Kenyon Cox - Artist and Public
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Kenyon Cox >> Artist and Public
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The "Poetry" (Pl. 11) is the most beautiful of the medallions, but they
are all much alike: a draped female figure in the middle, seated to give
it scale, large enough to fill the height of the circle amply but
without crowding, and winged _putti_, bearing inscribed tablets, on
either side. There are other ways of filling a circle acceptably, as
Botticelli had shown and as Raphael was to show again in more than one
_tondo_, but for their situation, marking the principal axes of the
room, there is no way so adequate as this. As Mr. Blashfield has said,
speaking from experience: "When a modern painter has a medallion to fill
and has tried one arrangement after another, he inevitably realizes that
it is Raphael who has found the best ordering that could be found; and
the modern painter builds upon his lines, laid down so distinctly that
the greater the practice of the artist the more complete becomes his
realization of Raphael's comprehension of essentials in composition."
Not only so, but the modern painter finds as inevitably that, accepting
this ordering as the best, even then he cannot add another figure to
these four. He may, perhaps, draw it better in detail or give more
character to the head, but he cannot capture that felicity of spacing,
that absoluteness of balance, that variety and vivacity combined with
monumental repose. The more his nature and training have made him a
designer the more certainly he feels, before that single medallion of
Poetry, that he is in the presence of the inimitable master of design.
[Illustration: Plate 11.--Raphael. "Poetry."
In the Vatican.]
If the composition of the rectangles is less inevitable it is only
because the variety of ways in which such simple rectangles may be
filled is almost infinite. Composition more masterly than that of the
"Judgment of Solomon" (Pl. 12), for instance, you will find nowhere; so
much is told in a restricted space, yet with no confusion, the space is
so admirably filled and its shape so marked by the very lines that
enrich and relieve it. It is as if the design had determined the space
rather than the space the design. If you had a tracing of the figures in
the midst of an immensity of white paper you could not bound them by any
other line than that of the actual frame. One of the most remarkable
things about it is the way in which the angles, which artists usually
avoid and disguise, are here sharply accented. A great part of the
dignity and importance given to the king is due to the fact that his
head fills one of these angles, and the opposite one contains the hand
of the executioner and the foot by which the living child is held aloft,
and to this point the longest lines of the picture lead. The dead
child and the indifferent mother fill the lower corners. In the middle,
herself only half seen and occupying little space, is the true mother,
and it seems that her explosive energy, as she rushes to the rescue of
her child, has forced all these other figures back to the confines of
the picture. Compare this restless yet subtly balanced composition, full
of oblique lines and violent movement, with the gracious, placid
formality of the "Adam and Eve," and you will have some notion of the
meaning of this gift of design.
[Illustration: Plate 12.--Raphael. "The Judgment of Solomon."
In the Vatican.]
But it is the frescoes on the four walls of this room which are
Raphael's greatest triumphs--the most perfect pieces of monumental
decoration in the world. On the two longer walls, nearly unbroken
lunettes of something over a semicircle, he painted the two great
compositions of Theology and Philosophy known as the "Disputa" and the
"School of Athens." The "Disputa" (Pl. 13), the earlier of the two, has
the more connection with the art of the past. The use of gilded relief
in the upper part recalls the methods of Pintoricchio, and the hint of
the whole arrangement was doubtless taken from those semidomes which
existed in many churches. But what an original idea it was to transform
the flat wall of a room into the apse of a cathedral, and what a
solemnity it imparts to the discussion that is going on! The upper part
is formal in the extreme, as it need be for the treatment of such a
theme, but even here there is variety as well as stateliness in the
attitudes and the spacing. In the lower part the variety becomes almost
infinite, yet there is never a jar--not a line or a fold of drapery that
mars the supreme order of the whole. Besides the uncounted cherubs which
float among the rays of glory or support the cloudy thrones of the
saints and prophets, there are between seventy and eighty figures in
the picture; yet the hosts of heaven and the church on earth seem
gathered about the altar with its sacred wafer--the tiny circle which is
the focus of the great composition and the inevitable goal of all
regards, as it is the central mystery of Catholic dogma.
[Illustration: Plate 13.--Raphael. The "Disputa."
In the Vatican.]
Opposite, in the "School of Athens" (Pl. 14), the treatment is different
but equally successful. The hieratic majesty of the "Disputa" was here
unnecessary, but a tranquil and spacious dignity was to be attained, and
it is attained through the use of vertical and horizontal lines--the
lines of stability and repose, while the bounding curve is echoed again
and again in the diminishing arches of the imagined vaulting. The
figures, fewer in number than in the "Disputa" and confined to the lower
half of the composition, are ranged in two long lines across the
picture; but the nearer line is broken in the centre and the two
figures on the steps, serving as connecting-links between the two ranks,
give to the whole something of that semicircular grouping so noticeable
in the companion picture. The bas-reliefs upon the architecture and the
great statues of Apollo and Minerva above them draw the eye upward at
the sides, and this movement is intensified by the arrangement of the
lateral groups of figures. By these means the counter curve to the arch
above, the one fixed necessity, apparently, of the lunette, is
established. It is more evident in the perspective curve of the painted
dome. Cover this line with a bit of paper, or substitute for it a
straight lintel like that seen beyond, and you will be surprised to find
how much of the beauty of the picture has disappeared. The grouping of
the figures themselves, the way they are played about into clumps or
separated to give greater importance, by isolation, to a particular
head, is even more beyond praise than in the "Disputa." The whole design
has but one fault, and that is an afterthought. In the cartoon the
disproportioned bulk of Heraclitus, thrust into the foreground and
writing in an impossible attitude on a desk in impossible perspective,
is not to be found. It is such a blot upon the picture that one cannot
believe that Raphael added it of his own motion; rather it must have
been placed there at the dictation of some meddling cardinal or learned
humanist who, knowing nothing of art, could not see why any vacant space
should not be filled with any figure whose presence seemed to him
historically desirable. One is tempted to suspect even, so clumsy is the
figure and so out of scale with its neighbors, that the master refused
to disfigure his work himself and left the task to one of his
apprentices. If it had been done by one of them, say Giulio Romano,
after the picture was entirely completed and at the time of the
"Incendio del' Borgo," it could not be more out of keeping.
[Illustration: Plate 14.--Raphael. "The School of Athens."
In the Vatican.]
Each of these walls has a doorway at one end, and the way in which these
openings are dissimulated and utilized is most ingenious, particularly
in the "Disputa," where the bits of parapet which play an important part
at either side of the composition, one pierced, the other solid, were
suggested solely by the presence of this door. In the end walls the
openings, large windows much higher than the doors, become of such
importance that the whole nature of the problem is changed. It is the
pierced lunette that is to be dealt with, and Raphael has dealt with it
in two entirely different ways. One wall is symmetrical, the window in
the middle, and on that wall he painted the "Parnassus" (Pl. 15), Apollo
and the Muses in the centre with groups of poets a little lower on
either side and other groups filling the spaces to right and left of the
window head. At first sight the design seems less symmetrical and formal
than the others, with a lyrical freedom befitting the subject, but in
reality it is no less perfect in its ponderation. The group of trees
above Apollo and the reclining figures either side of him accent the
centrality of his position. From this point the line of heads rises in
either direction to the figures of Homer and of the Muse whose back is
turned to the spectator, and the perpendicularity of these two figures
carries upward into the arch the vertical lines of the window. From this
point the lateral masses of foliage take up the drooping curve and unite
it to the arch, and this curve is strongly reinforced by the building up
toward either side of the foreground groups and by the disposition of
the arms of Sappho and of the poets immediately behind her, while, to
disguise its formality, it is contradicted by the long line of Sappho's
body, which echoes that of the bearded poet immediately to the right of
the window and gives a sweep to the left to the whole lower part of the
composition. It is the immediate and absolute solution of the problem,
and so small a thing as the scarf of the back-turned Muse plays its
necessary part in it, balancing, as it does, the arm of the Muse who
stands highest on the left and establishing one of a number of
subsidiary garlands that play through and bind together the wonderful
design.
[Illustration: Plate 15.--Raphael. "Parnassus."
In the Vatican.]
The window in the opposite wall is to one side of the middle, and here
Raphael meets the new problem with a new solution. He places a separate
picture in each of the unequal rectangles, carries a simulated cornice
across at the level of the window head, and paints, in the segmental
lunette thus left, the so-called "Jurisprudence" (Pl. 16), which
seems to many decorators the most perfect piece of decorative design
that even Raphael ever created--the most perfect piece of design,
therefore, in the world. Its subtlety of spacing, its exquisiteness of
line, its monumental simplicity, rippled through with a melody of
falling curves from end to end, are beyond description--the reader must
study them for himself in the illustration. One thing he might miss were
not his attention called to it--the ingenious way in which the whole
composition is adjusted to a diagonal axis that the asymmetry of the
wall may be minimized. Draw an imaginary straight line from the boss in
the soffit of the arch through the middle of the Janus-head of Prudence.
It will accurately bisect the central group, composed of this figure and
her two attendant genii, will pass through her elevated left knee, the
centre of a system of curves, and the other end of it will strike the
top of the post or mullion that divides the window opening into two
parts.
[Illustration: Plate 16.--Raphael. "Jurisprudence."
In the Vatican.]
This single room, the Camera della Segnatura, marks the brief blossoming
time of Raphael's art, an art consummate in science yet full of a
freshness and spontaneity--the dew still upon it--as wonderful as its
learning. The master himself could not duplicate it. He tried for
Venetian warmth of color in the "Mass of Bolsena" (Pl. 17) and
experimented with tricks of illumination in the "Deliverance of Peter"
(Pl. 18), and in these two compositions, struck out new and admirable
ways of filling pierced lunettes. The balancing, in the one, of the
solitary figure of the pope against the compact group of seven
figures--a group that has to be carried up above the curved screen in
order to counteract the importance given to Julius by his isolation and
by the greater mass of his supporting group below--is a triumph of
arrangement; and here, again, it is notable that the bleeding wafer, the
necessary centre of interest, is situated on a straight line drawn
diagonally from the keystone of the arch to the centre of the window
head, and almost exactly half-way between these two points, while the
great curve of the screen leads to it from either side. In the
symmetrically pierced lunette opposite, the distribution of the space
into three distinct but united pictures, the central one seen through
the grating of the prison, is a highly ingenious and, on the whole, an
acceptable variant on previous inventions. But these two are the last of
the Vatican frescoes that show Raphael's infallible instinct as a
composer. He grows tired, exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greater
and greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are either
pompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy of
the "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive of
nothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine," a
picture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably left
something in the way of sketches.
[Illustration: Plate 17.--Raphael. "The Mass of Bolsena."
In the Vatican.]
Yet even in what seems this decadence of his talent Raphael only needed
a new problem to revive his admirable powers in their full splendor. In
1514 he painted the "Sibyls" (Pl. 19) of Santa Maria della Pace, in a
frieze-shaped panel cut by a semicircular arch, and the new shape given
him to fill inspired a composition as perfect in itself and as
indisputably the only right one for the place as anything he ever did.
Among his latest works were the pendentives of the Farnesina, with the
story of Cupid and Psyche--works painted and even drawn by his pupils,
coarse in types and heavy in color but altogether astonishing in freedom
and variety of design. The earlier painters covered their vaulting
with ornamental patterns in which spaces were reserved for independent
pictures, like the rectangles of the Stanza della Segnatura. It was a
bold innovation when Michelangelo discarded this system and placed in
the pendentives of the Sistine his colossal figures of the Prophets and
the Sibyls, each on its architectural throne. It was reserved for
Raphael to take a step that no earlier painter could have dreamed of and
to fill these triangular spaces with free groups relieved against a
clear sky which is the continuous background of the whole series. One
may easily think the earlier system more architecturally fitting, but
the skill with which these groups are composed, their perfect
naturalness, their exhaustless variety, the perfection with which they
fill these awkward shapes, as it were inevitably and without effort, is
nothing short of amazing. It is decoration of a festal and informal
order--the decoration of a kind of summer house, fitted for pleasure,
rather than of a stately chamber--but it is decoration the most
consummate, the fitting last word of the greatest master of decorative
design that the world has seen.
[Illustration: Plate 18.--Raphael. "The Deliverance of Peter."
In the Vatican.]
It is this master designer that is the real Raphael, and, but for the
element of design always present in the least of his works, the charming
illustrator, the mere "painter of Madonnas," might be allowed to sink
comfortably into artistic oblivion without cause for protest. But there
is another Raphael we could spare less easily, Raphael the
portrait-painter. The great decorators have nearly always been great
portrait-painters as well, although--perhaps because--there is little
resemblance between the manner of feeling and working necessary for
success in the two arts. The decorator, constantly occupied with
relations of line and space which have little to do with imitation,
finds in the submissive attention to external fact necessary to success
in portraiture a source of refreshment and of that renewed contact with
nature which is constantly necessary to art if it is not to become too
arid an abstraction. Certainly it was so with Raphael, and the master of
design has left us a series of portraits comparable only to those of
that other great designer whose fate was to leave little but portraits
behind him, Hans Holbein. Allowing for the necessary variation of type
and costume in their models and for the difference between an Italian
and a northern education, their methods are singularly alike. Raphael
has greater elegance and feeling for style, Holbein a richer color sense
and, above all, a finer craftsmanship, an unapproachable material
perfection. They have the same quiet, intense observation, the same
impeccable accuracy, the same preoccupation with the person before them
and with nothing else--an individuality to be presented with all it
contains, neither more nor less--to be rendered entirely, and without
flattery as without caricature. There have been portrait-painters who
were greater painters, in the more limited sense of the word, than these
two, and there has been at least one painter whose imaginative sympathy
gave an inner life to his portraits absent from theirs, but in the
essential qualities of portraiture, as distinguished from all other
forms of art, perhaps no one else has quite equalled them. One can give
no greater praise to the "Castiglione" or the "Donna Velata" than to say
that they are fit to hang beside the "Georg Gyze" or the "Christina of
Milan"; and at least one portrait by Raphael, the "Tommaso Inghirami,"
in the collection of Mrs. Gardner (Pl. 20)--the original of which the
picture in the Pitti Palace is a replica--has a beauty of surface and
of workmanship almost worthy of Holbein himself.
[Illustration: Plate 19.--Raphael. "The Sibyls."
Santa Maria della Pace, Rome.]
[Illustration: Plate 20.--Raphael. "Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami."
In the collection of Mrs. Gardner.]
Raphael's portraits alone, had he done nothing else, would justify a
great reputation, but they form so relatively small a part of his work
that they may almost be neglected in examining his claims to the rank
that used to be assigned him among the world's greatest artists. It is,
after all, his unique mastery of composition that is his chief title to
fame, and his glory must always be in proportion to the estimation in
which that quality is held. It was because composition was to him a
comparatively unimportant part of painting that Velazquez thought little
of Raphael. It is because, for them, composition, as a distinct element
of art, has almost ceased to exist that so many modern painters and
critics decry Raphael altogether. The decorators have always known that
design is the essence of their art, and therefore they have always
appreciated the greatest of designers. That is why Paul Baudry, in the
third quarter of the nineteenth century, idolized Raphael and based his
own art upon that of the great Umbrian. To-day, in our own country,
mural decoration is again becoming a living art, and the desire for the
appropriate decoration of important buildings with monumental works of
painting is more wide-spread, perhaps, than it has been anywhere at any
time since the Italian Renaissance. So surely as the interest in
decorative painting and the knowledge of its true principles become more
widely spread, so surely will the name of Raphael begin to shine again
with something of its ancient splendor.
But design is something more than the essential quality of mural
decoration--it is the common basis of all the arts, the essential thing
in art itself. Each of the arts has its qualities proper to it alone,
and it may be right to estimate the painter, the sculptor, the
architect, or the musician according to his eminence in those qualities
which are distinctive of his particular art and which separate it most
sharply from the other arts. In that sense we are right to call Frans
Hals a greater painter than Raphael. But if we estimate a man's artistry
by the same standard, whatever the form of art in which it expresses
itself, rating him by his power of co-ordinating and composing notes or
forms or colors into a harmonious and beautiful unity, then must we
place Raphael pretty near where he used to be placed, admitting but a
choice few of the very greatest to any equality with him. If we no
longer call him "the prince of painters" we must call him one of the
greatest artists among those who have practised the art of painting.
V
TWO WAYS OF PAINTING
Among the modern paintings in the Metropolitan Museum is a brilliant and
altogether remarkable little picture by John Sargent, entitled "The
Hermit" (Pl. 21). Mr. Sargent is a portrait-painter by vocation, and the
public knows him best as a penetrating and sometimes cruel reader of
human character. He is a mural painter by avocation and capable, on
occasion, of a monumental formality. In this picture, as in the
wonderful collection of watercolors in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts
and Sciences, one fancies one sees the essential John Sargent, working
for himself alone without regard to external demands, and doing what he
really cares most to do. In such work he is a modern of the moderns
and, in the broadest sense of the word, a thorough Impressionist. Not
that he shows himself a disciple of Monet or occupies himself with the
broken touch or the division of tones--his method is as direct as that
of Sorolla and his impressionism is of the same kind--a bending of all
his energies to the vivid realization of the effect of the scene
rendered as one might perceive it in the first flash of vision if one
came upon it unexpectedly. This picture is better than Sorolla--it is
better than almost any one. It is perhaps the most astonishing
realization of the modern ideal, the most accomplished transcript of the
actual appearance of nature, that has yet been produced. It is because
of its great merit, because of its extraordinary success in what it
attempts, that it leads one to the serious consideration of the nature
of the attempt and of the gain and loss involved in the choice that
modern art has made.
The picture is exactly square--the choice of this form is, of itself,
typically modern in its unexpectedness--and represents a bit of rough
wood interior under intense sunlight. The light is studied for its
brilliancy rather than for its warmth, and if the picture has a fault,
granted the point of view of the painter, it is in a certain coldness of
color; but such conditions of glaring and almost colorless light do
exist in nature. One sees a few straight trunks of some kind of pine or
larch, a network of branches and needles, a tumble of moss-spotted and
lichened rocks, a confusion of floating lights and shadows, and that is
all. The conviction of truth is instantaneous--it is an actual bit of
nature, just as the painter found it. One is there on that ragged
hillside, half dazzled by the moving spots of light, as if set down
there suddenly, with no time to adjust one's vision. Gradually one's
eyes clear and one is aware, first of a haggard human head with tangled
beard and unkempt hair, then of an emaciated body. There is a man in the
wood! And then--did they betray themselves by some slight
movement?--there are a couple of slender antelopes who were but now
invisible and who melt into their surroundings again at the slightest
inattention. It is like a pictorial demonstration of protective coloring
in men and animals.
[Illustration: Plate 21.--Sargent. "The Hermit."
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
Now, almost any one can see how superbly all this is rendered. Any one
can marvel at and admire the free and instantaneous handling, the web of
slashing and apparently meaningless brush strokes which, at a given
distance, take their places by a kind of magic and _are_ the things they
represent. But it takes a painter to know how justly it is observed. In
these days no painter, whatever may be his deepest convictions, can
escape the occasional desire to be modern; and most of us have
attempted, at one time or another, the actual study of the human figure
in the open air. We have taken our model into a walled garden or a deep
wood or the rocky ravine of a brook and have set ourselves seriously to
find out what a naked man or woman really looks like in the setting of
outdoor nature. And we have found just what Sargent has painted. The
human figure, as a figure, has ceased to exist. Line and structure and
all that we have most cared for have disappeared. Even the color of
flesh has ceased to count, and the most radiant blond skin of the
fairest woman has become an insignificant pinkish spot no more important
than a stone and not half so important as a flower. Humanity is absorbed
into the landscape.
Obviously, there are two courses open to the painter. If he is a modern
by feeling and by training, full of curiosity and of the scientific
temper, caring more for the investigation of the aspects of nature and
the rendering of natural light and atmosphere than for the telling of a
story or the construction of a decoration, he will, if he is able
enough, treat his matter much as Sargent has treated it. The figure will
become, for him, only an incident in the landscape. It will be important
only as a thing of another texture and another color, valuable for the
different way in which it receives the light and reflects the sky, just
as rocks and foliage and water and bare earth are valuable. For to the
true Impressionist light and atmosphere are the only realities, and
objects exist only to provide surfaces for the play of light and
atmosphere. He will abandon all attempt at rendering the material and
physical significance of the human form and will still less concern
himself with its spiritual significance. He will gain a great vividness
of illusion, and he may console himself for what he loses with the
reflection that he has expressed the true relation of man to the
universe--that he has expressed either man's insignificance or man's
oneness with nature, according as his temper is pessimistic or
optimistic.
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