overpowering. For in the majority of cases in which we find Christ presented for example merely as a teacher, art will not pass much beyond the point in which He is depicted as the noblest, most worthy, and wisest of men, much as Pythagoras or any other wise man, is presented to us in such a picture as Raphael's "School of Athens." The most important way in which painting can overcome such a difficulty is to bring the Divinity of Christ mainly into direct contrast with His surroundings, and above all, to contrast it with the sins, the repentance and penance, or the meanness and evil of our humanity, or again conversely through His worshippers, who, by their adoration of Him remove Him as one of themselves and a man, existing in a particular place, from such immediate conditions, so that we behold Him exalted to the heaven of Spirit, and at the same time get a glimpse of the fact that His appearance has not merely been that of God, but also that of the human form under its ordinary and natural, in other words, not wholly ideal conditions, who as Spirit essentially possesses his existence in our humanity and the human community, and expresses His divinity as reflected in the same. But we must not understand this reflection as though God is present in humanity as in a purely accidental or external mode of form and expression; rather we ought to regard the Spirit manifested in the consciousness of mankind as the essential spiritual existence of God Himself[255]. Such a mode of presentation will be exceptionally appropriate where Christ is to be represented as man, teacher, as the risen and glorified person who ascends up to heaven before our eyes. To speak plainly, in situations such as these the means of expression in painting such as the human form and its colour, the countenance, the glance of eye, are not wholly sufficient to express all that is implied in the Christ. And least of all will the antique beauty of forms suffice. In particular the resurrection and ascension, and generally, all scenes in the life of Christ, in which He, the individual man, is already divested of immediate existence as such on His return to His Father, require a more elevated expression of Divinity than the art of painting is able to supply, for the reason that it ought to cancel the very means it uses in its representation, that is, the expression of human soul-life in its external form, and glorify the same in a light of purer quality.

Consequently, we shall find those scenes of Christ's life treated with greater advantage and more fitting effect in which He Himself has not yet arrived at the full consummation, or where His Divinity appears to be obstructed and depressed in the moment of negation. And this we find is the case in His childhood and the Passion. That Christ as a child expresses definitely from a certain point of view the significance which attaches to Him in religion. He is God Who becomes man, and Who consequently passes through the stages of man's natural life. In another aspect of the same fact that He is presented to our minds as a child we are led to feel the practical impossibility of disclosing entirely to us all that He essentially is. And it is just here that the art of painting possesses the incalculable advantage of being able to show how the loftiness and dignity of Spirit can shine forth from the naïveté and innocence of the child, which in some measure derives actual force from such a contrast, and in part, for the very reason that it is predicated of an infant, is to an infinitely less extent required by us in comparison with that we look for in Christ as man, teacher, and judge of the world. In this way the examples of Christ the babe which we find in Raphael's pictures, and above all, that in the Sistine Madonna picture at Dresden, offer us the most beautiful presentment of childhood. We are, however, aware in them also of a tendency to pass beyond merely childlike innocence, a passage which discloses quite as much the Divine already present in the opening sheath, as it enables us to surmise the expansion of such Divinity to an infinite fulness of revelation, a revelation the incompleteness of which in the child carries with it its own justification. In the Madonna pictures of Van Eyck, on the contrary, the Divine babe is the least successful feature, for they are in general stiff and emphasize the defective form of a newly-born child. It has been attempted to regard this as allegorical and intentional. They are not to be fair in aspect because it is not the beauty of the Christ babe which is that which is adorable, but the Christ as Christ. Such a mode of thought is not consonant with the true aim of Art, and the babes of Raphael regarded as works of art are in this respect of far higher rank.

In the same way the history of Christ's passion, such as the scenes where He is mocked and crowned with thorns, that of the Ecce Homo carrying the cross, deposition, and burial, are exceptionally appropriate to pictorial presentment. For in these it is precisely the Divinity, in its contrast to its triumph and in the depression of its unlimited power and wisdom, which supplies the content. Art is not merely able to present this, but there is ample room for the play of originality in the composition of such scenes without falling into purely fantastical imagery. God is here set before us as suffering, in so far as He is man and under certain determinate bounds. Such pain is not merely disclosed as human pain over human calamity, but it is an awful suffering, the feeling of an infinite negativity, albeit in human form, as the conscious life of one individual. And withal there is added, for the reason that it is God who suffers, a certain sense of alleviation, a reduction of such anguish which is thus unable to break forth in actual despair, distortion, and horror. This expression of soul-suffering is, more particularly in the works of several Italian masters, an original creation. The pain is in the lower portions of the countenance, a gravity of mien, and nothing more, not as in the Laocoon a contraction of the muscles, which can be interpreted as an actual cry; but in the eyes and on the forehead the billows of soul-anguish are, so to speak, allowed to roll over one another. The sweat drops that bespeak the heart's agony stand forth; and with true instinct on the brow, in which the immovable bone constitutes the determining feature, precisely at the point where nose, eyes, and forehead coalesce, and the life of mind and heart is concentrated and emphasized, we find that just one or two indications of skin-folds and muscles, unable to be distorted to any great extent, are suffered pre-eminently to bear and express in tension this accumulated weight of agony. In particular I can recall a certain head in the gallery of Schleisheim, in which the master—I fancy Guido Reni[256]—and doubtless others in a similar way, have discovered a distinct colour tone for the flesh, which is quite unlike that of human flesh. They had to disclose the night of the Spirit and created for the same a dowry of colour, most admirably adapted to express this tempest, these black clouds of Spirit which are likewise encompassed by the brazen forehead of the Divine Nature[257].

As the most perfect subject of such painting, however, I have already affirmed that Love, which is essentially satisfied, whose object is no purely spiritual Beyond, but one actually present, so that we can behold Love itself in its object. The highest and most unique form of such a Love is that of the Virgin Mother for her Christ child, the love of the one mother who has brought forth the Saviour of the world and carries Him in her arms. This is the content of most loveliness to which we may say Christian art generally and pre-eminently the painter's art in the religious sphere has been exalted.

The love of God, and more expressly[258] that of which Christ is the object, is of an entirely spiritual type. Its object is only visible to the eyes of the soul, so that in these cases we do not in the strict sense get the reciprocity which is bound with the notion of Love, and moreover there is no natural tie which secures the lovers and from its origin binds them to each other. Every other type of love, to put the matter conversely, remains in some measure accidental in its incidence, and in another aspect of it the lovers possess, as, for instance, sisters, or the father's love for his children, yet further relations outside this particular one, which assert an essential claim upon them. A father or brothers are compelled to direct their attention to the world, the State, affairs or war, in one word universal ends; the sister becomes wife, mother, and so forth. In the case of a mother's love of her child, on the contrary, the love is from its very nature neither something that is contingent, nor is it merely a single phase[259]. It is its highest earthly type, in which its natural character and its most sacred function immediately coalesce. From the point of view, however, in which as a rule in maternal love the mother sees and feels at the same time her husband in her child, we may observe that this aspect, too, in the Virgin Mary's case disappears. Her feeling has nothing in common with a wife's love for her wedded husband; on the contrary her relation to Joseph is rather that of a sister, and on the side of Joseph a feeling of respectful reverence for the Child that is God's and Mary's. We therefore find that religious love is set forth in its fullest and most ideal[260] human form, not in that for Christ amid His sufferings, nor in His resurrection, nor as He delays His departure among His friends, but in the emotional nature of a woman, in Mary. Her entire soul and life is human love for the Child, which she calls her own, and along with it adoration, and love of God with whom she feels herself thus united[261]. She is humble before God, and yet is steeped in the infinite exaltation that she is the single one among maidens who is above all blessed. Not alone and apart, but only in her Child is she made perfect in God, but in that, whether it be by the cradle or as queen of heaven, she is entirely content and blessed, without passion and yearning, with no other want, with no other aim to have or possess anything but that which she possesses.

The manifestation of this love under the aspect of its religious content expands in many directions, such as the annunciation, the visitation, the birth, the flight into Egypt, and other such incidents. We may also associate with it, during the later course of the Christ-life, the disciples and women, who follow Him, and in whom the love of God is more or less a personal relation of their love to the living, present Saviour, Who, as actual man, pursues His course among them, and in like manner also the love of those angels who, on the occasion of His birth and at other times, hover around in grave adoration or simple joy. In treating all such figures the art of painting in particular discloses the complete peace and content of such a love.

But this peace, furthermore, is dissolved in the most heartfelt anguish. Mary the mother beholds Christ carrying the cross. She sees Him suffer on the cross and die; she sees Him taken from the cross and buried, and no grief is more poignant than her own. And yet we may observe that it is neither the irreparableness[262] of such a grief, or rather of such a loss, nor the weight of the calamity, nor the lament over the injustice of destiny, which constitutes the real content in such anguish, so that a contrast between it and the sorrow of Niobe is particularly instructive. Niobe, too, has lost all her children, and is set before us in severe loftiness and unperturbed beauty. The main content here is the aspect of the natural life of this ill-starred sufferer, the beauty in which Nature has robed her and which embraces the entire presentment of her actual existence. She, this actual personality, is beauty personified, and therein she persists. But her soul-life, her heart, has lost the entire content of its love, its soul, and her individuality and beauty can only turn into stone. The grief of Mary is of a wholly different type. She feels intimately the dagger which cuts through her soul's very centre, her heart breaks, but she does not become stone. She did not merely possess love, but her soul-life throughout is nothing but love, that is, free and concrete ideality, which retains the absolute content of that which it loses, and in the loss itself of the beloved persists in the peace of love. Her heart indeed breaks, but the substantive principle of her heart, the content of its life[263], which is disclosed through her anguish of soul with a vital strength that can never be lost, is something infinitely more exalted, namely, the living beauty of the human soul, as contrasted with its abstract substance, whose ideal existence as presented in bodily shape, when it is lost remains indeed indestructible, but is turned to stone.

There is one further subject for painting in connection with Mary the mother of Jesus, and that is her death and assumption. Schoreel has with exceptional beauty depicted a death of Mary in which we find the charm of her youth once more restored[264]. This master has united in his picture the expression of somnambulism, presence of death, rigidity, and blindness towards the exterior world with one which seems to suggest that the spirit, which seems somehow to penetrate through their general aspect, has found a home elsewhere and is blessed therein.

(γγ)Thirdly, we must include within the sphere of the actual presence of God in the life, sufferings, and glorification of Himself, mankind at large[265], that is to say the consciousness of individual human life, which God, or more accurately the events of His history, constitutes as itself an object of His love, communicating to it a content which is not merely finite but absolute in its significance. Here, too, we may emphasize the three aspects of tranquil devotion, repentance, and conversion, which both from the point of view of the soul and that of external condition the history of the Divine Passion repeats to mankind, no less than the ideal consummation in glory and the blessedness of pure attainment.

In respect to the first of these, namely, devotion, we have here what is primarily the content of prayer. This relation is in one aspect of it a humbling, surrender of the self, the seeking of peace in another; from another point of view it is not a petition but rather a prayer[266]. Petition and prayer are no doubt closely connected in so far, that is, as a prayer can be a petition. And yet the genuine petition seeks after something for itself. It importunes the man who possesses something of importance to myself, that he may feel inclined to do me a favour in virtue of the request, that his heart may yield, or his love may be roused toward me, in one word that his feeling of identity with myself may be awakened. What I, however, feel in making a petition is the desire for something, which the other person must lose if I am to secure it. The other person is to love me in order that my self-love may be satisfied, and my weal and necessity be promoted. I on the contrary give nothing further in the transaction unless it be contained in an admission that the person thus opportuned may ask for similar favours from myself. Prayer is not a petition of this type. It is an exaltation of the heart to the Absolute, which is assumed to be essentially Love, and as such possesses nothing independently[267]. The devotion itself is the gift, the petition itself is the blessedness. For although prayer may contain a petition for some particular thing, yet it is not this particular thing which is the true purport of the prayer; rather the essential truth of it is the conviction that the petition will be heard, and not heard in its relation to the particular request so much as to the absolute trust that God will apportion that which is best for me to receive. And thus even in such a connection prayer is itself its own satisfaction, the enjoyment, the express feeling and consciousness of eternal Love, which not only with its ray of illumination shines through the object[268] of prayer and its situation, but in fact constitutes the situation and what is there actually or is thereby manifested. It is this type of supplication which we find exemplified by Pope Sixtus in the picture of Raphael already mentioned[269], no less than by Santa Barbara in the same picture, and by many other representations of the prayers of apostles and saints, of Saint Francis[270] and the like at the foot of the Cross, where we find in the place of the suffering of Christ, or the dismay, doubt, and despair of the disciples the love and adoration of God, and the prayer that loses itself in Him is selected as the significant content. We find such rendered with particular force for the most part on the countenances of aged men marked strongly with the sufferings and experience of life in the earlier period of painting, faces that appear to be portraits, souls permeated with devotional feeling to such an extent that this attitude of prayer does not merely appear to be experienced at this particular moment, but rather they are presented us as pious and saintlike persons whose entire life, thought, instinct, and volition is one prayer, and whose expression despite of all the truth of their portraiture may be summed up wholly in this assurance and peace of Love. It is otherwise, however, among many of the earlier German and Flemish masters. The subject of the altar picture in Cologne Cathedral is the adoring kings and patrons of Cologne. We find this subject too frequently selected by the school of Van Eyck. In such examples the persons who adore are frequently famous individuals, princes, as, for instance, in a well-known adoration picture, which has been taken for the work of Van Eyck, critics have identified two of the kings with portraits of Philip of Burgundy and Charles the Bold. In the case of personages of this type we see that they are something more than saints, have affairs in the world, and only go to mass on Sunday or in the early morning, but during the rest of the week or for the rest of the day have other business to look after. And more particularly in our Flemish or German pictures the patrons are pious knights, God-fearing housewives with their sons and daughters. They resemble Martha who fares hither and thither and is concerned with matters of external or mundane significance, rather than Mary who has selected once and for all the best part. Their piety is not deficient, it is true, in intensity and soul; but we do not find here the song of Love which is at once the beginning and end of it, and which is perforce not merely an exaltation, a prayer, or thanks for a gift received, but is as much its unique life as that of the nightingale.

We may summarize the distinction which can be drawn generally in pictures of this kind between saints and worshippers on the one hand, and pious members of the Christian community as they actually appeared on the other, in the statement that the worshippers, more especially in Italian pictures, disclose in the expression of their piety a complete harmony of external and spiritual condition. It is their very soul which we find written for the most part on their countenances, which are not permitted to express anything opposed to the emotions of their heart. In the actual conditions of life this is not always the case. An infant, for example, when it weeps, more particularly when beginning to do so, quite apart from the fact that we know its grief is not worth the trouble of crying over, often makes us smile with its ugly faces. And in the same way old folk pucker up their face when they laugh, because the lines of their features are too pronounced, cold, and stiff to accommodate themselves readily to an unreserved and natural laugh or a friendly smile. The art of painting should endeavour to avoid this incompatibility between the emotions of piety expressed and the sensuous forms which have to express them, and, so far as possible, produce a harmony between the soul and its external mode of expression. And this in the highest degree was effected by the Italians; the Germans and Flemish were less successful, because the main object in their work was living portraiture.

I will add one further remark, that this devotion of the soul ought not to reach the point of the actual cry of anxiety, that cry of tribulation and desire, such as the Psalms and many Lutheran hymns express, and we may illustrate it with the old words: "As the hart crieth for the water-brooks, so crieth my soul for Thee." We may rather indicate it as a gradual melting away, not to that attenuation of sweetness perhaps we associate with the nun, but at any rate a surrender of the soul, and an enjoyment and satisfaction in such surrender. For that travail of faith, that anxious troubling of soul, that doubt and desperation which persists in disunion, such a type of hypochondriacal piety which never is certain whether it is still sin, whether there has been repentance and pardon is complete, a surrender, in which the soul can never advance a step, and is always betraying the fact by his anxiety, such a state is not compatible with the beauty of the romantic Ideal. We much prefer that the eye of devotion should raise its look of yearning heavenwards, although it is both more artistic and gives us yet more satisfaction when it is centred on some present object of adoration, whether it be the Virgin Mother, Christ, or saint. It is a facile thing, only too facile, to attach to a picture a spiritual interest, by making its central figure gaze heavenwards, anywhere beyond the world, just as we find that nowadays people are only too ready to make use of an equally facile way of proving God and religion to be the foundation of society by quoting texts of the Bible rather than establishing such a basis on the reason of actual reality. Such a gaze of countenance upwards becomes in the pictures of Guido Reni[271], for example, a pure mannerism. The Assumption of the Virgin, too, which we find at Munich, has been much eulogized by its admirers and critics, and we may admit that the exalted character of its transfiguration, the absorption and surrender of the soul in the heavenly vision, and indeed the entire pose of the ascending figure, to say nothing of the brilliance and beauty of the colouring, is most impressive. But for myself I find such representations which depict the Virgin Mother in her own daydream of love and blessedness with her glance centred on her babe still more appropriate to her truth. The other type of yearning and strain, with its upward gaze heavenwards, is somewhat too near to our modern sentimentalism.

A further aspect of importance is concerned with the entrance of the principle of negation into the spiritual devotion of Love. The disciples, saints, and martyrs, have to pass through, in some measure as an experience of their souls, and in part, too, as one of their external life, that way of suffering along which the Christ in the history of His Passion passed before them.

This suffering lies to some extent on the confines of art. Painting can very easily overstep this boundary, in so far, that is, as it accepts for its subject-matter the horrors and terrors of the bodily torture, whether it be in flaying, or burning, or crucifixion, and its pains. This it is not permitted to do, if it is not to forsake the spiritual Ideal. This is not solely due to the fact that to present martyrs under such conditions to our sight is not beautiful to the sense, nor because our nerves nowadays are too keenly strung, but on the better ground that this material aspect is not the really important one. The true content we have to follow with sympathy and which should be depicted is the spiritual experience, the soul in all that it suffers through Love, and not the direct bodily pain of a certain individual, the grief for the sufferings of another, or the anguish felt personally for personal demerit. The endurance of martyrs in physical tortures is an endurance which carries with it merely physical pain: what the spiritual Ideal looks for is the trial of the soul in its own domain, its own peculiar suffering, the wounds of its love, the repentance, mourning, anguish, and penance of its heart.

But we must add that in depicting this pain of soul the positive aspect must not wholly be absent. The soul must be assured of the actual and essentially consummated reconciliation between mankind and God, and only experience anxiety that this eternal salvation be realized as a truth in itself. In this connection we not unfrequently meet with repentant people, martyrs, and monks, who, despite of their assuredness of an objective atonement, partly are overwhelmed with sorrow for a heart whose entire surrender they deem to be right, and partly have already made such complete surrender, and yet are always for realizing such reconciliation anew, and consequently for ever imposing on themselves the burden of penances. And we find, therefore, in the artistic treatment of such situations a twofold point of departure. In other words, the artist may, to start with, presuppose in his subject an open disposition, freedom, cheerfulness, and decision of spirit, such as carries with ease life and the yoke of the actual world and knows how to readily deal with the same, then he may fitly associate with such painful experiences a native nobility, grace, freshness, freedom, and beauty of form. When, on the contrary, his work is based upon a natural sense that is more refractory, defiant, savage, and limited, the conflict of the spirit in overcoming the flesh and the world, and securing to itself the religion of salvation will necessarily imply more severe travail. In cases of such obstinacy of soul, therefore, the harsher reflections of force and stability are more apparent, the scars of the wounds which have been inflicted on an obstinacy of this type are more visible and enduring, and the beauty of the physical result tends to vanish[272].